Placemaking: observing the planned and the lived city:

Placemaking is an innovative, transdisciplinary practice to tackle an array of social urban issues collaboratively. With Placemaking education at the University of Amsterdam students learn to design places on basis of local qualities (functional, natural, social) and local knowledge (informal knowledge that people have about their places, territory, local uses and local culture). Placemaking is a philosophy and methodology developed in architecture, planning, and environmental psychology in the 1960’s. The basic principle is that places are designed based on local knowledge and local qualities, with the (end) user at the centre. The process of placemaking gives meaning to a place by connecting the community (more) with the place. Emphasizing the importance of considering the actors’ experiences, perceptions, and diversity of perspectives in Placemaking endeavours, aligns with the transdisciplinary approach of integrating various disciplines and stakeholders to create a meaningful and inclusive place.

In our workshop we will zoom in on methods approached to learn to become open to perspectives based on local or ‘everyday’ knowledge in order to make this knowledge productive in a transdisciplinary and transformative practice. In this workshop we will literally go outside and use your senses and those of others to map out a ‘place’ in order to better understand the tension between a ‘lived’ and a ‘planned’ city. The use and behaviour of users often differs from how the environment is planned or designed.

After a brief introduction of Placemaking and the related transdisciplinary approach, we will go outside with a map of the area and during a walk we will map the different aspects of the place. For example, materials, infrastructure, and functions, but also activity atmosphere and users. How many people are there, who are the users, what do they do and why? In order to properly map what we see; we will use observation schemes and other formats. After the observations we’ll come back and discuss the experience and insights with each other. What has caught your eye and attention? How do the observations of different participants compare? What do they tell us about the place, and about its lived versus its planned situation? Finally, we will reflect on the role of senses in higher education programmes. How could these methods contribute to educate your students in generating and applying transdisciplinary knowledge?

This workshop can be of interest for educators and researchers who are willing to address the place-based interplay between theory and practice and apply placemaking as a transdisciplinary educational and/or research practice.