ABSTRACT
This chapter asks why ‘good’ strategic plans and urban design often translate into poor physical places. Richard Sennett offers an insight, referring to a ‘cité and ville’ divide: cité, the accumulation of fine grain human places that people value as an experience; ville, the comprehensively planned city of top-down plans and policies (Sennett, 2018). In contemporary global cities, placemaking is overwhelmed by metropolitan-scale urban infrastructure and the economic and governance models and processes driving them, narrowing and overwhelming the placemaking process itself. Strategic planning and urban design in isolation cannot deliver successful placemaking. A three-part proposition to deliver improved places is set out here to narrow the divide, in essence, elevating the role of placemaking by adopting its processes into the current economic and political decision-making process. This comprises adopting an iterative, rather than linear process, more closely aligning and integrating urban governance, and broadening urban economic models including cost–benefit analysis. The chapter provides an overview of contemporary strategic planning and urban design, their urban governance and economic drivers, examining their impact on placemaking with respect to two case studies, one in the author’s city, Sydney, and one in Tokyo. The conclusion details the three-part proposition to improve placemaking.
