Placemaking in the Nordics

Placemaking creates sustainable and attractive urban environments by focusing on the people that in habit them. Through community engagement and a collaborative process, it fosters long-term relationships between actors to transform and sustain public spaces. The concept was developed in the 1970s in the context of infrastructure-oriented and top-down city planning. In opposition, inspirational and key figures in the placemaking movement such as the urban activist Jane Jacobs, sociologist William H. Whyte, founder of Project for Public Spaces (PPS) Fred Kent, and Danish architect Jan Gehl advocated the need for more diversity, meeting places, and walkability. They were calling on city planners and politicians to address city-planning by looking at the human scale and acknowledge the value of public spaces for communities. More importantly, they wanted to put urbanism back at the centre of democratic processes. As Jane Jacobs aptly puts it: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Today, different methodologies can be gathered under the placemaking umbrella. The placemaking methodologies consist of tools to study urban life and how people experience urban environments, as well as guidelines on how to create attractive public places by putting the emphasis on experimental approaches. It also investigates how urban spaces are produced, emphasizing open processes, bottom-up initiatives, and collaboration between stakeholders. Placemaking practices have now crystallised in global and regional movements such as Placemaking X and Placemaking Europe.

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