By: Ernesto Alfaro, LJA Engineering.
Courtesy of the West Houston Association
Placemaking, as an intentional practice, came into being in the late 1960’s, as architects, scientists, artists, geographers, planners, and designers all struggled with the impersonality and alienation of Modernism (1). The rationality of the prevalent design practice at that time, the oppressiveness of brutalism, the gospel of the Modern skyscraper made these various professionals react with a call for a different type of solution, one that involved a multi-disciplinary approach: placemaking. These professionals called for an emphasis on the human experience, rather than the formal spatiality of the built environment, which allowed them to focus on the importance of human-scale development, on the economic relevance of mixed-use neighborhoods, and the critical role of walkable streets. These discrete components would collectively contribute not just to the vibrancy of public spaces, to the creation of the idea of a sense of place.
It was not until 2010, when Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa wrote their landmark white paper Creative Placemaking (2), that art entered the placemaking conversation in a significant way. As the name implies, this is an approach that uses art as the lens by which placemaking comes into being. We are all aware of how street art can transform a building into a memorial, how a large statue in a corporate plaza can create a visual marker, and so on- but the role of art in placemaking is much more profound than that. ArtPlace America, the 10 year philanthropic project dedicated to establishing, funding, and growing the field of creative placemaking in the United States, acknowledged that community development can happen across a wide range of sectors, including housing, agriculture & food, public safety, transportation, workforce development, etc. For them, art has the capacity to work in a intersectional capacity- meaning that it can cut across a variety of strata and make connections that would otherwise not exist. For example, a storytelling festival can bring together a diverse age range that might not otherwise interact in a location where they may not typically enter, which would allow for new forms of community building to happen.
