ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the potential of placemaking for catalysing community adaptation to a climate-changed future, and how researchers might support practitioners in that work. The first section positions climate change as an urgent mandate for the reconfiguration of sociotechnical practices and describes how we might conceptualise and model those everyday activities in terms of their tangible and intangible elements. The second section argues that placemaking may work as a methodology for extending that model into futurity, thus allowing for the extrapolative exploration of reconfigurations. This positions placemaking as a living laboratory for the participatory production of new practices, and for the reconstitution of the places in which those practices are situated. The final section asks what might be offered to placemaking by researchers concerned with the sociotechnical transformations mandated by the climate crisis, whether in terms of theory or practice. What knowledges might make the consequences of a changing climate situated and legible for communities and placemaking practitioners? How might we better analyse the relationships between the abstract of complex infrastructural systems and the concrete of local ways of life? And how might we encourage placemaking, and integrate it into the greater project of adapting to the Anthropocene?
