Communities are the experts.

Creating places where the social life of a community thrives is essential for its residents to have opportunities to build relationships. Every neighbourhood has those bumping spaces where people want to hang out; it might be the local bar, park, bus stop, playground or even benches. If it doesn’t have those spaces, we need to connect with our neighbours to create them.

I recently had the honour of spending an afternoon with Fred Kent and Kathy Madden. Over the last 40 years Fred and Kathy have been leading lights of the placemaking movement, creating a network of people who have been rejuvenating public spaces, ensuring that communities have a social life. After founding the Project for Public Spaces (www.pps.org) based in New York, Fred and Kathy have gone on to co=create Placemaking X (https://www.placemakingx.org/) a global network of placemakers and The Social Life Project. Fred shared that the key principle of placemaking is that the community is the expert. Through bringing neighbours and local changemakers together, they can identify actions that can be taken to improve public spaces. The spaces act as a catalyst for bringing people together. These actions are often inexpensive, but simply require a focused effort by the community to act together.

Fred took me to Camden Market, a place that models the power of placemaking.

Coming out of the Tube Station you walk into a street which is bustling with people, with stalls spilling out onto the pavement. There are entrepreneurs everywhere using every bit of available space from doorways where umbrellas are for sale to food huts centred around an outdoor eating area by the canal. The buildings are painted in bright colours and street art hangs from walls above shops; it is far from the regular British high street.

So how come this street came to be the bustling place it is today. Fred attributes much of the growth to the establishment anchor projects. One such anchor is Camden Market, a former disused industrial building by the canal, which has been converted into a warren of stalls selling clothing, ornaments and shoes, with a food market adjacent to it where you can sample street food from around the world. As these anchor projects become destinations, other entrepreneurs move in and the vibe spreads across the neighbourhood.

Of course, not all placemaking initiatives are as large scale as that seen in Camden. They can be considerably more modest. The essential thing to remember is not to control through the creation of a predetermined masterplan, but rather allow a place to find its own way through supporting communities to focus in on manageable projects. Placemaking should be about nurturing the social life of a place, where the community is the expert.

Fred more about Fred and Kathy’s work at https://medium.com/the-social-life-project

It would be good to hear examples of how your community is creating a social life.