Written by:
Louise Dennison
Sharing Place: Think Pieces invite external contributors to explore the theme of sharing place from diverse perspectives, and offering a broad range of reflections, ideas and provocations.
In this edition of Sharing Place: Think Pieces, Placemaking Practitioner George Lovesmith, explores the importance of our sense of belonging in how we relate to places and each other.
Sharing Belonging
Sharing a cuppa is at the heart of how we live. It sustains our relationships and helps them get started. Those shared cuppas are foundational to successful placemaking too, as they encourage contributors to join for a chat.
And of course, we can usefully share much more than tea: ideas, skills, experiences and social time. ‘Meeting Agenda’ and ‘Consultation’ are not terms that make us feel like we comfortably belong but ‘Sharing’ definitely is.
Sharing is important to me because, as a placemaking practitioner, I have long been influenced by the Situationists, a 1960s politically-radical artist alliance. They pioneered thinking that our public life should not be “in the hands of a small body of specialists but … made by everyone” (Gray 1974).
However, whilst social engagement (at least the discussion of it) has entered the mainstream, we too often neglect to acknowledge that many people don’t feel they belong in processes of public placemaking. In turn, because we don’t include people, we don’t hear their voices.
We need to creatively cultivate this sense of belonging.
Credit: Maindee Unlimited
Defined as “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,” we must reflect on the barriers to this belonging. How do contributors feel in the spaces of production? How can we ensure comfort rather than distrust? How must we treat contributors to nurture belonging?
In Design for Belonging, a handbook for inclusion that is relevant to a range of social processes, educationalist Susie Wise stresses belonging as “being accepted and invited to participate.”
I’ll come back to acceptance shortly. But first, I want to ask: ‘What might an invitation to place-make be?’
Credit: Maindee Unlimited
The staging of events, to reinterpret a place or rewrite memories of it, is often key in this work. This can be a challenge to what we’re permitted to do or what’s socially acceptable in public space; it’s an invitation to take ownership. When working on a project with street play organisation Playing Out, the main vehicle of engagement was a programme of outdoor play events designed to fit into residents’ everyday lives. We collectively modelled alternative uses of the spaces in an instant, moving on to propose how they might be made different.
Inviting people to put forward ideas for small-scale changes and then helping to fund and execute them was part of that work, and one of many open invitations during the processes of remodelling volunteer-run Maindee Library+.
Acceptance is a taller order than invitation and depends highly on trust. It’s all about relationships and these can only come about after a lot of shared cuppas (replace ‘cuppas’ as preferred with time / experiences / skills etc). And this trust can be even more effective when shared with more than one contributor: where the sense of belonging in the process is reinforced by a potential for empathy and a sense of inter-belonging between individuals.
Credit: Maindee Unlimited
Working towards such deep and sustained user contribution, the development of a cohort engagement model was the linchpin of the Libraries Reclaimed project. Young artists, some of whom had never had a paid commission, were invited to develop proposals for how a library building might be modified, or used differently, to better serve the needs of others their own age. Tools included mentoring, workshops, a bursary and various forms of public sharing (performances / exhibition), engaging an ever-wider audience.
Community-led placemaking is rightly championed but for many, everyday life doesn’t have much spare capacity. Allocations of resource (childcare, training, payment, mentoring, entertainment, professional support, hospitality, moral support…), what we could also call actions of care, can be found in different ways in the projects referenced here. These are attempts at civic capacity building, that can and must dismantle barriers to participation, so all potential community contributors might feel they could belong in these processes.
Establishing projects to span time frames sufficient for relationships to spark and thrive are part of that. The luxury of time enables us to identify barriers to inclusion and participation, which can enable us to prototype work-arounds.
The capacities that might grow through placemaking contribution encompass tacit knowledges – things known about place, things known by people – that can be personal, different for everyone, constantly (re)emerging and site-specific. We must also value these place-based knowledges if we are to value contributors from a place in the processes of shaping that place.
The notion of ‘place recognition’ (representing a shift from practices of “tool-kit, quick fix” placemaking) emerged at Maindee Library+, working with the character of what was already there and initiating change at a speed and to a degree that contributors are comfortable with.
Credit: Rising Arts
Establishing this sense of belonging, and mutually recognising these tacit knowledges, might enable contributors to better understand urban processes and subsequently re-claim their environments with renewed vigour. It has the exciting potential to be as likely to build community (capacity) as it is to build physical space.
About the Author
George Lovesmith is an architect, public artist and educator with a practice focussed on social engagement. Recent collaborations include the Filwood Broadway Delivery Plan, co-producing a high street in transition; and Undershed, a gallery conceived both to foster togetherness – where conversation is actively encouraged and to be wildly regenerative, with materials that speak of the natural world. Internationally, George has executed work at the Taiwan Design Expo and as an Arts Council International Fellow in Spain.
About the WEdesign 2024/25 Series: Sharing Place
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Sharing Place brings people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
