Community-Oriented Placemaking and Urban Policy: Investigating Tensions and Possibilities Across Contrasting Policy Contexts.

The public realm has always been a vital arena for civic life, well-being, and collective meaning-making. As both a site of gathering and contestation, it reflects broader socio-political dynamics. Within this landscape, community-oriented placemaking has gained traction, recognised for fostering belonging, trust, and cultural specificity (Aelbrecht and Stevens, 2018). Defined by its participatory ethos and responsiveness to local identity, this form of placemaking aspires to co-create socially embedded outcomes, aligning cultural infrastructure with goals of regeneration and civic pride.

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This essay examines how governance structures, spatial policies, and cultural strategies shape and often limit the potential for community-driven, socially generative placemaking as an iterative practice rooted in local memory and stewardship. This reorientation suggests a pathway for more responsive, democratically engaged urban futures, investigating how the tensions are navigated in London through policy frameworks designed to support inclusive community spaces. London is a paradoxical megacity, abundant in opportunity, yet marked by fragmented community ties. It is simultaneously a case of a city that strives towards and, in some instances, integrates socially and ecologically regenerative practices within the cityscape. 

‘Socio-political structures and spaces: design-led spatial interventions for collective and individual re-imagining.’ 

Paper intro: All built environments, our cities, homes, religious institutions, and public arenas, are embedded with power, values, and histories, shaping emotional, social, and ecological relationships while mirroring the ideologies of the societies that produce them (Foote & Azaryahu, 2009). At a more intimate scale, spatial settings and the cultures they nurture actively shape norms of behavior, emotional responses, and modes of engagement through their physical and symbolic configurations, serving as tangible manifestations of social, political, ecological, and spiritual belief systems (Colomina & Wigley, 2016, p. 9). As sites that hold and structure human activity, the design of built environments can promote the realisation of our potential, enabling settings to work, learn, be inspired, commune with others, reflect, and recreate. Yet they can also impose constraints, reinforcing the limitations and exclusions embedded in the organisational systems that produce them. As Edward T. Hall articulates, “space is one of the primary organisational structures for all living organisms and as such, to better understand the human experience, it cannot be separated from the environment where it takes place”(1966, xii). 

Savvala Residency: Earth Rammed Construction (first in Latvia).

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Speculative application: Osaka World Expo (Latvian and Lithuanian Pavillion) (2024). 

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Installation: Through the Space Into the Breath (2024)

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Hastings Regenerative Public Art Commission (2025

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