A New Model for Place Development – Bringing Together Regenerative and Placemaking Processes

This paper describes the bringing together of two practices, placemaking and regenerative development. Placemaking is a relatively recent term, describing a city making movement focusing on the process of developing places through the active participation of the citizens that conceive, perceive, and live in that place. It aims to create place attachment, a foundational concept of environmental psychology linked to positive outcomes in health, community participation, civic behaviour, and perceptions of safety. Regenerative development is an approach to supporting design for place to focus on the delivery of vital, viable, and resilient places, able to evolve over time to support all human and non-human life. In this paper, these two practices are integrated under the ‘Place Agency’ model. This model harnesses the key strengths from both practices, while providing ways to address their limitations. The research approach used to integrate the models was discursive grounded theory; where each practice, its rhetoric, its tools, and case studies was looked at. The content was analyzed using inductive coding to identify potential synergies. The resulting model indicates that merging these two practices can deliver a place designed for both human and non-human participants, potentially shifting city making from a largely anthropocentric based practice. The combined approach supports the ability to look across history and its attributes to understand a place’s potential, while providing a method through which the community can actively participate in the city making process. Placemaking can thus become a strategy to bring forward this potential, test, play, and evaluate regenerative initiatives, in context of spatial, temporal, social, and ecological influences.