How Placemaking Projects Uplift Communities
Community development will always be an essential aspect of bettering towns and communities, which is why I tip my hat to initiatives that focus on improving lives by bettering places; communities drive placemaking.
According to the Project for Public Spaces, placemaking is a way to inspire residents of a town or city to reimagine and reinvent public spaces as an integrated heart of a community. It is a way to strengthen connections and collaborate toward shaping a happy and healthy society. It is also important to highlight that placemaking is more about creating beautiful spaces. It is also about the intention to develop a community through thought-driven projects and a shared identity. It is about change with a purpose!
Rural America is benefiting from change brought on by the Rural America Placemaking Toolkit, a platform to showcase diverse placemaking activities, projects, and success stories across rural America. This project, for example, sees how a talented artist paints everything good in her community, and a fraction of the sale is given back to her community. In Harlan County, Kentucky, this community theatre creates meaningful conversations through a mutual love for the arts. The USDA Rural Development supports these initiatives and has been investing in the Toolkit since 2020. More recently, they entered into a cooperative agreement with the University of Kentucky’s Community & Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky to host the first-ever Placemaking in Small & Rural Communities Online Conference.
Placemaking in Europe seems to be more focused on public spaces in cities, as opposed to the rural communities embracing placemaking in America. Over at Placemaking Europe, this non-profit foundation creates a network of practitioners, academics, community leaders, market players and policymakers across the field of placemaking. Here, people can develop and share knowledge, contribute to designing and testing tools and advocate for policies for better public spaces. Like Rural America Placemaking Toolkit, Placemaking Europe has a digital toolbox with curated resources. From explorative walks in Vienna to workshops on the future of urban space, this platform creates a fun, information-filled environment where positive change can flourish.
However, one lesson I believe European placemaking projects can learn from our American counterparts is shifting some placemaking attention from urban to rural. While many projects exist to create positive, engaging spaces in city settings, little information is available about rural placemaking projects. Although the European Commission focuses on agricultural policies, these developments largely surround the sustainable management of natural resources. It also looks at achieving balanced territorial growth within rural economies and ensuring natural resource management. These are essential aspects of any society but do not touch on the human element of bettering communities.
Studies show that one-quarter of the EU population lived in rural areas in 2015. European organisations can take a page out of Rural America Placemaking Toolkit’s book by encouraging community interaction. One of my favourites includes having community members paint their states during important community meetings to prevent distractions from digital devices. Another project includes Radical Walking, where people from the same areas are invited to walk together and examine their surroundings for placemaking opportunities. At the heart of placemaking, there are also suggestions for improving public spaces and gathering places. One includes a community mural toolkit created by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, while another focuses on creating a universal playground. Here, community youngsters participate in creating a design for a new playground.
There are many possibilities for creating positive environments for citizens — rural or urban — if we just put our heads together!
