From 'placemaking' to 'placekeeping'

I have developed a love-hate relationship with the term 'place-making'. At its very best, it is what it set out to be when first coined in the 1970s, an inclusive and adaptive antidote to top down silo-addicted urban planning, one that:

• Shares the (design) pen with the end user.
• Places in the name the greater good an emphasis on collaboration between often wildly different stakeholders.
• Is hyper-focused on the public space as the nexus for everything that makes for the sorts of places people like to live, work, and play in.

At its worst, however, it is a 'single impact' brief gone horribly wrong, where top down profit-seeking is the primary motivator for a given development, everything else a tick box exercise in tokenism, and nothing in the design to suggest the development has the capacity to flex with a change in need and want.

Too often, mention and use of the term is a bit like taking multiple hits of gas-and-air to cover the perceived planning pain of a given intervention - engage stakeholders (hit), local community groups (hit), and publish your evidence-base (hit) for moving forward. Truth is, the intervention either runs out of gas-and-air or the drugs just stop working. Either way, it's easy to see how initially enlightened placemaking can suffer over time, the capital expenditure afforded its planning and development replaced by paltry place-management budgets, the once high level of community-led input compromised by short term contracts, and its relative success leading to gentrification and so to the eventual exit of the very communities the original development was supposed to benefit.

If our placemaking is going to do everything it has historically and continues to promise, then we need to take note of, design for, and put serious money into the notion of 'placekeeping', a term introduced, as far as I know, in relation to the stewardship and managing of placemaking developments in Sheffield (UK) in the late 2000s. Broadly speaking, placekeeping takes up the much-neglected reins of long term place management, thereby ensuring, as academics and practitioners Nicola Dempsey and Mel Burton say, 'that the social, environment and economic quality benefits the place brings can be enjoyed by future generations'. To which I would add two things:

• Those benefits are not always or necessarily realised by an original or ongoing (re)development. Rather, they are the result of an intervention that - either from scratch or as a means of course-correcting the gentrifying effects of development - seeks to engage the community and its representatives as both the primary stewards of the stories and culture that make a given place what it is and also the primary long term managers of that place.
• Two, this shifting of long term management of place to the community in a way that serves different people in different ways for futures that it is impossible to be certain of will require that we - policy makers, planners, designers -? are much more humble when it comes to our placemaking design intentions. We need to make room for in our placemaking for multiple futures, build redundancy into our planning, and so make space for all those unknown unknowns.?

More on all this at another time. For now, I'd love to hear your thoughts - on placekeeping, sure, but also on placemaking in general. As they say, it's good to talk.?