ABSTRACT
The places where we live are changing fast, as are our relationships with them. This chapter urges those shaping places to catch up by designing-in and making way for ongoing active exchanges – essential as our connections with cities and streets become multi-directional. The chapter explores the importance of meaning, equity, and a bit of magic, for enabling the best dialogues with the places we occupy. It reflects on the way in which initiatives taken by so many through the recent pandemic fast-forward shifts in how we relate to neighbourhoods, including those we thought we already knew so well. How does a city speak to us? The chapter explores how our diverse bonds with places lead to an ‘urban lexicon’ – as a vocabulary of signs, symbols, and sensations, through which we each connect differently with cities and streets. How do we speak back to a city? We see communities and professionals as place makers – both now trailblazing paths for greater agency and connection through forms of place prototyping and ongoing ‘call and response.’ The very human responses through the tragic COVID-19 pandemic gave placemakers a unique glimpse into different, people-first futures. It’s time, this chapter contends, for placemaking to respond.
