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A proliferation of participatory spatial practices is emerging in cities, as citizens seek alternative forms of urban governance and land use. Characterised by peer-to-peer production and mediated through the use of digital technologies, these practices are part of a larger narrative about the commons, the ways in which citizens participate in them...
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... Fresque-Baxter and Armitage (2012, p258) explains that it "can serve to strengthen both individual and community identity with places, resulting in common values, shared history and joint narratives". Other (Frangos, Garvey and Knezevic, 2017) follows Williams' definition of place-making as a process "of deliberate effort of people to try to shape, contest, and/or otherwise govern the landscape" in meaningful ways (2014). ...
... Initiatives, such as placemaking (particularly creative placemaking), which have the goal of improving the local community's quality of life in a sustainable way, are only successful if the local community plays an active role (Lefebvre, 1991;Friedmann, 2010;Cilliers and Timmermans, 2014;Šmid Hribar et al., 2015;Frangos et al., 2017;Dupre, 2019;Gallagher and Ehlman, 2019). However, in modern, seemingly participatory spatial and urban planning, we often witness mere tokenistic participation (Cilliers and Timmermans, 2014;Franklin and Marsden, 2015). ...
The challenges of modern tourism development increasingly indicate the need for new approaches based on the creative use of intangible assets and heritage, and a more harmonious relationship between the local community and tourists. Placemaking is one such approach, which goes to the core of what builds places and local communities. This paper looks at the evolution of the concept, and its approaches and definitions. Among the tools of placemaking, tangible (physical design), intangible (mental images), and mixed approaches are recognized. The examples in this paper have been selected mainly from tourism and community development studies. Quality placemaking leads to the development of a sense of place, increases social cohesion, and stimulates the long-term regeneration of public spaces, which contributes to tourism attractiveness. In this light, the concept of placemaking can serve as a useful analytical category for more systematic research on spatial transformations and as a development tool in strategic tourism planning.
... In reference to Table 1 it is evident that certain UA systems and practices have the potential to be initiated and maintained as citizen-led greening activities as part of cross-sectoral networked movements (Mendes et al., 2008). Broader literature studies classify the potential of UA systems and practices under contributions to citizen-led place-making (Frangos et al., 2017), and highlight potential contributions to the quality of urban areas. Individual gardening practices have long contributed to domestic food production through small-scale cultivation of fruits and vegetables in urban areas (Lategan and Cilliers, 2013), often for own consumption. ...
Urban green spaces have been researched extensively for their contribution toward
livable, sustainable and resilient cities. Studies illustrate increasing awareness of the
multi-functional roles such spaces can fulfill in addressing urbanization pressures and
associated impacts such as increasing stress on global food systems, notably by
accommodating practices of urban agriculture (UA). This paper investigates the potential
for UA in South Africa as a citizen-led urban greening strategy, considering potential
and limitations for the increased application of UA in spatial planning. The paper
provides a review of core concepts and illustrates potential and certain limitations via
UA cases studies in two leading South African provinces and a review of the national
policy and legislative framework pertaining to UA. Findings highlight particular issues
for consideration to augment the implementation of UA in South Africa, including
opportunities to draw on existing citizen-led initiatives and increasing awareness of
UA among communities, authorities, non-governmental organizations, and the private
sector; the potential to utilize skilled and knowledgeable rural migrants; and possibilities
to capitalize on a growing market for UA related opportunities to stimulate economic
growth and employment creation whilst addressing food security concerns. Limitations
highlighted in the paper, include many current UA initiatives not being self-sustaining and
fully citizen-driven, requiring constant support and resources from multiple stakeholders;
a cultural stigma attached to UA activities, hampering more uptake, especially among
the youth; limited national support as no dedicated national policy on UA exists to
direct the spatial planning community; and lastly, that South African spatial planners
exhibit limited knowledge of UA and green infrastructure in general. The paper concludes
with broad recommendations for the international planning community to advance the
implementation of UA as a citizen-led urban greening strategy, drawing on the South
African experience.
This article explores how citizens respond to ruptures and problems in the places they inhabit by enacting adaptive improvised and incremental urban infrastructure patching. This might relate to citizens deciding to undertake small scale interventions in their communities to develop solutions to problems that are being overlooked by local government; or it might involve a community response to an ongoing systemic place-based problem that formal agencies involved in managing change are not addressing. This paper develops the concept of urban infrastructure patching with reference to conceptual debates and informed by research undertaken in Birmingham, UK. Drawing upon observations, interviews, and collective art projects, citizen-led urban patching is identified as an important urban intervention process that emerges in response to tensions between professional urban policymakers’ ostensive views of a place and the lived experiences of inhabitants. Cities are in a continual process of becoming and this includes the impacts of citizen end-user adaptive and incremental patching to maintain and enhance urban social-material environments. Two distinct contributions are made. First, citizen-end-user urban patching is based on residents’ experiences of perceived or actual ruptures in local urban infrastructure. Secondly, patching in response to ruptures is an individual and collective response. As a collective response, the power of numbers can bring about transformational change in places, but such participatory action is often viewed as challenging existing hegemonic power structures associated with representative democracy, whereas citizen-led responses can serve as a useful and parallel activity to urban government if it is legitimised.
Societal trends, such as the governmental withdrawal from the public realm, increasingly motivates communities to self-organize in taking care of it. As a result, designers have explored the concept of 'generativity' as a quality of design that supports communities in questioning, supporting and giving form to self-organization in the public realm. Nonetheless, a thorough investigation of how to enable generativity in the context of community-based participatory design (PD) is lacking. When designers give form to generativity, they intend to allow people to 'self-organize' by transforming and using infrastructures through and for debating and creating public matters, without assistance from the infrastructure's original designers. While design for informatics defines generativity with a focus on ‘self’-organized processes, we conclude that generativity in the context of designing for the complex politics of the public realm is a quality that mainly supports communities' ‘co’-organization. We describe the generative quality of design in the community project Betty's Garden and discuss how the specific roles and capabilities that were developed by the community and by us as researchers contributed to this quality.
This e-zine documents the discus- sions and group work done at the ‘Infrastructuring in Participatory Design’ workshop, a full-day event that took place at the Participatory Design Conference 2018 in Hasselt and Genk, Belgium. The workshop invited the Participatory Design (PD) community to come together, with their cases or projects, questions and topics of interest in order to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring, and their relevance to the revitalization of the political agenda of PD. Following a hands-on approach, participants - collectively and critically - mapped issues, disentangled assumptions, identified blind spots, and outlined new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an
infrastructuring approach in Participatory Design at large.
