Placemaking Principles

Because we design places for people, Townscape Design has developed ten key placemaking principles that honor the individual and the community and provide a human framework for technical decisions. They include:

1. Good planning is all about placemaking. All too often, planning professionals and others get all tied up in the language of planning or the process and lose sight of the ultimate goal: creating a great place where people can achieve, thrive and enjoy life.
2. Placemaking is inextricably linked to community-based economic development. A place must have a stable business climate, a balance between large and small employers and a balance between new businesses, existing businesses and home-grown entrepreneurs. In other words, a balance between economic hunting and gardening.[1]
3. Placemaking is the outward and visible result of creating a quality of life value for all residents and businesses. How the built environment is planned and executed is of extreme importance. However, it can be overly focused on and too often artificially and unnecessarily controlled. A more appropriate measure of success of a place should include stability, permanence, connectivity, social junctures, walkability, opportunity and personal success.
4. Places are a composite of neighborhoods, districts and corridors; the fundamental building blocks of community. Neighborhoods have distinctive attributes and are the logical human settlement pattern for millennia.  These tools are the basis of the lost art of town building and placemaking due to the inappropriate and all-too-often destructive use of zoning, legalese, typical details and single zone land use ‘color’ when planning and building our communities.
5. A place’s personality and composition is expressed in its fabric. To be successful, a place’s fabric must be of a fine-grained pedestrian scale, must be walkable and must be integrated so as to foster multiple opportunities for social interaction and to provide the maximum social, business, service, cultural and entertainment opportunities with a minimum distance.
6. A properly functioning place has a logical framework. This includes appropriately scaled mass transit, an integrated and supportive energy and technology infrastructure, a street network that is complete, a civic-culture-arts-entertainment infrastructure and a variety of recreational opportunities.
7. A place must have a sense of permanence and stability which will lead to sustainability. If a place is conceived and arranged to allow for the occasional ‘bending in the wind’ and an accommodation of new ideas, technologies and businesses without wholesale destruction, then it is stable, predictable and ultimately sustainable. All places evolve and grow, but stable places have a sense of permanence, not only because they were ‘built well’, but also due to their inherent ability to accommodate change.
8. Great places are inherently efficient. Some may want to use terms such as ‘green’ or ‘environmentally sensitive’ but these are loaded terms. An efficient place, by its very nature is a steward of the environment and a steward of the limited resources it has at its disposal. Place efficiency goes beyond simplistic levels and embodies the whole of the built environment.
9. An educated citizenry is an engaged citizenry. Placemaking education starts in elementary school and must be a continuum through life. This education will foster an understanding of a place’s history, importance, culture and its unique character and will give individuals the tools to properly engage in its success.
10. A pride of place creates a culture of stewardship. When all the pieces are in place, there is the opportunity to foster intense civic pride. This will lead to a successful community that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. This ultimately leads to stewardship and the desire to provide the next generation with something of value that is greater than that which they inherited.