What is Placemaking?
To understand the concept of placemaking, it’s helpful to think of a home. Let’s say you’ve just bought your first house. No one moves into a new home and immediately calls their friends to come over for dinner. Most of us would likely spend a few days and weeks transforming the house into a home. Room by room, you’ll unpack. You’ll paint and decorate, you’ll assemble furniture and begin putting things in their place. Along the way, you’ll make a series of intentional decisions to create a comfortable place for the people who will spend time there.
Placemaking is a similar process but applied to public spaces. Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as “a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value.” At Proximity Project, we like to say placemaking is the art of turning public spaces to pass through into welcoming places to be.
In this post, we explore the concept of placemaking in depth and how it applies particularly to the church context.
Placemaking is invitational
What makes placemaking different from beautiful architecture or landscape design? At its core, placemaking is invitational. It’s about transforming spaces into welcoming environments for the purpose of building relationships. Of course this involves thinking about aesthetics and the principles of good design, but it’s not just about making something nice to look at. It’s about building something that sparks connections within a community.
For example, someone might plant flowers in their yard — that’s nice to look at and makes the neighborhood more pleasing. But compare that to someone who starts a community garden. In this context, not only are they adding beauty, but they’re creating a space for people in the neighborhood to interact and get to know each other. This relational, social component to placemaking is what makes it so valuable to neighborhoods: it’s not just about improving the look and feel of a place, it’s concerned with strengthening the social fabric too.
For churches, placemaking involves carefully considering how and what the exterior of your property communicates to the surrounding community. Before anyone even comes through your church door, how is your property reflecting your care for the neighborhood? This is a relatively new approach to thinking about the relationship between churches and non-members. Your property can be a place where relationships are built simply by providing comfortable public space for neighbors to interact.
Placemaking is incremental and gradual
It’s a common assumption that property upgrades require serious architectural plans with expensive landscaping, fancy lighting features and impressive amenities. One of the best things about placemaking is that it doesn’t require such large scale commitments. Placemaking is not about keeping up with trends or impressing people. Placemaking is about listening to your congregation and your community and identifying small investments that you can build on over time as you collect more feedback.
Sure, you can opt for the fancy landscaping and the master architectural plans. But also keep in mind that it’s possible to transform your property in a way that blesses the community without spending lots of money and committing to huge projects that are much harder to adapt later.
At Proximity Project, we always encourage churches to look for small scale projects they can start with and then grow from there as they get to know what their congregation is capable of maintaining and as they discover what really connects with the community.
Some examples might include creating a weather-conducive seating area outdoors, making simple improvements to outdoor activity areas such as basketball courts and playgrounds, repurposing part of a parking lot to become a play area such as a Foursquare court or even committing to hosting coffee hour outside on Sunday.
Placemaking is collaborative
Compared to expensive architectural plans that require churches to rely on external experts and contractors, placemaking is a collaborative approach to property improvement that seeks to leverage the skills and talents of the congregation and the local community. This creates a unique opportunity for churches to get to know their community better and to celebrate the unique talents embedded within their congregation.
At Proximity Project, we believe that some of the best projects are not those built to a finished state by an expert, but rather those that are built incrementally by many hands. This approach not only leads to meaningful outcomes – projects that contain stories and memories for everyone involved – but it also positions churches to create generous cycles of listening to everyone involved, which inevitably establishes an invaluable foundation of trust.
The collaborative approach might not lead to the trendiest or prettiest projects, but they are more likely to help churches establish meaningful ties with the neighborhood around them.
ReADY to learn more about placemaking?
Click below to hear firsthand how placemaking has empowered Ambassador Church to connect with their community!
