How Spaces Become Places: Place Makers Tell Their Stories

How Spaces Become Places showcases participatory placemaking practices and strategies that transform ordinary spaces into extraordinary places. It features thirteen contributors who share personal experiences of addressing complex and contentious situations in cities, such as affordable housing, racial violence, and immigration. Readers will learn how place makers listen, learn, diagnose local problems, convene stakeholders, build trust, and invent solutions together, with instructive examples of work they can do in their own communities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 25 October 2021
Publisher: New Village Press

Useful and inspiring cases illustrate participatory placemaking practices and strategies.

How Spaces Become Places tells stories of place makers who respond to daunting challenges of affordable housing, racial violence, and immigration, as well as community building, arts development, safe streets, and coalition-building. The book's thirteen contributors share their personal experiences tackling complex and contentious situations in cities ranging from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and from Paris to Detroit. These activists and architects, artists and planners, mediators and gardeners transform ordinary spaces into extraordinary places. These place makers recount working alongside initially suspicious residents to reclaim and enrich the communities in which they live. Readers will learn how place makers listen and learn, diagnose local problems, convene stakeholders, build trust, and invent solutions together. They will find instructive examples of work they can do within their own communities.

In the aftermath of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, the editor argues, these accessible practice stories are more important than ever.

Weight: 532g
Dimension: 151 x 229 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781613321423