Placemaking for Change


Book Description

The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (RBA) is a national award for urban places that promotes innovative thinking about the built environment. Established in 1987, the award celebrates urban places distinguished by quality design-design that considers form in conjunction with social, economic, and environmental issues.




Placemaking with Children and Youth


Book Description

An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and youth in the process of urban design From a history of children’s rights to case studies discussing international initiatives that aim to create child-friendly cities, Placemaking with Children and Youth offers comprehensive guidance in how to engage children and youth in the planning and design of local environments. It explains the importance of children’s active participation in their societies and presents ways to bring all generations together to plan cities with a high quality of life for people of all ages. Not only does it delineate best practices in establishing programs and partnerships, it also provides principles for working ethically with children, youth, and families, paying particular attention to the inclusion of marginalized populations. Drawing on case studies from around the world—in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States—Placemaking with Children and Youth showcases children’s global participation in community design and illustrates how a variety of methods can be combined in initiatives to achieve meaningful change. The book features more than 200 visuals and detailed, thoughtful guidelines for facilitating a multiplicity of participatory processes that include drawing, photography, interviews, surveys, discussion groups, role playing, mapping, murals, model making, city tours, and much more. Whether seeking information on individual methods and project planning, interpreting and analyzing results, or establishing and evaluating a sustained program, readers can find practical ideas and inspiration from six continents to connect learning to the realities of students’ lives and to create better cities for all ages.




Placemaking


Book Description

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).




Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment


Book Description

This book is for all those actively working in the built environment. It presents the latest theory and practice of engaging with stakeholders to co-design, develop and manage thriving places. It starts from the importance of integrating design of nature into practice built on a foundation of First Nations understanding of place. The art of engagement of community, government and the development industry is discussed with reference to case studies and best practice techniques. The book then focuses on the critical role placemaking has in supporting resilience and adaptability of communities and looks at issues of leadership and governance. Building on these steps for placemaking, the last parts of the book address economics, evaluation, digital and art based tools and approaches to support projects that aim to create an engaged, contributive, collaborative and active citizen.




The City Creative


Book Description

Introduction : a brief history of the recent past -- The (near) death and life of postwar American cities : the roots of contemporary placemaking -- The roaring '90s -- Into the twenty-first century -- Growing place : toward a counterhistory of contemporary placemaking -- Producing place -- Creating place -- Conclusion : Placemaking is for people.




Recast Your City


Book Description

Community development expert Ilana Preuss explains how local leaders can revitalize their downtowns or neighborhood main streets by bringing in and supporting small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale manufacturing businesses help create thriving places, with local business ownership opportunities and well-paying jobs that other business types can't fulfill.




Learning from Bryant Park


Book Description

Andrew M. Manshel helped transform New York's Bryant Park from a blighted eyesore to a vibrant destination, then applied its strategies to an equally successful renewal project in a very different neighborhood: Jamaica, Queens. Here, he candidly describes what does (and doesn't) work when coordinating urban redevelopment projects.




Changing Senses of Place


Book Description

Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place.




The Placemaker's Guide to Building Community


Book Description

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.




Placemaker


Book Description

Placemaker is a call to tend our souls, our land, and our homes--to cultivate comfort, beauty, and peace in the places God has us. Images of comfortable kitchens and flower-filled gardens stir something deep within us--we instinctively long for home. In a world of chaos and conflict, we want a place of comfort and peace. In Placemaker, Christie Purifoy invites us to notice our soul's desire for beauty, our need to create and to be created again and again. As she reflects on the joys and sorrows of two decades as a placemaker and her recent years living in and restoring a Pennsylvania farmhouse, Christie shows us that we are all gardeners. No matter our vocation, we spend much of our lives tending, keeping, and caring. In each act of creation, we reflect the image of God. In each moment of making beauty, we realize that beauty is a mystery to receive. Weaving together her family's journey with stories of botanical marvels and the histories of the flawed yet inspiring placemakers who shaped the land generations ago, Christie calls us to cultivate orchards and communities, to clap our hands along with the trees of the fields, to step into our calling to create, to make a place in the place God made for us. Placemaker is a timely yet timeless reminder that the cultivation of good and beautiful places is not a retreat from the real world but a holy pursuit of a world that is more real than we know.