Place, Plaza, Piazza: What do these have in common?

Main Street, Salt Lake City, UT

What is Place? And why are urban designers obsessed with it? Placemaking is the practice of connecting people to a physical place and it is fundamental to urban design. A place reinforces a physical or spiritual connection to your surroundings. Places can enrich, uplift, and inspire the human spirit. Places have meaning. Spaces have no meaning. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Davie Street, Vancouver, BC

When you connect with a place, a memory is created. If it is a positive one, this is the type of place you will want to return to again and again.

French Quarter, New Orleans, LA

Quite literally, “place” is derived from “platea” –the Latin word meaning an open space or broadened street. “Place” is perhaps too common to mean what urban designers wish it to mean. The goal of placemaking is to produce places that embody the characteristics of the Spanish plaza or the Italian piazza: scale (How do the buildings around the plaza create its “walls?” How tall are they? Is there something that anchors the plaza?), dimensions (How large or small is the plaza? Can you recognize someone you know on the far side?), detail (What is there to see? What is the texture of the ground? What makes this plaza alive?), and use (What is happening there? Can you sit down? Is there a spot to eat?). Also, the French use of the word place directly means plaza.

Union Square, San Francisco, CA

Place is not static. Place is always changing, multi-valent, and relativistic because it is based on individual perceptions. Multiple factors, including materials, built form, texture, and color, but also societal, personal, climatological, and time, combine to make a place unique every time it is visited. Place is also a function of time, season, weather, and course of the day.

Italian Market, 9th Street, Philadelphia, PA

Lack of place is placelessness. Place theory and placemaking are the result of a post-modern dissatisfaction with the outcomes of modernist architecture and planning. Mass production, zoning, and globalization have resulted in our ability to replicate sameness. Modern design is frequently considered “placeless” due to its lack of articulation and detail. Minimalism is not a bad thing. It is when local knowledge, climate, context, and people are ignored in a design that placelessness results. On placelessness Kurtz (1973) has this to say:

“…it is all remarkably unremarkable… .
You have seen it, heard it, experienced it all before, and yet…
you have seen and experienced nothing…” (in Relph, 1976: 143).

Placelessness: State Street in Murray, Utah, but this could be anywhere U.S.A...

In practice, placemaking is about connecting people to the views of the mountains, the edge of the water, key landmarks, and locally-sourced materials. We are successful when our children who live near the mountains can get to those mountains and experience the quiet beauty of the forest and the rush of the canyon creeks. We are successful when our children who live near the water can get to the water’s edge and watch the sun dance on the ripples and waves. We are successful when our children who live in the desert know that not all grasses and trees can grow there and a desert doesn’t just mean cactus. To know the place where you live, is to connect with the fundamental aspects of that place: sun, wind, rain, earth.

Connecting with place in the garden

So, why is place so important? A strong sense of place can inspire value and meaning for someone. This is important for building the relationship between society and nature and between society and cities thereby helping to advance our connections to each other. Isn’t this the reason we live in communities?