Good question.
A little over a week ago Atlanta played host to the 2024 South and Appalachian Creative Placemaking Summit. That name needs a little unpacking, and we’ll get into what it means and what it has to do with design—but let’s just say that when hundreds of creatives and urbanists converge on the Woodruff Arts Center for three days of workshops, presentations, tours, and performances around the city, we are prepared to swerve from our best-laid editorial plan. (Good design depends on good questions. Good planning allows for right turns.) So with the Summit still fresh in our minds, let’s discuss placemaking, public space, public art, and where we stand in Atlanta.
Since 2018, the regional Creative Placemaking Summit has convened in cities across the South to explore and support the intersection of art, community, policy, and the built environment—or “placemaking.” Dating back to the 1960s and the work of those great champions of life on the street, Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte, the term placemaking took root with reference to public spaces in particular: why we need them, how to protect them, how to design them.
As an aside, public space probably seems straightforward as a concept: the places everybody shares, right? But if you stop and think about it, there are actually a lot of rules and expectations about all that sharing. On a recent episode of the Perkins&Will podcast Inhabit, show hosts Eunice Wong and Dr. Erika Eitland—an urban designer and public health scientist, respectively—tackle these visible and invisible boundaries head-on, using Eunice’s hometown, Toronto, as a case study. But we are in Atlanta, not Toronto, and the Summit was about creative placemaking, not the plain old kind.
Actually, there will never be anything plain or old about good placemaking, but in the decades since it captured the urban imagination, the idea has received some tweaks and amendments. Recently, designers…
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