Placemaking Resources

The following resources are meant to inspire and provide ideas for feasible and achievable placemaking projects within your community.

What is Placemaking?

What if We Built Our Communities Around Places? Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution – Project for Public Spaces.

• Placemaking: What if we Built our Cities Around Places?
• How a Massachusetts Town is Investing in Social Infrastructure to Rebuild its Main Street
• Locally-Led Neighbourhoods: A Community-Led Placemaking Manual
• Neighbourhoods Made by Neighbours: Guide to Community-Led Placemaking
• Project for Public Spaces
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation Creative Placemaking Toolkit
• Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking
• Build Back Better, Together: 11 Transformative Agendas to Restore Social Life in Your Community
• Navigating Main Streets as Places: A People-First Transportation Toolkit (produced in partnership by Project for Public Spaces and Main Street America)
• Places in the Making: How placemaking builds places and communities (by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT)

Tactical Urbanism

Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighbourhoods and city gathering places.

• The Pop-Up Placemaking Toolkit
• Tactical Urbanism Guide
• DIY Community Cookbook
• Project for Public Spaces: The Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper Transformation of Public Spaces
• A Friendly Business Guide for Outdoor Expansion Tactics
• Planning By Doing: How Small Citizen-Powered Projects Inform Large Planning Decisions
• The Memfix Manual: A Practical Guide For Reimagining Your Neighborhood
• San Francisco Shared Space Design Guidelines
• Vermont Better Places Program Guide
• Burlington Community-led Demonstration Project Policy + Guide
• DC Public Spaces Activation and Stewardship Guide
• Minnesota Demonstration Project Implementation Guide
• Rapid Placemaking to Bring Back Main Street: A Pandemic Recovery Toolkit for Local Communities

How to Engage Your Community

Community engagement and involvement is at the core of placemaking. Building places for people, with people is critical to ensure that all people see themselves in a place and feel a sense of belonging. How you engage community is the first step toward inclusivity.

• International Association for Public Participation
• Jay Pitter Equity Guidance
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation Creative Placemaking Toolkit

Promotion

Reaching your community broadly to ensure engagement and awareness is a key element to inclusion and participation. If you want to create a great place, you’ll need to involve as many people as possible. Your community is full of neighbours with interesting ideas and desires for what role local public spaces need to fill, and the resulting space can only reach its greatest potential if it can be responsive and useful for the broadest group of people.

• Five Essential Elements of a Placemaking Campaign
• Placemaking Marketing: In Tune with Your Surroundings
• Digital Placemaking – Authentic Civic Engagement
• Checklist: 10 Social Media Marketing Basics
• Social Media 101: Understanding the Basics

Measuring Success

Evaluating engagement allows you and the public to determine participant satisfaction, identify lessons learned, and improve future engagement strategies. There are always takeaways that help refine and enhance the next project!

• Initiatives Support Corporation Creative Placemaking Toolkit (Watch video)
• Tamarack Institute – Evaluating Community Impact
• PPS Place Game – an easy to do, repeatable group exercise
• Placemaking Engagement Evaluation
• How to Measure Progress Toward Downtown Revitalization and Engaging Public Spaces

These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only, meant to support and guide; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by Build Nova Scotia of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. Build Nova Scotia bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

To add a suggested resource, please email: ideas@buildns.ca.