Let’s rethink placemaking
These definitions acknowledge four different relationships to place. Two of the four—placeknowing and placekeeping—are terms foregrounded by one of our participants, Roberto Bedoya. The other two—placesharing and placefeeling—extend the critical intervention of the first two by drawing on the workshops’ conversations about civic space and lived experience.
The way these four terms reframe how designers, museum administrators, civic and community leaders, policy makers, collectors and donors, advocates, and everyday people perceive their claim on museum spaces has the potential to drive more equitable relationships between museums, the people they engage, and the people who engage with them.
(Place)knowing
“Placeknowing is asking you to really think about that river that runs through the park, and why is it there, and how many rivers, how many streets are paved over a river? We don't know that. Well, maybe we should know that. Placemaking may put a freeway over the river, but that river is still there, and placeknowing is about that.”
— Roberto Bedoya
Museums are themselves an artifact of Western European approaches to knowledge, which have historically entailed inequitable—at best—practices of exploring, procuring, and archiving objects of study in institutional collections. “All decisions are philosophy,” Elaine Gurian insisted in the Inclusive Design workshop. “Systems are culturally dependent.”
If museums are to survive as fertile ground for acknowledging and nurturing a shared understanding of the world, design decisions and processes must begin to manifest, for example, the indigenous lifeways Wanda Dalla Costa lifted up in the same workshop and what Bedoya called the “sovereignty of context.”
(Place)keeping
“Placekeeping is about knowing your locale, knowing where you stand, where you sit, what is your relationship to your neighbors? What is your relationship to the sky? What is your relationship to the folks coming out of the neighborhood bar? Those relationships are keeping you wanting to keep those things alive.”
— Roberto Bedoya
In the Civic Hubs workshop, Joanne Kim called out placemaking as a misleading description of the Destination Crenshaw initiative in South Central Los Angeles. It is “placekeeping,” she said, because it is “legitimizing” the assets that are already there, “preserving, showcasing, and leveraging” them to keep the economic value in the community that is doing the making.
Ownership is, similarly, the operative meaning of equity for Jason Price, Titus Kaphar, and Jonathan Brand in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood. “We could dream big,” Price said in the Belonging workshop, “because NXTHVN was our dream to dream.” The kind of equity Kim and Price have prioritized in their projects is the flip side of “keeping” as a relation of care and familiarity, a way of owning through intimate, even spiritual attention.
Placekeeping is in the service of equity when the physical design turns itself over to the people who are responsible for the place that will cradle the design. It is a relationship of reciprocity through vulnerability, trust, and transparency.
(Place)sharing
“Public service is paramount,” states the Code of Ethics of the American Alliance of Museums. Museums are public institutions, yet they are not always or necessarily public spaces.
“What if,” Lori Fogarty asked in the Civic Hubs workshop, reflecting on the renovation of the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), the museum was “serving a purpose beyond going to see X?” What if the museum had a civic purpose? What if success were measured not by return visits, but by the amount of time people spend in the garden without ever setting foot inside? Then again, who decides how long they get to linger?
During the civil rights protests of summer 2020, Brenda Sanchez recalled in the Inclusive Design workshop, protestors made pilgrimages to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in order to grieve and shout and have conversations.
Some museums are dissolving the barriers to access by taking their holdings and programming out into communities and neighborhoods at pop-up events and exhibits, and some museums, like OMCA, are tearing down walls to be able to share their space with the communities. Placesharing, however, is also about recognizing through municipal infrastructure, accessibility, and security protocols that visitors are sharing their culture and community with the museum.
(Place)feeling
“Experience has to be part of this conversation,” Zena Howard said. Placefeeling is experience grounded in the particularities of the design and how they catch visitors in their expression of past, present, and future.
Every single person who approaches the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum takes the same ramp into the museum: it is the “most accessible museum ever,” Dennis Barrie proclaimed in the Inclusive Design workshop. Holly Deichmann recalled the architectural emphasis on “democratizing space.” For Howard, designing for Black communities at home in North Carolina and in L.A., D.C., and Detroit, there is a critical future orientation to every physical expression of the past: the Sankofa loop of the Metro platform at Destination Crenshaw cycles between past and future; NMAAHC’s reimagined porch forms front the National Mall in a gesture both cradling and welcoming.
If, Shalini Agrawal asserted, we reframe the opening of a museum or building to be the beginning, instead of the culmination, of the process of engagement and equity, we would be “shifting the whole idea of what a museum is.”