The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America

REVIEW

THE CITY CREATIVE: THE RISE OF URBAN PLACEMAKING IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA

by Michael H. Carriere / David Schalliol

Review by James Hamilton

JAMES is a first-year master’s student with the Department of City and Regional Planning whose interests center on urban form as it relates to community marginalization, environmental justice, societal cohesion, and suburban retrofit. He studied public policy and economics at Duke University and has since worked in New Orleans and New York before circling back to the triangle. Never happier than when he is hiking up a mountain or traveling on a train, James fails to commit enough time to his average writing collections, ambitious reading list, and lifelong rugby enthusiasm. The University of Chicago Press, 2021, 336 pages

Placemaking has long held a coveted position in planning literature as a central tenant of good urban form. Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and their considerable academic company formalized thought on the interplay between social capital and design, thus laying a framework for those hoping to arrange public space to create community.

But truly successful places tend not to be made consciously by planners or developers, most of whom are preoccupied with the economic benefits of increased sociability; instead, the kinds of spaces Jacobs and co. idolize are most effectively cultivated by community members who do not necessarily see their work as placemaking—so is the process replicable? If so, how?

By detailing more than two hundred initiatives, The City Creative is an attempt to answer—or, rather, reframe – these questions. The book pairs the historical fluency of Michael H. Carriere (Associate Professor of Humanities, Social Science, and Communication at Milwaukee School of Engineering) with the storytelling and sociological expertise of David Schalliol (associate professor of sociology at St. Olaf College) to trace placemaking as an understated revolutionary tool that can be harnessed to reach a more equitable future. In their words, they “strive to use the processes of embedded observation and communityrooted engagement to help illuminate the merits, demerits, and possibilities of a more inclusive, more equitable approach to placedbased action.” Their exploration is divided into two distinct halves that together convey the evolution of creative placemaking. The first unpacks its history, paying primary attention to mainstream influences. The first chapter “The (Near) Death and Life of Postwar American Cities” documents the movement’s roots, which concluded that anonymous, unsafe spaces “needed to be reclaimed… by strengthening…urban social bonds” and that “the promise of sociability” could be “the cornerstone for urban economic redevelopment” (p. 52). However, in order to understand the role that the history of placemaking played in the creation of American cities, the authors chose to further scrutinize “The Roaring ‘90s” (chapter 2), shifting from traditional schools of thought to their more contemporary offspring, such as communitarianism and new urbanism. The authors argue that small-scale activism responding to globalization and the sanctity of private property, although only narrowly influential at the time, “crafted a template for how creative placemaking would grow” by “foreshadow[ing] the neighborhood-centric model…that would inform the practice” (p. 79). The study goes on to paint the current state of what modern creative placemaking is understood to be. It discusses how the disintegration of social ties is tied to space, how the economy is increasingly driven by individuality and self-expression, and how the resulting “creative class” have the resources to transform that space.

The City Creative’s second half documents efforts to direct sociability towards the

revitalization of communities as healthy and equitable ecosystems, beyond simply activating spaces. The pages are the product of the authors’ documentary-style research, spanning ten years of interviews, community meetings, protests, and other such means of first-hand connection to actors critical of mainstream placemakers. These voices believe that the practice is a means of

“transforming the social as well as economic, political, and cultural forces that have given us the city of the early twenty-first century” (p.21).

Chapters 4–6 are meant as a demonstration of how democratizing modern creative placemaking can promote production as a concept beyond marketplaces. This production has traditionally been viewed as vague—community connections and identity, for example—but the authors try to show how it can also be concrete—“temporarily transforming a field house into a brick-andmortar library,” for example (p. 24). Through this lens, The City Creative proposes that the placemaking movement must “embrace a vision that is holistic, redistributive, and cognizant of the connection between tangible and intangible outcomes” in order to minimize displacement and unequal economic development. If The City Creative has a major pitfall, it is that its coffee-table-book-esque format primes the audience for a visual-forward read but is instead met with dense text and interspersed, minimally referenced photographs. It wants to be both an academic text and an art exhibition so fails to be either. It is also not the how-to guide for which pragmatic readers would hope: they would not leave with the same decisive recommendations that they might from Jacobs or Lynch.

That said, Carriere and Schalliol make it very clear that their purpose is not to prescribe action to budding creative placemakers so much as it is to document the process. Their deliberate shift in outcome prioritization, from social capital to social justice, feels a fresh and worthy advancement of placemaking literature. Anyone studying the field in the contexts of academia or revitalization would benefit from the grassroots insights that, if the reader is open-minded, have the substance to shape modern perceptions of how public space should be used. Perhaps others will codify and make practical the findings of this exploration, but for now The City Creative stands alone as a meticulous, thoughtful depiction of how community collaborations, both unpresuming and activist, mold equitable spaces in ways with which governments and developers cannot compete.