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.

Introduction

For the world as a whole, the twenty-first century will be seen as the concluding chapter of a three centuries-long saga, the urban transition. Beginning in the final decades of eighteenth century Europe, when urban population stood at less than 10% globally (Bairoch, 1993, p. 143), current projections suggest a rise to 70% urban by 2050, a percentage that will surely increase still further toward the end of this century. The global dimension of the urban, however, can be said to begin only with the post-World War II era, when urban population in the less developed regions of the world increased by nearly eight times, rising from 310 million in 1950 to 2.4 billion in 2007, or from 18% to 44% globally (United Nations, 2009, Table 1). Around the same time, and for the first time in history, the global rural/urban split, marked in purely demographic terms, shifted towards a majority urban.

Although smaller cities account for more than half the urban growth, the vast assemblages of the urban in certain regions, many of them in Asia, are of critical importance. The Population Division of the United Nations estimates that by 2025, the world will have 447 of these so-called mega-cities of ten or more million residents, among them such behemoths as Tokyo, Mumbai, Delhi, Dhaka, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Calcutta, each with more than twenty million residents (United Nations, 2009, p. 19, Table 4). All of this is happening, even as national states appear to be losing control over urban policy, having devolved substantial powers for managing urban growth to local governments (Brenner, 2004).

The result has been intense competition among cities in their hunger for global capital for infrastructure, housing, and production. Along with this, the private sphere has expanded at the expense of the public, as governments, eager to capture the attention of potential investors, turn entrepreneurial themselves, hoping their cities will reach world-class status through public–private partnerships essentially geared to profits. Many local governments attempt to “brand” their cities, as if cities were a commodity for sale, promoting extravagant projects to catch the attention of the world such as Dubai's Burj Khalifa super-skyscraper that rises 825 m into the air. In this frenzy of excess, the needs of ordinary people and the neighborhoods they inhabit have been forgotten. It is an old, perhaps universal story; in the current eagerness to build glass-sheathed office towers, airports, opera houses, and spectacular sport facilities for the newly rich, this forgetfulness is shrugged off as the inevitable “cost of progress.”

My intention in this paper runs counter to this narrative: it is to recall something that is, in essence, a moral imperative. As will be shown, the recent literature on place and place-making is extensive, as a range of disciplines have engaged the topic. But there are relatively few treatments written for and by planners, and even fewer that look at the sprawling metropolises of Asia where urbanization is rampant.1 This is the lacuna I hope, at least in part, to fill.

The following is a discursive essay rather than an empirically based article. It is a personal view based on observation, extensive reading, and long reflection. There are two loosely related parts. The first is an attempt to formulate an operational definition of place along with some criteria by which places can be identified. This is followed by a commentary about planners and place-making, with examples taken from Japan, China, and Canada. Amidst widespread fascination with mega-projects and the huge assemblages of the urban, I want to enter a plea for the small spaces of the city and their importance both for the people who inhabit them and for the planners who, in the developing but rapidly urbanizing world, are paying them far too little attention.

A Placeless Scenario

The literature on the city is filled with references to desolate placelessness and a yearning for place, for some solid connection to the earth, to the palpable physicality of cities and the everyday need for social contact. As sprawling suburbs move steadily outwards towards the horizon, the very concept of “city” has become diluted and vague. For those of us who live in the urban, it is a labyrinthine network of power and disempowerment.2 A few years ago I called the forces of contemporary life that steadily eat away at our sense of being anywhere at all, erasing our sense of place, “entropic” (Friedmann, 2002, p. 13).3 I argued that, applied to the human habitat, entropy can be read as a measure of disorder. Unless countervailing flows of negentropic energy—human energy, the product of mind and body—can overcome the constant dissipation of energy which is everywhere around us, random events will become increasingly common, life forms will cease to flourish (Schroedinger, 1992 [1945]).

Here is a story by French Nobel Prize winner J.-M. G. Le Clézio (2002). “Ariadne” tells of a brutal gang rape by a motorcycle gang in one of the desolate public housing projects (banlieues) that “warehouse” immigrant workers on the edge of Paris and other large French cities, such as Marseille.4 His opening description of this quartier captures the sense of desolation and lack of human connection that give rise to random acts of violence by young men who, surplus to society, prowl the streets and corridors of these projects in search of anything that will at least temporarily release their anger at a system that excludes them.

On the banks of the dry riverbed stands the high-rise project. It is a city in its own right, with scores of apartment buildings—great gray concrete cliffs standing upright on the level asphalt grounds, surrounded by a sweeping landscape of rubble hills, highways, bridges, the river's dusty shingle bed, and the incinerator plant trailing its acrid heavy cloud over the valley. Here, it's quite a distance to the sea, quite a distance to the town, quite a distance to freedom, quite a distance from simple fresh air on account of the smoke from the incinerator plant, and quite a distance from human contact, for the project looks like an abandoned town. Perhaps there really is no one here—no one in the tall gray buildings with thousands of rectangular windows, no one in the stairwells, in the elevators, and still no one in the great parking lots where the cars are parked. Perhaps all the doors and windows have been bricked up, blinded, and no one can escape from within the walls, the apartments, the basements. And yet aren't the people moving around between the great gray walls—the men, the women, the children, even the dogs occasionally—rather like shadowless ghosts, disembodied, intangible, blank-eyed beings lost in lifeless space? And they can never meet one another. As if they had no names.

From time to time, a shadow slips by, fleeing between the white walls. Sometimes one can get a glimpse of the sky, despite the haze, despite the heavy cloud drifting down from the chimney of the incinerator plant in the west. You see airplanes too, having torn free of the clouds for an instant, drawing long cottony filaments behind their shimmering wings.

But there are no birds here, no flies, no grasshoppers. Now and then one finds a stray ladybug on one of the big cement parking lots. It walks along the ground, then tries to escape, flying heavily over in the direction of the planters filled with parched earth, where a scorched geranium stands. (p. 67)

You will argue that “Ariadne” is an extreme case. There are many working-class suburbs where such outbreaks of random violence are unlikely, where life conforms by and large to the customary rules of civility. Extremes should not be taken as an accurate depiction of urban life as we know it. From a global perspective, however, this story illustrates where we seem to be headed, as in many parts of the world ever larger numbers of young people are, in effect, declared redundant and so are pushed to the margins of society. In rich countries such as France, they are “warehoused” in heavily policed suburban projects. In poor countries, such as in Africa, they disappear into the vast irregular settlements surrounding the small central cores that are the natural habitat of business elites and government. Simone calls them “spectral cities” (Simone, 2004, chapter 3, pp. 92–117 passim).5 As their hopes of finding sustaining work are dwindling, they succumb to the yawning marginality of their lives, seeking by whatever means on offer—drugs, physical violence, criminality, terrorism, genocidal rage—to drown out awareness of their actual conditions of life. It is a growing malaise caused by the ceaseless entropic forces that are at work in many of the world's large cities.

My answer to this problem—and here I speak as a planner—is to reclaim the bits of the human habitat that are given us as residents in the urban, and to reconnect our lives with the lives of others in ways that are inherently meaningful. I began with the horror of placelessness. In the remaining pages I will attempt to show how the recovery of places, specifically the small spaces of the urban, can begin to release constructive energies of negative entropy, taking back what societal forces geared to maximizing profits and narrowly defined efficiencies have taken from us. I believe that we can re-humanize the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods.

A First Approach: What is a Place?

It is difficult to take a word such as place, which is in everyday use and applied in all sorts of ways, and turn it into a concept that has a precise and operational meaning. The academic literature on place (and the related idea of place making) is growing rapidly across a spectrum of the human sciences and the professions, including geography, social anthropology, landscape architecture, architecture, environmental psychology, planning, and philosophy.6 Much of this literature as well as many items not included in this foreshortened bibliography are critically examined in Cresswell's Place: A Short Introduction (2004). Cresswell is a geographer, and his view of places is, so to speak, from the outside in: an outside observer's gaze on places, hierarchically arranged, from single room to planet Earth.

In contradistinction to the multiple scales of the geographer, the scale I propose to adopt here is exclusively the local, and the perspective on place will be from the inside out, that is, as place is experienced and sometimes transformed by those who dwell in the urban. Before venturing a more formal definition, however, I would like to provide a sketch of such an intimate place of social encounter in order to make the idea of place more palpable and real. Here is a word painting of a temple ground on the periphery of Taipei, Taiwan's capital city.

This is a story about Shan-Hsia, a country town located in what some would call the peri-urban area of Greater Taipei where city folk meet country folk. Actually, Shan-Hsia is only about 25 km from the center of the capital city. We could also say, of course, that there is no longer any “peri-urban” in Taiwan, since urban growth sprawls uninterruptedly from north to south along the west coast of this island nation, backed by a chain of mountains some of which rise to over 2000 m.

I visited Shan-Hsia on a Saturday morning in the Spring of 2006. As we approached, we passed a number of massive apartment complexes which anywhere else would have been an architect's nightmare but here were loudly hawked to customers eager to experience what they imagined to be the heaven of modern living.

Arriving, we parked our car, no small feat in itself in a street choked with vehicles and people. Hundreds of motor scooters, like frenzied mosquitoes, darted in and out of the traffic. You had to be nimble to avoid being knocked over.

It was market day in Shan-Hsia, and as we wended our way to Tsu-Sze Temple, which was our goal, we walked past dozens of market stands crowding the sidewalk, with eager customers jostling each other to buy fresh fish, meats, vegetables, and fruits spread out before them in splendid profusion.

Tsu-Sze Temple is famous throughout the region. Originally constructed in 1769, it was destroyed and rebuilt three times. The latest rebuilding started in 1947 and is still incomplete. The temple is dedicated to Chen Tsao-Yin, a native of Henan Province on the mainland who, together with some of his people, had migrated to a place called Chuan Chu in Fujian Province on the coast. His image was enshrined in the temple, and the local folks in Chuan Chu showed respect for his exploits and regarded him as their patron saint. When the original settlers from the district arrived from the mainland in the eighteenth century, they built the temple in memory of their saint.

Today, it is wedged into a small corner of the town, fronting a broad but shallow river. A small irregularly shaped square containing some shade trees was bustling with people. Children raced each other playing tag, the ubiquitous mosquito scooters had temporarily slowed to participate in the scene, a smell of incense was in the air, and adults in small groups were chatting with each other while a sound truck hovered in a corner of the square, encouraging people to vote for a Mr. Wu, the local candidate for city council.

Looking around me, I thought for a moment I was magically transposed from the twenty-first century into a scene of the famous scroll painting, “Spring on the River” depicting a northern Song Dynasty cityscape alive with people going about their daily affairs. Here life washed in and out of the temple, as worshippers sent their silent prayers to the saints on incense smoke, including a female divinity and her heavenly entourage, pleading for health or money or a husband or a good grade on the next exam, in a fusion of the secular and sacred. People gawked and talked, bowed down and prayed, wandered about (as we did), admiring the intricate, delicate carvings with which every square inch of the temple, including its 122 columns, was adorned.

A pedestrian bridge spanned the river. We ascended by some steps to get a better view. The bridge was lined on both sides with booths, most of which sold some sort of food: freshly fried pancakes prepared under the watchful eyes of waiting customers, a variety of aromatic soups, delicious noodles and dumplings, iced fruit and vegetable juices, and sinful sweets. Nine out of ten stands were cookeries with mostly middle-aged ladies stirring, ladling, cutting, frying, and selling their handiwork for ridiculously low prices to hungry customers. On the far end of the bridge, a stage had been set up, and people were beginning to sit down for a show. Meanwhile, a loudspeaker blared what I took to be a Taiwanese version of hard rock. I decided a rural festival was under way, because a long table had been cordoned off on which dozens of competing trays laden with the pride of local farmers, a large but to me unfamiliar root vegetable used in making soup stock, were on display. Presumably, the winning tray would receive a blue ribbon prize. (Friedmann, 2007, pp. 357–358)

Granted this story is still a view from outside, but it draws attention to a center of neighborhood life whose participants, most but perhaps not all of whom are neighbors, are drawn from a larger area with which this temple ground and its immediate surrounds stands in a close, reciprocal relation, thus constituting a distinctive neighborhood, the heart of a territorial place. Cresswell's observations are apposite here:

The work of Seamon, Pred, Thrift, deCerteau and others show us how place is constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and reimagined in practical ways…Place provides the conditions of possibility for creative social practice. Place in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological place rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence (Cresswell, 2004, p. 39).

Urban places, according to Cresswell, are embedded in the built environment but come into being through “reiterative social practices” such as the activities recorded in the neighborhood centered on Tsu-Sze Temple in the town of Shan-Hsia, Taiwan. Some of them are daily, such as prayer and worship, others obey an annual calendar of festivities. The temple and its grounds must be maintained—a responsibility of the community of the faithful. The county fair is held in the same place on a seasonal basis. Political elections for local office are held whenever they are due, and candidates vie for votes wherever potential voters are gathered. The nearby farmers' market is held on weekends. All these activities occur in the tight space of a few hundred meters from the temple itself. Indeed, one could say, with Cresswell, that the temple grounds are a sort of “performance stage.” It is also an open, inclusive place, so that those who wish to do so can join in the festivities, whether for worship, business, politics, or just being social. And so, to repeat once more with Cresswell, Tsu-Sze Temple could be described as an event whose precise spatial configuration and rhythms are dynamic even though its pattern of social interaction has remained fairly constant over time; recall that since its founding in 1769, the temple was destroyed and rebuilt three times and is currently still under construction.

We are now in position to define place more formally, with reference to places not only on the periphery of Taipei but wherever in the world they may be found. Accordingly, a place can be defined as a small, three-dimensional urban space that is cherished by the people who inhabit it. To the characteristics of urban places identified by Cresswell above—reiterative social practices, inclusiveness, performability, dynamic quality—we can now add three more: the place must be small, inhabited, and come to be cherished or valued by its resident population for all that it represents or means to them.7

In this definition, the question of scale is left indeterminate, but my inclination is to argue for a pedestrian scale, which allows people to interact in a variety of mostly unplanned ways, on the street or in business establishments among other spaces of habitual encounter. In this perspective, neighborhoods are defined from the inside out as the area that neighbors acknowledge as their home or, as sociologists would say, as their primary space of social reproduction. This criterion tells us nothing, however, about the intensity of the interaction in question: some forms may be quite superficial, such as being recognized by name on the street or in a store, or simply by a friendly greeting as neighbors go about their daily errands.

The second criterion of inhabiting is obviously a necessary condition of living in a neighborhood, and therefore excludes certain non-places, such as large hotels, department stores, shopping malls, banks, airports, bus terminals, and office buildings among others that have no soul (Augé, 1995, Kunstler, 1993). By being lived in, the actual physical and social spaces of an urban neighborhood come to be modified and possibly even transformed. This happens naturally through the simple fact of being lived in and the spatial patterns of social interaction that are formed over time, as newcomers arrive, old residents depart. It may also be a result of specific joint actions undertaken by neighbors.8 External circumstances and forces impinge on the neighborhood as well, contributing to its changing character. In the course of these several actions and changes, the neighborhood acquires particular meanings for its inhabitants, though not all of them may be shared; it thereby becomes a distinctive place and may even acquire a name.

Finally, there is the matter of attachment to place, which is included here as constitutive of place. Attachment is a subjective, invisible attribute—invisible, that is, under normal circumstances. It may occasionally become visible when a neighborhood is threatened with demolition and organizes (or not) to fight for its survival, or when its social composition changes rapidly, and the integration of newcomers becomes stressful and problematic. It is indicated by the way neighbors respond to newcomers, or the manner in which groups of neighbors decide to join up in an effort to improve the physical conditions of neighborhood life. The number and variety of local organizations that depend primarily on local volunteering can perhaps provide an additional, if indirect, measure of place attachment.

The “Centering” of Place: Spaces of Encounter and Gathering

Yet a fourth criterion important to the formation of places is the existence of one or more “centers” or spaces of encounter and/or gathering. This criterion was suggested by the British anthropologist of religion, Stephan Feuchtwang (2004), as a structural imperative for places to come into being. Tsu-Sze Temple is an instance of such a center for a neighborhood whose boundaries are unspecified but clearly have local dimensions. Feuchtwang is somewhat vague about the process of centering. He writes: “Small-scale territorialization is a series of actions and their repetition, centring and thereby making a place” (p. 4). In a case study from China in the same volume, he goes a little further, describing the processes of place-making as involving “gathering, centring and linking” (chapter 9). The entire passage is worth quoting:

The Chinese strategy of location that I have singled out celebrates the name of a village or a line of descent that is also a set of links and social connections…Through it, powerful leaders and donors make their mark by combining their own face with that of a locality in a process of indirection, that is via an ancestor or a temple that is the space where meetings, networks, and gossip are gathered. The leader is respected for a local loyalty. I am suggesting that there is a distinctively Chinese sense of public space as a tacit space of gathering, linking and centring.

By contrast with both, in China and elsewhere, the cosmology of the project of modernity is spatially signified by a line that is the arrow of progress or development, not the centre but the pursuit of the vanishing point of abundance and infinity. As lived, the time and space of modernity remains a space, not a place. In China, it is likened to the ocean…. Everyone indeed fishes in the ocean of fortune. But it is nevertheless spoken about in China, including of course, by those that live by it, as chaotic. Modernity is the chaos of ordinary life, as out of abstract space and its lines to infinity, places and networks of trust, if not friendship, are made, imposing upon it a more sacred landscape of places, curved eaves, and homes by the three gestures of gathering, centring, and linking. (p. 178)

Feuchtwang's language is allusive here. What he calls the “chaos of ordinary life” is here counterposed to the networks of traditional practices and rituals, the building of ancestral halls, a temple dedicated to a local deity, all of which, in turn, become points of attraction for a village (or urban neighborhood) to talk, gossip, tell stories. Networks so formed are based on familiarity and trust, Feuchtwang claims, and help to bring about a sense of what it means to live in this village, this particular neighborhood. This may ultimately lead to a degree of belonging or attachment, to a sense of place and, ultimately, of one's place in the cosmos. Territorial places in Feuchtwang's sense are centered but not bounded. Or rather, the boundary of centering is a ragged, dynamic, indeterminate edge that shades off into other territories or the unloved spaces of random events that surround us.

We don't have to accept the full implications of Feuchtwang's specifically Chinese version of place-making to accept his criterion of centering—of encounter and gathering—where the former is the weaker term, while the latter suggests a coming together for a purpose. If the whole idea of place is of an environment conducive to sociality or, which is much the same thing, civility (Ho & Douglass, 2008), then communication among people who are known to each other, whether repetitive and patterned or purposeful, is at the nub of this process. Feuchtwang goes on to argue that centering calls into being interiority: “Territorial openness is without walls,” he writes.

But it is not without interiority. It is identified usually by a name and by one or more centres: focal points that may well be buildings with enclosed places. It may contain smaller-scale places or differently defined places of the same name according to different mental or symbolic maps. But so long as it is marked and centred in addition to having extension, the open ground—the market place, the street, the square, part of a park, the neighbourhood, a territorial cult, the streets of a carnival or a village—is also an opening to a greater variety of interactions than more enclosed spaces. (p. 4)

Interiority points to inwardness, the identity of a place, but for most of us this can only be one identity among others, and not necessarily the most important. Sense of place and place identity speak to this; even so, we need to remember that centered places are always open to the world, so that, with the passage of time, they will inevitably change. In the way I use this term here, places undergo their own transformations; they are not forever. But this doesn't mean that they are unimportant.

Randolph Hester is a landscape planner and designer who works with local people to map their own communities. Instead of “centering,” he speaks of the sacred spaces, which in the course of redesigning a locality, such as Manteo, a declining fishing village in North Carolina, should be left untouched (Hester, 2006). He ascribes to them an almost metaphysical quality.

The sacred places in Manteo are buildings, outdoor spaces, and landscapes that exemplify, typify, reinforce, and even extol the everyday life patterns and rituals of community life. They are places so essential to the life of residents through use of symbolism that the community collectively identifies with the places. The places are synonymous with residents' concepts and uses of their town. The loss of such places would reorder or destroy something or some social process essential to the community's collective being. (p. 120)

Manteo's Sacred Structure, for the most part consisted of humble places (“holes-in-the-wall”) that were the settings for the community's daily routines…Even to locals, the sacred places were outwardly taken for granted. (p. 122)

On a practical note, mapping sacred places transforms vague descriptions like “quality of life” that typically fuel emotional disputes into concrete measurable factors…In Manteo…the Sacred Structure map depicted fundamental social patterns and cultural settings more effectively than any other planning document…If I could make only one map of any community to use as a basis of decision making, I would opt for a map of sacred places. That information most enables community. (pp. 125–126)

In relation to place-making, centering and acknowledging that certain sites are endowed with a sense of the sacred are much the same thing. But the local state is typically unaware of sacrilege when it reduces a neighborhood to rubble in order to make way for a profitable real estate venture such as an office building or shopping mall. By whatever name, whether it's slum clearance or gentrification, the results are the same: the erasure of places is a violent act, as established patterns of human relationships are destroyed.

The Invisible Costs of Displacements

The destruction of places, the very opposite of place-making, is one of the more heart-rending stories of city building, resulting in the displacement of millions of people worldwide. It isn't simply that older and often overcrowded parts of the city must inevitably be redeveloped, that no place is forever. This much is true, though erasure is not a natural phenomenon but a consequence of human action. It is actual people who make these decisions, who tell the bulldozers to move in and do their dirty work.

Imagine you are an elderly person living on one of Beijing's alleyways (hutong) in the central part of the city. One night you go to sleep, and when you awake in the morning, a huge character sign has been painted on the outside wall of your modest dwelling, with the one-word proclamation, RAZE! This, as it turns out, is your official eviction notice. The invisible planning authorities (Meyer refers to them as The Hand) have condemned your rental unit or property, and have given you two weeks or at most two months to accept a compensation payment (set by the state) and vacate the dwelling where you have lived for decades. Between 1998 and 2001, more than half a million people were officially displaced from their old neighborhoods in the center of Beijing and moved into apartments on the city's periphery beyond the fourth ring road (Meyer, 2009, p. 40). In the run-up to the Summer Olympics, several hundred thousands more followed the first contingent, as entire hutong quarters were earmarked for demolition to make way for shopping malls, office buildings, and high-rise luxury condominiums. Expelled from the inner city, erstwhile neighbors suddenly lost their place in the world, the faces they had known for decades, the intimate streets they had walked, the web of meanings they had spun over a lifetime of talk. Displaced, some of them were moved into modern apartments with indoor plumbing and central heating, but the apartments were located in distant, under-equipped, and generally dismal suburbs, where they would suddenly find themselves perhaps on the seventeenth floor of a vast housing complex, disconnected from the earth's energy, with strangers on all sides.9 This story of urban displacement is unique only in its specifics. Jane Jacobs' classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962) tells a similar tale, as do books by Peter Marris on re-housing in Lagos, Nigeria (1962), Janice Perlman's The Myth of Marginality (1976) and Favela (2009), and Mindy T. Fullilove's Root Shock (2004), the last of which documents the deep trauma experienced by African Americans when thirty years earlier they were uprooted from inner-city neighborhoods. Now it is the turn of Beijing's hutong and their inhabitants.10

It is of course true that by the turn of the millennium, Beijing's centuries-old hutong were vastly over-crowded, and that the physical infrastructure of the housing was, to put it mildly, badly in need of updating and repair. Still, hutong alleyways had been part of Beijing's cityscape for over 500 years, and their inhabitants had created a distinctive environment and way of life—an interiority, as Feuchtwang would have it. I don't want to dwell on this process of erasure or place breaking, but if place is something to be valued (though not in terms that can be measured in dollars and cents), and if there is anything to the notion that cherishing a neighborhood in which one has spent a significant part of one's life is a meaningful concept, if sense of place and identity are at issue, then the demolition of places large and small inevitably imposes immense human costs.11

And yet, displacement is one of the most common phenomena in modern city life. We often use other words to talk about it—people removal, squatter eradication, slum clearance, gentrification, rehousing, redevelopment—some terms more benign, others more brutal, but in the end, the results are the same. The world where ordinary people made their home, people without the power to offer more than token or symbolic resistance, is bulldozed down to make way for more profitable buildings, and in a matter of hours the neighborhood is gone.12 Of course most of those who were displaced survive, even though a few may die of broken hearts or loneliness, and some may even take their own lives. The media hardly notice. They celebrate the new Wal-Mart, the Golden Arches, the 8-lane expressway, the luxury hotel, all of them symbols of a globalizing world without soul.

Some well-known academics appear to have sided with this world. Nigel Thrift, a British geographer, notes the presence of new technology—the Internet, the cell phone and their various off-shoots—in what has become a nano-second world that annihilates communicative space. Technology, he argues, has become embedded in cyborg men and women who walk with a plug in their ear, oblivious to what's around them. In such a world, he asks, what is place?

The short answer is—compromised: permanently in a state of enunciation, between addresses, always deferred. Places are “stages of intensity”. Traces of speed and circulation. One might read this depiction of “almost places”…in Baudrillardean terms as a world of third-order simulacra, where encroaching pseudo-places have finally advanced to eliminate places altogether. Or one might record places…as strategic installations, fixed addresses that capture traffic. Or finally, one might read them…as frames for varying practices of space, time, and speed. (Thrift, 1994, pp. 212–213, cited in Cresswell, 2004, p. 48)

The long answer is the same: Thrift observes a world where the notion of place has become redundant. We now live in a different space–time continuum, unmoored from real places, except for a few that have been saved for posterity (and tourists) as third-order simulacra.

In a more recent book jointly authored with Ash Amin, Thrift continues this celebration of speed, movement, and power. He now refers to this as the “distantiated world,” which is neither here nor there but always suspended “in between” structured around “flows of people, images, information and money moving within and across national borders” (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 51). So perceived, cities, or rather the urban economy from which any mention of people has been surgically removed, are neither bounded nor punctured entities but “assemblages of more or less distantiated economic relations which will have different intensities at different locations” (p. 52). This distantiated view of the urban and its economic relations—that is, a view beheld at a distance—is to me a class-based perspective of those who, like the authors and indeed like myself, frequently jet-set across the oceans, have more friends and colleagues who live far from home, and who only occasionally come down in their own neighborhoods where they are likely to leave essential shopping and other locally based activities to others. Yes, we who are part of the power elites, tend to see the world “at a distance.” It is a spectral world without people.

I have made a number of claims in this essay, beginning with the working-class housing project on the edge of a large city in southern France, with its numbing atmosphere of terror. This project and others like it, whether in Rio de Janeiro or Moscow, in Lagos or Shanghai, is what place-making is not. I then introduced a number of criteria by which we can determine the degree to which neighborhoods are places: being small, inhabited, cherished by most of those who live there, and centered as revealed in its sacred spaces, reiterative social practices and rituals. Above all, it is a space where the daily drama of small events is enacted for the benefit of everyone who cares to watch.

But these lived spaces, what Lefebvre calls espaces vécus, do not just exist in a moment of time; they have a history, a past as well as a future, and it is this last that from a planner's perspective is the most important. And so we need to ask: how should we as planners proceed to approach the recovery of places?

Making Places is Everyone's Job

Contrary to command planning, which globally speaking is still the dominant form, I would argue that planners need directly to engage those who reside in neighborhoods, and that this engagement means to establish a moral relation that from the start acknowledges people's “right to the city” which is to say their right to local citizenship (Lefebvre, 1996).13 From the beginnings of urban history 5,000 years ago, there have been neighborhoods. Some were planned by designers, developers, the government, but most probably were not. They happened in all sorts of physical settings, a result of being lived in by people who came there, stayed, perhaps eventually moved on, and who dealt with each other on a daily basis. Each neighborhood has a unique social profile. Over time, it acquires a character of its own, perhaps also a name, but whereas names are sometimes retained, a neighborhood's character inevitably changes, its name is a legacy to the future. The point is that the very act of inhabiting a neighborhood will shape its character, its daily and seasonal rituals, and the recurrent socio-spatial patterns that imprint themselves on its memory.

In this essay I've been primarily concerned with the neighborhoods of ordinary people, all of them struggling to make ends meet. The corollary of this is that there are always improvements that can be made, beginning with sanitation or playgrounds or making a street corner safe for pedestrians, or simply paving a street that during the rainy season turns into ankle-deep mud. These are small things, but they loom large for the neighbors who may approach the authorities or undertake to do the work themselves. Making neighborhoods is essentially a collective undertaking, and Japan's traditional neighborhood associations are a well-known instance of this (Hashimoto, 2007).14

Although never very powerful, when the central government failed, as it did following the devastating Kobe earthquake, it was the well-organized neighborhoods in the demolished areas that recovered most quickly (Ito, 2007). Japan's machizukuri—a form of citizen participation in local governance—could be described as an urban movement that spread rapidly during the economic doldrums of the 1990s (Sorensen & Funck, 2007). Describing a diverse range of citizen involvement, it is not a precise term and has multiple and contested meanings. What is beyond dispute is its importance for the ways Japanese cities are being governed today, no longer exclusively at a distance from central ministries, but more frequently through the synergies of local effort. “Thousands of machizukuri processes have been established nationwide, in an enormous outpouring of local energy…in which local citizens play an active role in environmental improvement and management processes” write the editors (p. 1). The traditional planning determinations by the central government are losing legitimacy in Japan, and recent legislation enabling non-profit organizations (NPOs) supports machizukuri processes with professional services and expertise.

China is undergoing a similar restructuring of neighborhood governance. During the Maoist period, every urban worker belonged to a danwei that designated a work unit of a state-owned enterprise. When fully functioning, danwei were in effect miniature cities grouped around a production unit, including housing and a wide range of facilities from health and education to recreation and child care. Following the introduction of a competitive market system in the 1980s, however, surviving danwei were no longer able to provide virtually free housing and other birth-to-death services to their remaining workers and retirees. This occasioned China's unprecedented housing boom, which (among other things) gave rise to the massive displacement of hutong residents discussed earlier. Cities outdid each other in the rapidity with which they transformed their central districts even as they pushed built-up areas further and further towards the periphery, overrunning fields and villages. The post-reform call was now for city people to change from being state-dependent “danwei persons”, living collectively, to “persons of society” relying on self, family, and neighborhood.15

The official name for the reconstruction of neighborhood governance was Shequ Construction, meaning the promotion and building up neighborhoods. The term shequ is a neologism, officially defined as “the social collective body formed by those living within a defined geographic boundary.” As conceived, a shequ residents' committee was to be a self-governing people's organization providing services to the elderly, the poor, the young, and the disabled; organizing cultural and recreational programs, such as a library and dances; and offering convenience services of the 7/11 variety as a modest source of revenue. Each designated neighborhood (there are now over 80,000 throughout the country), would have a physical facility staffed by a small contingent of “social workers” whose salaries would be paid by the District government. In practice, most social workers are middle-aged women, many of them Party members, who have received an intensive course in shequ management. The elected shequ committee is entrusted with maintaining social order in the neighborhood, including helping to resolve neighborhood disputes. Despite the official emphasis on self-governance (zizhi), most residents understand their shequ center to be an extension of the District government. Still, neighborhood autonomy is vouchsafed in China's Constitution.

This scheme, which has been in place for about a decade, is still undergoing an experimental phase, with multiple variants (so-called models) across China's cities. It is even possible to argue that the shequ construction policy is a strategy for action more than a rigid formula. For instance, in some cities, it is being used to link non-profit social enterprises to provide essential social services such as to the elderly. In this respect, shequ construction is not unlike Japan's machizukuri, representing an Asian response to a similar challenge: how to manage and maintain a semblance of civic order in the chaotic urban environments of late capitalism. But unlike Japan, physical planning in China does not as yet reach down to the neighborhood level, nor does it attempt to engage the local citizenry, which remains disengaged from urban planning (Friedmann & Chen, 2009).

I would like to conclude these comments on “making places” with a return to North America and the story of the Collingwood Neighborhood House (CNH) in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is a story of how a particular institution—the neighborhood house—was able to “center” this neighborhood and enable its successful transition from predominantly Anglo to one of Vancouver's most mixed, multi-lingual community areas.

CNH, which started up in 1985, was an offshoot of the settlement house movement, initiated by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr when they co-founded Hull House on Chicago's south-side nearly a century earlier. It evolved over a lengthy series of meetings between City of Vancouver planners and residents of what was then the Collingwood (later Renfrew-Collingwood) neighborhood. The City was interested in helping to renew the neighborhoods, through which a new mass transit line, the Skytrain, would travel, particularly in the vicinity of local stations, one of which, at Joyce Street, later helped in relocating the fledgling neighborhood house to its present site. An important consideration was that a working-class suburb such as Collingwood, which was rapidly becoming a reception area for immigrants from many countries, needed a “gathering place” that would help newcomers to get settled. Inspired by the Hull House experience, CNH would be an inclusive, non-judgmental, democratically managed, non-profit organization. Most importantly, it would invite people to become involved with its many activities, acting as a hub of information and resources for immigrants, fostering leadership, and building relationships. In short, it would bring people together to take part in building a community (Sandercock & Cavers, 2009, p. 125).

The story is too long to relate here in full; it is the subject of both a book and a DVD (Sandercock & Attili, 2009). Its senior author here summarizes the experience:

Over the course of twenty years, Collingwood redefined itself as a productive process of social interaction. The CNH is indeed a physical place…that has helped to create a sense of belonging. But perhaps paradoxically, that belonging has only partially to do with the actual physical place, and more profoundly…with the lived experience of building relationships…. CNH has created [a] space for intercultural dialogue, for exchange across cultural difference, which is the precondition for relationship building.

But such initiatives do not automatically become sites of social inclusion. They need organizational and discursive strategies that are designed to build voice, to foster a sense of common benefit, to develop confidence among disempowered groups, and to arbitrate when disputes arise. And that is precisely, and systematically, what the CNH Board and leadership have done through two decades of social and demographic change (Sandercock, 2009, pp. 224–226).

Three countries—Japan, China, Canada—three experiments in making places, creating living neighborhoods. In the end, there is no single, best method; each way is culturally attuned and has its own historical trajectory. But what we see in all three cases is what may seem a paradoxical finding: on the one hand, the critical role of government in getting local initiatives underway and, on the other hand, the encouragement (including financial resources) given to what, in principle, are autonomous neighborhood institutions—Japan's traditional (but newly energized) neighborhood associations, China's elected shequ residents' committees, and British Columbia's not-for-profit settlement houses. It is in this specific sense that I argue that making places is everyone's job.

Concluding Thoughts

Speaking globally, and fixated as they often are on globalization, planners in the newly industrializing countries but elsewhere as well seem to have forgotten about the small spaces of the city, the self-defined neighborhoods of urban life. These days, everything we dream about is “mega”, those functional structures that, geared to profits, lack soul. Except when state and capital need the land on which ordinary people are living, they and their stake in the city are largely forgotten. Without ado, they are displaced, given inadequate compensation, and with luck, rehoused in the outer reaches of the urban. None of this, of course, enters the national income accounts, as though ordinary people and their livelihood are redundant. I have tried to muster arguments against this view and the related ideas of some geographers that place no longer matters, that in the age of nano-technology, we can earn good money without living anywhere at all, in what some of them call an “in-between” world. According to this perspective, the city is reduced to a functional assembly of interchangeable parts, a kind of hotel, where all of one's needs are provided for at the push of a button.16

I have focused on the small and ordinary because small and ordinary are mostly invisible to those who wield power, unless, when stepped upon, they cry out. But genuine places at the neighborhood scale have order, structure, and identity, all of which are created, wittingly or not, by the people living there. The order is civil, the structure is centered, and the identity (Feuchtwang's “interiority”) is constantly being made and remade, because neighborhood places are dynamic, and every snapshot is nothing more than a moment in the flow of life. Michael Meyer insists on this point when he writes:

Outsiders often called the hutong neighborhoods slums, but the neighborhood did not cause pathologies or problematic behavior. Our neighbourhood was not a pit of despair; you heard laughter and lively talk and occasionally, tears and arguments, just like everywhere else. People treated each other with something I missed the minute I set foot outside the hutong: civility. Residents recognized each other, so there was no cursing or name-calling directed at anonymous faces, without repercussions. Cars could not blare the horn, cut you off, and motor away. In the lanes, belligerence was not a virtue, tolerance was. Strangers knew they were guests, not authorities. (Meyer, 2009, p. 162)

A successful neighborhood is cherished by its inhabitants, even when housing is ill-maintained and the infrastructure inadequate. But housing can be renewed, new infrastructure can be emplaced. The neighborhood is cherished for very different reasons: because it has places of encounter where people reaffirm each other as who they are, or comment on the day's events; because life has a certain rhythm with which all are familiar and to which all expectantly look forward; because there are places that are “sacred” to the people; and because there are special places of gathering where events important to the community transpire. It is this rhythm, these repetitive cadences that are always the same and yet a bit different as well, like a seasonal festival, that is a measure of a neighborhood's vitality.

Ordinary neighborhoods, I would argue, need to be brought back into view, so that planners and local citizens can engage in a joint search for genuine betterment in the physical conditions of neighborhood life. This is a challenge for both parties who, for the most part, are inexperienced in what is, in effect, a moral engagement from which both have something to gain. Official planners represent the state and power, but local people don't speak that language. When confronted with authority, they lower their eyes and fall silent. An engagement with agents of the state must thus be undertaken in good faith. The ground on which both parties stand must be leveled so that an authentic dialogue can ensue.

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).