Reclaiming public spaces

As the cost-of-living crisis impacts low-income communities, public spaces are increasingly important providers of safety, education and culture, as well as playing a key role in regeneration. So it’s vital to ensure local people remain connected to them. 

Placemaking – simply put – is a community-based approach to the planning, design, and management of public spaces. It creates areas that reflect and meet the needs and values of a community, promote social interaction and wellbeing and are economically viable. Reclaiming these public spaces, whether private or publicly run, is an essential part of placemaking.

The disconnect between communities and public places is usually linked to privatisation, but commercially operated spaces aren’t always inaccessible or off limits. And communities can just as easily be disengaged from publicly owned spaces. 

Unwelcome in public space

Depending on age, sexuality, class, ethnicity or address, people can feel unwelcome or unsafe anywhere in public space – from community centres, libraries, galleries and museums to civic squares, parks and gardens, canals and rivers. Often this is a result of a lack of consultation with residents and a lack of involvement in decision-making about how spaces are run or even how to access them. 

A genuinely public space values the partnership opportunities between arts, culture and community. Both government-run and privately-owned ones are essential to providing opportunities for the community; and an inclusive placemaking process is crucial to building relationships between shared spaces.

At the Foundation for Future London, our aim is to connect local communities with the new East Bank – as the cultural quarter in the Olympic Park is known – and its globally-renowned arts, innovation, and cultural partners. We want everyone to be able to enjoy the same opportunities for learning, training and employment. 

We do this through participatory grant making for educational, employment and creative skills, and personal growth and development courses in the arts, education, creativity and innovation across many public spaces. 

Placemaking as a participatory planning tool

Public spaces are where the community comes together to work, play, socialise and enjoy family time. They are also places to learn, experience art and culture and boost health and wellbeing. To truly be public, they must be inclusive, accessible and open to everyone. 

As a participatory planning tool, placemaking invites people to talk about what they like and don’t like about where they live – the local area, its facilities and spaces.

This approach encourages a conversation about how to design a community based on people’s needs and wants, giving individuals and organisations a chance to direct their skills and expertise into tangible solutions. This is particularly important for communities that have been in place for decades and who might find themselves displaced by gentrification. 

Placemaking creates a level playing field for people to voice opinions, regardless of occupation, housing status or ethnicity. It also gives people a sense of cultural and social pride and ownership of their neighbourhoods and environment. 

When you feel you belong in a place, you feel you have a right to access local services and facilities. You feel more confident to go into arts spaces, museums or community centres that may once have felt off limits.

Local initiatives transform lives

The Westfield East Bank Creative Future Fund* is an example of placemaking. The programme encourages communities to develop their own creative projects such as a women-led textiles cooperative, a start-up accelerator or a free creative programme for local schoolchildren. 

Amid London’s higher-than-UK average rates of unemployment and staff shortages, our creative employment programme will invest £10m into local communities in Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest to support and transform the lives and careers of East Londoners by putting funding and resources in their hands.

Funded placemaking projects can activate cohesion, employment and skills development. A key aspect of the programme’s success is providing local people of all ages and backgrounds the opportunity to enhance skills needed to forge a career in the creative sector. 

The fund also supports working with arts, culture and heritage industries, investing in opening doors to local people and inviting funders to listen to what people need and to deliver the resources to make it happen.   

Placemaking for sustainable development

Placemaking can support sustainable development goals as it creates inclusive, safe, resilient and viable communities; lasting, economic growth that excludes nobody; long-term decent work for all; public creativity; and universal quality education and lifelong learning opportunities.

Placemaking in action is guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all" by the year 2030. It puts local people in the driving seat, actively participating in and co-designing their local neighbourhoods and public spaces. 

Local people need the tools to create locally sourced solutions and bring their ideas to life. Residents of all ages and backgrounds can become producers, architects and planners of local projects that improve access to nature, green spaces – promoting biodiversity – and accessible, inclusive spaces that reflect the community’s character. 

A nice place to live

Fundamentally, placemaking is about providing people with a nice place to live and the way people connect with the public places is crucial to that.

Reclaiming public space promotes a sense of belonging and can be the basis for learning, employment and a good quality of life. Doing so is vital for providing places where people they feel they belong, are ‘at home in’ and can enjoy.

This leads to a greater sense of safety, community, civic life and ownership which, in turn, increases happiness, health and wellbeing. Everyone wants a nice place to live. Placemaking can make that possible.

Maria Adebowale-Schwarte is CEO of Foundation for Future London.
future.london
@FdnFutureLondon | @mariaadebowale

*The Westfield East Bank Creative Future Fund is a five-year programme from the Foundation for Future London in partnership with retailer Westfield Stratford City.
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