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This study aims to address the research gap about value in the holistic discourse of creative placemaking. It identifies and synthesises the often discounted social and environmental values of creative placemaking along with typically emphasised economic values.

This paper builds upon two research phases; first, a review and extraction of creative placemaking value indicators from relevant current urban, cultural and planning literature; and second, the identification of relevant, practice-based, value indicators through interviews with 23 placemaking experts including practitioners, urban planners, developers and place managers from the two largest cities of NSW, Australia; Sydney and Newcastle.

This study identifies three broad thematics for valuing creative placemaking along with several sub-categories of qualitative and quantitative indicators. These indicators reveal the holistic value of creative placemaking for its key stakeholders, including expert placemakers, designers, building developers, government and community groups. A key conclusion of the research is the need for tools that grasp the interconnected, and at times conflicting, nature of placemaking’s social, economic and environmental outcomes.

While a variety of value indicators exist to understand the need for ongoing resourcing of creative placemaking, stakeholders identified the limitations of current approaches to determine, represent and appraise the value of creative placemaking. The indicators of value proposed in this research consolidate and extend current discourse about the value of creative placemaking specifically. The indicators themselves have profound practical implications for how creative placemaking is conceived, executed and evaluated. Theoretically, the study builds on the deep relationships between values and practice in creative placemaking, as well as critiquing narrow forms of evaluation that entrench economic benefits over other outcomes.

The predominant neoliberal structure of capitalism and tourism as the fuel of capitalism exposes growing problems of injustice, unfairness and inequality. Places and communities around the world are currently expressing the need for radical changes in placemaking to be able to think, plan and act differently. This theoretical contribution adopts a humanistic management (HM) perspective of placemaking to promote places where people enjoy living, working, interacting and having meaningful experiences. Tourist destinations are relevant places to discuss the application of HM principles in practice and promote humanistic destinations and the humanisation of placemaking. This chapter concludes by arguing for an interface with eco-centric and posthumanist transformative approaches to promote holistic value-based placemaking and regeneration of places.

An increasing effort to reinforce cultural and social activities in creative placemaking is observed. Despite extensive previous studies, works of literature ignored the necessary group-specific indicators and processes in creative placemaking. In successful placemaking, the vital attributes of a place as a social platform should be identified and intensified in the initiatives taken. As such, this study aims to examine the functions of urban design social attributes in generating meaningful creative placemaking initiatives.

A survey was performed, which involved 340 visitors in the inner city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from one case study (a strategic social event initiative called RIUH) on users’ preference toward the social attributes of place and the factors influencing preference. Field observations were carried out to understand the social activities and pattern of engagement.

The preference study revealed that urban design social attributes encompassed the essential inclusiveness, value, diversity and vitality of place because of high preference and a significant difference among groups.

Understanding users’ preferences has emphasized the relevance of each urban design social attribute in accommodating different user opportunity groups, ultimately inducing a positive social impact in creative placemaking.

This study demonstrated the success of creative placemaking in urban development from the social dimension. It provides an understanding that the priority of creative practices should be redirected toward a more in-depth approach in addressing individuals, social capacity, involvement and well-being through the optimization of benefits and other creative placemaking values.

While placemaking is a multi-disciplinary concern, it is a key focus within the discipline of spatial planning. This paper aims to explore the development of theoretical trends with regard to placemaking in spatial planning since 1975 to identify current emerging theoretical perspectives. Special attention is given to differences in perspectives between the Global North and the Global South.

The study used an integrative literature review (ILR) to analyse placemaking literature over a period of 41 years and five months. The ILR followed the basic review stages: scoping; planning and review protocol; identification/availability; searching; and screening. ILR differs from other reviews as quality appraisal, data gathering, analysis and synthesis rely on coding, thematic content analysis and synthesis.

Initially, the planning/review protocol resulted in 59 contributions on placemaking in various disciplines (excluding publications in other languages that English). Contributions included spatial and design disciplines (29 contributions), social sciences (14 contributions) and other disciplines (16 contributions). The literature review proceeded with a selection of 23 spatial planning contributions (20 from the Global North and three from the Global South). Theoretical trends include placemaking theorised as a physical construct, a social construct, an economic construct (absent in literature from the Global South), a tool for empowerment, a psychological dimension and an environmental management tool.

The most recent theoretical perspectives in literature suggest placemaking as an enabling tool in which people share knowledge and learn new skills to transform their own environment. This empowering process creates a linkage between planning theory and practice.

This paper contributes to the current theories of placemaking in spatial planning. It provides a simplified view of an exhaustive list of existing literature. This paper reports on the current trends and the development of placemaking theory.

This paper aims to examine urban community gardens from the urban planning perspective. The paper analyses the Berlin case study Himmelbeet and its relation to the concept of critical placemaking (Toolis, 2017) and placemaking principles of Madden and Schwartz (1999).

The study is based on participatory action research. It examines one specific case study in Berlin where the author volunteered for several years. The set of placemaking principles is used as an ex-post analysis tool to evaluate how the community garden meets the criteria of placemaking.

The paper shows that the urban community garden can be considered as a placemaking scheme although it was not planned with placemaking instruments. The garden’s placemaking process shows strategies to challenge issues of exclusion, disinvestment and depoliticization of public spaces and thus exemplifies the possibilities of citizen-controlled placemaking processes.

The paper links placemaking with urban community gardens by assessing the placemaking principles and discussing the criteria of critical placemaking. The paper also contributes to a better understanding of urban community gardens in relation to current trends of austerity and urban inequalities.

This article explores the relationship between knowledge and sustainable placemaking. Distinguishing between “expert knowledge” and “local knowledge,” it first problematizes expert knowledge, and then traces the local knowledge approach to placemaking. The widening gap between expert and local knowledge prompts understanding their sources and modes of knowing. By viewing place as an organization this article draws from Nonaka's (1994) distinctions of four modes of knowledge creation in an organization, and explores the commonalities between the two. The analogy between place and organization helps gain new insights from the organizational theory literature which links processed information to knowledge creation. Seeking similarities between place and organization arises from how individuals in organizations and places process information to solve problems. Critically examining local knowledge questions the presupposition of a fixed, static mode of knowing, and helps incorporate a range of activities and knowhow associated with different stages of placemaking. The study suggests that local knowledge converts existing knowledge into four types of new knowledge during the placemaking process. Furthermore, compared to the top-down nature of expert knowledge which mainly adheres to the principles of scientific rationality for grand planning and problem solving, the local knowledge approach to placemaking is bottom-up, fosters piecemeal growth, and thus is more adaptable and sustainable. Promoting (social) sustainability through knowledge conversion (i.e., converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and vice versa), social interaction and self-help characterize placemaking in informal settlements.

This purpose of this study is to explore the voices of women in conceptualizing a city with clean air, and how this relates to urban structural changes being made more environmentally and socially sustainable.

A growing body of research suggests that gender is central to placemaking, and in dealing with environmental sustainability, fear of crime, longer life expectancy, unpaid work and economic inequality shape mobility and experiences of the city for women. In this context, the authors conducted a series of interviews with women in Greater Manchester and explored how they envision a city with clean air.

Findings suggest that the conceptualization of a city with cleaner air is influenced by a range of both direct and indirect factors including safety, pleasantness, greenspace, litter and homelessness. Consequently, these can be powerful elements in designing relevant policies for women and for society at large and in communicating them effectively.

The major limitation of this study is that whilst it gives voice to women with different backgrounds (e.g. age, ethnicity or professional background) and experiences (e.g. number of children or preferred form of transport), it is not an encompassing voice of all women. For example, although the professional backgrounds of these women are diverse, they all hold a position of relative economic privilege, and as such it is important to acknowledge that these findings do not fully incorporate the voices of other, less privileged, women.

These interviews and their analysis present a novel exploration of the question of air quality and placemaking from a gender perspective, highlighting both a willingness to change and to support structural changes.

This paper aims to present the potential of placemaking as an approach of sustainable urban facilities management and its impacts on the improvement of the planning procedures which was aimed at involving citizens in the process itself. The study is based on the general concept of placemaking represented as an “overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighbourhood, city or region”, that serves as a process that “inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community” (PPS, 2007).

The study used placemaking (onsite analysis, stakeholder identification, citizen survey and emotional mapping) and public participation geographic information systems (The Kernel Density tool in ArcGIS and hot spot analysis) methodologies to map problems and preferences identified by stakeholders related to particular spaces within the move formed by Maršala Birjuzova and Sremska streets in Belgrade. The research covered two-day stakeholders’ workshops including four groups of users participated in the workshop – pupils of local private high school, street residents, students of the Faculty of Forestry and the Faculty of Architecture and owners of local shops and businesses.

Research has shown that different stakeholders can offer very rational observations on the quality of a particular space and provide clear suggestions on its improvement and transformation. These proposals can be organised in the form of visions of the future appearance and functioning of the space, thus recognising the potential in the function of a sustainable urban facilities management tool in the form of creating a common idea, which will result in the creation of a common space.

The research covered only part of the process that resulted in the creation of an idea of future public space transformation. Continued research should be conducted after the intervention, which would give a more comprehensive picture of the effects of the approach.

Practical implications include the presentation of the ways different groups of users perceive the actual and future transformation of the street to make this place more user-friendly and sustainable, i.e. practical example of the co-design process.

This paper provide an overview of the possibilities of placemaking approach seen from the perspective of sustainable urban facilities management.

Placemaking is an established practice and research field. It takes on a spatial dimension created through a socio-political process where value and meaning are assigned to settings. An emerging concept, sustainability citizenship relies on social actors creating sustainable urban settings by working, sometimes, “outside” formal planning; offering an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places. The purpose of this paper is twofold: examine one of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements to explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, and use this exploration as a means to argue the appropriateness of sustainability citizenship when investigating/realising settings in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

To address the paper’s aim, books, journal articles and monographs related to citizen/community participation, placemaking, citizenship (in Latin America and conceptually) and sustainability citizenship were collected and critically reviewed. Identification of these documents was achieved through a literature review of the library database at Deakin University and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the co-authors of this paper contributing to and reviewing submissions to the 2016 Routledge publication, Sustainability Citizenship. Field observation and engagement with the citizenry living in the informal settlements of Bogotá, Colombia were conducted at various times in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Sustainability citizenship and placemaking are linked through their “process-driven” approach to realising places and use of the citizenry to enact change. In Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlement of Caracoli, public spaces are created outside formal planning processes through alternative path dependencies and the resourcefulness of its citizens. Sustainability citizenship, rather than placemaking, can work outside formal planning and manoeuvre around established path dependencies, which offers an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places in the global south.

This paper provides insight into the use of placemaking when explaining the realisation process of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements. The paper’s contents also explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, which in terms of the latter is a new citizenry dimension that can be used to provide new insight into the realisation process of public spaces in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and clarify the relationship between creative developments and the concepts of place and placemaking.

This paper systematically reviews scholarly literature on the relationship between creative developments and the concepts of place, and critically analyzes the extent to which creative developments acknowledge different aspects of place.

The findings demonstrate that the relationship between creative development and place is multifaceted, and combines physical, cultural and social aspects of place. However, the literature also calls for the greater valuation of particular facets of place, including the daily experiences of communities and local cultural producers, alongside symbolic and imagined aspects of place, all of which inform either positive or negative perceptions of urban form. In addition, the authors argue that the cultural value of the creative industries needs to be better acknowledged in creative developments, implying support for a range of cultural practitioners.

The authors argue that embracing a more holistic understanding of place in creative development has the potential to minimize the negative impacts sometimes associated with such developments (like gentrification and social displacement) while generating greater social and cultural benefits to people and place. The study findings raise questions that frame a critical research agenda for creative-led developments and creative placemaking in this context.

By examining the broader relationship between creative developments and place and identifying areas neglected by researchers, this research contributes to an articulation of “creative placemaking” that moves creative city policy toward enhancing community development.