The role of knowledge institutions in placemaking (original) (raw)

Urban development is increasing in its complexity. Processes that transform urban areas are not steered by the public sector or private enterprises alone. Hybrid forms of urban development are emerging, with a gradually bigger role given to citizens’ initiatives and self- organization. This favours also the involvement of knowledge institutions that add to new models of innovation by actively contributing to and partnering with public and private initiatives. With the growth of urban areas we also witness the proliferation of urban spaces. There are every time more areas for common uses, more nodes and also more underutilized spots within the urban fabric due to conflictive ownership, lack of planning or other reasons. Rapidly urbanizing territories provide not only a quantitative challenge but equally qualitative demands to our urban environment. New models that apply integrative strategies in particular to the development of public space use placemaking as a core concept, referring to the processes that reveal new, complex and multi-level perspectives for urban systems. The idea that cities are unpredictable in their development trajectories (Herrle, Jachnow, & Ley, 2006) and not subject to centralized control is widely recognized. However, the appreciation of complexity in the domain of urban development and planning and the involvement of non-governmental actors is relatively recent (Jachnow, 2006; Roo, Hillier, & Wezemael, 2012). We suggest that, with the growing complexity of urban development, the role of universities and knowledge institutions could increase for the qualitative improvement of urban public space by bringing expertise, students and innovative ideas. At the same time, academic institutions could get the opportunity of exposure to contemporary societal challenges, real cases and “testing grounds” for meaningful research, thus establishing a mutually beneficial process. In this paper, we analyse the experience of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. As an academic institution with a focus on the Global South, IHS took the initiative for an experimental placemaking process in its hometown, Rotterdam, in 2015. Within the Master of Science for Urban Management and Development, participants and academic staff of the specialization for Urban Strategies and Planning (USP) engaged actively in conceptualizing placemaking activities for deprived areas in the city. The result was the development of diverse concepts and methods to facilitate placemaking processes, assess and evaluate demands and potentials, and reflect on the multifaceted implications of each of the possible contributions. Moreover, it provided valid lessons learnt for the opportunities and limits of placemaking as a tool for developing cities and societies that we herewith intend to feed back into the academic discourse.