Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach

Placemaking is a process of giving meaning to a space and triggering positive emotional connections between a community and their environment. Its practice, relevant for built-environment disciplines, requires a combination of cognitive, affective, and practical skills. However, these skills are not often taught in tertiary education. Place Agency is an education programme that engages students in place-centred practice as an iterative process where people, process, product, program, and place evaluation interact (5P framework). It applies the Head, Heart, and Hand pedagogical model, through a series of practice-led studios (Sandbox studios), where students engage with real communities to deliver tangible placemaking outcomes. This holistic approach provides opportunities for the students to practice the soft skills required for effective placemaking within a safe environment. This chapter describes this pedagogical framework as applied by Place Agency to discuss the challenges in its implementation, and its potential for placemaking learning as experienced by several Sandbox studios that ran at the University of Melbourne throughout 2018.