I wrote this short essay in the summer of 2014, with much optimism about placemaking.
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Places are designed, but not always by licensed professionals. When the café owner puts a parasol for outdoor seating, she is designing a portion of the public streetscape; when a housekeeper decides to grow some plants on the balcony, she is creating a new image of the façade for the apartment tower which she shares with the other 100+ residents.
Economists categorize such behaviors as externalities, meaning that individualistic decisions ultimately add to the collective reality of the society. Places are the sum of externalities from individual actions, be them the barbecue smoke from someone’s yard, the bright colors from someone’s apparel, or the boombox music (or noises) from someone’s car. These positive or negative externalities might be very unintentional in the beginning, yet they affect those who inhabit or pass by the space, thus offering provocative and often amusing case studies to reframe the conversations about city life and placemaking.
The idea of people being an essential part of spatial creation is not a new concept in architectural theory. However, what’s worth noticing in our contemporary society is a strange juxtaposition: on one hand, many people have not quite realized their powers of transforming spaces – instead, they like to admire (or blame) architects as someone who singlehandedly created our physical environment; on the other, quite ironically, architects are eager to assume their omnipotent design authority, thus often making arbitrary decisions, resulting in buildings and environments inadaptable to human use.
If the general public could grant themselves more confidence and pride, and if the architects could pay attention to people’s everyday usage of space, the built environment might be even more fun (as well as more functional). The constant human actions, both at the individual level and at a collective scale, are what makes cities so puzzling and exciting at the same time. How the public and the small group of professionals negotiate power in the realm of shaping the built environment is what interests me, personally, as the process of placemaking.