The Placemakers Guide To Building Community

From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. The book shows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work. The book also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. The book also offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking. Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide. (publisher)

This is a guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context.

This is a guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context.

In this groundbreaking new book, landscape architect Lynda H. Schneekloth and architect and planner Robert G. Shibley challenge the most fundamental assumptions about the ways human beings transform the places in which they live. A call to action for a more inclusive, democratic approach to the design of human spaces, the authors use stories from their own practice to cast a new light on the relationship between communities, design professionals, and the shaping of their physical "places." The stories they tell reveal techniques for generating a collaborative spirit that will help designers, planners, and community development professionals understand the human values that lie at the heart of their professions. The death of Main Street, the blight of the inner city, the sterility of so much contemporary development--these are effects of a major disconnection between the human community and the built environment. At no time in the history of our society has there been a more urgent need to take a hard look at how we create physical environments. In response to this unmet need and moral confusion, Placemaking: The Art and Practice of Building Communities calls for a more dynamic, more inclusive design process and demonstrates new placemaking practices that have emerged from different communities and environments. (Publisher).

Growing numbers of residents are getting involved with professionals in shaping their local environment, and there is now a powerful menu of tools available, from design workshops to electronic maps. The Community Planning Handbook is the essential starting point for all those involved: planners and local authorities, architects and other practitioners, community workers, students and local residents. It features an accessible how-to-do-it style, best practice information on effective methods, and international scope and relevance. Tips, checklists and sample documents help readers to get started quickly, learn from others' experience and to select the approach best suited to their situation. The glossary, bibliography and contact details provide quick access to further information and support. This fully updated new edition contains extra material on following up after community engagement activities.

Building Community is a practical guide for local leaders working to build equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities. Featuring a chapter covering each of 12 Guiding Principles common to thriving communities, the book includes rich case studies and leaderships tools.

Abandoned lots and litter-strewn pathways, or rows of green beans and pockets of wildflowers? Graffiti-marked walls and desolate bus stops, or shady refuges and comfortable seating? What transforms a dingy, inhospitable area into a dynamic gathering place? How do individuals take back their neighborhood? Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community. Recapturing that sense of belonging and pride of place can be as simple as planting a civic garden or placing some benches in a park. The Great Neighborhood Book explains how most struggling communities can be revived, not by vast infusions of cash, not by government, but by the people who live there. The author addresses such challenges as traffic control, crime, comfort and safety, and developing economic vitality. Using a technique called "placemaking"-- the process of transforming public space -- this exciting guide offers inspiring real-life examples that show the magic that happens when individuals take small steps, and motivate others to make change. This book will motivate not only neighborhood activists and concerned citizens but also urban planners, developers and policy-makers.

Place branding is often a response to inter-place competition and discussed as if it operated in a vacuum, ignoring the needs of local communities. It has developed a set of methods – catchy slogans, colourful logos, ‘star-chitects’, bidding for City of Culture status etc. – that are applied as quick-fix solutions regardless of geographical and socio-political contexts. Critical views of place branding are emerging which focus on its unexplored consequences on the physical and social fabric of places. These more critical approaches reveal place branding as an essentially political activity, serving hidden agendas and marginalizing social groups. Scholars and practitioners can no longer ignore the need for more responsible and socially sensitive approaches to cater for a wider range of stakeholders, and which fully acknowledge the importance of resident participation in decision-making. The contributions in this innovative book set out to introduce new critical ways of thinking around place branding and practices that encourage it to be more inclusive and participatory. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of branding, critical marketing, and destination marketing as well as critical tourism and environmental design.

This book provides readers with a wide overview of place-based planning and design experiments addressing such powerful transformations in the African built environment. This continent is currently undergoing fast paced urban, institutional and environmental changes, which have stimulated an increasing interest for alternative architectural solutions, urban designs and comprehensive planning experiments. The international and balanced array of the collected contributions explore emerging research concepts for understanding urban and peri-urban processes in Africa, discuss bottom-up planning and design practices, and present inspirational and innovative co-design methods and participatory tools for steering such change through public spaces, sustainable services and infrastructures. The book is intended for students, researchers, decision-makers and practitioners engaged in planning and design for the built environment in Africa and the Global South at large.