Placemaking for the Planet
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Placemaking focuses on the co-design of healthy places in which communities thrive. In the face of climate change, it’s vital that we broaden our approach to placemaking to incorporate the natural environment, to design places that improve the health of not only humans, but other species as well.
It’s no secret that the environment impacts human wellbeing. Spending time in nature has been shown to reduce the risk of conditions like heart and autoimmune diseases, diabetes and obesity.
Proximity to nature improves more than just our physical health: a wealth of research shows that spending time in leafy outdoor spaces can mitigate stress, anxiety and depression.
But does our built environment encourage connection to nature? As cities become denser and urban sprawls creep outwards, it’s estimated that today’s population is less exposed to nature than ever before. We are just now seeing the effects of “nature deficit disorder”, a term describing the set of health and behavioural problems that arise when we spend most of our lives indoors and in poorly designed, artificial spaces.
Nature deficit disorder is in part caused by increasingly busy lifestyles, but is made worse by underplanned, overdeveloped public spaces and an unstable climate.
Alarmingly, some of the factors contributing to nature deficit disorder can snowball, as residents hole up indoors and try to counteract the effects of climate change. Poorly designed precincts combined with surges in energy consumption can push up temperatures and cause an urban heat island effect, sending inner city temperatures up to 4 degrees higher than in surrounding areas and making people less inclined to spend time outside.
So what can we do about it? Thankfully, a fresh approach to design thinking is taking human wellbeing into account.
Placemaking is a versatile, considered approach to spatial design. The power of placemaking is its focus on creating spaces that serve the community’s needs, ultimately influencing how people feel and behave within the space.
What’s more, placemaking can ensure spaces are future-proofed and adaptable to environmental changes. Placemaking interventions that encourage the plantation of vegetation in the form of trees, green roofs, green walls, or the creation of community gardens, can help filter the air, reduce urban heat, provide shade, and cut energy consumption. Prioritising water-sensitive urban design in places can also revolutionise how we store and manage water, providing resilience to droughts and floods.
In the face of climate change disturbance, it’s vital we integrate nature with the built environment.
Since the goal of placemaking is to create liveable, resilient, and lively spaces, it makes sense that many recent placemaking interventions have focused on sustainability.
New York City’s Playground Program co-designed 186 playgrounds with local communities. Roberto Clemente school playground captures 400,000 gallons of stormwater each year, improves the health of its nearby river, and connects students with nature through hands-on environmental education activities.
This project has not only delivered a lively playground, it has implemented green infrastructure, reinvigorated the surrounding natural environment, and build local capacity to carry these effects into the long-term.
Other placemaking projects repurpose streets for car-free use, helping decrease local emissions and improve air quality. In those projects, placemakers invite community members to re-imagine what road space could be used for and take their responses into account. Residents benefit from safer streets, booming with local activity and safe for pedestrians and cyclists.
Many successful placemaking projects introduce or add greenery. Neighbourhood gardening projects, for example, are a low-cost way to boost community engagement with an outdoor space. These gardens can regenerate underutilised places with streetside planter boxes, food forests and public nature strips. Place activations also help connect local people to the space by involving communities in landscaping projects, educating them about native species adapted to local climate and soil type.
Looking to regenerate environmental health using placemaking? Consider the following:
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- Incorporate environmental sustainability in your project’s vision statement to ensure sustainability is considered throughout the project’s lifespan.
- Assess the place’s natural environment before starting to retrofit a place to understand where improvements can be made.
- Find local organisations and community members who are passionate about sustainability and collaborate with them to assess a place’s ecological context, enhance its health, and better engage with the broader community.
- Make your place interventions as net positive as possible. Could you use solar panels instead of polluting energy? Could you create compost from food waste? Could you collect and store water for neighbours?
Placemaking can build sustainable, healthy communities that enjoy and respect nature. In the face of climate change disturbance, it’s vital that we better integrate nature with our cities. We can use placemaking as an effective tool to improve the sustainability and resilience of places we call home.
