Placemaking.Education

24/03/2026

Neighbors in Los Angeles are taking the vision of having no road deaths into their own hands – one bucket of paint at a time.

Maylin Tu reports in how locals are banding together to paint crosswalks, as local authorities struggle with budget constraints and the need for expensive upgrades to comply with design standards.

Bringing an intersection up to current standards can be costly — a single curb ramp costs the City of Los Angeles $50,000 to $100,000. However, to advocates impatient for change, citing accessibility requirements is just one more excuse to delay simple improvements that could prevent people from dying while crossing the street.

Atlanta is pioneering a new approach where local authorities partner with community members and 'actionivists' on a tactical urbanism program for temporary, quick-build projects to make it safer for walking, biking and rolling. Under the program, community members can make street improvements in their own neighborhoods. Residents recently built a bike lane for $10,000 on a school route.

Read more about what's happening in LA and Atlanta in Next City's article - https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/could-cities-partner-with-guerilla-urbanists-for-safer-streets

These examples highlight some interesting and challenging ethical and practical questions. For example, what's THE most important thing to prioritise?

☠️ Preventing road deaths and accidents by slowing vehicle speeds?
👩‍🦼‍➡️ Safe and inclusive access for people of all abilities?
📝 Upgrading every intersection to meet standards?
🪙 Keeping governments solvent and minimizing tax increases for businesses and residents?
🤝 Engaging and empowering local people to help to improve their place?

All of the above is the right answer and ideal, but not always possible.

What do you think? Could cities partner with local people and guerilla urbanists for safer streets?

23/03/2026

Great require the contributions of many people, organisations and disciplines. Here is a look at some of the key elements needed, and how they are more effective when they are part of a team-based approach, a coordinated system, rather than isolated, individual actions.

⛵ is both a philosophy and an iterative, collaborative process for creating public spaces that people love and feel connected to.

📣 Place . The stories, characters,history, events, branding and marketing can help to create a unique identity and offering.

🏗️ Place designing and constructing. The design, infrastructure, built form and layout of a place can be crucial to its success. Urban designers, landscape architects, engineers, planners and other professionals will be involved in this component.

📝 , coordination, care and maintenance. This involves many things, from coordinating stakeholder meetings, cleaning, waste removal, caring for trees and landscaping, security and repairing damaged items, through to utilising data to better make better decisions.

🕺 Place encourages people to visit, gather and stay in a place.

🤝 Place includes the partnerships, leadership and decisions required to keep places active, healthy and prosperous

People and Place sit at the heart of this system and (should) guide everything that happens.

02/03/2026

"To truly transform places, we must lead with place as the outcome, rather than letting disciplines dictate the process", says Ethan Kent.

Projects are typically done to or for places. They might be dictated by regulations or top-down strategies, come from grant or funding opportunities or done to meet the requirements of a single discipline or sector. But, even when every person or discipline is doing their best, something important is missing.

💵 A simple change of focus can unlock huge potential for the same cost (or even less).

"By reframing the process, placing communities at the core, and using disciplines as supporting tools rather than drivers, we can generate more demand for expert contributions while fostering deeper, systemic change", says Ethan Kent.

💡 This is a fundamental and necessary paradigm shift in urban development, evolving from the delivery of physical assets to the cultivation of social, environmental and economic value and neighbourhood regeneration.

Town Team Movement PlacemakingX

19/02/2026

18/02/2026

Do you want to consult people? Or engage them? There are some big differences!

Consultation is:

👇 One-way - the institution decides topics
⏳ Short-term and transactional
👔 Formal. There's no time for trust or relationship-building
🏢 Set-up for vested interests, particularly opposition
❌ Doesn't build community or their capacity to organise and act

Engagement is:

🤝 Two-way. Discussion topics are more fluid
🙂 Ongoing, encouraging understanding and relationships to form
☕ Formal or informal
🤝 More likely to encourage partnerships. I'll help you. You help me
💥 Builds community and their capacity to organise and act

Consultation is superfically faster and easier. But it can be dominated by a vocal minority, rather than representing the broader community’s views. Consultation fatigue means people only participate when they have strong views or vested interests. And minority groups and people from marginalised backgrounds don't see any point in participating. Or even know about it.

Authentic engagement is what is needed if you genuinely want better outcomes and connected and empowered communities.

Our Beyond Community Consultation course provides tips and examples to better work with and enable action by local communities. Learn whenever you like in the easy to use online course. Find out more at https://placemaking.education/p/beyond-consultation

02/07/2024

Help!! The budget for this project is TOO BIG!
Can too much money ever be a problem in -related projects?

Common Placemaking Mistake No. 11 is expecting money to solve everything.

Big budgets can steer discussions and ideas towards large, capital works-intensive projects that focus on place hardware improvements. These may be needed, but can sometimes be driven by or a desire for 'silver bullet' solutions to fix all of a place's problems. Many expensive streetscape upgrades don't actually improve the medium-term performance of a place, or how people relate to and take ownership of it.

Larger budgets can be much more effective when there is a better balance between one-off capital works funding and ongoing operational expenditure on place managers or coordinators, collaborative groups of businesses, residents and government staff working together on an ongoing basis (for example the Town Team approach) and funding for Place Action Plans rolled out in a staged way to build confidence and momentum over time.

01/07/2024

Seth Kaplan's Neighborhood Flourishing Continuum is an excellent framework to assess the health of the places where we live, work and spend time.

"If its flourishing, residents have the wind at their backs. If its fragile, they are constrained in countless ways every day," he says.

"Locales run the gamut from flourishing to fragile. The most flourishing go from strong to stronger despite little intentional effort to improve them, while the most fragile remain fragile no matter how much effort is invested in them. Then there are so-called middle neighborhoods—places that could go either way, where strategic initiatives could make an outsized difference."

Governments, agencies and institutions play important roles, but strong institutions doing things To or For communities can reduce individual and collective flourishing and weaken the spirit and resilience of the place, whilst doing WITH or enabling action BY locals through the enabling mindset and use collaborative processes is more likely to encourage the flourishing to emerge/occur.

With thanks to Cormac Russell for this powerful framework!

28/06/2024

is the most valuable form of capital. Respect and collaboration move at the speed of trust.

Where does your organisation and place sit on the 'trustometer'? Is there a high level of trust, medium, low ...? Levels of trust in governments, institutions, corporations, the media, non-profits and even the people who live in our neighbourhoods are generally falling around the world, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. It's an epidemic of mistrust.

Common Mistake no. 10 is rushing to deliver a pre-conceived idea by an arbitrary deadline. The haste means there is insufficient time to build relationships and trust, or sometimes even to really understand what the place needs or wants. It's doing To or For the community, which creates significant risks further discussed in the Placemaking: making it happen in local governments online course - https://placemaking.education/p/makingithappen

Potentially excellent ideas can be perceived as a failure if relationships and trust are not developed early in the process.

27/06/2024

Most places use a ‘design then build’ approach. This can create local opposition or result in expensive mistakes. and testing an idea first, before delivering big place 'hardware' or 'software' upgrades allows you to create and test an idea quickly and relatively cheaply for a temporary period of time.

urbanism can:

🎉 quickly bring life and amenity to a space that needs some attention
▶ build momentum
😊 engage stakeholders with tangible and visible examples, rather than through diagrams, plans or reports
🚶‍♀️ break down resistance to change and encourage buy-in
💡 identify opportunities or issues that were not previously known
💰 save time and money, particularly through avoiding much bigger mistakes

But, don't make the mistake of forgetting about or mis-using tactical urbanism. It's not a gimmick. The mistakes to avoid are:

- designing a big infrastructure upgrade without using a tactical urbanism to test it first is risky and follows the standard design and build approach
- short-term trials with no follow-up can raise expectations, be a waste of time and money

Just like any tool, urbanism is excellent when it's used appropriately.

26/06/2024

We all want to live, work, run a business and spend time in spaces and places that are , , and .

Great places don’t just happen by accident. Professionals work hard every day to make it happen, but thriving places also need the knowledge, care and contributions of local people.

Why should you get involved as a volunteer hashtag ? Not only can help people around you and the community, but giving back is a great way to benefit yourself and your family.

Learn more in our Introduction to Placemaking course at https://placemaking.education/p/introduction-to-placemaking