Document Type
Article
Abstract
Democracy in a post-industrial society such as the United States is increasingly characterized as a system of governance orchestrated by the media to shape a mass of passive consumers who live in non-places. Because of the scale and structure of the political economy, we have come to understand the body politic as an adversarial system in which the primary responsibility of the citizen is to vote and consume. After 9/11, an additional alienating element, fear, has entered into our national imagination of passivity leading many people to believe that they are collectively powerless in the face of unknown terrors. If one is committed to democracy as a social structure of human organization and politics, the question must be asked: Where does one learn to be a citizen? How do groups of people communally engage in democratic action and develop community intentions?
The authors propose that the practice of placemaking offers a unique public space in which webs of relationships interact to create a common world in specific locales. Placemaking is the ongoing work of transforming the places we find ourselves into places in which we can truly dwell as individuals and communities of people [2]. The practice of making our places changes and maintains the physical world and our ideas about it while it also creates communities of people who share concerns, interests, hopes, desires, and fear.
The authors present two stories of their own practice to offer insight into the tasks of placemaking: the opening of a dialogic space, the dialectic of confirmation and interrogation; and framing action. These tasks offer an approach for interrogating place, revealing and resolving conflict, and taking action in places such as neighborhoods, cities, public agencies, offices, and intermediate institutions. This theoretical and practical lens attempts to demonstrate how placemaking as a critical practice supports the struggle to create and maintain democratic societies, addresses the problems inherent in work normally assigned to experts, and establishes placemaking as an act of resistance and hope.
Repository Citation
Schneekloth, Lynda H., and Robert G. Shibley. "Placemaking: A Democratic Project." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 3, 2025, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss3/11
Included in
Personality and Social Contexts Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons