Creativity in placemaking: who can make good spaces happen?

Michel Mossessian: redefining the concept of public space

The highway and its urban space as an exhibition

The Beauty of the Large Highway

The Orange Edge urban art project »B1_21st«

JUMP: influence through arts-led regeneration and cultural planning

JUMP is 'not against development but is concerned simply with the quality of development'

Unlocking creativity in placemaking doesn't need to depend on huge budgets or complex megaplans. Successful places inspire, engage and surprise. Urban environments that make the most of existing place assets and ‘energise’ or activate our places and spaces is what most of us are looking for.

We know that this doesn't need to be rocket science. We've seen popular, creative places emerge before our very eyes – often created on tiny budgets. We like the recent spate of 'pop-up' amenities, from a Lido on the roof of London's Hayward Gallery; an outdoor community living room in a disused rooftop carpark; community gardens in neglected council-owned green spaces; play areas on mothballed development sites; a summertime urban forest on a public riverside walkway and numerous creative galleries and workshop hubs housed in recession-hit empty high street shops.

We support, and encourage, such smaller scale projects and social interventions. They serve real community needs, and help to achieve economic and civil wellbeing. They encourage community involvement, and they don't require the input of too many consultants or developers fixated on retail and commercial spaces.

Creative thinking required
It is perhaps even more important in times of economic restraint that inclusivity, originality and creativity is encouraged in the design and development of the built environment. As a leading resource and knowledge sharing network for urban designers and placemakers, RUDI believes that there is an important emerging agenda for how artists and the creative community are involved in the planning, design, development and delivery of vibrant, culturally relevant and inclusive places and spaces.

To this end, we've brought together a unique collection of inspirational and creative thinkers and practitioners to discuss and debate creative placemaking (for details, please visit A place for creativity): a debate that we'll be progressing in the coming months.

We'll be hearing, for example, from London-based architect Michel Mossessian on why it should be the role and responsibility of the architect to think through and define public spaces. Who, asks Mossessian, is responsible for public space?
Architecture has the power not only to reflect, but to transform the mindsets of the people that inhabit the spaces it creates, he says.

For example, in London, it is currently city planners who are responsible for defining (and defending) public spaces, but in reality their role is that of negotiator: they negotiate with property developers to guarantee the requisite contribution to the public realm, which is quantified through categories such as public art, green space and so on. This leaves little margin for creative thinking. Shouldn’t it be the role and responsibility of the architect to think through and define public spaces?

New public space definitions: the urban room
The term 'urban room' is a new way of thinking about defining public spaces. Working in Doha, I have developed a new model for public space, drawing on the function of the majlis in traditional Qatari architecture: the majlis is a space that negotiates between public and private functions, a space for meeting, greeting and exchange.

The new public square should equally serve the function of acting as an open space for exchange, but inhabited by members of the public as if it were a room in their own home. As well as encouraging a sense of public ownership, the urban room provides an opportunity to rethink the function of public spaces in relation to their defining architectural elements (landscaping, public art, building facades). It is an invitation to think just as creatively of the void as of the volume.

The space between buildings should be as beneficial to those outside the walls of a building as it is to those inside. The models inherited from the 20th century have been based on economic drivers. It is time to create a more balanced relationship between economic factors and social and environmental ones.

Airports and shopping malls (and the two are increasingly indistinguishable) are dedicated to the consumption of goods. Leisure is confined to increasingly rare green spaces and the space between buildings is left to function as an extension of the address it is attached to. The public realm surrounding a building is used to augment its value as real estate and 'public art' is added to add economic, not social, value.

Public spaces should be generous to the people who use them. They should not function to exclude or to divide, creating ghettoes by causing any single person to feel uncomfortable in them. Public spaces should not define their own function, dictating people’s behaviour; they should function as a space that belongs to the people, facilitating meeting and exchange.

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Land for free: a creative and informal city
We'll also be introduced to the work of the orange edge urban research bureau. Stefanie Bremer and Henrik Sander are working on transformations of the contemporary city with a particular interest in the role of traffic infrastructure as 'city makers', for new forms and locations of urban life and for the meaning of informal developments.

The orange edge project 'Land for Free', organised for the Cultural Capital Program 2010 of the Ruhr area, deals with vacant land on the »Zweistromland« between Emscher and Rhein Herne Kanal that will be given to local and international settlers for free – if they will use it in an entrepreneurial way.

Land for Free is a utopia: a new city in and between the cities of the Ruhr area. It is not a usual city (with planned streets, sewage networks, building authorities, but the city developed as the implementation of individual dreams of a lifetime, making it possible by acquisition of fallow land in the Ruhr area. It is the utopia of an unintended city that is build from thousand of new homelands in the Ruhr area.

Land for Free is a singular cultural and urbanic experiment in the context of the Cultural Capital of Europe 2010. It’s an experiment: an invitation to come be seduced to stay.

To sum up: the project is seeking to explore characteristics of modern urban landscapes and contemporary urban life. As professional urban planners, we work with artists, planning departments and traffic planners to create a connection between our theoretical work and the real life.

Highways and beauty
The Orange Edge urban art project »B1_21st« or The Beauty of the Large Highway (in translation), for example, is an exhibition project for the Cultural Capital Program 2010 of the Ruhr region. »B1_21st« is being developed along The B1, the main regional east-west link which is central for the Ruhr area. Along the 75 km between Dortmund and Duisburg on the B1 highway, the decentralized metropolis Ruhr has become a global prototype of a developing, decentralized and mobile regional city.

»B1_21st« involves artists, urban planners and cultural scientists in an exploration of the characteristics, languages and expression of the B1. The urban space of B1 serves as urban laboratory, in which the relationship between periphery, mobility and public space under the conditions of the 21st century is examined and defined.

The project »B1_21st« presents the highway and its urban space as a showroom/exhibition space. Mobility, one of the substantial components of the everyday culture of the Ruhr area, is the constituent element of the exhibition. By interventions, by events and by performance projects places have been discovered again, unexpected neighbourhoods became accessible and the beauty of the large highway has been made visible: from a drive-in cinema on the parking deck to the literature express at the gas station; from radio station as exhibition guide to the freeway as acoustic space, being experienced during the drive. Mobility and periphery, in a way that they are exemplary on exhibition in the urban space B1, are the substantial characteristics not only of the Ruhr district, but also of the future European city.

Orange edge will also discuss »City of speed«, a conference/exhibition for urban planners and traffic planners that dealt with the question of how urban highways can be integrated into the urban fabric. The context: the highway network characterizes the spatial structure of the Ruhr-Area. An agglomeration of 5.3 million inhabitants spreads over 4,400 km. The highway network is about 250 miles long and one of the densest in Europe, cutting through city centers, running along peripheries, creating a 50-mile long diverse urban structure.

The recent discussion on the urban integration of these highways started in 2001 with an experiment and the provocative question: May the B1 be able to become something like the Champs Elysées of the Ruhr-Area? The autumn academy »Cityscape B1« came up with various urban design visions that had but little in common with the traditional appearance of the Champs Elysées, yet still answered the question in a positive way, developing urban design schemes that demonstrate how the structural change of the Ruhr-Area can become a driving force for its urban development.

JUMP: an alternative approach to regeneration
We'll also meet a group called JUMP (Joined Up Master Planning), which has been pioneering a series of 'critiques & suggestions' based on the City of Edinburgh Leith Docks Development Framework (LDDF) and live Forth Ports Outline Planning Application (OPA). JUMP's aim is to influence, through arts-led regeneration, cultural planning and the delivery of social enterprise businesses, the creative development of key parts of the major Edinburgh waterfront regeneration project.

It's common, in the placemaking field, to hear complaints and criticism of major development plans, frequently for an over-emphasis on retail and non-affordable housing as key delivery drivers. Such mega plans can, and do, miss out on opportunities for maximising existing placeand cultural assets, and frequently leave local communities cold. But in Leith, Scotland, JUMP's alternative approaches to a major city-driven regeneration plan have been actively and passionately developed over several years, based on a series of creative and cultural interventions designed to use the selected areas of the existing space to maximum potential, and to involve local communities.

Currently, acting with the Granton Community Partnership (JUMP: Joined Up Master Planning, NET: North Edinburgh Trust, CLU: Community Land Use, AiA: Art in Architecture and Community Regeneration Plan for Granton) JUMP is developing plans for an international garden festival featuring artist/gardener collaborations that will open six months of every year, an artist/artisan village made from turf roofed sea containers, and a pop-up lido on the Forth waterfront.

Read more about the project online

JUMP formed in December 2007, at the time comprising a voluntary (unpaid) core team of design professionals supported by a wider field of professionals of mixed background and members of the public. JUMP was set up in order to contest the Outline Planning Application (OPA) submitted by Forth Ports Plc and also to question the process supported by the City of Edinburgh Council that has led to the current Planning Application. JUMP is 'not against development but is concerned simply with the quality of development,' it states.

JUMP is now working on building community support in the Granton area. Several opportunities for projects are considered around an area of the waterfront, along with ideas for preserving the integrity of the historic walled garden at Granton. Proposals for the site, now being referred to as Granton sur Mer, will deliver a community development consisting of an annual art and horticultural festival; an artist / artisan village made from recycled sea containers and a beach front Lido. All projects will be self-sustainable, with their own green energy plant. All projects will train and emply local people. All projects will run as social enterprise business models with profits going back to the community.

Artist Shaeron Averbuch is one of the drivers of the plans, which focus around a programme of art- and design-related activities created to act as stepping stones for Granton sur Mer and the continued cultural development of the Edinburgh waterfront – or at least the parts we can have influence on, says Averbuch.

These successful and innovative placemaking approaches will be examined at A place for creativity, an event exploring ways in which creativity in placemaking can be unlocked, enabling the development of urban environments that are both inspiring and interesting can have a positive impact on economic and civil wellbeing. Feedback and multimedia will be posted after the event.