ABSTRACT
Place is – essentially – personal; placemaking is – most meaningfully – interpersonal; in integral terms place and placemaking are also transpersonal – ultimately spiritual. Above all, this fundamentally implicates the placemakers, as whole persons – in body, mind, soul, and spirit – in an ever-more-whole-making endeavour. This contribution offers some observations of the more recent work of a professed integral practitioner – a ‘state of the art’ statement. It reflects the latest culmination of some protracted action research. Framed as developmentally oriented action inquiry, and invoking a dedicated embrace of integral theory, it focuses on a practitioner’s practice as praxis – viewing praxis as ‘a professional making-place.’ Through an integral lens place is represented, and presented, as a making, by makers. Placemaking is regarded as an evolving construct, essentially integrative – a primal human practice with remarkable intrinsic ongoing potency. This personal journey began with an inquiry into placemaking as applied integral ecology, which evolved into some wondering about a post-modernised integral planning as placemaking – intermediating planning professionals and the people-in-place, the people-of-the-place. More recent journeying, featured here, revolved around my encounter with wellbeing, another whole-making pursuit. My planning became ‘placemaking as wellbeing by design,’ a form of meshworking well beyond networking. Now, fired by a concern for professional-self design, my placemaking has become ‘a poiesis of sophrosynes.’ Is this the placemaking to come, if we might will it?
