ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a practitioner perspective on creative placemaking within a contested landscape of urban renewal. Focused primarily on a public art project developed by Esem Projects in 2015 at Barangaroo, Sydney, the chapter discusses the tensions involved in negotiating contested territories of historical, institutional and community attachment to a prime waterfront precinct. Through creative practice, the resources of memory and affective engagement were used to expand the different layers of meaning ascribed to the place, many of these now erased from the physical landscape through the process of urban renewal. In this context, conjuring an emotional landscape of attachment became an act of resistance to urban revitalisation, while at the same time renewing, celebrating, and expanding the many versions of place that have existed in this significant waterfront precinct through time.
