ABSTRACT
Placemaking has grown in awareness and popularity significantly over the past two decades (Friedmann, 2010); however, when it comes to community-led placemaking, a participatory approach to placemaking where the projects are initiated, led, implemented, or managed by local leaders, a number of barriers exist (CoDesign Studio, 2019e). Local residents and community volunteers often find it difficult to deliver place improvements in their own neighbourhoods, due to a prevalence of red tape such as permits, fees, and licenses, while local councils often lack the internal enabling environment needed to support locally led initiatives. In response, not-for-profit organisation CoDesign Studio, based in Melbourne Australia, created The Neighbourhood Project, a four-year practice-based program that worked with community leaders and local councils to tackle process barriers while concurrently activating underutilised public space and developing a model for community-led placemaking. Drawing on tactical urbanism (Lydon and Garcia, 2015) as an approach, the program used prototyping and short-term activations as a low-risk testing environment through which councils and communities could work together on practical place-based projects, supported by a six-step community training and mentoring program delivered by CoDesign Studio. This chapter offers a summative case study overview of the experiences and outcomes of The Neighbourhood Project delivered between 2015 to 2019. It will discuss the program’s People, Process, Place (PPP) framework as a tripartite model for placemaking professionals, local governments, and community leaders to adopt in order to improve their understanding and implementation of community-led placemaking. It is also hoped that the program’s results will provide inspiration and insight for community-led approaches globally.
