Placemaking and Innovation Need to Go Together To Achieve Inclusion
Turning Cities, and Economies, Right-side Up with an Integrated Focus on Innovation, Place, and Inclusion
To create stronger, and more inclusive economies, as well as stronger and more inclusive places, we need new models to harness the power of people to shape economies and places together. Placemaking fosters collaboration and convergence of disparate groups, and community assets, fostered around places, and in the process can yield more inclusive and equitable economies and places.
The cities that thrive most in the future will be the ones that harness their potential for people to inclusively contribute to the shaping their public realm and their economy through placemaking and innovation together.
Placemaking is about empowering, and challenging, the inclusive shaping of the built environment. It is about maximizing shared value, purpose, and meaning, in the public realm through supporting users not just as consumers of more public wealth, but co-creators. Shaping our environment without shaping our economy, without connecting placemaking and innovation, is missing perhaps the strongest city shaping force, and a major opportunity for driving shared prosperity.
Places and cities are growing beyond something to consume as efficient, aesthetic or even just livable. The narrow focus on livability has led to increasingly expensive and exclusionary cities and public realms. A focus on lovable and publicly accessible places can help achieve inclusive and livable more quickly and affordable. The cities of the future will best thrive when people have attachment to them, and are invited, and driven, to contribute to their continued success through placemaking, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Of course, economies shape places too, usually more than planners and designers do. We need to ground place shaping in the larger economic context, and leverage more equitable economies to better shape places.
Grounding economy shaping in place, and in communities, facilitates the benefits being shared locally, and with sustained impact. Leveraging economy shaping with dynamic, diverse, and open places, and placemaking, means breaking downs barriers to more inclusive local economies and places. Integrating innovation and placemaking can harnesses sociability, open culture, and long-term shared value generation for shared prosperity, social integration and upward mobility.
Perhaps the fundamental global crisis is one of collective capacity to shape our civilization — our economies, places, governments and cultures. Fundamental, and perhaps most practical, to building that capacity is a focus on placemaking, innovation, and inclusion. At the district scale, new models of place-led governance, financing, and development can proliferate through demonstrating their benefit for growing both shared and private value.
Grounding innovation in pluralistic and civic places can hopefully, more broadly share the benefits of innovation and yield more civic minded, and pluralistic innovations.
The placemaking movement is positioned to facilitate a global conversation through the many different disciplines and sectors competing to shape places and urban economies, with a growing realization that when place becomes a goal of citymaking, that it draws out the best in communities, professions, and governments.
This post builds on work that I did while I was at Project for Public Spaces with the Bass Initiative on Innovation and Placemaking, a program we developed in collaboration with Bruce Katz, Jenifer Vey and Julie Wagner at Brookings Global. The Brookings Metro program and Project for Public Spaces are continuing to build on this work under Brookings’ Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking.
