ABSTRACT
Concepts of ‘place’ and neighbourhood ‘character’ have emerged in recent decades to take key roles in the discourse and practice of urban planning – deployed in the defence and protection of existing urban neighbourhoods against transformational change, but also in the design and marketing of new developments (see also Low, Paddison, Nyseth and Montgomery, Chapters 17, 18, 19 and 20, this volume). This chapter explores the relationships of place identity to urban planning. How is neighbourhood place identity experienced in everyday life? How is it defined and constructed in planning discourses and legislative practices? How is it created through urban design and protected through regulation? The potency of experiences of place identity and character makes this a crucial issue in the politics of urban planning and the production of urban cultures. One clear finding is that conceptions of place and character are fundamentally both social and spatial, and that the production and protection of place can be complicit with the production and protection of social privilege. Perceptions of place and character are multiple and flexible; it follows that the implementation of such concepts in planning legislation can be problematic. Fluidities of place identity can open opportunities for creative urban design but also the creative destruction of deregulated markets. Desires to legislate place identity can protect valuable places, but also paralyse urban development and ironically kill the very phenomenon that is to be protected.
