Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective

Abstract

Since the 1990s, interest in place (as opposed to space) has surged across a spectrum of social science disciplines including planning. But the empirical focus has been chiefly on cities along the Atlantic Rim even as vast new areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were undergoing accelerated urbanization. This essay outlines a planning perspective to global place-making in the face of fierce inter-city competition for footloose capital. The question of how a place can be defined, and what criteria might serve to delineate a place occupies the first part of this essay. The definition proposed encompasses both a physical/built environment at the neighborhood scale and the subjective feelings its inhabitants harbor towards each other as an emplaced community. Specific criteria are discussed, with brief illustrations from Taiwan and China. But the art of place-making has not informed planners of the swaths of the urban in the newly industrializing global regions of Asia and elsewhere. Their principal preoccupation has been with the branding of cities and the advanced infrastructure required by global capital. In the process, millions of ordinary folks have been displaced and their neighborhoods erased, as speed, movement, and power have been valued more than the fragile social infrastructure of place-based communities. The essay concludes with an argument that place-making is everyone's job, local residents as well as official planners, and that old places can be “taken back” neighborhood by neighborhood, through collaborative people-centered planning. Examples from Japan, China, and Canada are used to illustrate these propositions.

Acknowledgements

Constructive comments on earlier drafts of this essay by Leonie Sandercock, Mike Douglass, and Janice Perlman, as well as three anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged. None, of course, are responsible for such errors of commission or omission that remain.

Notes

 1. A notable exception is Douglass and Ho (2008) and Douglass et al. (2008).

 2. The “labyrinth of power” acknowledges the impossibility to obtain an unambiguously holistic view of the urban in which the actually existing networks of power are clearly delineated. Our knowledge of the urban is therefore always fragmentary, partial, and inevitably biased. The contrary view is upheld by David Harvey whose neo-Marxist theory lends a certainty to his interpretations of the urban that other scholars do not necessarily profess. See, for example, Nigel Thrift (2006).

 3. “Outside its specific application in molecular physics, entropy can be conceived of as a measure of steady deterioration in social organization, the built environment, and natural resource wealth” (Friedmann, 2002, p. 13).

 4. For French debates around public policy with respect to these working class suburbs, see Kipfer (2009). A major riot in 2005, and smaller ones since then, have generated a small industry of commentaries by academics and activists.

 5. Of Douala, Cameroon, Simone writes: “the challenge is how residents keep each other in some kind of consideration and keep open the possibilities of a common future. In part this occurs through circulation of meanings, styles, vantage points, experiences, and ways of talking—tried and discarded and perhaps tried again. These elements thus come to belong to no one, even though particular groups may make strong claims on them at any given time. This performance of circulation—which produces an incessant sense of incompleteness ad haunting in whatever arrangements are momentarily put together by diverse residents trying to figure each other out and live together—is what I refer to hear as the spectral” (Simone, 2004, pp. 93–94).

 6. Jacobs (1962), Relph (1976), Tuan (1977), Heidegger (1977), Seamon (1979); Norberg-Schulz (1980), Whyte (1980), Pred (1984), de Certeau (1984), Lefebvre (1991), Kunstler (1993), Hayden (1995), Augé (1995), Cooper (1995), Feld & Basso (1996), Beatley & Manning (1997), Gelder & Jacobs (1998), Kenney (2001), Escobar (2001), Aravot (2002), Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga (2003), Feuchtwang (2004), Massey (2005), Hester (2006), Douglass & Ho (2008), Douglass et al. (2008).

 7. In a personal communication, Janice Perlman argues that places can be feared and despised rather than cherished. I find this argument difficult to accept. Neighborhoods that are not only drug centers but also areas ruled by killer gangs, are entropic settlements in process of dissolution. I purposely chose to talk about cherished neighborhoods, because their conviviality is a negentropic energy that leads to community rather than fortress mentality and fearful isolation.

 8. An excellent example of joint neighborhood action comes from Penang, Malaysia (Zabielskis, 2008).

 9. “According to the Widow, the best thing about living in a courtyard home is that it keeps one's feet on the ground, which is healthier than living in a high-rise apartment. The concept is called jie digi in Chinese, ‘to be connected to the earth's energy.’ The Widow once demonstrated by gently tapping her foot on our gate's granite step, wooden threshold, and surrounding muddy lane. At every touch, she repeated connected” (Meyer, 2009, p. 7).

10. Michael Meyer, a 36-year American who lived for many years in Beijing, could be called a reincarnation of Jane Jacobs. When he writes about his inner-city Beijing neighborhood Dazhalan, he writes with Jacob's love and passion for the place and with anger at the displacement and dispersal of its good people. It is a neighborhood comprising 114 hutong alleyways, 1500 businesses, seven temples, and 3,000 homes. Dazhalan's half square mile contains some 57,000 residents, one of the highest population densities in the world. Today, Dazhalan stands no more; Meyer's book is at once its obituary and memorial (Meyer, 2009, p. 5).

11. Marris (1962) has extensive data on what it means to be moved involuntarily from the center of Lagos to new housing estates on the periphery. Family relations are disrupted, livelihoods are destroyed, sociality is impeded, street trade is diminished, the costs of housing, transport, and food are raised, while the quality of life in the suburban housing estates is diminished. Within a year, 196 households (about 20% of all tenancies) were evicted from their new suburban housing for failure to pay rent (see chapter 8). He concludes with a question: “The fundamental problem raised by the Lagos slum clearance scheme is this: How can a neighborhood be physically destroyed, without destroying at the same time the livelihood and way of life of the people who have settled there? If these are disrupted, the clearance of slums is likely to do more harm than good (p. 129).

12. I stress “ordinary,” although I might have used the less familiar “subaltern” to describe the people most affected by dis/placement. The rich and powerful are rarely dis/placed; they live in their own compounds and, as I point out below, are frequently more at home in the hotels of global cities than they are in their own neighborhood enclaves, condominiums, or whatever. See Robinson (2006) as my inspiration for using “ordinary” with this specific meaning.

13. The Right to the City (RttC) is now building a social movement in the USA. See www.righttothecity.org.

14. Their functions were typically limited to contacts with municipal government; presenting petitions from residents; management of a community center; cleaning and beautification of a neighborhood; festivals, athletic meets, travel; cooperation with charities and blood donation drives; installation of street lights and security lights (Hashimoto, 2007, p. 226).

15. This section draws on a doctoral dissertation in process by Leslie Shieh a doctoral candidate in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver campus).

16. Such a “hotel,” 152 stories high, is under construction in Seoul, Korea. According to Mike Douglass of the University of Hawaii, “Another touted globopolis plan is ‘U-Town,’ short for Ubiquitous Town. The idea is to create a ‘ubiquitous life’ by constructing self-contained, autonomous living, work, shopping, entertainment and leisure complexes that will supply residents with ‘everything within a single building complex. As described by a director of its project in Daejon, by adding residential units to a shopping and business complex, all of life's needs are met without having to leave the interconnected complex of buildings of U-Town. Apropos to the motives of globopolis, the director of U-Town declares that there are only two goals in making this self-contained mini-city: profit and customers to spend money in its many commercial buildings” (personal communication 22 July 2009).