Placemaking Sandbox: Emergent Approaches, Techniques and Practices to Create More Thriving Places [1st ed.] 9789811527517, 9789811527524

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Reimagining Place Through the Sandbox Studio Pedagogy: An Introduction (Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, Kelum Palipane)....Pages 1-14
Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach (Cristina Hernandez-Santin)....Pages 15-34
Capturing the Multiplicities of Place: Neighbourhood and Classroom (Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, Kelum Palipane)....Pages 35-52
Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking (Tanja Beer, Angela Campbell)....Pages 53-69
Realising ‘Rights to the City’ in Contested Space (Andrea Cook, Imogen Carr)....Pages 71-89
Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design: A Case Study (Judy Bush, Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Dominique Hes)....Pages 91-106
Conclusion: Placemaking as Critical Pedagogy of Place (Kelum Palipane, Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, Cristina Hernandez-Santin)....Pages 107-121
Back Matter ....Pages 123-126

Citation preview

Placemaking Sandbox Emergent Approaches, Techniques and Practices to Create More Thriving Places Edited by Iderlina Mateo-Babiano Kelum Palipane

Placemaking Sandbox

Iderlina Mateo-Babiano  •  Kelum Palipane Editors

Placemaking Sandbox Emergent Approaches, Techniques and Practices to Create More Thriving Places

Editors Iderlina Mateo-Babiano Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

Kelum Palipane Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

Place Agency University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-15-2751-7    ISBN 978-981-15-2752-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the funding that we received from The Myer Foundation to support the implementation of all Sandbox studios as part of the Place Agency Project, enabling us to work with so many amazing people. We would also like to acknowledge our future placemakers, all the postgraduate students at the Melbourne School of Design who worked on several placemaking projects as part of five Sandbox studios showcased in this book. We acknowledge the contribution of colleagues and partners in academia, government and industry who shared their time and resources to mentor our future placemakers. We thank all of you for being the inspiration and foundation of this book. We acknowledge the contribution of our co-­authors who share the same aspiration of shaping more meaningful places and the same passion to inspire others through our stories of teaching placemaking. We acknowledge and thank the support that was extended to us by the University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning Research Office in recognizing the importance of supporting early and mid-career academics in the Faculty. We extend our utmost gratitude to the Palgrave Pivot team for their guidance and patience.

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Contents

 Reimagining Place Through the Sandbox Studio Pedagogy: An Introduction  1 Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Kelum Palipane  Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach 15 Cristina Hernandez-Santin  Capturing the Multiplicities of Place: Neighbourhood and Classroom 35 Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Kelum Palipane  Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking 53 Tanja Beer and Angela Campbell  Realising ‘Rights to the City’ in Contested Space 71 Andrea Cook and Imogen Carr  Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design: A Case Study 91 Judy Bush, Cristina Hernandez-Santin, and Dominique Hes

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 Conclusion: Placemaking as Critical Pedagogy of Place107 Kelum Palipane, Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, and Cristina Hernandez-Santin Index123

Notes on Contributors

Tanja  Beer  is an award-winning ecological designer, community artist, and creative researcher. She has more than 20 years professional experience, including creating over 70 designs for a variety of theatre companies, events, exhibitions and festivals in Australia and overseas. Beer has a background in theatre design and sustainability and works across disciplines. She collaborates with landscape architects, urban ecologists, horticulturists, and placemakers to explore the intersection between landscape and performance design. Beer’s most significant work is The Living Stage, an award-winning global initiative that combines stage design, horticulture, and community engagement to create recyclable, biodegradable, biodiverse, and edible performance spaces. Judy Bush  is Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research is focused on urban green space governance in a changing urban landscape. Her research investigates innovative governance arrangements that address multifunctional and participatory approaches, to link policy domains, and to facilitate green space management and evidence-based policy processes. Prior to academia, she led a local government alliance working on climate change action, and before that urban waterway restoration. Angela  Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Federation University, Australia. Her teaching, research, and published works have been both practical and theoretical. She has investigated performance from the archives, site-specific theatre, the politics and poetics of place, eco-practice, and practice-led research. Her research interests have ix

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been developed from her 15 years of experience as a freelance actor and theatre creator in a range of industry environments, from mainstream to independent production. Imogen  Carr  is affiliated with the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is a PhD candidate and research assistant. Carr’s research focuses on intersectional identities within the public realm, particularly on their expression and experience in relation to the micropolitics of place and the presence of difference. Carr’s work explores issues such as discursive definitions of Self/Other, inclusivity, and power within place, narrative, and self-reflexivity. Andrea  Cook is jointly affiliated with the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is an early career academic fellow, and the Director of RedRoad, an urban and community planning agency, in Melbourne, Australia. Cook’s work focuses on the social/cultural dimensions of cities and on urban contestation, social/spatial justice, citizenship and rights to the city, public engagement in urban change, and methodologies that support robust understandings of the city. Cook’s planning, community planning, participation, and community safety work have been acknowledged with 17 major awards for excellence in planning and community safety. Cristina  Hernandez-Santin holds a Master in Environment from the University of Melbourne and a Bachelor in Biology from Universidad de las Americas. Combined with her qualifications within the field of ecology, she has extensive experience working across disciplines and utilising her expertise in landscape design and participatory design practice. Convinced of the critical role that nature plays in ecological and human health, she is particularly interested in the topics of biodiversity sensitive urban design and bridging the gaps between place-practice and ecology-practice. Dominique Hes  received degrees in Science (Botany), Engineering, and Architecture. Her key research questions are: Why, when we have been ‘doing’ sustainability for so long, are we having an ever-increasing impact? Why is it so difficult to be a thriving part of the earth’s systems? Her conclusion is we do not have the narrative right about who we are in the world and the contribution we can have. She believes placemaking is central to re-connecting people to place and re-reaction of this narrative. In her work she uses the concepts of placemaking, ­custodianship, biomimicry, biophilia, regenerative design, permaculture, and positive development.

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Iderlina  Mateo-Babiano  is Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. An architect, urban planner, and transport planner by training, she teaches and coordinates the subjects Urban Design for People and Places, Placemaking for the Built Environment, and Cities Without Slums. She is part of the collaborative Place Agency Consortium—an award-winning group of academics and placemakers delivering education programmes focused on placemaking theory and practice (www.placeagency.org.au). Kelum  Palipane  is Lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. Through her research and teaching, Palipane investigates how creative ethnographic methods can inform design in demographically complex urban conditions. Prior research has included developing a design framework that would help retain and foster the placemaking practices of multicultural communities in urban regeneration projects.

List of Figures

Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Outcome Sunflower as viewed by the students participating in the research. (Source: Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Place Agency, University of Melbourne) Outcome Sunflower for self-reported HHH skills in three of the Sandbox studios. (Source: Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Place Agency, University of Melbourne)

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Capturing the Multiplicities of Place: Neighbourhood and Classroom Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Springvale Activity Centre, the five laneways, and open spaces. (Note: (1) Multicultural place (2) 248A Underpass (3) Arcade 303 (4) Lane across the car park (5) Post office lane (6) Laneway near Springvale Rise Primary School). (Source: © 2019 Nearmap Australia Pty Ltd) 38 Students engage across different modalities in tasks. Photos: Top three by authors, bottom three by Mark Wilson, https:// markwilson.com.au40

Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Lake Wendouree, City of Ballarat Master Plan. (Image courtesy of Chippy Riviera and City of Ballarat) Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens site. (Photo by Tanja Beer)

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List of Figures

Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Albert Charles Cooke, Chinese Quarter Ballarat. Wood engraving published in The Illustrated Australian News, Melbourne: Ebenezer and David Syme, 18 July 1868. (Photo courtesy of The State Library of Victoria) North Gardens design by Zongjing Yu. (Photo by Zongjing Yu) Community activity with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. (Photo by Tanja Beer) Ariel Songs at the 2019 Begonia Festival. (Photo by Zimo Wang)

60 61 62 65

Realising ‘Rights to the City’ in Contested Space Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Lennox Street corridor in the Melbourne metropolitan context. Google Maps, 2018. “Lennox Street corridor, Melbourne”. Accessed 01 August 2018. https://goo.gl/ maps/18LrZaCx7H58qNvb772 Visiting the Lennox Street site with Studio D (mapping and spot interviews) (Photo by Andrea Cook) 78 The pop-up event staged by the students at the Lennox Street site (Photo by Andrea Cook) 82 A note from a pop-up event participant (Photo by Andrea Cook) 84

Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design: A Case Study Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

The studio site, Paine Reserve and the surrounding Newport area. (Source: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) 95 Community consultation by Newport Project studio. Left: The Imaginarium. Right: The Wishing Tree (Photo by Michelle Fisher) 98 A student’s feedback on their skills development throughout the studio, represented using Place Agency’s competency sunflower 103

List of Tables

Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach Table 1 The 5P framework for placemaking Table 2 Overview of the Sandbox studios Table 3 Demonstrating development of students’ placemaking skills

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Capturing the Multiplicities of Place: Neighbourhood and Classroom Table 1 Studio P weekly schedule

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Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking Table 1 Summary of placemaking activities

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Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design: A Case Study Table 1 Evaluating the development of students’ placemaking skills

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Reimagining Place Through the Sandbox Studio Pedagogy: An Introduction Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Kelum Palipane

Abstract  This book shares several case studies on Placemaking Sandbox Studio, specifically on how to engage students and individuals who are interested in teaching placemaking to apply the different approaches that would shape and create thriving public spaces. It tackles a unique, little-­ researched topic on the pedagogy of place and placemaking, thereby bridging the gap between academia and practice. This introductory chapter begins with a discussion on the increasing awareness of the strategic importance of public space in the development agenda to address key global challenges. Although society has already gained deeper understanding of urbanisation, globalisation, and the challenges that accompany

I. Mateo-Babiano (*) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Palipane Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_1

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these phenomena, we still have very limited understanding of the diversifying publics and of the strategies in place that either gives privileges or marginalises certain sectors of society. In other words, we do not understand who we are designing for. We argue that this is inexorably intertwined with the need to improve how place and placemaking are being taught in the academe. The chapter then situates placemaking pedagogy within a studio model, as approached in the case studies featured in this book. It concludes with an outline of the chapters and a call to adopt the Sandbox Studio as an approach in place-based and placemaking pedagogy. Keywords  Studio teaching • Placemaking • Place-based pedagogy • Urban planning • Public space

The Global City Agenda, Public Space, and Placemaking Public space and placemaking are back on the international agenda. On 25 September 2015, the 193 countries of the United Nations General Assembly adopted the blueprint Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to tackle persistent global challenges of poverty, inequality, climate, among others. This blueprint is an integrated plan that is collectively expressed in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Accordingly, SDG 11 calls for nations to develop cities and human settlements that are inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.1 Although the SDGs are global in scope, cities also hold an important role as an enabler of placebased change that acknowledges the significance of place to people’s daily lives. Moreover, because place is the setting where we live, work, and recreate, it also reveals many ways in which place can be deeply pedagogical.2 Places are the context where learning and experiences occur. They also shape our identities and our relationships in a variety of meaningful ways. We (humans) also play a vital role in the shaping of places as we are its inhabitants and placemakers. Places, therefore, represent the artefacts of our encounters and cultures. However, Iris Duhn laments on how educational theory and practice have ‘taken-for-granted the nature of place, yet “place” holds the potential to expand and challenge understanding of how the self relates to the world, both human and more-than-human’.3

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Place and Placemaking, Theory, and Practice The concept of ‘place’ as a fixed and enclosed domain has seen changes in recent philosophical debate. The significance of the social body and the recognition of its multiplicity, together with postmodern and postcolonial perspectives, have seen the emergence of a pluralist conception of ‘place’ that is in constant state of flux and ‘open’.4 Edward Casey adopts a phenomenological point of view and places the experience of sensing bodies at the centre of ‘place’ construction. Accordingly, the social and cultural conditioning of perception plays a key role in this process.5 On a broader scale, geographer Doreen Massey proposes place as a product of interrelations, ‘as a meeting place, the location of the intersections of particular bundles of activity spaces, of connections and interrelations, of influences and movements’.6 This implies wider political and power configurations in which place can be entangled. To comprehend the ‘local’ in relation to the complex structures of global processes, Lefebvre conceptualises ‘spatial practice’, in which users absorb these complexities and ‘“secrete” their own social spaces’ through their unthinking, everyday practice. In this way, everyday routine interactions between spaces and people are seen as vital in establishing a strong connection to place. As the geographer Edward Relph explains, ‘To be inside a place is to belong to it and to identify with it. And the more profoundly inside you are, the stronger is this identity with the place’.7 This understanding of placemaking by local user groups and the importance of their placespecific knowledge are key in the approaches showcased in this book. Most cities have traditionally relied on outside experts to improve public spaces, while place-based practitioners and design-based pedagogy have persistently emphasised on the physical-spatial improvements but with little consideration of the community’s social and cultural character and democratic processes. These have often resulted in problematic urban places that do not resonate well with the people and with the communities they are meant to serve. As a reaction to this, ‘placemaking’ has become an operational technique that provides a way for community members to contribute to neighbourhood renewal initiatives. This is often in the form of consultation sessions with key stakeholders or interviews, workshops, street stalls, and surveys in the community. Although this may be a largely positive outcome in neighbourhood planning (which is normally professionally driven), those sections of the community that lack the necessary cultural capital (e.g., the sections of the community that lack English language skills, access to internet resources,

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and the confidence to engage in these approaches) are often marginalised. Experts and practitioners have argued that the design-driven approach, in which the professionals who can analyse such complex social issues are largely uninvolved in the process, exacerbates this lack of consideration for social equity.8 The result is a concerning lack of criticality, with generic outcomes that do not relate to a specific site and its users. Understanding placemaking pedagogy requires retracing its history. The story of place(making), particularly its development in the Western context, gives us clear insights into how placemaking has evolved as a practice and as a pedagogy. Placemaking as a concept and as an approach to public space transformation has been well recognised globally as a movement. It was pioneered through the works of Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in 1975 in the United States. After 15 years, the concept was adopted in Australia. In the early 1990s, Village Well, a placemaking firm founded by Gilbert Rochecouste, played an important role in reviving Melbourne’s now-iconic laneways as the firm proactively mobilised a series of activities (e.g., organising festivals) to bring the community together. The PPS also propagated placemaking as a practice in Australia during the time when Coombe invited the group to assist in establishing the People for Places and Spaces, which is a placemaking firm focused on improving liveability.9 This enabled PPS to deliver placemaking masterclasses at the same time. Although the aim of these masterclasses had been to develop the capacities of built-environment professionals in the country, they mainly targeted those who are already practising in the industry; they did not prioritise educating university students who will soon be joining the built-­ environment industry (e.g., architecture, landscape planners, and urban planners). Hence, there was very limited deliberation (if any) on the pedagogy of place and placemaking. What has been most consistent in the history of placemaking is that the frameworks that have been guiding the placemaking practice in Australia have constantly and strongly placed people as the key actor in shaping places. Placemaking has become an important empowering tactical tool; built-environment professionals engage with communities to bring them an agency to activate places. For instance, Co-Design studio, a placemaking organisation founded by Placemaker Lucinda Hartley, proposed the 3Ps of ‘Place, People and Process’ and has focused on the social architecture of place.10 Gilbert Rochecouste of Village Well has also strongly advocated agency creation—a dimension of the 5P lens espoused by Village Well. He states that the DNA of a place is a process of ‘(re) connecting people with place’. Hence, placemaking has been largely a strategy for place-led transformation, with ‘people’ at its core.

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Although placemaking has progressed as a practice, not much has been done in the theory of placemaking education. It was only recently that Place Agency, a collaborative consortium of academics from 5 universities and 14 placemakers and industry partners across Australia, has delivered a suite of educational and practice-based programmes to enhance the theory and practice of placemaking and place development. Led by the University of Melbourne, the consortium introduced the Sandbox studio and Sandbox methodology. These two different but related concepts were inspired by the sand-filled play space that offers children opportunities for imaginative place, a meaningful building, creating and shaping of whatever they imagine. The Sandbox studio is an experimental and experiential environment for creative problem solving, while the Sandbox methodology, on the other hand, is the creative way of co-designing space into meaningful places. The Place Agency delivers through three core aspects: an academic lens of analysis to placemaking and place development practices, integration of nature through an emphasis on place ecology, and the integration of indigenous perspectives to place. Accordingly, the Sandbox method is underpinned by the 5P framework (i.e., people, process, project/product, programme, and place evaluation) that captures the five building blocks of placemaking. It critiques earlier approaches but also suggests ways to educate placemaking.11 Pedagogy in Placemaking Studio Education: A Snapshot of the State of Affairs Built-environment professionals all over the world have committed to shaping sustainable cities and communities for all, specifically to ‘provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, particularly for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities’.12 However, placemaking as pedagogy is little understood with placemaking as a place-based education remaining invisible and largely untheorised. Little is known about the ways that would effectively teach and build the capacities of future built-environment professionals; yet, their knowledge and skills about place and placemaking and the application of these knowledge and skills in practice influence how places are shaped. Accordingly, this book considers placemaking pedagogy within the built-environment disciplines of planning, architecture, and landscape design. It deals with one of the principal models of teaching and learning placemaking—that is, the studio.

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Studio teaching is core to several built-environment programmes. Studios have long been used as a learning environment where students are trained as designers, representing and visualising aspects of a problem in graphic form. Conventional studios approach placemaking pedagogy using a workshop-style format. Students, typically in groups, attempt to address public space issues by design. According to Ledewitz,13 there are three aspects that are fundamental to studio-based education: skills acquisition, the use of a common (design) language, and learning different design approaches. While the general intent is to foster important design thinking skills such as creativity, drawing, problem solving, and communication,14 the studio has overshadowed the importance of context. As designers, we place emphasis on making environments more meaningful places by discovering its genius loci, yet conceptions of place and placemaking have remained mainly a theoretical exercise.15 The changing nature of tertiary education has once again prompted the need to re-visit studio teaching and learning.16 And beyond design, Bose argued that critical pedagogy in studio education is vital towards enhancing and shaping decision-making capabilities of students,17 particularly when they deliberate, scrutinise, and respond to place and its context.18 Studio-based education has opened up the possibilities for placemaking to produce both physical and relational outcomes19 recognising the important role of the studio in linking civic with academic work. In the alternative studio model proposed here, the aim is to immerse students in communities and engage them with ‘real’ clients to tackle complex, real-­ world issues.20,21 But more importantly, it suggests the possibilities of exploring place through the imaginative dimensions of placemaking as ‘deeply affective as well as cognitive; the active mental “reaching out” it entails; and the sense of possibility it implies’ (p. 124).22 Although both approaches presume that experiential learning is the foundation of studio teaching, it would still be helpful to see how Sandbox studios—which this book introduces—differ from current studio models. The traditional studio is based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century models coming from prominent European schools such as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Bauhaus. The key characteristics of these models include gaining knowledge on compositional theory and experimenting on formal design principles within an ‘atelier’ setting led by a studio instructor.23 As such, much time is devoted to learning and experimenting with the language and rules of abstract form, thereby making it detached from a specific context.

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Although the tools and modalities of engagement have changed across the years, this fetishising of form is still a considerable pre-occupation in studio settings, particularly in architecture. However, planning and urban design studios have taken on various pedagogical ontologies that go beyond the visual and physical aspects of place through observations. They consider placemaking as a multidimensional problem solving, in some instances through learning by doing; as cumulative knowledge acquisition through co-investigation; or as a means of emphasising the values of place to create meaning, which is derived from phenomenological approaches.24 Moreover, the community-oriented studios where the students work extensively with specific communities do exist. Although the ‘design-­ build’ or ‘live projects’ have become central to the curriculum, they are more specific to urban planning studios, which occupy the margins of studio delivery.25 However, some scholars still question whether this approach is still valid in today’s complex real-life conditions, in which the role of the professional spatial practitioner is changing. Ashraf Salama has critiqued the traditional design studio approach in his research. He surveyed several teachers from 28 architecture schools across 13 countries and examined their responses, revealing what he has identified as shortcomings across three key elements—content, process, and teaching style. In terms of content, he identified that the curriculum lacks exposure to user groups, has little interest in the political context within which the design takes place, and has little concern for social issues and associated ethics. Moreover, he stated that there are gaps between theory and practice. With regard to the process, he found that studio settings rarely include research activities. Design problems are clear cut, quickly defined but often superficially, and the emphasis is on the final finished product while rarely valuing the process. In terms of teaching styles and assessment, he cited that individual work is more emphasised and valued over group work and collaboration.26 Accordingly, this book attempts to provide a new perspective of studio-­ based learning as a crucial approach to place and placemaking pedagogy. Improving the Pedagogy of Place and Placemaking Through Sandbox Studio Case Studies This book highlights the need for a new agenda in spatial design education through improved pedagogy of place and placemaking in order to create a

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platform for telling stories about the growth in placemaking knowledge and skills. Through the lens of students who learn about placemaking, we critique the ways that public spaces have been conceived earlier and how they are actually lived. In the end, we aim to instil into the next generation of placemakers the need to recognise the important role of local expertise in shaping more thriving places. For more than several decades now, we have relegated the responsibilities of shaping our cities to experts. We have followed their suggestions in shaping better public spaces. Place-based practitioners and design-based pedagogy have, for the longest time, emphasised on the physical-spatial forms, with little recognition and consideration of the community’s heart and soul—the social and cultural character of place. Likewise, practitioners hardly use the democratic processes to listen to the many, and oftentimes, different voices. In the end, the lack of participation of those who will use the space has led us to create problematic urban places and places that do not elicit meaning to and purpose for the people and communities who use these spaces. We therefore reinforce the call of Arefi and Triantafillou to rethink the pedagogy of place and placemaking and to go beyond the visual-­ physical dimensions by exploring the product, process, meaning, and ecology of place and placemaking. These should serve as the driving forces for the discipline and the profession.27 This book’s purpose is two-pronged. First, it aims to stimulate debate about the little-researched topic on the pedagogy of place and placemaking, thus bridging the gap between academia and practice. We place values and meanings to our public spaces (e.g., streets, parks, playgrounds, squares, plazas); hence, these spaces are crucial to our everyday life as we exist in a geographical space or spatial dimension since our life meaning is derived and embedded in the very space we live, work, and recreate. Yet our places have become places devoid of meaning and story. Those who shape and create these places have not learned what comprises great places. Likewise, those who teach placemaking have limited ways of deepening their understanding of how places can enrich the teaching of place and placemaking. Such a debate is a vital pre-requisite for re-assessing studio-­ based teaching and learning delivery. Second, this book shares Sandbox Studio case studies such that the readers can explore critically what is required to successfully address the ‘big issue’ in a quasi-real-world setting. The focus is on the readers’ engagement and learning, rather than on delivering possible solutions to

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these issues. As such, those individuals who are interested in teaching placemaking can learn about the different approaches that can shape and create thriving public spaces. In recent years, an increasing number of design researchers and practitioners in placemaking have begun to be interested in applying placemaking strategies. However, it has been difficult to access case studies that deal with a range of studio-based placemaking activities. More so, the body of research on the pedagogy of placemaking is very limited, particularly those studies that focus on enhancing sustainability and liveability and on creating long-term positive legacy in public space provision. Accordingly, this book offers a case study-based placemaking narratives and pathways to students’ capacity building. This book’s distinct quality lies in its use of the case study approach to narrate several diverse placemaking examples and stories based on how the practitioners and educators have implemented the Placemaking Sandbox (Studio) methodology. The Sandbox studio methodology is a conceptual framework and a place-based testing environment that aims to teach and study placemaking pedagogy. As such, this book provides the readers with a significantly distinct and better reference on the topic. It would benefit almost anyone interested in place- and design-based teaching or in research and practice. Likewise, this book is intended for those who are dealing with public space issues or for those looking for ways to make urban areas thrive and more liveable. We invited established and emerging placemaking/public space scholars, who have strong background in multi-disciplinary research and strong practice-oriented experience, to critique and deconstruct the pedagogy of place via their engagement in a place-based studio. The book will be comprised of studio case studies collected from unpublished materials on placemaking, which were implemented based on the Placemaking Sandbox studio. In each chapter, we re-visit our own cities, including those cities that we have adopted as our own, and probe using the Sandbox methodology how our urban setting contributes to the overall liveability and sustainability of our cities. Each chapter will outline the research and practice behind the placemaking pedagogical approaches. It will highlight some key methodological themes, and subsequently interrogate, develop, and/or practice using these different methodological approaches and techniques. Each chapter concludes with a list of recommendations, arising from the unique

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experiences of the case studies but generalisable to be of use to the readers of this book. In ‘Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning’, Cristina Hernandez-Santin introduces the Sandbox studio methodology, which is a Place Agency framework that permits students to engage in quasi-real-­ world projects. In particular, the readers will be able to tackle place-based, complex ‘big issues’ through the story of a place, local community engagement, and shaping of place-based design ideation responses. It is referred to as a Sandbox studio and serves as a benign platform for design learning, in which students learn placemaking with partners. Sandbox Studio is conceived as a conceptual framework and a design-­ based testing environment that aims to advance placemaking pedagogy. Each chapter in this book articulates how the Placemaking Sandbox studio approach captures the narrative of place-shaping, thereby building relationships with and associating meanings in the spaces we live, work, and visit. Albeit the discussion in this chapter is within the Australian setting, it nevertheless has global implications. This chapter also discusses how the Sandbox Studio framework helps to deepen the reader’s understanding of how complex conditions of a place can be tackled using a hands-on and experimental look at evolving practices, pedagogies, and methods in placemaking across different contexts in order to create thriving places. In a super-diverse neighbourhood of Greater Dandenong, Dr Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Dr Kelum Palipane create in ‘Capturing the Multiplicities of Place’ a setting where students can scrutinise public space use within the subject of Master of Urban Planning studio. The authors adopt the Sandbox studio approach and introduce an alternative, reflexive approach to the popularised community consultation method. The method is based on the observation that considers the users who occupy a marginal position in urban space and who are often constrained because of their immigrant background. In this chapter, we aim to examine public spaces as places that can be re-imagined, re-produced, and re-purposed to cater to a different kind of people—that is, individuals from immigrant backgrounds, with limited English language abilities or lacking access to resources. The authors then ask: In what way can we make a difference, and do we design to make a difference? This chapter explores and attempts to answer this question. In ‘Performing Landscape’, Dr Tanja Beer and Dr Angela Campbell recount a visual story about the pedagogy of creative placemaking in

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Australia’s birthplace of democracy, Ballarat. Ballarat is one of Victoria’s rapidly growing regional towns and embedded within it is a rich multicultural and Chinese cultural context. Ballarat has deep stories of indigenous people, landscape, and culture. Students’ experience in a landscape architecture Sandbox studio will unravel through the pedagogical and performative tools and approaches discussed in the chapter. These tools and approaches were central to the students’ understanding of placemaking and served as their inspiration to hypothetical designs and, subsequently, to the realised event-spaces in Ballarat Botanical Gardens. The Ballarat Botanical Gardens is a 160-yearold reserve best known for its Victorian-style gardens and is located on the western shore of Lake Wendouree. In ‘Realising “Rights to the City” in Contested Space’, Dr Andrea Cook and Imogen Carr discuss Harvey’s ‘rights to the city’, which is core to the delivery of an urban planning Sandbox studio. The chapter frames the discussion within the politics of belongingness and explores the theory, methodologies, and practices of inclusive placemaking within the context of a deeply diverse and deeply contested public space. In this place-based context, students explore ‘wicked’ social conditions such as socio-economic difference/inequity, public drug use + (perceptions of) safety, ethno-cultural diversity, and cross-cultural barriers and contested services, among others. The discussion is set in Melbourne’s sole medically supervised injecting facility such that students will be challenged to pose the often taken-for-granted question of ‘who belongs’ in place. More importantly, the argument posed in this chapter will enable students to comprehend critically how such a place is often imagined and realised. ‘Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design’ describes the Newport Sandbox studio. Deliberated by Dr Dominique Hes, Cristina HernandezSantin and Dr Judy Bush, the chapter highlights a number of methodological and pedagogical priorities in the engagement, collaborative design, and planning of urban green spaces in a small (yet treasured) parkland located within a community and transport hub area of Melbourne. This chapter has critical contributions to the pedagogy of place and placemaking through listening skills development. It explores the critical role of listening as a way to engage the community and to attune to the multiplicity of ‘voices’. Although these ‘voices’ are mainly spoken, they can also go beyond the spoken as it reveals the different meanings of people’s everyday lived experience in place. Likewise, this chapter exposes those voices that may not have been heard or whose presence may have been overlooked.

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‘Conclusion’ closes and recognises the multiple entry points for understanding, implementing, critiquing, and then evaluating the pedagogy of place and placemaking. It rehearses many of the themes that have emerged in the previous chapters within the context of a critical placemaking pedagogy. It ends with the proposition that acts of placemaking within studio teaching have the potential towards building and shaping pedagogical frameworks through which students’ learning can be enhanced. The Sandbox methodology is presented across several case studies in this book. Each case study presents a rich story of place and placemaking. Although it presents a perspective that critiques the pedagogy of placemaking, it also offers an alternative pedagogy for understanding, critiquing, and advancing place/placemaking. As Foucault notes, our experience of the world is not one of linearity that is dependent on time but is also a series of networks of connections and intersections of points.28

Notes 1. “About the Sustainable Development Goals,” Sustainable Development Goals, last modified 5 September 2018. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. 2. David A.  Gruenewald, “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education,” American Educational Research Journal 40, no. 3 (2003): 619–654. 3. Iris Duhn, “Making ‘Place’ for Ecological Sustainability in Early Childhood Education,” Environmental Education Research 18, no. 1 (2012): 29. 4. Robert Rogerson and Gareth Rice, “Making Sense of Places: ‘Moral Geographies’ of Sensory Urbanism,” Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 2 (2009): 149. 5. Edward S.  Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, eds. Edward S. Casey, Steven Feld, and Keith H. Basso (School of American Research Press, 1996). 6. Doreen B. Massey, “The Conceptualisations of Place,” in A Place in the World? Places, Cultures, and Globalization, eds. Doreen B. Massey and Pat M. Jess (Oxford University Press, 1995), 59. 7. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, Vol. 1 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pion Ltd., SAGE Publications, 1976), 49. 8. Ruth Fincher, Maree Pardy, and Kate Shaw, “Place-Making or Place-­ Masking? The Everyday Political Economy of ‘Making Place,’” Planning Theory & Practice 17, no. 4 (2016): 516–536.

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9. PPS, n.d. 10. Lucinda Hartley, “Kemsley Oration 2012: New Urban Tactics,” Planning News 39 no. 1 (2013): 6. The Neighbourhood Project, n.d. 11. Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Gini Lee, “People in Place: Placemaking Fundamentals,” in Dominique Hes and Cristina Hernandez-Santin (eds.), Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment (2020): 15–38. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. 12. “Indicators by Target,” last modified 3 March 2015. http://indicators. report/targets/11-7/. 13. Stefani Ledewitz, “Models of Design in Studio Teaching,” Journal of Architectural Education 38, no. 2 (1985): 2–8. 14. Ashraf M.A. Salama and Nicholas Wilkinson, eds. Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future (Arti-Arch, 2007). 15. Veronica Ng, “Values of learning through ‘place-making’ in the design studio,” International Journal of Architectural Research: ArchNet-IJAR 7, no. 1 (2013): 86–98. 16. Marilyn Higgins, Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, and Jennifer Dixon, “The Pedagogy of the Planning Studio: A View from Down Under,” Journal for Education in the Built Environment 4, no. 1 (2009), 8–30. 17. Mallika Bose, Eliza Pennypacker, and Thomas Yahner, “Enhancing Critical Thinking Through ‘Independent Design Decision Making’ in the Studio,” Open House International 31, no. 3 (2006): 33–42. 18. Lorraine Farrelly, The Fundamentals of Architecture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012). 19. Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Gini Lee, “People in Place: Placemaking Fundamentals,” in Dominique Hes and Cristina Hernandez-Santin (eds.), Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment (2020): 15–38. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. 20. Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, “Paper, Scissors, Rock: Learning from the SchoolYard,” in Bridging Theory and Practice: Proceedings of the 2001 ANZAPS Conference, eds. Robert Freestone and Susan Thompson (University of New South Wales, New Kingdom, UK, 2001), 99. 21. Marilyn Higgins, “Promoting Social Entrepreneurship through a ‘Live Project’,” CEBE Transactions 2, no. 2 (2005): 63–73. 22. Mark Fettes and Gillian Judson, “Imagination and the Cognitive Tools of Place-Making,” The Journal of Environmental Education 42, no. 2 (2010): 123–135. 23. Ashraf M.A. Salama and Nicholas Wilkinson, eds. Design Studio Pedagogy: Horizons for the Future (Arti-Arch, 2007), 357. 24. Mahyar Arehfi and Menelaos Triantafillou, “Reflections on the Pedagogy of Place in Planning and Urban Design,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, no. 1 (2005): 75–88.

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25. Dorina Pojani, Laurel Johnson, Sébastien Darchen, and Katie Yang, “Learning by Doing: Employer Expectations of Planning Studio Education,” Urban Policy and Research 36, no. 1 (2018): 11–19. 26. Ashraf M. Salama, Spatial Design Education: New Directions for Pedagogy in Architecture and Beyond (London, UK: Routledge, 2016), 74–83. 27. Arefi and Triantafillou, “Reflections,” 75–88. 28. Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27.

Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach Cristina Hernandez-Santin

Abstract  Placemaking is a process of giving meaning to a space and triggering positive emotional connections between a community and their environment. Its practice, relevant for built-environment disciplines, requires a combination of cognitive, affective, and practical skills. However, these skills are not often taught in tertiary education. Place Agency is an education programme that engages students in place-centred practice as an iterative process where people, process, product, program, and place evaluation interact (5P framework). It applies the Head, Heart, and Hand pedagogical model, through a series of practice-led studios (Sandbox studios), where students engage with real communities to deliver tangible placemaking outcomes. This holistic approach provides opportunities for the students to practice the soft skills required for effective placemaking within a safe environment. This chapter describes this pedagogical framework

C. Hernandez-Santin (*) Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_2

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as applied by Place Agency to discuss the challenges in its implementation, and its potential for placemaking learning as experienced by several Sandbox studios that ran at the University of Melbourne throughout 2018. Keywords  Participatory teaching • Experiential learning • Sandbox studios • Built-environment studies • Place

Introduction Place is defined as a ‘constellation of meanings and appropriate behaviours that define an experience in a social setting’.1 Therefore, placemaking is the process of giving meaning to a space and developing positive emotional connections between a person, the community, and the area where they live. It is also a transformative process that encourages citizens to take action in an area to strengthen their sense of place by responding to their local needs and preferences.2,3 In other words, it aims to foster place attachment4,5 and generates a lasting impact on urban development.6 The benefits of high-quality places are well documented and include improved physical and psychological health,7,8,9,10,11 economic benefits such as increased property value and reduced public expenses,12,13 reduced crime and increased perceptions of safety,14,15,16 and active citizenship.17 However, the extent of a project’s ability to generate a lasting impact varies widely from project to project. Research indicates that there are three key elements in successful placemaking projects: (1) a process that applies deep community engagement; (2) the use of small, often quick, affordable projects that trigger change within an area; and (3) an overarching goal to improve the quality of life of its citizens.18 Placemaking is said to be a purpose-driven process that applies multiple tactics and should be analysed based on five key elements: people, process, product, programme, and place evaluation or the 5P framework (Table  1).19 Each level of the 5P framework has multiple characteristics that are important for the success and impact level of a project. British architect Matthew Carmona systematically reviewed a number of urban studies that explore the link between place quality and health,

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Table 1  The 5P framework for placemaking Characteristics include People

Process

Product

Program

Place evaluation

Including leadership (allowing the people to become active agents of place), deep engagement (who is engaged), and their needs (an exercise to understand the different ways in which people relate to the place by understanding their needs, aspirations, experiences, culture, and relationships). A ‘design-with’ exercise where the key role of the placemaker is to create a good environment for communication and empowerment. The process should give agency to the community, use local knowledge, respond to local perspectives, and have a clear purpose driving the project. The tangible outcomes of the project including temporary or permanent changes in the urban fabric (i.e., art exhibition and redesign of the main street respectively) or meaningful soft products (i.e., walking tours). Place-keeping mechanism used as ‘glue’ for the ongoing emotional connection to place. It includes maintenance, management, and place activation initiatives. Activities should be meaningful based on local needs and interests to enhance the experience of place. Process to monitor and evaluate the intervention and understand the outcomes and legacy of a project. It should incorporate relationship building outcomes and document social, ecological, and economic benefits.

well-being, economic success, and environmental sustainability. He explored 271 published papers and has determined that high-quality places require ‘greenness, mix of uses, low levels of traffic, walkability, bikeability, compact and coherent pattern of development, [and] public transport connectivity’.20 However, even when placemakers know exactly what attributes are needed to apply in order to ensure high-quality spaces, the sought-after emotional connection between the community and space and the associated long-term benefits cannot be fully developed (Fincher, 2016; Shaw, 2009).21,22 The recent research on tertiary education practices for built-environment courses has shown that part of the problem relates to the inability of graduates and built-environment professionals to integrate the necessary processes and relationships into their practice.23 Thus, as educators, we ask: • How can we support built-environment students to take on the roles of creator and facilitator of a placemaking process?

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• How do we teach project delivery that can adapt to the iterative nature of placemaking? • Do students have the skills to engage with the community, resolve conflict, and encourage people to become active citizens? Placemaking flips the power balance and thus enables the community to become the key driver of design while the designer often takes on a role of facilitating the process and providing support.24 As such, any educational programme aiming to educate students in placemaking should support facilitation capacity. This requires holistic learning approaches that give students not only the cognitive theories and concepts of high-quality design, but also the soft-skills required to work with the community, build on trust, and develop meaningful relationships.25

The Head, Heart, and Hand Model: A Pedagogy for Holistic Learning To work in placemaking, students need to come out of their educational experience, be able to adapt their skills and knowledge to the context of their work,26 and to continually improve them through reflection.27 Thus, it is critical for them to learn the cognitive skills relevant to the understanding of place and placemaking, the affective skills needed for placemaking process, and the practical skills for the implementation of place-based practice.28,29 As mentioned, recent research has shown that the current approaches to teaching are heavily biased towards cognitive development through coursework (lectures) and self-learning activities (i.e., reading and writing). The practical skills gained through design studios are normally focused on desk-based studies for site analysis and design skills that—although critical for design practice—fail to embrace the need for affective skills and for the soft-skills required to engage with the stakeholders of a project.30 The Head, Heart, and Hand Model (HHH model) represents a way to simultaneously engage our cognitive (head), affective (heart), and psychomotor (hand) domains of learning to achieve a holistic education.31 This model has been successfully applied to topics such as eco-literacy and sustainability; however, it has not yet been formally implemented as a pedagogical approach to placemaking in tertiary institutions.32,33 In a three-year-long project (Sep 2017–June 2020), seven Australian universities applied the HHH model to develop a national programme exploring placemaking teaching practice in Australia. The project, entitled

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Place Agency, combines placemaking theory with a series of practice-led studios called Sandbox studios.34 What Is Place Agency? Place Agency is a collaborative and multi-university education programme that focuses on enhancing built-environment students’ knowledge of the theory and practice of placemaking and tactical urbanism to ultimately create more vibrant, citizen-engaged public spaces and better cities. The programme was funded by the Myer Foundation (2017–2020) to increase social interaction in and better integrate nature into our cities by supporting future built-environment graduates. Place Agency defines placemaking as a process of ‘creating the capacity for people to invest space with meaning’35 and created a consortium36 that would run for three years in order to establish the topics needed, thereby pairing key theoretical understandings (cognitive/head) with the specific affective (heart) and practical (hand) skills required for deep engagement with the community of a place.37 More specifically, the consortium engaged in an iterative process to develop a holistic and adaptive learning framework that works at three different levels: 1. Enhancing the fundamentals of place by advocating and creating the literature that supports greater integration of nature and of indigenous perspectives into the place practice. 2. Developing Sandbox Studio Approach based on the HHH model where students can enhance their placemaking skills holistically by engaging with real communities and/or developing place-based interventions. 3. Having a positive impact on the communities we work with as a result of our collaboration with the students enrolled in a Sandbox studio. Over 25 studios ran across Australia during the three-year duration of the project. The programme also created a new subject ‘Placemaking for the Built Environment’, in which students are able to learn the placemaking process based on the 5P framework.38 This subject comprises a master-­ level subject available for architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design students. The subject was initially delivered at the University of Melbourne in July 2019 based on the curriculum developed by the consortium universities through 12 different ‘modules.’39

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An Innovative Approach to Studio Teaching: The Sandbox Studios The Sandbox studio approach provides a safe environment for emerging placemakers (students) to engage in a trial-and-error iterative process, thereby creating tangible placemaking outcomes. Students were expected to achieve four key learning outcomes: (1) a clear understanding of place and placemaking, (2) the ability to discern placemaking efforts that will achieve long-term benefits versus ‘tokenistic’ outcomes, (3) improved head, heart, and hand skills, and (4) the ability to reflect on their practice. Given that every project is unique and place-specific, the Sandbox studios were structured to be flexible and adaptable to various built-environment disciplines. Thus, each studio could have additional learning objectives, and the pedagogy could be adapted by focusing on the relevant elements of the 5P framework. Each studio received a small budget to support the heart and hand aspects and to develop physical interventions on the site. These interventions were focused either on community engagement events (e.g., through play) or product delivery (i.e., pop-up interventions, temporary performance space, etc.). A Sandbox studio is characterised by a practice-led approach, engagement with the community, establishing local partnerships (e.g., a project champion), seeking ongoing project legacy, delivering tangible outcomes within the community, and applying a common assessment framework in order to evaluate the learning outcomes. Evaluating the Sandbox Studio Approach Contrary to the latest insights about the functioning of the human brain and learning styles, practical teaching still takes the high road and focuses on the cognitive development of the students, as such skills are easier to be tested and evaluated. (Gazibara, 2013, pp. 71–72)40

This quote suggests that evaluation is one of the challenges to teaching through the HHH model. This held true when the programme developed an evaluation strategy for the ‘Sandbox studio’ approach as a whole. The evaluation strategy aimed to differentiate among no-learning (the student could not recall or use any knowledge relevant to the learning objectives), rote learning (the student cannot apply the knowledge gained and then transfer it to a new situation), and meaningful learning (student has been able to gain, apply, and reorganise the knowledge in new patterns or structures).41 We performed the evaluation using a single common

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assessment framework that can compare individual learnings throughout the studio and compare the outcomes across the different studios. Supplementary to the assessment tasks conducted for grading purposes, students participating in Place Agency’s Sandbox studios are invited to participate in the research process by asking them to fill out an additional, voluntary, and anonymous online survey. The survey methodology was developed, pre-tested, and refined during the first half of 2018 as the first two Sandbox studios ran within the University of Melbourne. After this trial period, the methodology was made available to all Sandbox studios across Australia. The refined survey gathers information of students’ perceptions across four key learning objectives to assess if meaningful learning was achieved: 1. Enhanced understanding of placemaking definitions and key terms. By asking students ‘what is placemaking?’, ‘what is the role of your discipline in placemaking?’ and ‘what are the benefits and limitations of a placemaking process?’ we assess the level of cognitive understanding (head skills) of placemaking theory by comparing the responses at the beginning and at the end of the semester noting how their perception of the term has changed through their participation in a Sandbox Studio. 2. Self-assessment of the HHH skills gained by using the Placemaking Outcome Sunflower. Using this tool, the students graded their skills from one to five. The Outcome Sunflower include three head skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, and ability to understand complexity); three heart skills (ability for reflection and self-awareness, empathy and deep listening, and humility); and five hand skills (quantitative literacy, spatial analysis, collaboration, verbal communication, and community engagement) Fig. 1. This list of skills resulted from integrating 62 skills that industry practitioners of the consortium regarded as ‘critical’ skills for successful placemaking. Skills were defined using the VALUE rubrics42 but tailored to the specific context of placemaking and design. 3. Reflection. At the end of the semester, the students had an opportunity to give a short reflection statement to supplement the data. 4. Understanding, application, and creation. The data gathered through these surveys were categorised into statements that ­demonstrate understanding, application, and creation (practice) based on the modified version of Bloom’s Taxonomy.43 By analysing the data, we sought evidence that the students not only learned about placemaking but also valued and intended to continue

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Fig. 1  Outcome Sunflower as viewed by the students participating in the research. (Source: Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Place Agency, University of Melbourne)

applying their learnings. In this chapter, we have prepared a small sample of the results as an overview of the performance of the HHH model for placemaking pedagogy. For more detailed results, see the subsequent four chapters of this book. These chapters expand four of the five studios outlined above.

University of Melbourne 2018 Sandbox Studios In 2018, 5 studios with 67 built-environment students applied the Sandbox methodology for placemaking at the University of Melbourne. Table 2 provides a short description of the key purpose of the placemaking

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Table 2  Overview of the Sandbox studios Studio

Project’s purpose

Areas of the 5P framework addressed

Target HHH skills

Newport Project Studio (pilot Sandbox) By Dr Dominique Hes, Dr Judy Bush, and Dr Gini Lee

Conceptual design for the redevelopment of an underutilised green space

Transdisciplinary studio for 16 students from the architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Methodology-targeted soft-skills such as deep listening, empathy, and engagement

Mille Feuille 2 (pilot Sandbox) By Dr Ammon Beyerle and Phillipa Hall from Here Studio

Develop a masterplan of the multicultural welcome centre, Ballarat within a heritage building

Inclusive public spaces in diverse communities (Studio1) By Dr Andy Cook and Imogen Carr

Unite a diverse community through the creation of an inclusive public space at Lennox Street, Richmond

(5 Jan–21 Feb 2018) People—Working alongside seven local artists and Hubcap Productions, Process—Delivered a community engagement event designed by the students (26 Feb–27 May 2018) People— Engagement with target multicultural groups Product—Students delivered detailed design of a small physical object for placemaking Program—Detailed consideration on how the space will be used by target multicultural groups (23 July–21 Oct 2018), People—Engaged with a variety of people regardless of their situation Process—Delivered a community engagement event to develop a community plan

Architecture studio for 16 students Methodology targeted Engagement skills and hard architecture as a representation of culture

Urban planning studio with 11 students Methodology targeted conflicts of inclusivity where perceptions of safety, risk, and drug abuse are in constant opposition

(continued)

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Table 2  (continued) Studio

Project’s purpose

Areas of the 5P framework addressed

Target HHH skills

Performing landscape (Studio2) By Dr Tanja Beer

Design and deliver a temporary installation to activate an underutilised site within the Ballarat Botanical Gardens and serve as a connector between the two areas within the gardens

Landscape architecture ‘thesis’ studio with 12 students Methodology mocked-up design competition processes and targeted practical skills and stakeholder management

Springvale laneways (Studio3) By Dr Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Dr Kellum Palipane

Develop a series of temporary pop-up intervention that encourage walkability through the laneways in Springvale

(23 July–21 Oct 2018) People—Invited various stakeholders to the classroom to share their local knowledge Product—Delivered two sustainable temporary performance spaces Program— partnered with Federation University Australia who performed in the space during the Begonia Festival, March 2019. (23 July–21 Oct 2018) People—Applying multi-­modal analysis to understand the site context Product—Engaging directly with the local council to design pop-up, tactical urbanism interventions. Receiving direct and immediate feedback Place evaluation— Observing how the community reacted to the different pop-ups

Urban planning studio with 12 students Methodology— Targeted mostly analytical skills, project implementation, and know-how to engage with local government

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project, the elements of the 5P framework used, and the targeted learning outcomes as part of the HHH model. In summary, all five studios started with people through either expert-­ led analysis (i.e., Springvale Laneways with the multi-modal analysis) or gaining local knowledge (i.e., community engagement events for all the remaining studios). Process was addressed differently in each studio; some studio leaders were given the responsibility of designing and delivering the whole engagement process to the students, whereas others crafted the engagement process themselves. There were two studios that directly addressed the product and programme through the student-designed place initiatives. Lastly, only one studio engaged in place evaluation as part of the studio curriculum. Common Assessment Framework In semester 2, 2018, a total of 35 students enrolled in the three University or Melbourne-led Sandbox studios (see Table 2). This corresponded to the students enrolled in Inclusive Public Spaces in Diverse Communities, Performing Landscape, and Springvale Laneways studios. The total survey response rate was 45 per cent, with 15 students participating at the start and at the end of semester surveys and 40 per cent participating in the reflection activity. The highest response rate came from the Performing Landscape studio (83.3 per cent response rate), whereas the lowest belonged to Springvale Laneways studio (16.7 per cent). Across all studios, the students reported an overall increase in their skills. The average skill increase in each of the 11 skills in the sunflower was +0.6 points for the head, hand, and heart skills. Figure 2 shows each of these skills with their corresponding specific levels of self-reported increase. The largest skill increase was that in verbal communication (+0.8), and this increase could be attributed to the high level of public engagement of the studios. The students not only engaged with local communities but also presented their projects back to these communities at the end of the semester. However, aggregating the self-reported skills blurs the individual stories of learning. Thus, we performed a second way of analysing the level of meaningful learning through the open-ended questions of the survey. Table  3 shows the students’ comments, reflections, and open-ended questions that demonstrate their understanding of the subject at hand. Their comments showed that they are highly aware of the importance of

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Fig. 2  Outcome Sunflower for self-reported HHH skills in three of the Sandbox studios. (Source: Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Place Agency, University of Melbourne)

community engagement and empowerment, are able to recognise place versus space by being able to consider the process and the meaning of being more relevant than the product, and are able to understand placebased practice through their reflections on their projects or their roles in placemaking (Table 3). Challenges and Opportunities Within our university, studios tend to be small with 10–16 students such that we can facilitate deeper learning through peer-to-peer discussions and hands-on experiences. With the additional funding, the studios could design immersive tasks in which the students could become ‘participants’ of the local place (i.e., field trips) and thus hand over the responsibilities to the students—that is, the students manage the budget for developing, designing, and/or implementing their ideas; they also perform risk

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Table 3  Demonstrating development of students’ placemaking skills Step 1: Understanding Evidence of student’s understanding of relevant concepts

Step 2: Recognition Evidence of student’s ability to discern between ‘place’ and ‘space’

Step 3: Practice Evidence of student’s skill development to conduct placemaking initiatives

‘process of creating or remaking a space by involving people and allowing them to express their needs and desires, and empowering them to change the space’ S1 ‘deliberate generation of a social system through alteration of space and program.’ S4 ‘It is crucial to talk to the people who live in or around the place. They have the deepest understanding of the place and determining the meaning of the place needs to include their opinions as they will be the main users’. S5 ‘[process] that enables and empowers people to connect to the space and to each other’. S13

‘we cannot make a place because it is already there, but what we can is to provide meaning’. S5 ‘Originally I had anticipated that my placemaking outcomes were going to [be] physical. I had assumed I would make suggestions to the built environment, changing the physical infrastructure in the site. Having consulted and read more theory into public participation I began to question this approach’. S8

‘I came with no agenda and set goals of actively listening and comprehending each individual participant’. S8 ‘I am not supposed to solve all the problems of a site. It is impossible, but I would like to find a specific point to make a space meaningful’. S10 ‘I will focus more on human experience than building structures in a park and would do more details’. S14 ‘Before … the stakeholders I considered were the nearby restaurant owners, working staffs and restaurant customers. But in the detailed plan, I realized [it] would influence the other nearby shops especially for these shops for pedestrians as a shortcut to connect their destinations’. S17

assessments under the guidance of the studio leader. This approach provides them with opportunities to learn how to communicate with different types of stakeholders. Meanwhile, the challenges to implementing the Sandbox approach are as follows: limited timeline, competing outputs required by the different partners, and the expectations placed on the process. Accordingly, the next subsections discuss the three key strategies that we were able to develop through Sandbox studio approach such that the abovementioned challenges can be addressed.

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Studio Timeframe The students attended between 2 and 12 teaching weeks (intensive vs. semester-long studios, respectively), with a total of 72 contact hours and 240 non-contact hours. Hence, the students’ capacity to intervene in a place was limited. The Sandbox studio projects needed to be discrete enough to occur within the allocated period while retaining the catalytic nature of placemaking projects for social change. To address this challenge, the studio leader prioritised two or three aspects of the 5P framework, instead of attempting to cover the whole framework, and thus relied on strong on-the-ground partnerships. As such, having a project champion was critical in addressing this challenge. The project champion needed to act as a place-based partner and should have the motivation and opportunity to continue the work beyond the studio timeline in order to reach the long-term legacy that placemaking can deliver. Competing Outputs As a practice-led experience, each studio had to harmonise the requirements of their discipline with those of the placemaking project. For example, some required that at least 60 per cent of the assessment were individually done; however, placemaking is about collaboration. The assessments in the interdisciplinary studios differed based on the student’s discipline. The flexible nature of the Sandbox studio allowed us to adopt week-to-week activities and assessment tasks in accordance with the specific requirements, discipline, and the project. Meanwhile, the common voluntary survey provided us with the means to compare the outcomes between studios. Managing Expectations There were differences between the project’s placemaking purpose and the learning objectives of the studio. As a project, each studio needed to resolve a real challenge faced by a local government or community while meeting their educational needs. As such, it was critical to develop a partnership based on trust and open communication. Each studio leader was constantly working with the project champion to clarify the approach applied by the studio while developing the pedagogy that links the key elements (people, process, product, programme, and/or place evaluation) to the long-term place outcomes sought by the community. Each partnership had to work together to outline at what

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stage they were and how the Sandbox studio fitted within the longer place process that the project champion led. These understandings allowed the studio leaders to position the learnings as an iterative process, in which the engagement was a small part of the whole place initiative. Although the programme faced the three aforementioned challenges, the extra effort of providing this holistic pedagogical approach received great feedback from the students.44 The students commented that the practice-led approach of the project allowed them to gain very relevant project engagement and implementation skills.45 Their comments also showed that the people and process focus of the studios exposed the students to real communities and helped them to feel confident in their ability to relate to real communities.46 Lastly, the students showed a desire to continue their practice with more awareness of community engagement and of the importance of deep engagement.47

Conclusion Placemaking is an iterative process for place-centred design. It requires cognitive understanding and affective and practical soft-skills to engage with the local community such that local knowledge can be integrated into the practice. This chapter has discussed how the Sandbox studio approach had been used as a strategy for placemaking learning through the HHH pedagogical model. It enabled a practice-led approach, thus allowing students to engage with real communities and/or local decision-makers. The targeted learning outcomes included the following: 1. Head skills—enhanced understanding of placemaking theory, creative thinking, critical thinking, ability to understand complexity 2. Hand skills—quantitative literacy, spatial analysis, collaboration, verbal communication, and community engagement 3. Heart skills—reflection and self-awareness, empathy and deep listening, and humility The approach was flexible and can be adapted to different disciplines while allowing the students to engage with real communities. The key lessons for educators applying this approach to teach placemaking are as follows:

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1. The Sandbox studio is a holistic learning approach that provides students with opportunities to develop the affective and practical soft-skills they need to have an effective and impactful placemaking. The approach does this by enabling the students to develop local partnerships and to create a safe space (the Sandbox) to learn through trial and error. 2. Instead of assessing whether the students’ designs, community plans, and engagement activities are effective, the Sandbox studio approach emphasises the learning process and progress. Meaningful learning is determined by enhanced understanding, application, and creation of place. The approach aims to prove that the students not only have learned but also intend to continue learning and engaging in place-centric approaches that place people at the centre of their design. 3. The key challenges faced by the Sandbox studio approach include limited timeframe. Consequently, this issue results in a more acupuncture-­ type activities, competing outputs, and difficulty in managing the expectations with the project champion and the local community. 4. The strategies applied to overcome the aforementioned challenges are as follows: (a) developing a strong partnership with a local partner through the project champion, (b) developing a research strategy (through an anonymous online survey) to be able to compare the learning process and outcomes from the beginning to the end of the studio programme, and (c) working with the project champion while being clear on the limitations of the studio and on the specific elements of the 5P framework that will be addressed within the studio.

Notes 1. Daniel Trudeau, “Politics of Belonging in the Construction of Landscapes: Place-Making, Boundary-Drawing, and Exclusion,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 3 (2006): 437. 2. Elizelle J.  Cilliers and Wim Timmermans, “The Importance of Creative Participatory Planning in the Public Place-Making Process,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 41, no. 3 (2014): 413–429. 3. Trudeau, “Politics of Belonging,” 421–443.

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4. Maria Lewicka, “What Makes Neighbourhood Different From Home and City? Effects of Place Scale on Place Attachment,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 30, no. 1 (2010): 35–51. 5. Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, “Defining Place Attachment: A Tripartite Organizing Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 30, no. 1 (2010): 1–10. 6. Mark J. Stern, “Measuring the Outcomes of Creative Placemaking” (paper presented at the symposium “The Role of Artists and The Arts in Creative Placemaking,” Baltimore, MD, 30–31 May 2014). 7. Charis E. Anton and Carmen Lawrence, “Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Effect of Place of Residence on Place Attachment and Community Participation,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 40 (2014): 451–461. 8. Matthew Carmona, “Place Value: Place Quality and its Impact on Health, Social, Economic and Environmental Outcomes,” Journal of Urban Design 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–48. 9. Howard Frumkin, “Healthy Places: Exploring the Evidence,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 9 (2003): 1451–1456. 10. Perry Hystad and Richard M. Carpiano, “Sense of Community-­Belonging and Health-Behaviour Change in Canada,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 66, no. 3 (2012): 277–283. 11. Jan C. Semenza, Tanya L. March, and Brian D. Bontempo, “Community-­ Initiated Urban Development: An Ecological Intervention,” Journal of Urban Health 84, no. 1 (2007): 8–20. 12. Carmona, “Place Value,” 1–48. 13. Robin Creagh, Courtney Babb, and Holly Farley, “Local Governments Developers in Placemaking: Defining Their Responsibilities and Capacities to Shape Place,” in Placemaking for the Built Environment, eds. D. Hes and C. Hernandez-Santin, Palgrave Macmillan (2020): 107–128. 14. Miriam Billig, “Is My Home My Castle? Place Attachment, Risk Perception, and Religious Faith,” Environment and Behavior 38, no. 2 (2006): 248–265. 15. Carmona, “Place Value,” 1–48. 16. Frances E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan, “Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?” Environment and Behavior 33, no. 3 (2001): 343–367. 17. Billig, “Is My Home My Castle?” 248–265. 18. Gerard Kyle, Alan Graefe, Robert Manning, and James Bacon, “Effect of Activity Involvement and Place Attachment on Recreationists’ Perceptions of Setting Density,” Journal of Leisure Research 36, no. 2 (2004): 209–231. 19. Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Gini Lee, “People in Place: Placemaking Fundamentals,” in Placemaking for the Built Environment, eds. D.  Hes and C. Hernandez-Santin, Palgrave Macmillan (2020): 15–38.

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20. Carmona, “Place Value” 35. 21. Ruth Fincher, Maree Pardy, and Kate Shaw, “Place-Making or Place-­ Masking? The Everyday Political Economy of ‘Making Place’,” Planning Theory & Practice 17, no. 4 (2016): 516–536. 22. Kate Shaw, “Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done About It,” Geography Compass 5, no. 2 (2008): 1697–1728. 23. Cristina Hernandez-Santin, “Teaching ‘Place-Making’: A Study of ‘Place-­ Making’ and Tactical Urbanism in the Formation of Our Future Built Environment Professionals” (Unpublished internal report by the University of Melbourne prepared for the Myer Foundation, 2016). 24. Nguyen N.H. and Than Dang H., “Adaptation of ‘Participatory Method’ in Design ‘For/With/By’ the Poor Community in Tam Thanh, Quang Nam, Vietnam” (paper presented at the Smart Sustainable Built Environment Conference, Sydney, Australia, 5–6 December 2018). 25. Hernandez-Santin, “Teaching ‘Place-Making’.” 26. Lorin W.  Anderson, et  al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, abridged edition (White Plains, NY: Longman, 2009). 27. Senka Gazibara, “‘Head, Heart, and Hands Learning’: A Challenge for Contemporary Education,” The Journal of Education, Culture, and Society 1 (2013): 71–82. 28. Eric Jensen, ed. Super Teaching: Over 1000 Practical Strategies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008). 29. Gazibara, “Head, Heart, and Hands Learning,” 71–82. 30. Hernandez-Santin, “Teaching ‘Place-Making’.” 31. Gazibara, “Head, Heart, and Hands Learning,” 71–82. 32. Vera Ivanaj, Kim Poldner, and Paul Shrivastava, “HAND/HEART/ HEAD: Aesthetic Practice Pedagogy for Deep Sustainability Learning,” Journal of Corporate Citizenship 54 (2014): 23–46. 33. Julie Singleton, “Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Transformative Learning: Place as Context for Changing Sustainability Values,” Journal of Sustainability Education 9 (2015): 1–16. 34. This chapter does not aim to advocate turning all design studios into Sandbox studios. There are other numerous valid strategies to teaching and learning that are equally effective at different levels of suitability depending on the subject matter. We do, however, contend that for placemaking education, practice-based learning is important in order to support our future practitioners. Learners should be offered courses with diverse teaching and learning styles such that they can find the style that best fits them.

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35. “Creating the Capacity for People to Invest Space with Meaning” last modified 6 June 2018, https://sdgs.org.au/project/place-agency-creatingthe-capacity-for-people-to-invest-space-with-meaning/. 36. The consortium includes the University of Adelaide, Curtin University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the University of Technology of Sydney, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of New South Wales. A total of 17 highly skilled placemaking practitioners support the consortium, and they have provided their input at various stages of the project development. These practitioners represent the following Australian organisations: Place Leaders Asia Pacific, CoDesign Studio, Village Well, Here Studio, 226 Strategic, Place Design Studio, John Mongard Landscape Architects, ASPECT Studios, City Collective, Oxigen, PIDCOCK—Architecture + Sustainability, Place SA, TPG + Place Match, MRA, Jensen +, and EcoUrban. 37. Place Agency, “Placemaking Big Ideas, Placemaking Collaboration Workshop” (unpublished report by Place Agency, 2017). 38. For more information about the programme, visit placeagency.org.au. 39. At the point where this chapter was written, each university has been working to develop strategies that would integrate the different modules into their teaching. 40. Gazibara, “Head, Heart, and Hands Learning,” 71–72. 41. Anderson, et al., A Taxonomy for Learning. 42. Terrel L. Rhodes, ed., Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics (Washington, DC, VA: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2010). 43. Anderson, et al., A Taxonomy for Learning. 44. “The opportunity to work with the project partners in addition to community residents was a huge privilege.” S8 “We seldom have the opportunity to take part into performing design, it’s a really good chance for us to participate into this programme.” S19 45. “(The) teachers taught (us) how to think detailed, and the thinking process of intervention.” S17 “This studio not only taught me the theoretical knowledge of placemaking, but also gave me the experience of applying theoretical knowledge to practice.” S22 46. “The greatest lessons of this studio included the conversations I had with the diverse stakeholders. I spoke to people who inject drugs, people who experience homelessness, people who are involved in local council, and various other practitioners. I gained insight into people’s personal experiences and relationship to the site.” S8

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“I learnt how to engage with diverse groups of people, facilitate a community engagement session, and create an inclusive public space plan.” S15 “I gained confidence in approaching members of the community. I also gained confidence in my conversational abilities.” S8 47. “I realised that I really want to work with people and (with the) diverse and marginalised communities. I want to make sure they are heard and that their needs and concerns are addressed through planning.” S15 “In my later career, I will also focus on the community needs and select top meanings people want from the place.” S5

Capturing the Multiplicities of Place: Neighbourhood and Classroom Iderlina Mateo-Babiano and Kelum Palipane

Abstract  This chapter presents a critical examination of a Sandbox placemaking studio, which adopted a multimodal approach to placemaking pedagogy. Students engaged with a complex multicultural site across a number of different approaches and techniques while considering users who are typically marginalised in community participatory processes. Underpinned by Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, we discuss the unique insights that arose from several intersecting challenges: logistical challenges of implementing design interventions on-site in collaboration with local government, the conceptual and ethical challenges of working in a complex multicultural site, and finally the pedagogical challenges of teaching a group of students predominantly from non-English-speaking backgrounds. We conclude with I. Mateo-Babiano (*) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Palipane Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_3

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recommendations for a critical (teaching) practice that can contribute towards capturing the multiplicity of place, be it neighbourhood or classroom. Keywords  Multimodal • Placemaking • Springvale laneways • Urban planning • Public space • Sandbox Studio

Introduction Mahyar Arefi and Menelaos Triantafillou urged us to rethink the pedagogy of place and placemaking. Mainly a critique of the traditional design-based education that emphasises the physical with minimal consideration of the social and cultural elements that affect place,1 they called for expanding the education model of placemaking by including not only the visual attributes but also the product, process, and meaning. German sociologist Herbert J. Gans further reinforced this concept and encouraged the academe to shift its perspective from a space-centred to a user-centred view to help drive the design discipline and profession.2 This chapter presents a case-study of a Master of Urban Planning studio at the University of Melbourne that adopted a multimodal approach to studio pedagogy allowing students to engage with a multicultural site and community across a number of different approaches and techniques. This includes a methodology for site interrogation that is reflexive and based on observation, considering users who are typically marginalised in traditional community consultation processes. We aimed for students to have a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between the physical environment and the sociality of its users, specifically the culturally conditioned approach to place through a focus on immigrant neighbourhoods. At the core of the studio was the provocation: How can we tell the stories of the multiplicity of place? How can we make placemaking by those marginalised, audible, visible, palpable? In this chapter we discuss the background and outline of the studio, the methods utilised, and the unique insights that arose from several intersecting challenges: first the logistical challenges of implementing design interventions on-site with students in collaboration with local government; second the conceptual and ethical challenges of working in a complex multicultural site, and finally the pedagogical challenges of teaching a group of students predominantly from non-English-speaking backgrounds who found it difficult to engage critically. We conclude the chapter with our recommendations for a critical (teaching) practice that can contribute towards capturing the multiplicity of place, be it neighbourhood or classroom.

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Studio Overview Background and Approach One of the distinct offerings of the Master of Urban Planning (MUP) programme at the University of Melbourne Architecture, Building and Planning Faculty is the inclusion of a capstone urban planning studio subject, a subject typically completed at the culmination semester in their degree. A learning-by-doing pedagogical tool which has only been recently introduced into the programme, the planning studio capitalises on the strong-built environment offering by the faculty, placing emphasis on students’ experiential learning which is grounded on practice.3,4,5 At its core is an attempt to tackle a real-world and practical challenge while still being grounded on critical, conceptual, and creative research. As such, the studio becomes the setting where the formal/academic intersects with the mundane/everyday life—a platform for transforming theoretical knowledge into action.6 The studio was also based on the Sandbox studio methodology which is an approach developed by Place Agency.7 Specifically, the Sandbox studio approach is a capacity-building tool that aims to empower current and emerging placemakers to be well-equipped future practitioners in order to ‘create the capacity for/with/by the people to invest space with meaning’.8 As such, the MUP capstone studio, aptly titled Placemaking: Designing for Difference, was structured around the implementation of on-site tactical design interventions that responded to specific social and spatial conditions of the site. The placemaking project engaged students in reimagining the public realm through a laneway revitalising project in the most culturally diverse city in Australia, the City of Greater Dandenong (CGD). It focused on the network of laneways within Springvale Activity Centre, one of three major activity centres identified within the CGD by Plan Melbourne, Melbourne’s metropolitan planning strategy for the next 35 years. The CGD is the most culturally diverse municipality of Victoria. About 60% of its population are born overseas (double the Melbourne metropolitan average of 26%), 64% speak a language other than English at home, and the residents report a diverse range of religious faiths. While the most diverse, it is also the most disadvantaged.9 This implies that resident migrants may experience serious challenge when establishing more thriving lives for themselves and their families in Melbourne.

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Springvale is approximately 25 kilometres south-east of central Melbourne. It presents a complex interaction of diverse land uses as well as being home to a multicultural populace, with residents who have emigrated from all over the world including Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. In consultation with key council officers, the project site, Springvale’s network of laneways, was identified. The project site comprised five different laneways, an arcade, and Multicultural Place (an existing public square). Multicultural Place was the only dedicated public space in the activity centre. These laneways presented a highly suitable transformative case study area (refer to Fig. 1). Students were expected to understand that as more multicultural urban communities are being created in Victoria, more multi-faced issues and challenges arise, requiring multi-dimensional strategies to infuse and create more equitable and inclusive, public spaces. To frame the studio and to begin a broad conversation, students were initially asked to consider the following statement and subsequent questions: In demographically diverse suburbs in Melbourne, placemaking practices are unconsciously enacted

Fig. 1  Springvale Activity Centre, the five laneways, and open spaces. (Note: (1) Multicultural place (2) 248A Underpass (3) Arcade 303 (4) Lane across the car park (5) Post office lane (6) Laneway near Springvale Rise Primary School). (Source: © 2019 Nearmap Australia Pty Ltd)

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through cultural practices and habits of citizenry from other places. Where do they originate? Can they inform urban renewal policy and design here in Melbourne? In what way can we, and do we, design for difference? In the studio the term ‘placemaking’ was framed as a concept that has its roots in the unprogrammed placemaking practices of communities.10 They consist of re-iterative embodied actions, are drawn from memory, are conditioned by culture, and are multimodal. Moreover, these actions manifest across multiple scales and sensory modalities of sights, sounds, and smell. Often, they cannot be generalised for the market, and, at times, they can be socially transgressive. ‘Placemaking’ has now also come to mean a host of programmed and practice-led techniques that provide a way for community members to contribute to public space improvements or renewal initiatives. This is often in the form of consultation or even co-production sessions with key stakeholders or interviews, workshops, street stalls, and surveys in the community. While the incorporation of participatory processes are largely positive outcomes in community planning where it is otherwise professionally driven, sections of the community that lack the necessary language skills, access to smart technology or internet resources, and the confidence to engage in these approaches continue to be marginalised. Not only are these disadvantages more pronounced in immigrant communities, the unprogrammed placemaking practices that help these groups adjust to new societies fail to be captured and considered. As Jeffrey Hou aptly queries in his book Transcultural Cities, “How can we re-envision placemaking in the context of a changing cultural terrain?’11 With this in mind, we encouraged students to interrogate public spaces as places that could be re-imagined, re-produced, re-purposed to cater for different peoples—in particular, those from immigrant backgrounds.

Methods and Process A studio setting for teaching and learning afforded us with the opportunity to use multiple pedagogical approaches. Additionally, as a placemaking studio with projects realised on site, it provided students as well as the teaching and learning team opportunity for experiential and immersive learning. David Kolb’s experiential learning cycle of first, being critical about the experience (concrete experience), second, reflecting on the experience (reflective observation), third, learning from the experience (abstract conceptualisation) and fourth, trying out what was learned

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(active experimentation)—provides an appropriate framework to systematically appraise the extent to which studio pedagogy enabled students to grow in both theory and practice.12 In tackling the assigned tasks, students were required to engage across a number of different modalities that privileged different skills and aptitudes. This included verbal presentations supported by visuals, model making and the use of props, immersive site analysis, experiential learning on site through the intervention that included engaging with people on site, some presentations that privileged graphics over text such as posters, and formal written reports and an informal reflexive piece that encouraged students to draw on prior experience and knowledge (Fig. 2 and Table 1). Assessments drive student learning.13 Accordingly, the studio was assessed through two planning and design exercises: one was through a group project (weeks 1–5) and the other through an individual exploration (weeks 6–14), respectively (see Table 1). In groups of three, the first assessment required students to understand specific attributes of Springvale and how they are distinct (or similar) from surrounding areas; understand design limitations but also opportunities, and objectives of the area; develop ideas for future public spaces; develop an overall vision as inputs into the laneway network concept plan. The second assessment was an individual project that comprised of a placemaking intervention on a selected site. Each student undertook a series of individual, self-guided tasks to develop a detailed design for the said

Fig. 2  Students engage across different modalities in tasks. Photos: Top three by authors, bottom three by Mark Wilson, https://markwilson.com.au

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Table 1  Studio P weekly schedule Task

Mode of engagement

Details

Week 1

Discourse and site analysis

Textual

Weeks 2 and 4

Multimodal mapping of sites

Experiential, multi-­ sensorial

Week 5

Scale model making of sites earmarked for interventions On-site one-day design interventions

Spatial, tactile, visual

The subject commences. Students are provided with an initial contextual understanding about the site as the setting on which a diverse majority choose to live, work and recreate, and conceptual understanding about placemaking. Students immerse in site and record the sensory rhythms associated with how people occupy place. They engage in ethnographic techniques to supplement the identified rhythms gaining understanding of the interrelationship between social bodies and space (built and unbuilt). Students make 1:50 scale models of their given laneways and use objects as props to recreate a narrative associated with their proposed interventions. Interventions were tactical, mostly using low-cost material. Students learned to plan and resolve the logistical challenges of bringing material to site, hands-on construction on-site, interacting/ negotiating with the daily users of space, and eliciting feedback from the community in regard to the interventions. Students create large A1 size posters with minimal text to communicate the conditions ‘before’ and impact ‘after’ intervention, with a projected scenario for future long-term design/use of laneway. Presentation to council curated to impact on issues relevant to council.

Week 8

Experiential, multi-­ sensorial

Week 10 Poster presentations

Graphic, verbal

Week 12 Presentations to academics and the council Week 14 Written report with critical reflection essay

Verbal, graphic Textual

Students encouraged to draw on prior experience and their own culturally specific knowledge to critically reflect on the placemaking process they are engaged in.

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project. The two assessments were broken down into manageable assessment tasks to engage students early in the semester. It was carefully structured to encourage independent learning but also enable a collaborative, multidisciplinary environment for students to be able to explore the multiplicity of place, building design and spatial thinking, critical analysis, participatory techniques as well as leadership and teamwork capabilities more broadly. At the outset, the students used the multimodal mapping approach and observed people’s social and spatial behaviours in urban places to understand critically what Gans refers to as the ‘sociology of place’.14 The mapping technique, which is drawn from ethnographic practices, is a method that foregrounds a sensorial and immersive site analysis.15 Investigation is based on a multimodal approach, acknowledging that multiple sensory modalities contribute to sensing phenomena. The term ‘multimodal’ also extends to encompass the data that is captured by various recording and communication media such as sound and video recording, sketches, photographs, and text. Students spent an extended period on site—up to 12 hours (in shifts) in selected spots in Springvale and recorded the sensory rhythms associated with how people occupied place. This measured and reflective attention to sensory rhythms offered a route to unravelling the nuances of unprogrammed and self-generated placemaking practices of existing users of the identified spaces. They sketched bodies engaging with the built environment, made sound and video recordings and notes supporting what they observed/experienced, and noted down impressions and insights they had on site. Our aim was that, based on these observations, the students would propose and implement a placemaking intervention appropriate for the selected sites. Several smaller tasks were progressively introduced to ensure that students can successfully progress incrementally in their projects but be helped in areas that may have been identified as needing support. After the issues were defined, pairs were then tasked to develop scale models of their assigned laneways and then asked to present an oral precis of their design intentions. In formulating a precis where they are required to communicate their design intentions in 100 words, students were forced to think critically and be selective. Groups were also asked to interact with professionals in the field, with a visit to Melbourne Central and a laneway tour conducted by one of the foremost placemakers in Melbourne, Gilbert Rochecouste of Village Well. Village Well, in the early 1990s, contributed significantly to the activation

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of Melbourne’s now-iconic laneways.16 Through visiting several of these laneways, the said activity inspired the students to appreciate placemaking as a discipline and comprehend the vital role of placemaking practice in enhancing public space that benefits multiple publics.17 The students were then given the opportunity to develop tactical placemaking interventions, test this intervention on-site, and defend their design under a real-world setting by presenting their work to the CGD Council at the end of the semester. Most importantly, at the culmination of the studio, the students were asked to complete a critical reflection of their actions and learnings. As an essential part of the learning process, critical reflection helps students to develop as a reflective practitioner.18 In doing so, students were inducted into the practices and cultures of higher education, which eventually helped build their confidence. We like to think that through these different activities we introduced in class, we were able to challenge students and push them out of their comfort zones, translating into positive learning experiences and outcomes.

Studio Outcomes: Appraising Student’s Experiential Learning Capstone studios play a pivotal role in shaping student life because they signal the culmination of formal learning. A critical component of capstone subjects is their ability to demonstrate that students are able to develop their knowledge and skills and then apply them to real-world settings. To this end, we used Kolb’s experiential learning cycle to appraise the extent to which the capstone studio experience enabled the students to grow in theory and practice. Having the Experience Through a variety of experiential learning activities inside and outside the classroom, students used the Sandbox approach to gain a visceral understanding of place (context) and placemaking (concept). Within the classroom, for most of the students, it was their first-time developing scale models. Students found that having a physical model of their assigned laneway was useful in many ways. It was useful as a visual communication tool which helped explain the features of the site, the context, and their placemaking intervention.

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Outside of the classroom, the multimodal mapping of the sites conducted by the student teams permitted them to critically analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each laneway, allowing them to define several place-based issues. For instance, while a team observed that Springvale afforded opportunities to greenify, the same team also identified its multicultural history as one of the activity centre’s strengths. In addition, the immersive mapping aided their understanding the current use of the laneways across time. For example, one team was able to observe intergenerational use of space, and how this use changed throughout the day. In Arcade 303, for instance, elderly Asian residents of Vietnamese background visited the hairdresser in the morning while the same space would be full of young people in the afternoon. Through their analysis of relevant stakeholders, they were able to re-create a temporal map which showed the socio-spatial use of laneways and infer ways of engaging with specific population subgroups (e.g. women, children, elderly). However, while the student teams acknowledged that Springvale is a culturally diverse community composed of different ethnic groups, there was limited articulation on the cultural values that were attached to these laneways, and how the placemaking intervention could be informed by these values. The one-day intervention on site, on the other hand, served as an important event to understand community needs and gather their feedback. Students found the formative feedback by the community helpful in enhancing their understanding about place and placemaking. They also understood that creating place for people does not only entail merely physical transformation of place. Incorporating the use of music and food in their interventions, the idea that meaningful transformation can also be achieved through soundscape and smellscape fascinated students. In the end, of the six placemaking intervention projects proposed, three were implemented on site. Reflecting on the Experience Critical reflection was encouraged in students through a survey devised as part of the Sandbox methodology as well as an assessed reflective piece at the culmination of the studio. In relation to their understanding of the theory of placemaking, students demonstrated a keen understanding of one’s ‘rights to the city’ in order to foster the development of inclusive, pluralistic public spaces. They

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drew on a number of works that discussed the social equity issues related to placemaking.19,20,21,22,23,24 However, overall knowledge of placemaking theory was weak with a tendency to review tool-kit and methodology material. We noted a significant shift in the students’ understanding of ‘placemaking’ as a concept where prior to the Sandbox studio experience many students articulated placemaking as a profession-led exercise, “it is creating and managing public spaces in the community”. At the conclusion of the studio, a student reflected, “placemaking is a platform for communication and interaction.” The understanding was also more nuanced, “However, placemaking also produces a problem of privatisation and erosion of public space. Privatisation may make some public spaces exclusive and segregated.” This indicates they have read and analysed discourse that critiques the appropriation of placemaking practices for gentrification purposes. Students also understood that the long-term implications for the site must be socially self-sustaining, and not based on a fleeting event-­ based connection to place, “they should be sociable environments in which people want to gather and visit again and again.” Prior to the studio experience, some of the students had a limited understanding of the scope of ‘engaging with community’. They understood surveys and community engagement workshops as primary means of gaining knowledge about the target communities. However, being involved in tactical, site-specific design interventions that facilitated communication with community users shifted their understanding considerably. They began to gain an understanding of the complexity of managing the needs of multiple stakeholders as they were required to negotiate with local council, shop and property owners, as well as everyday users of the sites. In designing and implementing on-site, the students also understood the place-specificity of each placemaking project, the competing and conflicting nature of stakeholder requirements, and the uneven impact of placemaking on the different sectors of the community, which leave some groups dissatisfied with the outcomes. Finally, they began to re-think traditional role of professionals in the placemaking process. Prior to the studio experience, students overwhelmingly understood placemaking as a profession-led operational tool that was used to gain knowledge of existing conditions of sites. Afterwards, they understood that the role of professionals in placemaking includes the ability to manage negotiations between multiple stakeholders and highlighted the importance of communication skills in this process. Specific to their

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professions, prior to this studio experience they understood planners as having a ‘top-down’ management role with impact largely in policy and guideline development, “In this process we are observers, analysts, planners.” At the culmination of the studio, they articulated the significant role planners can play as “…a bridge between stakeholders and governments”. Learning from the Experience: Challenges and Insights Working with Council Of the five laneways the students focussed on, four were owned by the local council with the other owned by the State government. The council played an important role in managing the physical context of the laneways, including its patterns and rhythms, the activities which were allowed or not at certain times of the day/night, and to an extent, they also programmed public space to privilege certain forms of public behaviour, the traffic permitted (e.g. foot, car), or the type of structure that may be built. The local council had a significant and innovative public arts programme that considered equitable access to the public realm. Having a strategic placemaking framework of its own, Greater Dandenong proved well-­ advanced and proactive in implementing placemaking strategies within the council and community. Demonstrating their commitment to shape a better public realm, they have also appointed a placemaking officer, whom we worked with from the inception of the studio, providing substantive and significant inputs into the development of the subjects’ placemaking briefs, to the students’ design evolution and to the possibility of implementing on the ground. We closely worked with three individuals in the CGD. This shaped the development of the students’ projects significantly. However, the council’s procedural requirements proved to be a significant hurdle; there were no mechanisms in place that differentiated the approval process for proposed student projects, which were mainly pedagogical in nature, from other project types. Thus, the students had to submit several documents, including a traffic management plan, as part of the application process for a project permit even though the students had no expertise in that field. As such, we, as studio facilitators, needed to closely supervise the students to ensure they complied with the requirements.

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The council was also very particular about maintaining existing relationships with and amongst the groups in the community that they had already invested in over a period of time. Consequently, this resulted in challenges to the approval of the design interventions to be implemented, as some of them were perceived to be compromising these existing relationships. Engaging with the council proved to be complicated due to the limited time of the studio and due to students’ inexperience. However, despite perceiving this at times to be an impediment to their creativity, the students were still able to overcome this push forward. Our ongoing interaction with the council proved to be helpful in coordinating student efforts and in implementing the project successfully, thereby making an impact on the ground.  omplexities of a Multicultural Site C Engaging in a multicultural site in an immersive way, students gained insights they attributed as specific to the South-East Asian communities dominant in Springvale. They observed the multigenerational use of space where the elderly are a visible presence. They noted greater incidents of social street encounters with a strong sense of collective living. They observed the use of space across a broader time scale and culturally specific forms of ‘play’ in adults such as elderly mah-jong players occupying public space. During the intervention on-site, language—which is usually a barrier in such contexts—became a bridge instead. Students who were proficient in Mandarin were able to communicate with the Chinese and Vietnamese bystanders and passers-by who may have been otherwise reluctant to engage. In doing so, they elicited useful and important insights. But always there is the question ‘whose truth is this?’25 as the limitations of attempting to understand a complex site in a 12-week period became evident. Students found it difficult to move beyond broad generalisations, and the design outcomes while place-specific, moved towards the generic. There was a general lack of criticality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak warns of attributing a collective voice to groups. She writes of the essentialising that could occur in which the inherent heterogeneity of groups is blurred in order to identify with a collective identity (of resistance).26 Exacerbating this is the inherently reductive processes of design where referencing cultural complexity always sits in tension with the simplification needed for a design response.

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Leonie Sandercock puts forward the concept of an ‘epistemology of multiplicity in planning’,27 and proposes that different ways of ‘knowing’ that other cultures bring must be acknowledged in the planning process. To realise this in a critical manner, we echo Fincher et al., in that professionals that can analyse complex social conditions need to be involved in the process of placemaking.28  eaching a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Student Cohort T The 12 students in the studio were all from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and many of them had weak English language skills. Due to a lack of confidence in language use, discussions in class were quite flat, with minimal verbal engagement during class with us or the guest speakers. While this was problematic at first, we realised the unique opportunity a studio setting provides—particularly, a placemaking studio with projects realised on-site,—in allowing the opportunity to engage students across multiple pedagogical approaches. Our studio used a number of different modalities through which students were required to engage that did not always privilege language: for example, model making and the use of props; verbal presentations supported by visuals; immersive site analysis; physical making on-site through the interventions; engaging with people on-site; some presentations that privileged graphics over the texts such as posters, formal written reports, and an informal reflexive piece to encourage the students to draw on prior experience and knowledges. We believe these diverse tasks allowed the students different ways to communicate and express themselves, across different modalities that played to different strengths. For example, a student with a Chinese background who did not speak during class, wrote in his reflexive essay how placemaking in Australia requires engaging with multiple stakeholders because of the private ownership of property. This is a unique critical insight that was drawn from the student’s experience of growing up in a country where private property ownership is not ubiquitous. In this way, students should be able to reflect on their own multicultural backgrounds and learn to value what they can bring as new epistemologies and ways of knowing. This can be seen as a starting point for cultivating an ‘engaged pedagogy’ as presented by bell hooks. She says that everyone’s presence in the class must be acknowledged in some way to build a classroom ‘community’ where we ‘…recognise the value of each individual voice’.29

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We also observed that the students in this group used peer-to-peer learning or engagement as a key strategy; they used each individual’s strengths to the advantage of the group. For example, those who were adept in verbal English served as the group’s spokesperson. As this was mainly a Chinese cohort, they also helped to translate instructions and discussion points, often going back and forth between English and Chinese. This helped the group to clarify vague instructions or to prevent misunderstanding and misinterpretations.

Conclusion Recommendations for Critical Teaching Practice This chapter presents a multimodal approach to studio pedagogy for placemaking as a means of engaging with a diverse and complex site as well as diversity in the classroom. Understood as a place-based approach, placemaking became an important experiential learning process that did not privilege language, which allowed students to be more critical and to communicate and express themselves. This approach contributes towards cultivating an ‘engaged pedagogy’30 where students feel included and heard, becoming ‘competent placemakers as they apply knowledge to practice’. Based on this Sandbox studio experience, we outline key recommendations on how to implement a critical teaching practice that can contribute towards capturing the multiplicity of place, be it in a neighbourhood or classroom. Logistics of implementing on site: 1. Beyond its role as the context for student’s placemaking interventions, the network of laneways in Springvale served as venue for the expression of relationships amongst different stakeholders. Central to the successful delivery of placemaking intervention on the ground was creating and maintaining trust with partners and key stakeholders. It was important for students to comprehend ongoing relationships between council and residents and commercial owners. Also, it was critical to liaise with local authorities before commencement of studio to understand the scope of the regulatory and legislative frameworks involved in implementing on site. It was vital to allow ample time for local authorities to respond.

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2. To an extent, the process of trust-building may have stifled creativity in students, but this also mirrored real-world placemaking practice. Negotiating in both contested physical and social environments is a skill that placemaking practitioners must develop but when founded on trust opens prospects for connecting with, belonging to, and loving place. Hence, the social practice of placemaking is vital ­ towards achieving positive place-based legacy in communities. Engaging in complex sites: 3. Considerable preparation is needed before commencement to gain a deeper understanding of the community and the socio-economic issues involved. Ideally, professionals that can analyse complex social conditions should be involved throughout the placemaking process, particularly at the preparation stage. Where possible, take advantage of existing/prior research on the site issues. In the classroom: 4. Use diverse pedagogical practices that play on different strengths and minimise weaknesses. Some measures for this may be creating an online forum so that those who are not confident in expressing themselves in class have an opportunity to engage. Allow for methods of presentation that does not privilege the use of language. 5. Classrooms could be a space to develop relationships which may be useful for peer support during their university study. This may be particularly useful in a design studio where knowledge can be disseminated through peer ‘critiquing’ of design work. 6. Make a space for multicultural learning; this allows us an opportunity to value alternative epistemologies and ways of knowing and to bring in knowledges that have been traditionally excluded.

Notes 1. Mahyar Arefi and Menelaos Triantafillou, “Reflections on the Pedagogy of Place in Planning and Urban Design,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, no. 1 (2005): 78.

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2. Herbert J. Gans, “The Sociology of a Space: A Use-Centered View,” City & Community 1, no. 4 (2002): 329–339. 3. Zenia Kotval, “Teaching Experiential Learning in the Urban Planning Curriculum,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 27, no. 3 (2003): 297–308. 4. Dorina Pojani, Laurel Johnson, Sébastien Darchen, and Katie Yang, “Learning by Doing: Employer Expectations of Planning Studio Education,” Urban Policy and Research 36, no. 1 (2018): 11–19. 5. Marilyn Higgins, Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, and Jennifer Dixon, “The Pedagogy of the Planning Studio: A View from Down Under,” Journal for Education in the Built Environment 4, no. 1 (2009): 8–30. 6. David H.  Montross and Christopher J.  Shinkman, Career Development: Theory and Practice (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 2008). 7. This is elaborated in chap. 2 of this book, “Head, Heart and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning: The Sandbox Studio Approach”. 8. Mateo-Babiano, Iderlina, and G. Lee. “People in Place: Placemaking Fundamentals.” in Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment, eds. D. Hes and Hernandez-Santin. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, (2020): 15–38. 9. Summary—Greater Dandenong (C)—City of Greater Dandenong. 2019. Retrieved from https://www.communityprofile.com.au/greaterdandenong/. 10. Henri Lefebvre and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space, Vol. 142 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 11. Jeffrey Hou, ed., Transcultural Cities: Border Crossing and Placemaking (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2013). 12. David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2014). 13. David Boud and Associates, Assessment 2020: Seven Propositions for Assessment Reform in Higher Education (Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2010). 14. Herbert J. Gans, “The Sociology of a Space,” 329–339. 15. Kelum Palipane, “Multimodal Mapping—A Methodological Framework,” The Journal of Architecture 24, no. 1 (2019): 91–113. 16. Village Well, n.d. Our Story. Retrieved from http://www.villagewell.org/. Accessed 20/04/2019. 17. Kurt Iveson, Publics and the City, Vol. 80 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011). 18. Donald A.  Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 19. Kate Shaw, “The Place of Alternative Culture and the Politics of its Protection,” Planning Theory & Practice 6, no. 2 (2005): 149–169.

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20. Heather Aslin and Valerie Brown, Towards Whole of Community Engagement: A Practical Toolkit (Canberra: Murray-Darling Basin Commission, 2004). 21. Nancy Henkin, Corita Brown, and Sally Leiderman, Intergenerational Community Building: Lessons Learned (Philadelphia: The Intergenerational Community Building, 2012). 22. Martin Fuller and Ryan Moore, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Macat Library-Routledge, 2017). 23. Jane Jacobs, “Downtown is for People,” The Exploding Metropolis 146 (1958): 124–131. 24. Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, DC, VA: Island Press, 2013). 25. Robina Mohammad, “Insiders’ and/or ‘Outsiders’: Positionality, Theory, and Praxis,” in Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers, eds. Melanie Limb and Clair Dwyer (London: Routledge, 2001), 101–117. 26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 67–111. 27. Leonie Sandercock and Rae Bridgman, “Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 8, no. 1 (1999): 108. 28. Ruth Fincher, Maree Pardy, and Kate Shaw, “Place-making or Place-­ Masking? The Everyday Political Economy of ‘Making Place’,” Planning Theory & Practice 17, no. 4 (2016): 516–536. 29. bell hooks, “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,” Journal of Leisure Research 28, no. 4 (1996): 40. 30. bell hooks, “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,” Journal of Leisure Research 28, no. 4 (1996).

Performing Landscape: Landscape as Medium for Placemaking Tanja Beer and Angela Campbell

Abstract  Ballarat is Victoria’s largest inland city founded on the wealth of the famous Victorian gold rush and has been celebrated as the ‘birthplace’ of democracy in Australia through the story of the Eureka Rebellion. The less well-known facets of Ballarat are the city’s multicultural and Chinese layers, its deep stories of Indigenous people, and its landscape and culture—a contentious history that is articulated and hidden in Ballarat’s grand Victorian architecture and streetscapes. This visual chapter explores a landscape approach to placemaking that acknowledges the multifaceted relationship of Ballarat’s past, present, and future. It focuses on the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, a 160-year-old reserve best known for its Victorian-­ style gardens located on the Western shore of the man-made Lake Wendouree. It examines placemaking approaches in the context of a landscape architecture studio (Performing Landscape), where the students T. Beer (*) Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. Campbell Federation University Australia, Ballarat, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_4

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took part in developing a hypothetical design and a realised event-space for the gardens by responding to the local needs, histories, and landscapes, and also explores the site’s potential and inherent challenges. The chapter uses a series of images to induce placemakers to reflect and examine ‘how place performs’ through the intersections across social, cultural, and environmental conditions. Keywords  Landscape architecture • Placemaking • Ballarat • Interdisciplinary • Heritage • Gold rush • Botanical Gardens

Introduction Ballarat is Victoria’s largest inland city, which was founded on the wealth of the famous Victorian gold rush. It is celebrated as the ‘birthplace’ of democracy in Australia through the story of the Eureka Rebellion. The less well-known facets of the city are its multicultural and Chinese layers, its deep stories of Indigenous people, its landscape, and its culture—a contentious history that is articulated and hidden in Ballarat’s grand Victorian architecture, landscapes, and streetscapes. In 2018, a Place Agency landscape architecture studio (i.e., Performing Landscape) at the University of Melbourne was conducted in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, a 160-year-old reserve best known for its Victorian-­ style gardens located on the western shore of Lake Wendouree. The students were invited to take part and to respond to the opportunities highlighted in the Lake Wendouree Master Plan (2017),1 which included creating an Indigenous sculpture park for the North Gardens Wetlands. While the Ballarat Botanical Gardens are in so many ways enmeshed in a history of colonisation, the project aimed to create constructive ‘reconciliation’ dialogue between the well-established conventions of botanical parks and the adjacent regenerated wetland gardens to the north. The students were encouraged to examine the underutilised North Gardens spaces that connect the two sites and to develop an ‘event space’ that celebrated the Ballarat Botanical Gardens as a multi-layered socio-ecological community. The Place Agency consortium2 defines placemaking as the process ‘creating the capacity for people to invest space with meaning’.3 The key components of the Sandbox studio include enhancing the placemakers’ understanding of place by integrating the ecological, social, and cultural

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perspectives into placemaking practice and by providing the students with the opportunity to engage and foster dialogue with ‘real’ communities. Over the course of one semester, the class engaged with a range of experts, stakeholders, knowledge consultants, and community partners to respond to a diversity of perspectives, insights, and provocations through site visits (Table  1). The students’ proposals and architectural renders were presented to community partners and subsequently showcased to the public through an exhibit. As part of creating the vision for the site, the students also had the opportunity to design a small-scale temporary performance space. The winning design was realised at the 2019 Begonia Festival, which was activated with performances by the Federation University’s (FedUni) Arts Academy students. This visual chapter explores a landscape approach to placemaking that acknowledges the multifaceted relationship of Ballarat’s past, present, and future. It discusses how the students were encouraged to respond Table 1  Summary of placemaking activities Week

Placemaking activities

1

Introduction  • Guest lecture by Angela Campbell: ‘What is Ballarat?’  • Guest lecture by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA’s Indigenous framework) Day trip to Ballarat: site visit, introductions, and sensory mapping  • Welcome to Country  • Stakeholder discussions with council and community members  • Sensory mapping activity Day trip to Ballarat: multicultural and cross-disciplinary exploration   • Tour of the city: John Dyke (City of Ballarat Heritage Advisor)   • Tour of the Gold Museum, Sovereign Hill Museums   • FedUni student performance Day trip to Ballarat: community brainstorming and prototyping   • Plant crafting workshop with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens Day trip to Ballarat: exhibition of student works   • Welcome to Country   • Morning tea with council and community members   • Recipients of the Audience Choice Award and Begonia Festival Event Space Award announced Begonia Festival Event Space creation: Ariel Songs

2

4

6

14

Post Studio

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creatively to the local needs, histories, and landscapes and to explore the site’s potential and inherent challenges. An emphasis on building relationships and relational thinking is key to the pedagogical approach taken throughout the project, allowing students to engage in placemaking practices with communities, beyond the classroom. The notion of performance is activated here to highlight the changing nature of the Ballarat landscape over time and into the future. In performance, a range of narratives and audiences play out to make connections, meanings, and marks on the landscape. Through a selection of images, we examine ‘how place performs’ through its intersections across the social, cultural, and environmental conditions of the landscape that is now known as the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. It is a truism to say that the gold rushes took place on Aboriginal land, yet this fact is not often articulated in discourse. There are many colonial testimonies that auriferous areas were an Aboriginal cultural landscape; that indeed an indigenous landscape is the fundament that underlies the numerous cultural landscapes laid down after the first European settlement in the late 1830s.4 Performing Landscape begins with acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land where the studio takes place. The Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation have always known this Country as ‘balla arat’ meaning ‘resting place’ or ‘bent elbow’.5 In fact, they shaped the landscape in their own fashion through fire-stick farming, hunting, and fishing. As researchers have pointed out, The views of environmentally harmonious Australian foragers who did not harm or alter the landscape were unsupported by palaeontological research, which has implicated human predation in the demise of the megafauna … They were also incompatible with arguments for Indigenous people being active resource managers in pre-European Australia.6

This knowledge of Country is held and passed down through the local Wadawurrung community. Acclaimed artist Aunty Marlene Gilson has painted a series of images including Black Swamp, Lake Wendouree, held in turn for the wider community by Art Gallery of Ballarat. This work highlights an indigenous landscape that precedes and co-exists with contemporary Ballarat. Gilson depicts Waa (the crow) and Bunjil (the Eaglehawk) that fly above the lake as the ancestor spirits of the Wadawurrung tribes,7 whose ‘continuous and ongoing presence demonstrates that the Dreaming

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is here and now—it is a lived system of relations and connections—as well as there and then’.8 Indigenous people had been living in the Ballarat area for millennia before the first white settlers, the Yuille brothers, claimed and called their sheep run ‘Ballaarat’ in 1837. The layered narrative of history and landscape is evident in the name changes given by white settlers, which saw Black Swamp become Yuille’s Swamp and then Lake Wendouree (Fig. 1). In 1851, gold was discovered in the area. Subsequently, the rich winter camping ground of the Wadawurrung, which had already been compromised due to white settlement and sheep farming, was entirely transformed by an influx of humanity from around the world and a technological revolution that radically reshaped the landscape of the whole region. Our studio aimed to highlight that all the land in Australia is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land, whether urban, regional, or remote. Moreover, we wanted to stress that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and their people are strong, diverse, dynamic, and living

Fig. 1  Lake Wendouree, City of Ballarat Master Plan. (Image courtesy of Chippy Riviera and City of Ballarat)

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all over Australia. Across Australia, un-ceded sovereignty, histories, custodianship, and belonging have been actively erased, hidden, and denied; our intention then was to begin with Traditional Owner perspectives and histories of place (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2  Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens site. (Photo by Tanja Beer)

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Our landscape architecture students, most of whom were international students and unfamiliar with the Indigenous history of Australia, were introduced to Ballarat’s historical intersections during the Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony led by Deanne Gilson, Marlene Gilson’s daughter, during their first visit. Deanne has followed in her mother’s footsteps as an artist and has recently completed her first public artwork, Murrup Laarr, which was commissioned by the City of Ballarat for the North Gardens Wetlands. Murrup Laarr sets hand prints from four generations of Gilson’s family to mark a stone circle sculpture, with each stone indicating an Aboriginal story from around the region.9 Many living in urban areas in Australia have acknowledged very little of the historic and ongoing connection of the place they currently occupy to the Aboriginal peoples. Accordingly, the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) launched its reconciliation action plan (RAP) in 2018 to advocate for a ‘Connection to Country’ approach to landscape planning, design, and management. The plan states, The RAP will facilitate the development of a deeper level of respect in our members and staff for Traditional Custodians and their relationship with the landscape. It will facilitate shared learning and will provide a unique way of viewing our profession in a world context. To support these objectives, AILA is developing the RAP with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Ambassadors to ensure the cultural safety of the process and to inform and guide the organisation in the building of its cultural capacity.10

For many of our international students, this was their first time to experience a ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony and a ‘Smoking Ceremony’ despite having studied landscape architecture in Australia for almost two years. These events set the scene for these students to understand what the careful custodianship of the land implies, thus providing the foundation for the students’ current and future designs through a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Australian culture. Interestingly, the majority of our landscape architecture students were from Central China, and this provided a dynamic intersection with Ballarat’s own Chinese history, thereby creating another layer of place understanding. Victoria’s population increased exponentially in 1857 after gold had been found in Ballarat in 1851. Although gold seekers came from all over the world, including the UK, Europe, America, Canada, and Asia, many came from China. Indentured Chinese workers travelled most often from

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Guangdong province in Southern China, in the Pearl River Delta via Hong Kong, and then Borneo to Melbourne. As many tourists do, the students visited Sovereign Hill’s Gold Museum to enable them to weave a fuller context of the cultural, built, and ‘natural’ landscapes of the place. The visit included viewing the extraordinary material remains of the Chinese’s participation in the Ballarat goldfields, which highlighted the region’s Chinese heritage that is becoming an increasingly important part of Central Victoria’s social, cultural, and economic future. It invites contemporary dialogue with the past and with Ballarat’s rich Chinese heritage (see Fig. 3). As the leading theatre artist and solo performer Mike Pearson points out, Just as landscapes are constructed out of the imbricated actions and experiences of people, so people are constructed in and dispersed through their habituated account of their own landscape: stories.11

Fig. 3  Albert Charles Cooke, Chinese Quarter Ballarat. Wood engraving published in The Illustrated Australian News, Melbourne: Ebenezer and David Syme, 18 July 1868. (Photo courtesy of The State Library of Victoria)

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Our Chinese international students became fascinated with the way the traces of their own history and future are written into the Australian landscape through tangible and intangible heritage of mining, commerce, horticulture, and religious belief. Some of their designs explored a personal experience of the changing landscape and how this might be expressed, represented, and communicated. This is particularly evident in Zongjing Yu’s work (Fig. 4), which referred to the use of Chinese agriculture systems as part of her vision for the permaculture-inspired event space. After the students had finished immersing themselves into the Indigenous and Chinese histories of Ballarat, they were asked to respond to the recommendations proposed in the City of Ballarat’s Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach. These recommendations, developed by UNESCO in partnership with participating cities across the globe, relate to the recent strategic measures of the city, including the Lake Wendouree Master Plan12; Ballarat Botanical Gardens Visionary Plan13; the City in the Landscape plan, which proposes to make Ballarat greener and be a more vibrant regional city (2013–2017); City of Ballarat Heritage Plan (2016–2030)14; and The Ballarat Strategy (2015–2040).15 The Place Agency studio aimed to provide students with opportunities to engage with ‘real’ communities; thus, they participated in a series of stakeholder engagement activities with the local council. Such activities include a walking tour around the cityscape ‘icons’, led by John Dyke, heritage adviser of the City of Ballarat. Accordingly, the tour highlighted the historic and contemporary layers of the wider urban fabric. The students also visited the Ballarat East Civic Precinct (Bridge St Mall, Bakery Hill, former East Ballarat Town Hall Gardens), where the Ballarat council deliberates on the major city development projects, in which heritage and placemaking form an integral part.

Fig. 4  North Gardens design by Zongjing Yu. (Photo by Zongjing Yu)

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Subsequently, the landscape architecture students returned to the campus of Federation University Arts Academy and met with the performing arts students’ Word of Mouth choir and with Richard Chew, the director of the Arts Academy and composer. Here, both sets of students participated in a workshop of singing and improvisational performance as a way of meeting and connecting in with each other. The performing arts provide unique opportunities for placemaking, with a focus on project-based, community-engaged, and artist-led activities that generate positive shared experiences. The Landscape students also spent time with the curator of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens (Peter Marquand) to identify opportunities for the proposed site of the North Gardens Wetlands (Fig.  5). The students were asked to respond to an ongoing, real-world problem outlined by Marquand concerning the underutilised space at the periphery of the Gardens. For example, they were prompted to re-imagine the North Gardens Wetlands

Fig. 5  Community activity with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens. (Photo by Tanja Beer)

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as a flexible social gathering space and a permanent connecting corridor between the North and South Gardens Wetlands that acknowledges and celebrates the site’s ecological, historic, and cultural layers. Student Zongjing Yu’s design proposition was built on David Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002), a book that outlines a series of design principles that are focused on whole-systems thinking and responds to ecosystem patterns.16 In the book, Yu responded to Ballarat’s previous overexploitation of natural resources during the Gold Rush era (exotic species, overgrazing, disappearing of natural woodlands, shrinking of native species, water and soil pollution) by reflecting on how the First Peoples used what we might understand now to be permaculture design methodologies to reinforce humans’ reciprocal relationship with the land. This also relates to Place Agency’s emphasis on integrating environmental processes into the human components of place. Yu’s design includes a series of permaculture gardens that incorporates the Indigenous-, Chinese-, and European-layered histories of the site. One of the highlights of the studio was the community activity with the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, which provided the students with an opportunity to interact directly with them (Fig. 5) and to build meaningful relationships. The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Garden is a loosely based consortium that aims to involve the community in the scientific, educational, historical, cultural, and recreational functions of the gardens. Their connections with other Friends of Botanical Gardens around Australia and with the rest of the world link a powerful network of gardening enthusiasts through curiosity and passion for plants.17 During one of our day trips to Ballarat, the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens organised a craft activity for the class, which allowed the students to converse informally with the residents as they shared an activity. Community crafting is an effective tool to break down the perceived differences among the members of a community and to build community connections.18 Accordingly, the plant-sculpture activity led by the Friends allowed us to tackle the ‘shyness’ among the group. By the end of the workshop, the students were able to effectively engage and initiate conversation with the residents. As one student commented, Through the study this semester, I think the biggest moment for me is when I found that it is crucial to talk to the people who live in or around the place. They have the deepest understanding of the place, and determining the meaning of the place needs to include their opinions as they will be the main users.

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Underlining the importance of this relational aspect of design thinking process, many students highlighted how the activity gave them an opportunity to ask the Friends some questions about possible design strategies for the North Gardens and suggestions on how to tailor their designs. This environment of social exchange allowed space for the students to consider the recommendations of the local community while still being able to incorporate the contemporary context of the site into their design process. The workshop provided the students with the additional foundations required to move forward with their designs through a series of landscape interventions that clearly responded to the various suggestions of the Friends. Such suggestions included a space for children to play, a garden for well-being, and a landscape that honoured the biodiversity of the region. As an event to mark and celebrate the fruitful relationship between the Landscape students and the wider community, Federation University Australia’s Arts Academy and the University of Melbourne’s Master of Landscape Architecture programme collaborated on the 2019 Ballarat Begonia Festival (located within the Botanical Gardens) to create Ariel Songs, a re-imagined song cycle taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The song cycle was put into contemporary musical arrangement by Chew and directed by Kim Durban, both of the Arts Academy. Ariel Songs was performed by Word of Mouth, current students of the Arts Academy’s Performing Arts programme. The work was supported by a prize-winning installation design by students Zongjing Yu and Libin Wang, who completed the Performing Landscape studio (Fig. 6). The installation was constructed from found materials, including reclaimed industrial pallets that formed the stage and the audience seats. Students Yu and Wang created an installation of suspended handcrafted flowers made from recycled materials (mostly plastic bottles). These were expertly hung by the Botanical Gardens staff between three mature oak trees to form the pillars of a natural stage. The colour design was inspired by the Begonia flowers in bloom. The designers aimed to lead the singers and audiences into a sea of flowers and also to remind people of the possibilities in using recycled materials. The temporary installation project gave the students an opportunity to engage actively with the local stakeholders and to build relationships with the council and community. Students Yu and Wang commented on how the highlight of the project was not necessarily to see their design realised, but to have the possibility to spend more quality time in the region. They

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Fig. 6  Ariel Songs at the 2019 Begonia Festival. (Photo by Zimo Wang)

spoke excitedly about how they were able to strike a friendship with the local Uber driver who regularly drove them from their Airbnb to the Botanical Gardens, and how much they enjoyed connecting with the Ballarat residents. For Yu and Wang, the experience seemed to give them

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a sense of community away from home and a unique opportunity to experience Australian culture in a way that was deeply rooted in the multi-­ layered landscape and its inhabitants.

Conclusion Performing Landscape demonstrated how multiple stakeholders across universities and community sectors can come together to re-imagine new landscapes and to build relationships and connections across regional and metropolitan divides. One of the key lessons gained from the studio was the idea that landscape and placemaking are ‘performative’ in their layers of more-than-human activities and that this performance is built on relationships, past, present, and future. Placemaking within the context of ‘heritage’ landscapes can ‘be understood as an action and a mode of communication rather than a re-presentation that is fixed and static, connected to a stable and “authorised” past’, which can open up new ways of viewing landscape through multiple (and often) contradictory narratives.19,20,21 As one student commented, The benefit of placemaking is that it can bring different aspects together to provide stakeholders with a full vision of the site. However, the difficulty (lies on how to balance the) differences in opinion, which makes placemaking more challenging. But this is also a good way to brainstorm and to generate new ideas.

Many students highlighted how the studio allowed them to see the benefits of connecting with the community as part of their design process. As one student commented, I think in my later career, I will also focus on the community needs and select (the) top meanings (that) people want from the place. This will also become their identity. Another important thing is to imagine what the placemaking process can provide to the users (with the help of community survey, etc.) and provide all types of user programs in this new place.

Through the Place Agency process, the students of Performing Landscape were able to reconsider the processes of responding to local histories and contemporary concerns, thereby interweaving the social, cultural, ecological perspectives of a place through community dialogue,

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craft, and performance. This demonstrates just some of the many ways in which placemaking can be activated and performed across shared landscapes, relationships, and narratives. Overall, we found that the collaboration across regions, institutions, students, local community members, and councils was a valuable approach to exploring place-based opportunities and bringing people together across metropolitan-regional divides. We outline six key pedagogical tools for placemaking educators below: 1. Engage with the Traditional Custodians as part of enriching the students’ understanding of place. All places in Australia reside on Indigenous lands and a key part of placemaking should thus be about acknowledging and fore-fronting First Nations’ sovereignty. We suggest that some budget should be allocated towards organising a Welcome to Country as part of this process. 2. Consider regional areas for conducting placemaking studios. Regional centres are often the most open and supportive environments for community engagement and are often starved for attention and outside inspiration. 3. Open up placemaking processes to include multiple perspectives and disciplines. This fosters not only interdisciplinary relationships but also new ways of seeing place. For example, one of the strengths of the Ballarat studio was that it incorporated both Landscape Architecture and Performing Arts staff and students to consider ‘stories of place’ together. 4. Commission a community liaison to be the link between the studio leader and the local community. Employing a local person helps to ensure that you are engaging authentically with place. A large part of the Ballarat studio’s success was the fact that we were able to pay a member of the community to help facilitate and organise our site visits and consultation processes. 5. Organise a collaborative activity for students and community members to get to know one another. Group activities such as crafting or gardening allow students and community members to break down barriers and open up conversation. 6. Create opportunities for students to publically showcase their work in the region where the studio was undertaken. Having a public exhibition of the students’ work allows local communities to be part of the re-visioning of the site, allowing new perspectives to be forged.

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Acknowledgements  The authors would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this research was conducted, the Wadawurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and extend our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations Peoples.

Notes 1. City Government of Ballarat, Lake Wendouree Master Plan (Ballarat, VIC: City Government of Ballarat, 2017), 6. 2. See https://placeagency.org.au/the-team/. 3. “Creating the Capacity for People to Invest Space with Meaning,” last modified 6 June 2018, https://sdgs.org.au/project/place-agencycreating-the-capacity-for-people-to-invest-space-with-meaning/. 4. Fred Cahir, Ian Clark, and Philip Clarke. Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia: Perspectives of Early Colonists (Clayton: CSIRO Publishing, 2018), 6. 5. City of Ballarat, Our People, Culture, & Place: A Plan to Sustain Ballarat’s Heritage 2017–2030 (Ballarat, VIC: City of Ballarat/Historic Urban Landscape, 2017), 8. 6. Cahir, Clark, and Clarke, Aboriginal, xvi. 7. Janice Newton, Mullawallah: The Last King Billy of Ballarat (Ballarat: BHS Publishing, 2014). 8. “Marlene Gilson, Art Gallery of Ballarat,” last modified 2 February 2019, https://memoreview.net/blog/marlene-gilson-art-gallery-of-ballarat. 9. Jolyon Attwooll, “Murrup Laarr Artwork by Ballarat Artist Deanne Gilson Unveiled in Lake Wendouree’s North Gardens,” The Ballarat Courier, 23 March 2019, https://www.thecourier.com.au/story/5970317/firstartwork-unveiled-at-new-aboriginal-sculpture-park/. 10. AILA (Australian Institute of Landscape Architects), Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan: June 2018–June 2019 (Canberra: AILA), 7. 11. Mike Pearson, In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 12. 12. City Government of Ballarat, Lake Wendouree Master Plan, 6. 13. City of Ballarat, Visionary Plan for the Ballarat Botanical Gardens (Ballarat, VIC: City of Ballarat, 2014), 12. 14. City of Ballarat, Our People, 23–73. 15. City of Ballarat, Today Tomorrow Together: The Ballarat Strategy (2015–2040) (Ballarat, VIC: City of Ballarat, 2015). 16. David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability (Hepburn, VIC: Holmgren Design Services, 2002).

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17. The Australian Association of Friends of Botanical Gardens states they are ‘interested in the well-being and public appreciation of botanic gardens through their conservation and development, scientific, educational, historical, and cultural and recreational functions. Its members represent a range of botanic gardens and parks in regional and metropolitan areas throughout Australia’ and with affiliations across the world. For more details, visit the AAFBG website, https://friendsbotanicgardens.org/. 18. Tanja Beer and Cristina Hernandez Santin, “Refugium WA: Crafting Connection through Plant-Relating Arts-Science Experiences of Urban Ecology,” Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies 5, no. 2 (2017): 30–43. 19. Angela Campbell, “Performing Cultural Heritage: Authenticity and the Spirit of Rebellion,” Australasian Drama Studies 66 (2015): 155–178. 20. Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. Intangible Heritage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 21. Laurajane Smith, “Class, Heritage, and the Negotiation of Place” (paper presented at the conference ‘Missing Out on Heritage: Socio-Economic Status and Heritage Participation’ English Heritage, London, March 2009.

Realising ‘Rights to the City’ in Contested Space Andrea Cook and Imogen Carr

Abstract  In the context of a hyper-diverse social landscape, ‘rights to the city’ are challenged by the tensions between different people’s needs of the same place. This chapter explores the theory, methodologies, practices, and challenges of inclusive placemaking in deeply diverse and contested urban spaces using a Master of Urban Planning studio as a case study. The studio took a place-based and applied approach and developed a pedagogy based on consultation and collaboration within a community. Key insights included the benefit of an embedded approach for inclusive engagement, a focus on social and relational outcomes as critical to enduring inclusivity, and encounter across difference as a powerful tool for highlighting shared values. These experiences support an

A. Cook (*) RedRoad Consulting, Abbotsford, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] I. Carr School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_5

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argument for combining spatial placemaking with social placemaking to appropriately confront issues of inclusion/exclusion, displacement, and marginalisation. Keywords  Diversity • Contestation • Inclusion • Community planning • Urban planning

Introduction A ‘right to the city’ underpins a range of philosophical and practical planning approaches to creating built form that enriches social connections in cities and enables people to move around but also to linger, to be and to feel safe, to be accepted and welcomed, and to encounter those the same— and those different—from themselves. A person’s ‘right to the city’, however, can be complicated by differences and perceptions of those differences. Difference is often the basis of stigma, fear, ‘othering’, and exclusion rather than inclusion.1 This chapter explores the theory, methodologies, practices, and challenges of inclusive placemaking in deeply diverse and deeply contested urban space. It takes a place-based and applied approach to challenging questions of ‘who belongs’ in local neighbourhoods, using a University of Melbourne Master of Urban Planning studio (Studio D), which ran in 2018 as a case study. Studio D focused on a corridor of public and quasi-public space running along Lennox Street in North Richmond, in inner-city Melbourne, Australia (Fig. 1). The site is centrally located within the Victoria Street

Fig. 1  Lennox Street corridor in the Melbourne metropolitan context. Google Maps, 2018. “Lennox Street corridor, Melbourne”. Accessed 01 August 2018. https://goo.gl/maps/18LrZaCx7H58qNvb7

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neighbourhood, a community marked by deep socio-economic difference/inequity, a history of public drug use and poor (perceptions of) safety, ethno-cultural diversity and cross-cultural barriers, and contested services (most notably, Melbourne’s sole Medically Supervised Injecting Room [MSIR]). The challenges of placemaking in such a hyper-diverse social landscape are multiple and complex. How can placemaking avoid ‘designing out’ certain people (especially those experiencing drug addiction, homelessness, and/or mental ill-health)? How can communities address individual and collective trauma through placemaking? What are the risks of ‘over-­ promising and under-delivering’ when placemaking in very disadvantaged communities? What techniques and approaches will work to train students and to engage multiple communities within a diverse community (e.g., people experiencing homelessness/addiction/mental ill-health, children, people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, refugees and migrants, public housing tenants, time-poor gentrifying residents, and disabled people)? The risks of placemaking are that they mask these less-salubrious dimensions of community and serve to exclude vulnerable people who may be part of the reason that space is abandoned or run down.2 Spatial placemaking, without social placemaking, can play on and reinforce the ‘tainted’ nature of some communities, like Lennox Street. This ‘leads to individuals being “discredited” and “disqualified” within beguiling conversations about “up lift” and “renewal” and “improvement”’.3,4 The opportunities of placemaking, in contrast, rest in acknowledging these potential exclusions and in finding routes for co-production that create a mutual language (neighbourhood, place) for people very different from one another. This is challenging because the very contestation of neighbourhoods like Lennox Street relates to the different needs that people have of the same place that sits in tension. People experiencing homelessness need the public realm to be a living space and many others in the community are discomfited by that need, for example. These opportunities lead us to define placemaking as a social act and a practice of co-production versus being a matter of just spatial (re)design or even the social activation of place after an expert-led change to it. This chapter (and this studio) very much focuses on that social intervention that occurs through co-design and seeks to demonstrate how planners, designers, and placemakers can acknowledge and work with hyper diversity.

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Studio Overview This studio, ‘Inclusive public spaces in diverse communities’ or Studio D, ran as a ‘capstone’ studio in the Master of Urban Planning programme at the University of Melbourne.5 Studio D was a funded Sandbox studio, contributing to the development and testing of approaches to teaching placemaking across seven Australian universities (see ‘Reimagining Place Through the Sandbox Studio Pedagogy’ for a deeper discussion of the Sandbox studio programme and goals). Eleven students enrolled in the studio, and all were successful in completing the module. The studio challenged students to explore the theory and practice of inclusive placemaking using the Lennox Street corridor (from Victoria Street to Highett Street) in North Richmond as a case study site.6 This corridor’s ‘super diversity’ and contestation enabled the urban planning students to wrestle with the question ‘how inclusive public spaces can be truly inclusive for very different people and their needs?’7 Supporting the studio were various stakeholder agency and community partners, including: • The City of Yarra (the local council) • The Neighbourhood Justice Centre (Melbourne’s first community justice centre and Magistrates Court) • The Yarra Drug and Health Forum (representing allied professionals working in drug and alcohol policy and treatment/services across the municipality) • The Residents for Victoria Street Drug Solutions (a community group pivotal to the lobbying for and establishment of the Medically Supervised Injecting Room [MSIR]) The North Richmond Community Health Centre; the MSIR; the Richmond Salvation Army; and special guest lecturers Hatice Yilmaz (Richmond Tenants’ Association), Blake Farmar-Bowers (City of Yarra), and Matt Novacevski (the University of Melbourne) were also critical agencies for the studio, offering resources and expertise. The range of agency and community partners was expansive with reason. First, the studio relied heavily on an applied framework of learning, and the students spent about half of their contact hours with people from the community (and the other half linking that practical experience back to theory/literature). Second, the local agencies associated with spatial

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and social placemaking in Lennox Street and in the wider Victoria Street neighbourhood are as diverse as the populations living in the area. The nuances of co-production started with co-producing the studio experience itself. Studio D was also process-focused and participatory. The focus was on the techniques that urban planners could harness in order to consult and collaborate with people who are very different from themselves and from each other and, in effect, to apply placemaking principles to the social spaces people share. The learning outcomes were less physical (e.g., to implement a design) as procedural (e.g., how to co-design with hyper-­ diverse groups of stakeholders and community members). Accordingly, the key concepts of Studio D were the sociability of space, spatial and social justice, diversity, inclusion/exclusion, and displacement that relate to place and placemaking. There were three demographic groups in the Victoria Street neighbourhood that the studio took particular interest in drawing into the social placemaking discussions: middle years’ children and young people (aged nine and above), people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, and people under the influence of drugs or alcohol. These three groups each contribute to the diversity of the neighbourhood in critical fashion while also suffering unique exclusions from traditional placemaking processes. The Victoria Street neighbourhood is heavily defined and shaped by those of Vietnamese, Chinese, and other Southeast Asian descent. Accordingly, it was critical to develop mechanisms to engage across language and culture to involve these communities. In addition to the established Asian communities, emerging communities from Africa and the Middle East are also settling in the neighbourhood. These CALD communities were also important to the question of inclusive public spaces, especially as the welcoming of new migrants is so telling of an area’s inclusivity. Currently, children are heavy users of some space and absent from others in the Lennox Street corridor. The ability of children to access and enjoy public spaces is considered an indicator of broader community access and inclusion. Additionally, children are rarely consulted directly in regard to planning, design, or development.8,9 Thus, this studio offered an important opportunity to co-design with children. Finally, the use of the area as a site of drug users presents a unique challenge to questions of ‘rights to the city’ and belonging. There is hardly a more stigmatised and marginalised identity to encounter in the public

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realm, and the injecting drug user people encounter is easily dismissed as ‘deviant, odd, strange or criminal’ and ‘abhorrent, embarrassing, disgusting, unwelcome’.10 The ways in which people with challenging public behaviours and identities intersect with placemaking processes and outcomes provoke the questions of ‘who belongs?’ and ‘who is invited?’. This was one of the focuses of the studio. Ethics The human research ethics of this Studio was complex, particularly around students’ engagement with the three ‘risk’ groups in the community mentioned above. Human research ethics for Studio D was approved in September 2018 by the Human Ethics Advisory Group (Humanities and Law) of the University of Melbourne. The application reference is HRE 1852218.1.

Studio Outcomes Through a place-based and applied approach, we embedded student projects in the real world, with real issues and real stakeholders. Issues of contestation within the site, especially around the issue of public drug use and the trial of Melbourne’s first MSIR, were highly publicised in the time leading up to the studio, and the negative narratives often presented in the media were readily accessible. Throughout the studio, we challenged students to question dominant narratives about the site and the individuals who live, work, and visit the North Richmond area. Engaging in the reality of this social context was confronting at times. It was, however, through this confrontation and through the process of engaging directly with those present within the site that students were able to develop their plans for an inclusive public place. As described above, the North Richmond site is contested, and there are complex issues surrounding the inclusiveness of the site. To introduce these issues and guide the students through the site, we assembled a panel of project partners from organisations who engage with the issues in the area on a professional level. Acting as clients, the panel briefed the students on what they saw as challenges to and opportunities for the inclusivity of the site from their professional perspectives. Throughout this briefing, we heard stories of the partners’ personal experiences, especially in relation to drug use in the public domain. The partners’ compassion

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and empathy for those who had been structurally marginalised was recognised and taken on board by the students. Through a Q&A forum, the students had an opportunity to ask more direct questions about their new clients. The key themes raised throughout the discussion included a focus on diversity, drug addiction as a health issue, harm minimisation, challenging behaviours, perceptions of safety, and the power of narrative. Following the briefing, we were guided through the site by project partners. The tour ventured into the back alleys, where discarded drug-­ injecting paraphernalia gave the students clues as to the landscapes of illicit drug use and the extent of the issue in this neighbourhood. The tour group met with a contract worker collecting and disposing of the discarded syringes, who shared his perspective of the use of the public realm and the ways in which conditions had changed since the introduction of the MSIR. The tour stopped and discussed a mural commemorating those who had died of drug overdose (and commissioned by a residents’ group). The tour group, finally, made its way through the public and quasi-public green spaces surrounding the public housing and finished up at the new MSIR, which is located at the North Richmond Community Health Centre, while discussing the concerns and stigmas associated with these spaces. The benefit of this place-based approach was to ground issues (e.g., public drug use and poor perceptions of safety) in a lived reality and to encourage students to see these issues from the ground rather than above as is typical within urban planning (Fig. 2). By embedding the introduction to the studio onsite, we focussed the student’s attention on the issues of contestation between stakeholders. Setting an Inclusive Public Places Plan11 as the major assessment cemented this contestation for a central theme throughout the studio. Although inclusive Public Places Plans are not common in Australian planning policy, the concept of re-orienting open space planning to be more inclusive draws on established and emerging public policy discourse. Our introduction to the site, its complex issues, and layers of contestation encouraged the students to develop not only their understanding of the complexity of the site but also of their own positioning in relation to its issues. With the issues raised onsite fresh in mind, we read Fincher, Pardy, and Shaw’s critique on placemaking in the article ‘Place-Making or Place-Masking? The Everyday Political Economy of ‘Making Place’’.12 Through the subsequent discussion of this reading, we encouraged students to consider what their roles might be as placemakers within this

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Fig. 2  Visiting the Lennox Street site with Studio D (mapping and spot interviews) (Photo by Andrea Cook)

contested site and how they might engage with the divergent needs and desires of the many stakeholders within the site to facilitate a more inclusive outcome. This thought-provoking reading sparked discussions throughout the semester and challenged the students to think beyond top-down approaches towards more engaged and inclusive forms of placemaking. As studio leaders, we acted as facilitators, giving students autonomy to guide their own research interests and design their methodology accordingly. To guide the students through the research process, we provided a worksheet that asked them to identify key research problems and to consider where their curiosity lay. A concise table laid out a method for working through the design of their research project with columns for key issues, theoretical links, methods, and analysis. Thinking about the research process in this methodical way allowed the students to narrow down their focus, highlight (and fill) the knowledge gaps, consider how they might produce data, and cultivate answers to their research questions.

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Students were responsible for figuring out these links on their own or working collaboratively with their peers. We further supported the students through this process by designing key sessions around essential knowledge areas, such as designing and conducting ethical research, applied social research methodologies, theory, and positioning in research, and methods of analysis. These targeted sessions gave the students the requisite knowledge to plan their research within the ethical bounds of our university-approved research project. Early in the semester, we designed a session that had a profound impact on the students’ line of thinking about difference. We used role-play to encourage students to think from another’s perspective. The students were randomly assigned an identity category and asked to think about how an individual identifying with this category might experience the public space of Lennox Street. Identity categories included indigenous, refugee, ice user, homeless, and schizophrenic. Students watched the corresponding episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s You Can’t Ask That television programme.13 On returning, students were engaged in dialogues with their peers, each championing the diverse and potentially divergent values, needs, and desires of the identity category they represented. Positioning the students as champions of these marginalised communities highlighted the challenges to reaching consensus among multiple diverse stakeholders through singular planning recommendations and interventions. The discussion that followed highlighted issues on the conflicting needs and values, misconceptions and misunderstanding due to stereotyping, and the difficulty in determining how urban planning might accommodate these multiple diverse stakeholders within traditional rationalist/utilitarian planning models. We also facilitated sessions with a range of professionals working in the area to provide students with insights into the complexity of issues through specific lens, such as health and well-being, cross-cultural, design and placemaking, spatial analysis, evaluating placemaking, and social policy. These sessions took the form of a single professional or a panel of professionals speaking about a particular issue. We did this to encourage the students to consider the site from different angles and to understand the complex issues experienced by the community more completely. The panel examining the site through a health and cross-cultural lens included professionals working in general and drug healthcare and a local resident with experiences as migrant woman, mother, and community

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member. This panel presented another critical moment in the students’ journey towards understanding the complexity of the issue of public drug use within the community. The poignant stories shared by these individuals, invested in the positive growth and development of their community, had a profound impact on the group. The stories shared, within both their professional and personal capacities, highlighted connection, care, and a deep respect for other humans. These stories humanised a marginalised population who are often negatively portrayed in mainstream media. Our aim was to provide the environment and context necessary to enable the students to learn and to allow them to achieve the learning outcomes through their own experiences and their collective reflections on these experiences. This meant that the more formal, instructor-led learning (e.g., lectures on theoretical and applied topics) was augmented by student-led learning (e.g., student presentations/discussions on their work to date and negotiation of shared research methods). This approach sought to build capacities in both critical thinking and research as well as in participatory modes that supported peer learning and learning from laypeople in the community. To this end, the teaching team were facilitators as much as directors of the students’ learning—we were there to offer support and guidance when required and to encourage self-direction and peer-to-peer learning. Working collectively within the studio had costs and benefits. There were clear moments of peer-to-peer learning throughout the studio. For example, in sessions when students reviewed one another’s research, framing, and progress, they had the opportunity not only to share their progress but also to give and receive critical feedback with their peers. These discussions provided a fertile ground on which to expand their own understanding of the issues and then develop their methodological approaches. These discussions clearly demonstrated the benefits of collaborating, with students sharing their expertise and challenging one another’s work— these were moments of growth. In contrast, there were times when working collaboratively, particularly when collecting data, exacerbated the differences in expertise and level of confidence of the students. The result was an uneven level of work by the students. When students’ requirements overlapped, we encouraged collaboration to collect data. This plan worked well for behaviour mapping as it allowed the students to collectively cover key points of interest across the site in a short allocation of time. However, the process decided on for digitising and sharing data was time consuming. For the students whose

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research did not rely heavily on this data, there was little impetus to digitise and share their data as planned and this inconvenienced students who did have a critical need of the data for their analysis. The ramifications of this decision negatively impacted on some students in the longer term—a common challenge of group work within an academic context. However, the experience seemed to provide a learning experience. When it came to sharing data from the later pop-up event, students negotiated to share it in a relatively unprocessed state. Reducing the time commitment required to share the data meant that everyone had access to the same data, thus mitigating the risk of students being disadvantaged through the process of working collectively. In contrast with this collective effort, students individually designed their participant interviews and/or surveys with questions reflecting their individual research focus. We dedicated two onsite sessions to collect these data, but we made it clear that there was an expectation that they would strengthen this with further face-to-face data collection in their own time. The repercussions of students not taking this advice were evident in their final assessments and compounded the stress they felt when others did not share data from the behaviour mapping. The experience of engaging directly, particularly with marginalised individuals, was cited by the students as one of the most powerful experiences of the studio. There was a level of apprehension as the students approached this task and initial difficulty in soliciting involvement. When these moments of engagement did transpire, however, the students connected deeply with the narratives of the community and its diverse members. For several students, these moments proved to be the turning points in their research focus and in the framing of their plans. For one student, the process of engagement itself became the basis of the research and plan. A pop-up event, designed by the students with the support of the partners and teaching team, was held in September 2018. It was designed around structured engagement activities (e.g., a community mapping activity exploring loved and hated aspects of the space) and more informal engagement (e.g., open-ended interviews and discussions). It was held in the open space outside the North Richmond Community Health Centre and included a free BBQ for participants. As a result, the pop-up event brought diverse groups of people together within a single space for a single cause—their community. This provided students with intimate encounters with people they would not have otherwise engaged with (Fig.  3). They uncovered the personal stories of these individuals in the common

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Fig. 3  The pop-up event staged by the students at the Lennox Street site (Photo by Andrea Cook)

values that had the power to bridge differences. These learnings inspired the student’s final work regarding how to foster an inclusive place within such a contested space. The legacy of this outcome is the education of future planners in the art of sensitivity and active engagement with the community. The students left the studio with a solid understanding of the level of nuance required to achieve successful placemaking outcomes. They were equipped with the knowledge that inclusive forms of engagement are crucial to inclusive forms of placemaking. The students experienced first-hand the challenges of engaging with the whole community, the necessity of examining power relations within planning processes, and working towards actively engaging with the ‘hard to reach’ members of a community in order to give people autonomy in the placemaking process. The practitioner relationships that were fostered throughout the studio and which continue to be strengthened moving forward are a legacy of the project. In particular, building on the studio and other related research (Restorative Yarra 2018), a new piece of research (Narrating

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Neighbourhood 2019) has been granted funding to explore the power of narrative to bring a community together and to develop understanding and solidarity despite the differences. The power of narrative was continuously highlighted throughout the studio and within several of the student’s final plans.

Key Insights In this final section, we will distil some of the key learnings/insights that have arisen from Studio D. We then focus on the outcomes of teaching placemaking in a dynamic, ‘live’ community. The first and most critical insight is that the embedded nature of Studio D proved to be a very important and very useful pedagogy for teaching students about placemaking, particularly within a contested and diverse area like the Lennox Street corridor. Students (and teachers and community as well) go to areas like Lennox Street with some durable preconceptions about public housing, drug use, homelessness, gentrification, and so on. The intersection of these issues in a small area, like the Lennox Street corridor, can be very confronting. It would be easy to be convinced or to convince others, on student safety or research ethics grounds, to avoid such an area and to exclude some of the community members that Studio D engaged with. Placemaking, as a process of co-production, greatly requires including these people and these spaces. Although there are ethical reasons, such as those related to citizens’ rights to the city and to city building processes, there are also pragmatic reasons.14,15 As people leading very public lives are living those lives in places like Lennox Street, they can contribute to or dismantle the sort of activations and improvements to community spaces that placemaking seeks to facilitate. Enabling the contact that students had with diverse stakeholders in Studio D was complicated. For example, it involved fostering studio partnerships with diverse agencies and supporting their active participation in the curriculum. It also involved designing a programme rationale and protocols that would satisfy human research ethics at the university. Although these investments can be onerous, they are still necessary and do make a difference to students’ learning experience. A second key insight concerns the products of placemaking. Placemaking is associated with material changes to environments.16 These are important aspects of placemaking. Our studio did not result in any of these sorts

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of changes, however: its products were social and relational. Not only are these valid outcomes for placemaking, but also they are generally critical if the material changes are to endure and enrich. Tangible placemaking outcomes (the physical and material changes to spaces) are, in our experience, subservient to the intangible outcomes (the interactions people have with each other and the physical space).17 This is the essence of placemaking. We also found that the intangible procedural outcomes—including even the most disenfranchised—was an important gesture in terms of real and perceived social justice (Fig. 4). Lennox Street is the sort of ‘a concrete abstraction’ that Lefebvre describes: ‘full of symbols, the source of an intense circulation of information and messages, “spiritual” exchanges, representations, ideology, knowledge bound up with power’.18 These abstractions interact with and produce the concrete and the social spaces of Lennox Street. At the centre of the conflicting ideas about and experiences of this space are those, like injecting drug users, whose lives are led quite publicly and who are

Fig. 4  A note from a pop-up event participant (Photo by Andrea Cook)

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traditionally disenfranchised. Their activities in the public realm have become intimately associated with the construction of neighbourhood identity, in ‘both physical and representational spaces’.19 Yet it is rare for drug users and/or people experiencing homelessness to be included in the decision-­making process of place. Their inclusion in the discursive spaces of this placemaking studio changed people’s impressions of each other because people cooperated with people who they did not normally encounter in anything other than a fleeting way. In collaborating on a vision for the future, both the specificity and the universality of people’s use of and connection to Lennox Street became apparent—this was the third insight. People with entirely different life circumstances often shared common values and goals. For example, many drug users expressed genuine and sometimes fierce protective impulses about the children of the neighbourhood, citing their safety and comfort as the principal priority for placemaking efforts in the area. This impulse extended to describing the ways in which they themselves should be contained and separated from children. Others talked about broader safety issues, claiming, ‘We want to keep this site safe. We don’t want the cops coming down here or have problems that would cause the cops to come or anything like that. We want the place to be a community’.20 Similarly, there were tender and protective expressions made by the broader community towards those experiencing trauma and addiction. This direct encounter strengthened these sentiments and stood in contrast to the more impersonal media and social media cover, where people are not co-mingling and where views of those at a ‘social distance’21 are more antagonistic. Encounter across difference is an important tool for highlighting the shared values people hold and for prompting the caring and care-full relations to be revealed.22 These intangible outcomes were powerful for students as well. Different students reflected on the ways they had grown and struggled with the relational and social aspects of the Studio: • ‘I didn’t expect it to be this fulfilling.’ • ‘People engage and hear their stories but it’s about what happens from that moment. I hope I can do justice to that engagement. It’s not enough to just collect data or hear a story; but how then will you transform that into change?’ • ‘I’ve had quite personal conversations with different people who express that they don’t normally have this opportunity to share or

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voice their opinions. It confronting—experience.’

has

been

an

eye

opening—and

These reflections reveal students’ growing self-awareness as professionals and reinforce the importance of reflective practice. The studio, as a process, facilitated the students, seeing that ‘our lives are shaped by practices and beliefs that we mostly take for granted’ and that planners need to ‘engage in “archaeological” or “genealogical” work to bring these assumptions to the surface and critically evaluate their dynamics’.23

Chapter Summary Like many places globally, the Lennox Street corridor in inner-city Melbourne, Australia, is a place of both cooperation and conflict across considerable socio-cultural, economic, and lived experience difference. The ‘inclusive public spaces in diverse communities’ studio—or Studio D—was an attempt to teach students to think critically about the theories and realities of what ‘place’ means (and to whom) and to wrestle with how placemaking might ensure equity and care, even to the most disenfranchised in our communities. Within sociology, the literature and applied research/teaching around social justice, stigma, and inclusion/exclusion are extensive, yet that work is generally population focused (e.g., on vulnerable cohorts in society). Urban planning and placemaking offer new scope to understand contestation, community, and cohesion across and between cohorts focusing on a shared element of very different lives: the neighbourhood. Additionally, as ‘built environment researchers…have been slow to adopt constructivist grounded theory as a research method’,24 placemaking with a focus on inclusion offers a way to fill a gap in planning students’ professional toolkits, making them more rounded practitioners. Planners who are better able to work through the challenges of community engagement and through the more ‘wicked’ aspects of the community—power, marginalisation, stigma—are better able to deliver beautiful and inclusive places for people. These are lofty normative ideals for teaching placemaking to students, but the findings from our Studio D experiment are really promising. Students experienced skills growth and all passed against the quantitative measures of university learning at a Master’s level. They also demonstrated

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that learning can be qualitative and experiential and lead to a fundamental shift in the way students think about place and community.25,26 The techniques used in Studio D to prompt this type of learning experience were not terribly complex: 1. We were both theoretically oriented (with material covering scholarly reflections on and critiques of placemaking) and practice oriented (with hands-on application of methods ranging from mapping to interviewing). 2. We expected students to be brave and talk to/work with people they wouldn’t normally (including professional partners that were not urban planners). 3. We challenged preconceptions about stigmatised and/or marginalised communities. 4. We did much of the learning (almost 50 per cent of the contact hours) onsite/in community. This chapter demonstrates how focusing on the processes of placemaking, as well as outcomes themselves, fosters inclusivity. The discursive spaces created through the placemaking studio demonstrated the power of encounter across difference to highlight shared values and common goals within hyper-diverse and contested contexts. Through an applied framework of learning, a group of future planners refined their skills in methods of active engagement. Facilitating these processes is a key to achieve social and relational outcomes that enrich more traditional and tangible placemaking outcomes.

Notes 1. Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” Social Theory and Practice 12, no. 1 (1986): 1–26. 2. Ruth Fincher, Maree Pardee, and Kate Shaw, “Place-Making or Place-­ Masking? The Everyday Political Economy of ‘Making Place’,” Planning Theory & Practice 17, no. 4 (2016): 516–536. 3. Paul Kirkness and Andreas Tijé-Dra, eds., Negative Neighbourhood Reputation and Place Attachment: The Production and Contestation of Territorial Stigma (London: Routledge, 2017), 23. 4. Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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5. For more information about ‘capstone’ studios, see https://edsc.unimelb. edu.au/graduate/subject-options/msd-studios/mup-studio. 6. From the subject manual provided to students. 7. Ibid. 8. Andrea Cook, “Children’s Citizenship,” in Risk, Protection, Provision, and Policy, eds. Claire Freeman, Paul Tranter, and Tracey Skelton (Singapore: Springer, 2016), 1–29. 9. Karen Malone and Catherine Hartung, “Challenges of Participatory Practice with Children,” in A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, eds. Barry PercySmith and Nigel Thomas (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2010), 24–38. 10. Deanna Grant-Smith and Natalie Osborne, “Dealing with Discomfort: How the Unspeakable Confounds Wicked Planning Problems,” Australian Planner 53, no. 1 (2016): 46. 11. While Inclusive Public Places Plans are not common in Australian planning policy, the concept of reorienting open space planning to be more inclusive draws on established and emerging public policy discourse. For example: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/ urban-development/migrants-inclusion-in-cities/good-practices/ inclusion-through-access-to-public-space/. 12. Fincher, Pardee, and Shaw, “Place-Making.” 13. You Can’t Ask That. Seasons 1–3. Directed by Kirk Docker and Aaron Smith. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Aired 2016–2018. 14. Mark Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,” GeoJournal 58, nos. 2–3 (2002): 99–108. 15. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1991). 16. Jill Sweeney, Kathy Mee, Pauline McGuirk, and Kristian Ruming, “Assembling Placemaking: Making and Remaking Place in a Regenerating City,” Cultural Geographies 25, no. 4 (2018): 571–587. 17. Jess D.  Linz, “Inhabiting the Impasse: Social Exclusion through Visible Assemblage in Neighborhood Gentrification,” Geoforum 85 (2017): 131–139. 18. Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 224. 19. Darrin Hodgetts, Ottilie Stolte, Alan Radley, Chez Leggatt-Cook, Shiloh Groot, and Kerry Chamberlain, “‘Near and Far’ Social Distancing in Domiciled Characterisations of Homeless People,” Urban Studies 48, no. 8 (2011): 1741. 20. Studio D Pop-Up event participant, 20 September 2018. 21. Hodgetts et al., “‘Near and Far,’” 1739–1753. 22. Mirriam J. Williams, “Care-Full Justice in the City,” Antipode 49, no. 3 (2017): 821–839.

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23. Patsy Healey, Making Better Places: The Planning Project in the Twenty-­ First Century (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2010), 55. 24. Natalie Allen and Mark Davey, “The Value of Constructivist Grounded Theory for Built Environment Researchers,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 38, no. 2 (2018): 225. 25. Mads Bølling, Rikke Hartmeyer, and Peter Bentsen, “Seven Place-­ Conscious Methods to Stimulate Situational Interest in Science Teaching in Urban Environments,” Education 3–13 47, no. 2 (2019): 162–175. 26. Mavi Akkaya Yilmaz and Ufuk Karakus, “The Impact of Place-Based Education Approach on Student Achievement in Social Studies,” Review of International Geographical Education Online 8, no. 3 (2018): 500–516.

Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design: A Case Study Judy Bush, Cristina Hernandez-Santin, and Dominique Hes

Abstract  Creating and shaping urban green spaces involves a diversity of voices and encompasses a range of priorities and approaches. This chapter presents a case study of a collaborative design process for a small, yet treasured parkland located within a community and transport hub area in Melbourne. The design process centred on a multidisciplinary Placemaking Sandbox Studio, with 18 students from architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning disciplines working in small multidisciplinary teams to develop design options for the park. Students worked with local traders, artists, and community members to research and develop placemaking design interventions. The Sandbox Studio focused on developing

J. Bush (*) • D. Hes Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C. Hernandez-Santin Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_6

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students’ placemaking skills in a local design context. We found that communication and in particular listening are key design skills in placemaking approaches. Keywords  Urban green space • Collaboration • Placemaking pedagogy • Community engagement • Social-ecological

Introduction The parks and green spaces in our cities provide valued places for urban residents, both human and non-human. Green spaces contribute to cooler cities, healthier air, and habitat for biodiversity. They provide places for relaxing, meeting and socialising, planting and growing food, thereby contributing to mental and physical health, well-being, and community cohesion. Creating and shaping our urban green spaces potentially involves a diversity of stakeholders’ views, priorities, and approaches. This chapter presents a case study of a collaborative, placemaking design approach for a small, yet treasured, parkland located within a community and transport hub in western Melbourne. The design process centred on an interdisciplinary Placemaking Sandbox studio comprising 18 students, which was delivered as an intensive project during the summer semester. The studio’s methodology and pedagogy were informed by research from Place Agency, which is a consortium of Australian universities and funded by the Myer Foundation.1 Place Agency’s key goal is to increase the placemaking capacity of built-environment graduates and professionals. The Foundation’s aim in funding the project is that through placemaking, we will have a greater capacity to love places, create stronger stewardship, and lead the practice towards both social and ecological benefits. Place Agency has developed a ‘Sandbox studio methodology’ to experiment with and explore how to embed placemaking within the existing design and planning teaching. This chapter outlines the Place Agency studio pedagogy and presents its application in the Newport studio. The studio’s content, outcomes, and the reflections of key participants are presented and discussed. The chapter concludes by highlighting seven key lessons for educators and studio leaders.

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Place Agency’s Sandbox Approach to Placemaking Studios The key to the education strategy of the Place Agency approach is the use of existing design and planning studios to provide opportunities for students to learn about placemaking while interacting with and contributing to real-world projects. The Sandbox studio provides a space where students can test placemaking initiatives, community consultation, and co-­ creation strategies. The key elements of the Sandbox studio pedagogy were identified during a workshop that Place Agency held with placemaking practitioners, developers, and local government partners.2 The workshop identified 62 characteristics of a great placemaker. For example, the roles of facilitation and building trust were seen as critical to successfully enable the placemaking process; they are integral to the placemaker’s ability to listen, understand, and connect with the community while also generating quality design options. The 62 skills identified during the workshop were categorised as analytical (head), affective (heart), or practical (hand) skills. These were synthesised based on the principles of VALUE rubrics,3 tailored to the specific needs of the Place Agency approach, to create the Place Agency ‘competency sunflower’ rubric (discussed in Chap. 2, ‘Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning’, of this book). The Place Agency sunflower rubric utilises a series of surveys before and after the studio to allow students and teachers to track the progress of placemaking skills development. Many of the competencies that were identified require continuing practice and real-world application; ongoing practice-based learning is critical to successful placemaking pedagogy. The Sandbox studio pedagogy was designed to be flexible and adaptable to a variety of disciplines and themes using a structure that addresses feedback from both students and studio leaders. The structure includes a focus on a practice-led approach, engagement with the community, establishing local partnerships and ongoing project legacy, and utilising an assessment framework to evaluate the project’s placemaking success. Sandbox studios also need to have established communities for the students to engage with and to have clearly outlined objectives that are easily adaptable to the duration of a semester (usually 14  weeks). The studios need to be developed in collaboration with local partners, with a commitment to implement the outcomes or potential of the studio and support a positive legacy. This ‘potential’ could include student

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employment, implementing some of the students’ ideas, and improved community relationships. As part of Place Agency’s support for the development of the studio pedagogy, each participating studio had access to a small budget so that the students could experiment with community engagement strategies and prototype placemaking initiatives. Place Agency’s intention is that after two years of running the Sandbox studios, there will be inspiring stories of their successes and lessons that will underpin the continued application of the pedagogical approach.4

Newport Studio: Place and Process From January to February 2018, during Australia’s summer semester period (when most students are on an annual break), we held a Place Agency Sandbox studio in Newport, a middle-ring suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The studio focused on Paine Reserve, a small park (about 4000 m2) with trees and shrub plantings, mown grass, and a playground. The park is located between a café, a lawn bowls club, and a community hub that houses the Hobsons Bay Council’s library, youth resources centre, maternal and child health centre, and facilities for seniors and cultural groups. The park fronts onto a shopping precinct and transport hub, with a train station, bus stop, and taxi rank all nearby. The major transport infrastructure, including the train line and a major roadway, creates substantial barriers for movement between the two sides of the suburb (Fig. 1). The Newport studio’s creation was prompted when members of the Newport’s Traders Association and the local arts production company, Hubcap Productions, approached Place Agency researchers. They requested student input into their local government-funded project investigating options for greater activation of Paine Reserve. As a result of their approach, the Newport studio was developed. It was designed to address these local needs and to contribute to Place Agency’s Sandbox studio pedagogical approach. The aim of the Newport studio was to re-design the park to accommodate increased future use associated with urban growth and to address park users’ needs (e.g. safety, amenity, shade, etc.). The studio site has the potential to reconnect and reinvigorate the area and to provide a valued community space. A total of 18 students from the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning disciplines worked in small

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Fig. 1  The studio site, Paine Reserve and the surrounding Newport area. (Source: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence https://www. openstreetmap.org/copyright)

interdisciplinary teams to apply placemaking, community engagement, urban planning, and design thinking towards the development of design options for the park. The studio sessions were held onsite in the adjacent community centre, where the windows overlook the parkland, enabling the development of a deeper familiarity with the site and its daily life. Local traders and artists, the local government, community members, and park users were also involved in the project. The Newport studio ran as an intensive project over seven weeks and focused strongly on the community engagement and co-creation strategies of placemaking. Across the studio process, the students worked closely with the two local partners (Newport Traders Association and Hubcap Productions) and with a small group of artists to develop conceptual designs for the park redevelopment. The students’ designs that were developed during the studio subsequently contributed to wider community planning and design processes, including the local Art and Industry Festival held in November 2018. Students were introduced to place and placemaking concepts and practices—from pioneering approaches5,6,7 to contemporary projects,

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methodologies and frameworks,8,9,10 local placemakers, including Village Well and CoDesign Studio,11,12 which presented examples of their own placemaking work and discussed the key principles that underpin their approaches. Importantly, apart from a one-line brief ‘the Paine Reserve needs to serve its community better’, we did not give the students prescriptive guidance; we asked them to start by listening to the community. We stressed the importance of the difference between ‘consultation’ and deeper ‘engagement’. The former is sometimes characterised by more structured and rigid data collection processes of surveys and interviews, whereas the latter is characterised by co-creation in which the community members have active agency in developing the outcomes of the process. We used ‘games’ to build students’ skills in active and engaged listening, to explore the concepts of systems thinking, and to embed a theme of playful, collaborative openness and creativity (Box 1).

Box 1  Teaching Activities to Build Active Listening, Collaboration, and Systems Thinking Skills

Activities that are playful and physically and conceptually dynamic are instructive for building students’ skills. These activities are designed to teach listening, empathy, creativity, and understanding complexity. These form part of a suite of tools drawn in part from improvisation practices, which facilitate ‘Collective improvisation … when the actors interact by trusting and caring for one another; listening to and hearing others; and building on others’ initiations and contributions’ (Nisula and Kianto 2018). Activity one: YES AND ‘Yes and’ (Leonard and Yorton 2015) builds skills and understanding of the difference between conversations that are open, creative, and generative and of those that are closed and restrictive. The studio leaders or facilitators first introduce a conversation with someone who is negative and keeps saying ‘no but’ and ‘we’ve tried that before’. Then they demonstrate a conversation where the comments are ‘YES great idea, what I like about your idea is … AND here is my idea. …’ The students then practise this activity with planning a holiday in pairs. This process, and the principle of always (continued)

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Box 1  (continued)

constructively building on each other’s ideas, becomes central to the design of the studio’s community engagement data gathering activities as well as the development of final place intervention designs. Activity two: Systems thinking This activity aims to interactively demonstrate how system ‘rules’ shape the system’s form and operations (Quaden et al. 2009). The process starts with asking two students to step out of the room, then explaining the system rule to the remaining students. In the first ‘run’ of the system game, each participant silently picks two other students from whom they need to keep equidistant, by moving around the room. As all the students start moving, call the two students back in to the room, and ask them to observe the ‘system’ and try to guess the rule that is regulating it. The two students can ask yes or no questions and discuss them with each other. After a short amount of time, reveal the rule if they haven’t been able to identify it. Discuss with everyone how complex systems often have very simple ‘rules’ governing them: if these simple rules can be revealed and understood, it may be possible to then intervene in or change the system very quickly. To illustrate this, ask the students to pick two different people (one is the ‘protector’ and the other is the ‘lion’). The student has to try to stay behind the protector who is protecting them from the lion. Watch how the system changes and then discuss this with the students.

The students’ first role was to design ways to entice community members to provide input about their local park and their hopes for its future. Designing this engagement became a key element of the preliminary site analysis. The students organised and delivered the community engagement event, held on 19 January 2018, in week 3 of the studio. Each of the four student teams established an engagement station, which was distributed throughout the park. They asked the community to envisage the potential of the park: What is working well and what is needed? What are your hobbies and how can the park support them? One team created ‘The Imaginarium’, a transparent ‘canvas’ where community members could

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Fig. 2  Community consultation by Newport Project studio. Left: The Imaginarium. Right: The Wishing Tree (Photo by Michelle Fisher)

paint their vision (Fig.  2, left). Another team established the ‘Wishing Tree’ where people could express what they loved and what they wished for in their park (Fig. 2, right). Students were asked to apply the key principles from the teaching activities (Box 1) to ensure that their community engagement approaches fostered a sense of participatory design for community members. In addition, the students were encouraged to look for the simple ‘rules’ of the place that their design could address and that would make the park work more effectively for the community. Following the community engagement event, the students worked in their interdisciplinary teams to analyse the results of their community engagement interventions and to translate these into design responses and proposals for the Paine Reserve Park. Students used their disciplinary training and expertise to bring specialised architectural, landscape design and urban planning perspectives and research to the development of park proposals. Two weeks after the community engagement, initial design proposals were presented to the studio collaborators Hubcap Productions, local artists, and local Council officers to share ideas and seek feedback. Following this, the students finalised their designs for the end-of-semester assessment. Importantly, after the formal academic assessment process, students were also able to join the artists in presenting their designs and to seek feedback from the community members at an exhibition in the adjacent Newport Substation arts exhibition space at the end of February 2018. The key skills (learning outcomes) that the studio aimed to develop in the students include the following: • Design engagement interventions that facilitate the community’s voice in the placemaking project.

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• Collect and analyse both site-based and community engagement data to inform the development of site designs. • Propose creative solutions that respond to site analysis and community consultation, as well as local strategic and statutory planning frameworks. • Understand the relationships between planning and design, and between society, environment, space, and politics. • Develop professional communication and presentation skills with community, business, and government stakeholders.

Newport Studio’s Place-Based Outcomes The Newport studio provided a unique and valuable opportunity to trial new approaches to studio learning, by applying the Placemaking Sandbox pedagogy to park design at Paine Reserve. The students’ designs for the park reflected their engagement with the site’s complexities, with the range of park users and their needs and hopes for the space, as well as with the wider context within which the park is located. The Newport studio generated several successful outcomes for both place and participants. The local arts production company and studio collaborator Hubcap Productions received an arts funding grant to implement one of the design elements created by the local artist Bindi Cole Chocka. Several of the studio’s students documented the design proposals for submission to the local council. The submission was successful: the Council allocated funding for park upgrade and integrated design elements into the park’s future design plan. Reflections on Newport Studio’s Sandbox Methodology The Newport studio’s pedagogical approach sought to embed skills development in place-based community engagement and interdisciplinarity, in addition to the ‘standard’ teaching studio focus on design and planning skills development. By physically locating the studio teaching ‘on site’ and providing opportunities for student interaction with the site, the community, and the broader context, the studio enabled an inherently place-based planning and design response. It also underpinned for the students a deepened awareness of and engagement with the diversity of park users and stakeholders. This section presents feedback from students and collaborators on the studio process, and discusses how the studio pedagogy underpinned the overall planning and design outcomes.

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Studio participants, partners, and community members provided feedback and reflections on the studio’s process, activities, and outcomes. Student feedback was gathered through responses to the end-of-semester surveys and through emails from students to studio leaders. Feedback from other participants and collaborators (including staff from Hubcap Productions, artists, local traders, and local council officers) was gathered from semi-structured interviews and from emails to studio leaders. To ensure confidentiality, no participants’ names or job titles have been used. They are referred to using unique identifiers (e.g. ‘Student 3’). The students reflected on the importance of engaging with the community through ‘games and fun activities’ instead of standard survey or interview-type approaches. Some students highlighted the difference in community consultation processes, which are less active, and those of the studio in which the engagement or co-creation promotes the community’s agency in the outcomes: I now feel that I know the difference between community consultation and community engagement. (Student 1)

The students welcomed the challenge of transforming placemaking concepts into practice and especially enjoyed the practical approach of the studio pedagogy: [We] are often taught how important consultation is … learning what all the steps are in conducting a full [engagement] was incredibly helpful. (Student 2) [I now] appreciate how useful these skills are. (Student 3) It’s got a whole lot more complicated now. … until you engage with the people, you have no idea because it’s not your interpretation that matters; it’s the user’s interpretation of that place that’s important. (Student 4)

For the students, the ability to work on a real project, with all its potential and problems, was important. The ability to ‘get their hands dirty’, plan something, execute it, and then report on what they learnt and how it informed their design was critical. The students commented: Our work is often hypothetical, so it was a great challenge and a learning opportunity to put these ideas into action. (Student 4)

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It was through practical application and real-life interactions that I am able to understand the importance of placemaking in the community. (Student 1)

The presentation of students’ final designs to community and collaborators at the post-semester exhibition in the Newport Substation reinforced the sense of working on a real project. The exhibition provided the opportunity for students to connect back with some of the community members who had provided input and ideas at the community engagement activity. For example, one girl who had suggested a tree house at the community engagement day was jumping with excitement when she saw that her suggestion was reflected in one of the playground designs: (It was a) mutually beneficial experience as it gave the community an opportunity to express their point of view while allowing us to practice in a supportive environment. (Student 4)

There was a tangible sense of pride amongst students showing off the results of their hard work. Student feedback was reviewed to assess the effectiveness of the studio pedagogy and to determine the extent to which students demonstrated the development of placemaking skills. The results of the skills development are summarised in Table  1 using three categories (modified from Bloom’s Taxonomy): understanding, application, and creation.13 Students were also asked to review and represent the development of their own placemaking skills throughout the course of the studio using Place Agency’s ‘competency sunflower’ (discussed in ‘Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning’ of this book). One student’s representation is included below; the development of the student’s skills is indicated by red arrows (Fig. 3). Collaborators’ Reflections The local arts production company, Hubcap Productions, and the local traders’ association were the key local partners that had approached the University to seek student input into design proposals for Paine Reserve. The local partners’ reflections on the studio process and outputs demonstrate a high degree of satisfaction and excitement with the placemaking collaboration. This provides support for the relevance and effectiveness of the pedagogical approach for community collaborators. Hubcap

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Table 1  Evaluating the development of students’ placemaking skills Date

Studio activities

Pre-semester (2 months prior to start of semester)

Pre-semester preparation

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Detail

Studio leaders: Scope studio objectives, content and outcomes, and gain university approval Students familiarise themselves with placemaking approaches, the site, and case studies Studio semester Introduction to studio timelines, On site studio: Lectures, assessments, and activities site visits, and research Students develop understanding of: The site and local policy frameworks Studio semester Students develop understanding of On site studio: Lectures, placemaking, tactical urbanism, and other site visits, and research tools, and consider their application to the site Studio semester Students research and design site-based On site studio: Design and placemaking intervention and associated implement community data collection and analysis approaches intervention, engagement, Students build and install intervention, and data collection engage with community, collecting data Studio semester Students review and analyse data to On site studio: Data identify key community responses to the analysis and design site’s issues, needs, values; apply the response findings to development of interdisciplinary design responses Studio semester Students finalise preliminary design On site studio: Design responses and present them to project responses partners to seek feedback and input Studio semester Students incorporate partners’ feedback to On site studio: Finalise finalise designs and draft implementation design responses plan Studio semester Students submit final designs and Assessment implementation plans, and present to interdisciplinary assessment panel

Productions created a short film of the ‘Newport Project’ to highlight the creativity and productivity of the exchange between local artists, the studio’s students, and community members.14 Following completion of the studio, Hubcap Productions engaged some students to help develop a report to the council with options and recommendations for the park.15 Donna Jackson, Hubcap Productions director, reflected,

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Fig. 3  A student’s feedback on their skills development throughout the studio, represented using Place Agency’s competency sunflower We really enjoyed this work and learnt a lot. We would like to do more of this artists/community/student engagement in the future as it has energy and heart!

One of the elected officials from the local council, who had initiated the original request for design input from Hubcap Productions, attended several of the engagement and feedback events. The councillor commented, It was really great to have the university involved—it brings impartiality and design skills and student enthusiasm to the process—new ideas underpinned by research thinking.

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The university’s participation provided a sense of credibility, independence, and trustworthiness to the process and to the design proposals. However, the studio’s short timeframes for engagement and conversations risked omitting input from some members of the community who may have been absent from Paine Reserve during the time of community engagement and whose presence was overlooked during the process.

Conclusion Applying a placemaking intervention in urban green space, the Newport studio highlighted a number of methodological and pedagogical priorities in the engagement, design, and planning for placemaking. These include the central importance of proactive and constructive listening as the key element of community engagement, as well as supporting students in finding ways to create openings for rich conversations. The Place Agency sandbox methodology highlighted key pedagogical principles and an adaptable framework to guide the studio teaching. The framework’s focus on a practice-led approach, engagement with the community, establishing local partnerships and ongoing project legacy underpinned the approach to the studio teaching and resulted in student designs that responded to the site with deeper understanding and empathy. We found that the collaboration between the university, students, tutors, researchers, local community members, artists, traders, and the local council provided a mechanism to link together the diverse stakeholders and to reflect and represent the range of views, opinions, and hopes for the area. The key lessons for educators applying this approach to teaching placemaking are: 1. Build strong relationships before the studio starts. Be sure that there is a clear, shared understanding of the placemaking process and the desired outcomes amongst all the collaborators. Placemaking is quick and playful. Placemaking is an opportunity for co-creating places with the community 2. Ensure that the students understand that the process needs to start with listening. Students cannot develop design responses before they have listened to the community, collected their views, and analysed the data.

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3. Model the placemaking practices by embedding listening and engagement activities into the studio’s teaching. This will give students opportunities to develop and practise their own placemaking skills. 4. Immerse students in the site. This can be done by meeting local people, eating at the local cafes, buying at the local shops, and so on. 5. Have information about the University’s studio approach to share with the community and traders. 6. Be clear about the difference between consultation and engagement/ co-creation. Students work with the community and use their skills as designers to support the community to be part of the design and eventual outcome. 7. Build clear and realistic expectations. With short-term interventions and fixed duration studios, ensure that the participants and community members understand the limitations of the process so that they are not disappointed when the studio concludes. If possible, keep communicating the status and progress of project outcomes.

Notes 1. The consortium includes the University of Adelaide, Curtin University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, the University of Technology of Sydney, and the University of New South Wales. The consortium is supported by 17 highly skilled placemaking practitioners who provided their input at various stages of the project development. These practitioners represent the following Australian organisations: Place Leaders Asia Pacific, CoDesign Studio, Village Well, Here Studio, 226 Strategic, Place Design Studio, John Mongard Landscape Architects, ASPECT Studios, City Collective, Oxigen, PIDCOCK— Architecture + Sustainability, Place SA, TPG + Place Match, MRA, Jensen + and EcoUrban. 2. Dominique Hes and Cristina Hernandez-Santin, ‘Increasing the Capacity for Built Environment Students to Connect Community to Decision Making on Space’ (paper presented at the 52nd International Conference of the Architectural Science Association ‘Engaging Architectural Science: Meeting the Challenges of Higher Density,’ Melbourne, Australia, 28 November to 1 December 2018). 3. Terrel L. Rhodes, ed., Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using The Rubrics (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2009).

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4. Place Agency, ‘Teaching’ accessed 21 October 2019, https://teaching. placeagency.org.au/. 5. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 6. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 7. William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 2001). 8. Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre, How to Study Public Life (Washington, DC, VA: Island Press, 2013). 9. Laura Pfeifer, The Planner’s Guide to Tactical Urbanism (Montreal: McGill School of Urban Planning, 2013). 10. PPS (Project for Public Places), What is Placemaking? (New York, NY: Project for Public Spaces, 2007). 11. Village Well, ‘Placemaking Projects’ accessed 21 October 2019, http:// www.villagewell.org/projects-2/. 12. CoDesign Studio, Tactical Urbanism 4: Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: CoDesign Studio, 2014). 13. Lorin W.  Anderson, David R.  Krathwohl, Peter W.  Airasian, Kathleen A.  Cruikshank, Richard E.  Mayer, et  al., A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (New York: Longman, 2001). 14. Lindy Allen, ‘The Newport Project: Making Paine Reserve Even Better,’ Vimeo video, 7:05, https://player.vimeo.com/video/27104001. 15. Hubcap Productions, Newport Project, Making Paine Reserve Even Better: 10 Recommendations and 4 Options for Development (Newport: Hubcap Productions, 2018).

Conclusion: Placemaking as Critical Pedagogy of Place Kelum Palipane, Iderlina Mateo-Babiano, and Cristina Hernandez-Santin

Abstract  This concluding chapter rehearses many of the themes that have emerged in the previous chapters within the context of placemaking pedagogy. It strives to frame the Sandbox approach to placemaking pedagogy as a critical pedagogy. It picks up key themes that emerged in the case study chapters and discusses them in relation to this framing, ending with questioning whether the Sandbox method offers an alternative to typical K. Palipane (*) Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] I. Mateo-Babiano Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Hernandez-Santin Place Agency, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4_7

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approaches of teaching and researching placemaking, particularly in design studios. The chapter concludes by identifying key aspects that need to be addressed in order to develop a more effective critical pedagogical framework through which to enhance student learning. Keywords  Critical pedagogy • Practitioner role • Teacher’s role • Classroom community • Placemaking Sandbox Studio In this book, we extend place-based educational theory and practice by introducing Placemaking Sandbox as a key pedagogical framework to critically explore and meaningfully shape places. As defined in chapter ‘Head, Heart, and Hands Model for Placemaking Learning’, this framework constitutes a holistic learning approach implementing experiential learning based on the HHH Model (head/heart/hand). Vital to placemaking pedagogy is the grounding of educational theory and practice in a specific place that the student can actively interact with in a trial-and-error or ‘sandbox’. By emplacing studio-based teaching and learning in a specific context, we invited students to elaborate on their interactions with people within specific ecological as well as socio-cultural contexts. A directed provocation framed and guided each studio’s critical exploration of place. The interrogation of shared experiences of everyday places not only created diverse learning experiences for students but also encouraged critical dialogue of such situations. This led them to evoke various learning possibilities and to confirm the importance of social and environmental justice in placemaking. Given that learners exist in specific socio-­ cultural contexts, these ‘situationalities’ motivated the students to reflect on their own learning experiences to a point of being challenged to act on them.1 This further reinforces what Gruenewald referred to as the mutually supportive tradition of ‘critical pedagogy’ and ‘place-based education’, contextualised within the discipline of placemaking.2 We posit that Placemaking Sandbox exemplifies a critical pedagogy of place. Described in the earlier chapters of this book are the different case studies of placemaking ‘sandbox’ studios implemented, which purposefully engaged students in theory, inquiry, and practice. Placemaking Sandbox studios demonstrated the importance of inter-disciplinarity; it also presented the collaborative nature of placemaking in order to create the capacity for people to invest (public) spaces with meaning. We used Placemaking Sandbox as an educational platform to prepare the emerging workforce to develop placemaking skills and knowledge and apply them in practice. Yet crucial to its success is the challenge to educators in making placemaking

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pedagogy, particularly studio teaching, more relevant. The different case studies presented different ways of extending the learning experience of placemaking by fostering interactions with diverse publics and by creating diverse explorations of local places.3 Through the interrogation of the social (Cook and Carr, ‘Realising “Rights to the City” in Contested Space’), spatio-cultural (Palipane and Mateo-Babiano, ‘Capturing the Multiplicities of Place’), creative (Beer and Campbell, ‘Performing Landscape’), and ecological (Bush and Hes, ‘Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design’) aspects of learning, placemaking was made possible. Also highlighted in the Placemaking Sandbox studio is the importance of investing students with a sense of agency. As students became actively involved with the community and continually interacted with multiple publics that had a stake in place (however difficult and challenging it may be), they were encouraged to extend their inquiry, which was largely informed by their improved understanding of stakeholder needs and preferences and to better respond to place-based issues. Placemaking pedagogy urges learners to favour approaches that help them to better understand and, if necessary, to give voice to the voiceless. The latter could be done through engagement and harnessing the vital contribution of the marginalised (e.g., substance-dependent peoples or with migrants/ refugees) as users as well as producers of (public) spaces. Although this illuminated the complexity in building relationships between people and place, the students continued to be critical, to be actively engaged, and to show enthusiasm in their own learning. Places were therefore vital platforms for learning to test theory, experiment with different placemaking processes, and define their own methods of evaluating place. Most importantly, it urged the students to be more critical of placemaking decisions in order to support the creation of vibrant, citizen-engaged ‘places’, and ultimately, better cities. The Placemaking Sandbox did not only make learning beyond the classroom more relevant, but it also showed some of the clearest demonstration that student learning could be cultivated outside the classroom. The approach further enabled the students’ agency to create and discover their own power to initiate and create change through place.

Placemaking Sandbox Pedagogy: Case Study Insights In this section, we highlight key commonalities across the different case studies, suggesting ways that Placemaking Sandbox differs from conventional approaches to advance a more critical pedagogy of place within the context of studio teaching.

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• It places heavy emphasis on drawing from place-specific local knowledge—be it user groups, local stakeholders, or professionals who have embedded themselves into the contexts and have gained a depth of knowledge over a period of time. The studios outlined in this book deployed various strategies to elicit local knowledge, using diverse and playful techniques that capture the imagination of the users, stakeholders. In chapter ‘Capturing the Multiplicities of Place’, Studio P engaged in socio-spatial mapping that was based on the close observation of how locals use and occupy space. In chapter ‘Realising “Rights to the City” in Contested Space’, Studio D that dealt with complex social issues drew on the knowledge—in the form of panel discussions—of locally based community agencies who were engaged in the ground conditions. Such agencies included the Neighbourhood Justice Centre and the Residents for Victoria Street Drug Solutions.4,5 Meanwhile, the Newport studio in chapter ‘Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design’ had a strong focus on community consultation and co-creation strategies as the students worked with the two local partners (i.e., Newport Traders Association and Hubcap Productions) over an extended period of time. The landscape studio Performing Ballarat involved a guided walking tour around cityscape ‘icons’ led by a heritage adviser. This activity was able to highlight the historic and contemporary significance of the site while the students connected with the site in an embodied way. • It is effective when supported by research. This includes the broader theoretical discourses that help students situate their approaches as well as place-specific empirical data. The students in Studio P drew from systematic databases that the local council had built over an extended period of time to shape their site interventions. This included foot traffic data and behaviour mapping by the council. Meanwhile, as elaborated in chapter ‘Realising “Rights to the City” in Contested Space’, Studio D endeavoured to get the students to contextualise what they were seeing on the ground and hearing from experts and community within related theoretical discourse. This was done through systematic discussion of readings after a site/community engagement event. They also held targeted sessions around designing and

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conducting ethical research, applied social research methodologies, theory and positioning in research, and methods of analysis. Meanwhile, in the Newport studio outlined in chapter ‘Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design’, the students were introduced to placemaking concepts and practices ranging from seminal works6,7,8 to contemporary projects, methodologies, and frameworks.9,10,11 Involving local placemakers in the process, such as that done by Village Well and CoDesign Studio,12,13 allowed the students to gain insight into the place-­ specific constraints, opportunities, and approaches in Melbourne. • It is immersive, participatory, and process focused. Many of the Sandbox studios presented in this volume emphasised the value of participatory processes in placemaking over specific design outcomes. The Newport studio used playful activities to build the students’ skills in active and engaged listening. The aim was to stress the importance of proactive and constructive listening as an important element of community engagement. A key outcome of this was designing an onsite engagement process to create dialogue with the community, which the students organised and delivered as an event. This approach is echoed in Studio D, where the outcome is described as ‘procedural’. Accordingly, the students learned how to co-design with a hyper-diverse group of stakeholders and community members by listening to and drawing with community members. In Studio P, a tactical approach to interventions onsite required understanding specifics of place down to minute details in order to create a meaningful response to each individual site—this includes understanding the existing behavioural patterns across the site, sun path and microclimates, the material conditions, and the spatial dimensions of each laneway. The students learned to plan and resolve the logistical challenges of bringing material to the site, hands-on construction onsite, negotiating with the daily users of space, and eliciting feedback from the community with regard to the interventions. It also involved deep engagement with local authorities to understand the scope of the regulatory and legislative frameworks involved in implementing onsite. Although these interactions could be frustrating and can be perceived as having stifled the students’ creativity, it also mirrored a real-world placemaking scenario. Meanwhile, the Performing Ballarat studio describes the use of community crafting workshop with The Friends of the Ballarat Botanical

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Gardens. This allowed the students to have a point of entry through which to begin a dialogue with the community. They described how the plant sculpture activity was particularly useful in overcoming barriers such as a lack of confidence in speaking to strangers. The authors write that many students highlighted how the activity gave them an opportunity to ask The Friends questions about possible design strategies for the North Gardens and tailor their designs to the suggestions of the local community. To explore performance-based outcomes in the Botanical Gardens, the students participated in a joint workshop with Performing Arts students’ Word of Mouth choir in singing and improvising, thereby allowing them to have an opportunity for interdisciplinary skills exchange. The process-focused outcomes described above have all been grounded on immersive site experiences. Studio P engaged in extensive onsite ethnographic mapping, which immersed the students in the context and allowed them to observe existing users engaged in everyday spatial practice. In chapter ‘Realising “Rights to the City” in Contested Space’ that outlined Studio D, the authors have described confronting site visits guided by project partners. Through this, the students were able to engage directly with the lived reality of drug use. This included seeing laneways littered with drug-injecting paraphernalia, the individuals who clean-up the discarded syringes, and murals commemorating those who had died of drug overdose. The authors write that this encouraged the students to see these issues from the ground rather than above as is typical within urban planning. The Performing Ballarat studio commenced with acknowledging the traditional owners of the land where the studio took place. The authors explained how this allowed the students to gain a visceral understanding of indigenous land custodianship, therefore sensitising them to alternative knowledge systems ahead of their design exercises. • Group work is valuable and necessary. However, this often sits in conflict with the evaluation of individual student learning that is required in the tertiary education context. Reflective of real-life placemaking projects, placemaking pedagogy involves collaboration and collective effort that utilises the different strengths/aptitudes and talents of a group. In Studio P, group work was seen as a valuable asset in a group of students with a predominantly Chinese background. The authors observed peer-to-peer learning or

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engagement as a key strategy utilised by the students in this group. Various strengths in individuals were used to the advantage of the group. The ‘spokesperson’ was the more confident in conversational English, while the group members helped to translate instructions and discussion points, often going back and forth between English and Chinese. This helped to clarify vague instructions or to prevent misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In Studio D, collaborative work became challenging at times, exacerbating differences in expertise and confidence levels amongst the students. This inherent tension between assessing individual learning and the intrinsically collaborative approach of placemaking pedagogy is an important lesson that needs to be further studied and resolved. In moving forward with refining the delivery of placemaking pedagogy, we suggest developing innovative assessments rubrics as a way to value collaborative efforts while still evaluating individual student learning and mapping the mastery of key competencies. • It promotes social equity and plurality. The suite of studio case studies presented in this book offers multiple strategies/ways to enter and engage with the ‘social spaces’ of the specific contexts. Central to each studio were public spaces that are valorised as plural and inclusive and respond to the increasingly heterogeneous communities and a changing public realm. Studio D focused on a corridor of public and quasi-public space in inner-city Melbourne. The site is characterised by layers of complex demographics and supporting amenities competing for rights to place. This included groups who are involved in drug use, ethno-cultural diversity in terms of established Asian communities and emerging African and Middle Eastern communities, children, and contested services (most notably, Melbourne’s sole medically supervised injecting room [MSIR]). This inevitably led to the questions ‘who belongs?’ and ‘who is invited?’, which became the focus of the studio. Therefore, the authors write that it is critical to develop mechanisms that would engage across language and culture and involve these communities. The Newport studio was focused on a small park that was centrally located fronting a number of civic and private amenities such as a café, a lawn bowls club and a community hub that houses the local library, youth resources centre, maternal and child health centre, and facilities for seniors

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and cultural groups. It also fronts a shopping precinct and transport hub, with a train station, bus stop, and taxi rank all nearby. Because of this, as in Studio D, students had to consider diverse users and uses in designing their engagement strategy. Studio P considered laneway regeneration in the suburb of Springvale home to a multicultural populace, with residents who have emigrated from diverse regions including Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The suburb itself is situated in the most diverse but also the most disadvantaged local government jurisdiction in Victoria. As such, students were expected to understand that as more multicultural urban communities are being created in Victoria, more multi-faced issues and challenges arise, thereby requiring multi-dimensional strategies to infuse and create more equitable and inclusive, public spaces. To provoke the students’ thinking, a statement and key questions were posed to them: In demographically diverse suburbs in Melbourne, placemaking practices are unconsciously enacted through cultural practices and habits of citizenry from other places. Where do they originate? Can they inform urban renewal policy and design here in Melbourne? In what way can we and do we design for difference? Meanwhile, in the Performing Ballarat studio, the students were encouraged to inquire beyond the idealised and dominant narrative of Ballarat as a gold rush town and to explore multicultural and Chinese histories in Ballarat, as well as alternative knowledge systems drawing from the indigenous presence in the land.

The Sandbox Methodology: An Alternative Approach? We have argued that the Placemaking Sandbox is an alternative approach to placemaking pedagogy that goes beyond the typical modes of (spatial) design education. In fact, it addresses many of the shortcomings that have been identified in the traditional studio model (refer to chapter ‘Reimagining Place Through the Sandbox Studio Pedagogy’). However, does it provide us with an alternative way of teaching and researching placemaking? Built environment disciplines require a combination of theoretical and practical knowledge before one can be considered a ‘master’ of their discipline. In traditional tertiary education, the typical teaching approaches

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include ‘studios’ as a pedagogy that supports learning through presenting an existing problem through a case study that the students analyse and ‘solve’ through their practice.14 In this setting, the students often work collaboratively, in relatively small learning groups, and under the tutelage of an expert. It is considered a practice-based pedagogy as the students have to apply the theoretical knowledge gained in this and other subjects and to apply their software skills, analytical skills, and design skills to address the design challenge presented. However, the learning is heavily biased towards presenting the designer as the ‘expert’, and the students are not provided with the opportunity to engage with the community and to tap into the local knowledge as it is often assumed that these soft-skills will be gained once they move into practice.15 Thus, while ‘practical’ for some of the design skills required in the professions, it does not provide opportunities to engage with the whole spectrum of skills to address place-­ based issues. Design practices that are deliberately participatory, immerse in place, and re-evaluate the role of the designer in the process are not unknown. Public works is an artist and architect’s collective based in the UK that often engage in developing models, objects, and artefacts that invite community participation, revealing site dynamics that are ordinarily overlooked. For example, the project DIY Regeneration in Kings Cross involved inviting everyday users that are already involved in community placemaking to provide tips and advice for greater user involvement in the regeneration process.16 Consultation occurred through a customised milk float which acted as a mobile workshop space and onsite office. The creative output included handmade posters incorporating the advice which were exhibited in public space and galleries. Similarly, muf art and architecture engages in site investigations that involve the development of context-­specific prototypes and spatial interventions that not only allow for community consultation but also activate interactions between members of the community.17 The socio-spatial insights that this offers the designers influence the briefs and formal outcomes of the projects. They write: Research into ground conditions and site preparation in urban strategies can take on spatial properties of their own and thus suggest templates for the built. By ‘research’ I mean the site investigations that can expose the ground conditions of the site—social infrastructure as much as soil samples and topography.18

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Atelier d’architecture autogérée works to empower self-driven community collectives, often involving marginalised groups.19 The work commonly entails workshops in communities exploring self-build construction techniques using local and recycled material. The upskilling leads to greater agency and autonomy for the participants. Meanwhile, here studio is a Melbourne-based practice that engages in participatory design in which innovative and creative participatory practices are used to engage with users throughout the whole design process. They write, ‘We are deeply engaged with the not-for-profit and social enterprise sectors and see significant opportunities for community engagement that results in making places that people feel connected to, inspired by and share a sense of belonging with.’20 A notable project is the redevelopment of the Ballarat Civic Hall, where they facilitated a community-led process, one in which they can ‘identify a supported vision for the site which includes a range of parameters which go beyond purely commercial and economic in nature’.21 They ran face-to-face community workshops engaging local activists and groups where networks were formed and ideas were generated not only for design proposals but also for the governance of place. Within school settings, typically design-and-build studios offer the students opportunities to engage in hands-on learning and actively work towards delivering a tangible outcome while simultaneously resulting in deeper learnings relevant to their practice. For instance, a study conducted with architecture students in the UK, specifically found that architecture students participating in design studios with hands-on learning, had deeper understanding of building materials than those participating in traditional studios.22 Melbourne School of Design has consistently offered design-and-build studios such as the Bower Studio. Through it, architecture students are provided with an opportunity to engage with indigenous communities in remote Australia, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea.23 While extremely valuable for gaining experience in architecture design and construction in remote areas, the tangible outcome is limited to housing and infrastructure services to deliver a small built outcome and providing the students with opportunities to build their ‘expertise’. While similarly experiential, where the Sandbox studio approach diverges from this model is that it positions the ‘designer’ as the facilitator and not as the expert. Although the approach strives for ‘tangible’ outcomes, that outcome does not necessarily need to be a ‘built’ outcome. It can be an event or community engagement event that enables the ‘practice-­ based’ approach to be applied by urban design, landscape architecture,

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and planning disciplines as well as architecture. The emphasis of the pedagogical approach employed by the Sandbox studio is to achieve holistic learning (cognitive, practical, and affective skills) for place-based particularly. Thus, (and as showcased in the previous chapters) the characteristics of a Sandbox studio can be summarised as follows: 1. Practice-led approach using real projects, and real communities that the students actively engage with provides opportunities for the students to directly interact with various stakeholders. 2. Flexible learning strategy that focuses on people, process, product, programme, or place evaluation process for placemaking. Since not all 5P can be successfully delivered within the timeline of a semester, each studio could choose what elements it wants to emphasise in response to the characteristics of the project. 3. Utilises strong local partnerships that are able to carry on the project beyond the timeline of the studio for the ongoing evolution of the project. In this way, the studio placemaking practice is used as a catalyst for further locally led place-based initiatives. 4. Can either apply community engagement strategies as a knowledge-­ generation and site-analysis strategy to inform placemaking or to apply placemaking as a community engagement strategy but consistently uses placemaking as the pedagogy for place. 5. It measures meaningful learning through the learning process and progress understood as increased understanding, application, and creation of place achieved through cognitive, practical, and affective skills.

Moving Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Place In moving forward, we suggest developing a framework for placemaking studios based on a critical pedagogy whilst retaining the diverse ways in which curriculum is developed and teaching is delivered. Critical pedagogy is a specific approach to teaching and learning that draws from critical theory. The aim is to contextualise social reality by understanding underlying socio-political forces and power structures at play. In doing so, the aim is to transform relations of power to achieve social justice. As Thompson writes, ‘It is a form of social criticism that contains within it the seeds of judgment, evaluation, and practical, transformative activity.’24 In

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its approach to pedagogy, it involves a transformative education, in which students are challenged to think critically in order to address the problems posed to them.25 The ideal outcome is the development of a critical consciousness. The educational approach highlighted in this book, the Sandbox approach to placemaking pedagogy, and the individual techniques and methodologies adopted in the studios make significant inroads towards a critical pedagogy. It exposes students to the social and political and associated ethical conditions of a particular site and its users. It allows students to consider groups who are typically marginalised. The evaluation of the studios involves self-reflection by the students, in which they situate their learning within the context of a profession as well as life experience. However, there are aspects that were unevenly approached across the studios that could be underscored in moving towards a more critical pedagogy of placemaking. First, a re-framing of the role of teacher and student is needed where both are seen as co-creators of knowledge. Aliakbari and Faraji write, “To Freire (1970), both students and the teacher are subjects in this process. The teacher uncovers reality and creates knowledge of the world. Students in this view develop power to critically reflect on the way they exist in the world and they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation.”26 The experiential learning students gained by being immersed in the respective contexts made the students question the traditional approaches to community consultation and the traditional role of professionals. However, further teaching strategies that encourage critical reflection are needed. Some were utilised in the studios presented in this book: for example, classroom discussions around specific pieces of text, objects, media outputs, online discussion forums, and ‘listening exercises’ as outlined in chapter ‘Learning Placemaking and Green Space Design’. In co-creating knowledge, students need to be seen as active agents in their learning. Likewise, strategies need to be in place to encourage them to bring their own prior stock knowledge (including culturally specific ones) and skills to the classroom in a meaningful way.27 Including a reflective essay or journal could be seen as one way to encourage this, but other innovative methods need to be considered. In this relationship as co-­ creators of knowledge, in which teachers play a role as problem posers and facilitators, they must also be self-reflexive. Mechanisms need to be in place such that the teachers will be able to articulate their own approaches,

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biases successes, and unsuccessful attempts at teaching strategies to receive critical feedback from peers. In their discussion of critical pedagogy, Aliakbari and Faraji outline the importance of being aware of marginalisation in the classroom.28 Addressing this issue can be identified as the second move towards a more critical pedagogy. As outlined in chapter ‘Capturing the Multiplicities of Place’, this is a particularly pressing issue in contemporary tertiary education, with its often diverse student cohorts. Solutions need to be reflected in curriculum design through innovative teaching methods and assessment tasks and that do not privilege one form of communication over another, encourage peer-to-peer learning and embed mechanisms to value prior knowledge of students from their life experiences. In chapter ‘Capturing the Multiplicities of Place’ students were required to engage across a number of different modalities that favoured different skills and aptitudes, while still encouraging communication with each other and most critically in a placemaking scenario, with those that are not professionals (local communities). Students should be able to reflect on their own cultural backgrounds and learn to value what they can bring as new epistemologies and ways of knowing, thereby making their voices heard. This can be seen as a starting point for cultivating a ‘classroom community’. Finally, rubrics that value peer-to-peer learning and collaborative group work need to be designed. Placemaking has the potential to inspire new generations to become key actors in reshaping their cities. Quite consistently in the different Placemaking Sandbox studios, placemaking is purposely place based to insist on ways to create possibilities for connecting learning with context-­ based realities. By introducing different tasks and activities, we allow them to link place with people (and nature) as a way for them to continue to co-create and re-shape public spaces at the neighbourhood scale into places that people and nature would love. As this is work in progress, the Placemaking Sandbox studios present possible further enhancement of the placemaking pedagogy. Concurring with Gruenewald, the Placemaking Sandbox could be strengthened through a critical pedagogy of place [that] fosters both re-inhabitation and decolonisation, meaning: it aims to (a) identify, recover, and create material spaces and places that teach us how to live well in our total environments (re-­ inhabitation); and (b) identify and change ways of thinking that injure and exploit other people and places (decolonization).29

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The increasingly complex conditions into which students will enter practice require them to craft praxis that responds to socio-economic, environmental, and demographic multiplicities, needing spatial and programmatic conceptualisations hitherto unprecedented. This might also entail a changing role for practitioners, an awareness of which needs to be raised during their education. In striving for a more critical pedagogy, we can prepare students to meet these challenges through the exercising of a critical consciousness.

Notes 1. Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of the oppressed” (USA, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018) (originally published in 1975 in Spanish). 2. David A.  Gruenewald, “Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education,” American Educational Research Journal 40, no. 3 (2003): 619–654. 3. Clifford Knapp, Just Beyond the Classroom: Community Adventures for Interdisciplinary Learning (Charleston, WV: Eric Press, 1996). 4. Neighbourhood Justice Centre is Melbourne’s first community justice centre and magistrate’s court. 5. The Residents for Victoria Street Drug Solutions is a community group pivotal to the lobbying for and establishment of the MSIR. 6. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 7. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 8. William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 2001). 9. Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre, How to Study Public Life (Washington, DC, VA: Island Press, 2013). 10. Laura Pfeifer, The Planner’s Guide to Tactical Urbanism (Montreal: McGill School of Urban Planning, 2013). 11. PPS (Project for Public Places), What Is Placemaking? (New York, NY: Project for Public Spaces, 2007). 12. “Placemaking Projects,” last modified 26 June 2019, http://www.villagewell.org/projects-2/. 13. CoDesign Studio, Tactical Urbanism 4: Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: CoDesign Studio, 2014). 14. Judith Grant Long, “State of the Studio: Revisiting the Potential of Studio Pedagogy in US-based Planning Programs,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 32, no. 4 (2012): 431–448.

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15. Cris Hernandez-Santin, “Teaching ‘Place-Making’: A Study of ‘Place-­ Making’ and Tactical Urbanism in the Formation of our Future Built Environment Professionals” (Unpublished internal report by The University of Melbourne prepared for the Myer Foundation, 2016). 16. “publicworksgroup.net” accessed November 18, 2019, https://www. publicworksgroup.net/home/projects/diyregeneration/792. 17. “muf.co.uk,” accessed July 13, 2015, https://www.muf.co.uk/profile. 18. Rosa Ainley, ed., This is what we do, a muf manual (London: Ellipsis, 2001), 9. 19. “Urbantactics.org,” accessed July 13, 2015, http://www.urbantactics. org/index.html. 20. “herestudio.net,” accessed July 13, 2015, http://www.herestudio.net/ index.php?/services/participatory-design/. 21. http://www.herestudio.net/. 22. Johnathan Djabarouti and Christopher O’Flaherty, “Experiential Learning with Building Craft in the Architectural Design Studio: A Pilot Study Exploring its Implications for Built Heritage in the UK,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 32 (2019): 102–113. 23. David O’Brien, Stephanie Richardson, and George Savrias, Bower Studio (Victoria: The University of Melbourne, 2013). 24. Michael J.  Thompson, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory (Berlin: Springer, 2017), 1. 25. Some key proponents of critical pedagogy are Paul Friere, Wolfgang Klafki, Henry Giroux and bell hooks. 26. Mohammad Aliakbari and Elham Faraji, “Basic Principles of Critical Pedagogy” (paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Humanities, Historical, and Social Sciences, Cairo, Egypt, 21–23 October 2011), 79. 27. Paulo Freire, “Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach,” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 23, no. 1 (1998): 40–55. 28. Aliakbari and Faraji, “Basic Principles,” 77–85. 29. David A. Gruenewald, “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” Educational Researcher 32, no. 4 (2003): 9.

Index1

A Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island, 57, 59 Applied approach/applied framework of learning, 72, 76 Artists, 56, 59, 60, 95, 98–100, 102–104, 115 Atelier, 6 Australian culture, 59, 66 Australian landscape, 61 B Ballaarat, 57 Ballarat, 11, 54–57, 59–61, 63, 65, 67, 114 Ballarat Begonia Festival, 64 Ballarat Botanical Gardens, 11, 54, 56, 58, 62, 63 Belonging, 50, 58, 75, 116 Big issue, 8, 10 Black Swamp, 56, 57 Bloom’s Taxonomy, 22, 101

C Capstone studios, 37, 43, 74 Casey, Edward, 3 Chinese background, 48, 112 City of Greater Dandenong (CGD), 37, 46 Classroom community, 119 Co-design, 73, 75, 111 Co-Design studio, 4, 96, 111 Collaboration, 7, 19, 21, 28, 29, 36, 67, 80, 93, 96–97, 101, 104, 112 Community crafting, 63, 111 Community engagement, 10, 16, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 34n46, 45, 67, 86, 94, 95, 97–101, 104, 110, 111, 116, 117 Connection to Country, 59 Contestation/contested urban space, 72–74, 76, 77, 86 Co-production, 39, 73, 75, 83

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s) 2020 I. Mateo-Babiano, K. Palipane (eds.), Placemaking Sandbox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2752-4

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Creative placemaking, 10 Critical pedagogy, 6, 108–120 Culturally and linguistically diverse student, 48–49 D Data, 22, 42, 78, 80, 81, 85, 96, 97, 99, 104, 110 Design-based pedagogy, 3, 8 Difference, 10, 11, 28, 39, 63, 66, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85–87, 96, 100, 105, 113, 114 Discursive spaces, 85, 87 Diversity, 11, 49, 55, 73, 75, 77, 92, 99, 113 Duhn, Iris, 2 E Emotional connection(s), 16, 17 Encounter, 2, 47, 72, 75, 76, 81, 85, 87 Engagement, 7–9, 11, 19, 20, 25, 29, 30, 48, 49, 61, 76, 81, 82, 85, 87, 93, 96–100, 103–105, 109, 111, 113, 114 Evaluation strategy, 21 Exclusion, 72, 73, 75, 86 Experiential learning, 6, 37, 39, 40, 43–49, 108, 118 F 5P framework, 5, 16, 17, 20, 25, 28, 30 H Hartley, Lucinda, 4 Holistic learning, 18–20, 30, 108, 117 Holmgren, David, 63

I Inclusion/inclusive, 2, 5, 25, 34n46, 37, 38, 72, 74–78, 82, 85, 86, 113, 114 Inclusive placemaking, 11, 44, 74 Indigenous, 5, 11, 19, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 67, 79, 112, 114, 116 K Kulin nation, 56 L Lake Wendouree, 11, 54, 57, 61 Learning-by-doing, 37 Learning outcomes, 20, 25, 29, 75, 80, 98 Lefebvre, Henri, 3, 84 Listening, 11, 21, 29, 96–97, 104, 105, 111 Local council, 33n46, 45, 46, 61, 74, 98–100, 103, 104, 110 Local government, 28, 36, 93, 95, 114 M Massey, Doreen, 3 Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR), 11, 73, 74, 76, 77, 113 Multicultural, 11, 36, 38, 44, 47–48, 50, 54, 114 Multimodal, 36, 39, 42, 44, 49 Murrup Laarr, 59 N New agenda, 7 Newport Sandbox studio, 11 North Garden Wetland, 54, 62 North Wetland Gardens, 59

 INDEX 

O Outcome Sunflower, 21, 22, 27 P Participatory, 42, 75, 80, 98, 111, 115, 116 Participatory processes, 39, 111 Pedagogy, 2–12, 18–20, 22, 28, 36, 40, 49, 74, 83, 92–94, 99–101, 108–120 Pedagogy of place, 4, 7–12, 36, 108–120 Peer-to-peer learning, 49, 80, 112, 119 Perceptions of safety, 11, 16, 73, 77 Performative, 11, 66 Performing Landscape, 10, 25, 54–67, 109 Permaculture design, 63 Phenomenological approaches, 7 Place Agency, 5, 10, 19–21, 37, 54, 61, 63, 66, 92–94, 101, 103, 104 Place-based, 2, 3, 5, 8–11, 18, 19, 26, 28, 44, 49, 50, 67, 76, 77, 99–104, 108, 109, 115, 117 Placemakers, 2, 4, 5, 8, 17, 20, 37, 42, 49, 54, 73, 77, 93, 96, 111 Placemaking, 2–12, 16–30, 32n34, 33n36, 33n45, 36–40, 42–46, 48–50, 54–67, 72–77, 79, 82–87, 92–105, 108–120 Placemaking outcomes, 20, 21, 82, 84, 87 Placemaking Sandbox Studio, 9, 10, 92, 108, 109, 119 Precis, 42 Project for Public Spaces (PPS), 4 R Reconciliation action plan (RAP), 59 Reflective, 39, 42–44, 112, 118 Reflective practice, 86

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Relph, Edward, 3 Rights to the city, 11, 44, 72–87, 109, 110, 112 Rochecouste, Gilbert, 4, 42 S Salama, Ashraf, 7 Sandbox methodology, 5, 9, 12, 22, 44, 99–101, 104, 114 Sandbox Studio, 2–12, 16–30, 37, 45, 49, 54, 74, 92–94, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117 Sandercock, Leonie, 48 Scale model, 42, 43 Sense of place, 16 Smellscape, 44 Smoking Ceremony, 58, 59 Social, 3–4, 7, 8, 16, 19, 28, 36, 37, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 56, 60, 63, 64, 66, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 84, 85, 87, 92, 108–111, 113, 115–118 Social justice, 75, 84, 86, 117 Social placemaking, 73, 75 South Gardens Wetlands, 63 Sovereign Hill, 60 Spatial placemaking, 73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 47 Springvale, 25, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 47, 49, 114 Strategic placemaking, 46 Student-led learning, 80 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2 T Timeframe, 28, 30, 104 Top-down, 46, 78 Traders, 100, 101, 104, 105

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U Urban green space, 11, 92, 104 Urban planning, 4, 7, 10, 11, 36, 37, 74, 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 98, 112

Village Well, 4, 33n36, 42, 96, 111 Voices, 8, 11, 47, 48, 86, 98, 109, 119

V Victoria, 37, 38, 54, 59, 60, 72, 74, 75, 110, 114

W Welcome to Country, 58, 59, 67 Wicked social conditions, 11