Belonging in place/-making tools to creatively cultivate belonging in processes of public placemaking

Lovesmith, George

Abstract

Beyond our most basic needs, Maslow, posited belonging (alongside love) as our most significant psychological need.
Belonging noun
“the feeling of being comfortable and happy in a particular situation or with a particular group of people, and being treated as a full member of the group”

This paper argues for the need to ceatively cultivate belonging in processes of public placemaking, presenting experiments & tools to achieve this, developed through practice. Specifically it’s about making possible the co-production of any non-professional within creative processes of spatial change - asserting the(ir) right to a place at the table by identifying and working around barriers that make participation a constant challenge.

Discourses (rightly) celebrate community-led and self-organised initiatives, yet there’s little exploration of how to enable community members to take part within a landscape of scarcity and the complications of everyday life. How can co-production overcome such thresholds of power imbalance? The catalysing of agency, needs investment, time and creative acts of care.

Cultural practices of participation and engagement, too often underestimate the importance, and regrettable lack of, confidence and access.

Active citizenship implicit in many briefs, is a term encompassing much of what might be meant by belonging but with one critical difference – The objective shouldn’t be that the citizen ‘be’ active (though of course that’s welcome), but that they feel they could be – That they have the sensation they could contribute, appropriate; a sense of autonomy and control, that they feel they belong.

The projects presented, evidence civic capacity building. Dialogue and compromise are fostered and civic thinking is developed as participants envisage and use places they inhabit.

Kath Shonfield, in her call to develop the public realm, described this shared territory as our ‘lived experience of democracy’ , saying it is ‘as fundamental to the experience of humanity as the loving touch of the parent’ . It is perhaps in this vividly intimate metaphor, that the need for belonging within the conceptualisation of the spaces we share, is most powerfully expressed –
We need to belong.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Architecture 101: Questioning the Fundamentals
• Start Date: Nov 9, 2023
• End Date: Nov 11, 2023
• Deposit Date: Aug 25, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11060981