Making Place Making Self

Making Place, Making Self explores new understandings of place and place-making in late modernity, covering key themes of place and space, tourism and mobility, sexual difference and subjectivity. Using a series of individual life stories, it develops a fascinating polyvocal account of leisure and life journeys. These stories focus on journeys made to the North Cape in Norway, the most northern point of mainland Europe, which is both a tourist destination and an evocation of a reliable and secure point of reference, an idea that gives meaning to an individual's life. The theoretical core of the book draws on an inter-weaving of post-Lacanian versions of feminist psycho-analytical thinking with phenomenological and existential thinking, where place-making is linked with self-making and homecoming. By combining such ground-breaking theory with her innovative use of case studies, Inger Birkeland here provides a major contribution to the fields of cultural geography, tourism and feminist studies.

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Swarupa Gupta outlines a paradigm for moving beyond ethnic fragmentation by showing how people made places to forge an interregional arena. The analysis includes interpretive strategies to mediate contemporary separatisms.

Urban policy makers are increasingly striving to strengthen the economic competitiveness of their cities. Currently, they do that mainly in the field of the creative knowledge economy - arts, media, entertainment, creative business services, architecture, publishing, design; and ICT, R&D, finance, and law. This book is about the policies that help to realise such objectives: policies driven by classic location theory, cluster policies, ‘creative class’ policies aimed at attracting talent, as well as policies that connect to pathways, place and personal networks. The experiences and policy strategies of 13 city-regions across Europe have been investigated: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Birmingham, Budapest, Dublin, Helsinki, Leipzig, Milan, Munich, Poznan, Riga, Sofia and Toulouse. All have different histories and roles: capital cities and secondary cities; cities with different economies and industries; port-based cities and land-locked cities. And all 13 have different cultural, political and welfare state traditions. Through this wide set of contexts, Place-making and Policies for Competitive Citiescontributes to the debate about the development of creative knowledge cities, their economic growth and competitiveness and advocates the development of context-sensitive tailored approaches. Chapter authors from the 13 European cities rigorously evaluate, reformulate and test assumptions behind old and new policies. This solidly-grounded and policy-focused study on the urban policy of place-making highlights practices for different contexts in managing knowledge-intensive cities and, by drawing on the varied experiences from across Europe, it establishes the state-of-the-art for both academic and policy debates in a fast-moving field.

The regeneration of critical urban areas through the redesign of public space with the intense involvement of local communities seems to be the central focus of place-making according to some widespread practices in academic and professional circles. Recently, new expertise maintains that place-making could be an innovative and potentially autonomous field, competing with more traditional disciplines like urban planning, urban design, architecture and others. This book affirms that the question of 'making better places for people' should be understood in a broader sense, as a symptom of the non-contingent limitations of the urban and spatial disciplines. It maintains that research should not be oriented only towards new technical or merely formal solutions but rather towards the profound rethinking of disciplinary paradigms. In the fields of urban planning, urban design and policy-making, the challenge of place-making provides scholars and practitioners a great opportunity for a much-needed critical review. Only the substantial reappraisal of long-standing (technical, cultural, institutional and social) premises and perspectives can truly improve place-making practices. The pressing need for place-making implies trespassing undue disciplinary boundaries and experimenting a place-based approach that can innovate and integrate planning regulations, strategic spatial visioning and urban development projects. Moreover, the place-making challenge compels urban experts and policy-makers to critically reflect upon the physical and social contexts of their interventions. In this sense, facing place-making today is a way to renew the civic and social role of urban planning and urban design.

This volume looks at the concept of the declarative city from an interdisciplinary perspective, comprising literary and linguistic studies, arts and art history, discourse analysis, as well as urban planning. The various contributions demonstrate the semiotic complexity and inconsistency of declarative and discursive practices in different social, cultural, aesthetic, and historical contexts.

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of ‘placemaking’ in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector. Placemaking has seen a paradigmatic shift in urban design, planning, and policy to engage the community voice. This Handbook examines the development of placemaking, its emerging theories, and its future directions. The book is structured in seven distinct sections curated by experts in the areas concerned. Section One provides a glimpse at the history and key theories of placemaking and its interpretations by different community sectors. Section Two studies the transformative potential of placemaking practice through case studies on different places, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It also reveals placemaking’s potential to nurture a holistic community engagement, social justice, and human-centric urban environments. Section Three looks at the politics of placemaking to consider who is included and who is excluded from its practice and if the concept of placemaking needs to be reconstructed. Section Four deals with the scales and scopes of art-based placemaking, moving from the city to the neighborhood and further to the individual practice. It juxtaposes the voice of the practitioner and professional alongside that of the researcher and academic. Section Five tackles the socio-economic and environmental placemaking issues deemed pertinent to emerge more sustainable placemaking practices. Section Six emphasizes placemaking’s intersection with urban design and planning sectors and incudes case studies of generative planning practice. The final seventh section draws on the expertise of placemakers, researchers, and evaluators to present the key questions today, new methods and approaches to evaluation of placemaking in related fields, and notions for the future of evaluation practices. Each section opens with an introduction to help the reader navigate the text. This organization of the book considers the sectors that operate alongside the core placemaking practice. This seminal Handbook offers a timely contribution and international perspectives for the growing field of placemaking. It will be of interest to academics and students of placemaking, urban design, urban planning and policy, architecture, geography, cultural studies, and the arts.

How can pottery studies contribute to the study of medieval archaeology? How do pots relate to documents, landscapes and identities? These are the questions addressed in this book which develops a new approach to the study of pottery in medieval archaeology. Utilising an interpretive framework which focuses upon the relationships between people, places and things, the effect of the production, consumption and discard of pottery is considered, to see pottery not as reflecting medieval life, but as one actor which contributed to the development of multiple experiences and realities in medieval England. By focussing on relationships we move away from viewing pottery simply as an object of study in its own right, to see it as a central component to developing understandings of medieval society. The case studies presented explore how we might use relational approaches to re-consider our approaches to medieval landscapes, overcome the methodological and theoretical divisions between documents and material culture and explore how the use of objects could have multiple implications for the formation and maintenance of identities. The use of this approach makes this book not only of interest to pottery specialists, but also to any archaeologist seeking to develop new interpretive approaches to medieval archaeology and the archaeological study of material culture.