Urban transformation and placemaking: A video essay

Abstract der Sitzung

Public spaces are vital, as they are sites of social reproduction and political engagement. Participation and access to public space shape a wide range of opportunities and constraints. The physical form of places, their infrastructure, ownership and use, influence the way people can shape their lives and enable or constrain future development. City management styles such as the entrepreneurial or neoliberal city drive the privatization of public space, create concealed existing inequities, and lead to a withdrawal of the public from political engagement.

Placemaking has emerged as a movement that allows people to shape and transform the spaces they inhabit. Placemaking has no uniform definition but is usually understood as a mostly informal, bottom-up approach to planning, design and management of public spaces that centers the needs of the local community. There is a growing body of research that suggests that place-based awareness and movements hold a transformative potential, promote social change and political engagement.

This video essay explores initiatives in Heidelberg and Koblenz that create spaces and meanings with and for the public and how their work is both helped and constrained by neoliberal city planning structures. We asked them, what are their visions of public space? What potential does their work hold to make those reality?

The video essay is about half an hour long. The interviews are in German with English subtitles and the narration is in English.