With this post I am launching what I hope will be a regular blog exploring the intersection between the field of terrapsychology, and an approach to urban improvement known as "creative placemaking."
My perspective is that of a professional city planner (30 years experience) and an amateur terrapsychologist. Within the field of city planning, creative placemaking is new trend. The term refers to the involvement of community-based arts and cultural activities to shape the form and socioeconomic structure of neighborhoods, cities, and even regions. For much of my career I have been a proponent and sometimes initiator of creative placemaking activities in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Area where I work, even before the term was coined earlier in this century. Similarly, my interest in what is now called "terrapsychology" (a term coined by Craig Chalquist in 2003) extends back to my early years as a city planner, even though I did not have a name for the phenomenon then.
The marriage of terrapsychology and creative placemaking seems to be a match made in heaven. The in-depth understanding of place generated by terrapsychology begs to become incarnate in the evolving form of our cities and regions, and the field of creative placemaking yearns for such an in-depth understanding to provide enduring meaning and purpose to its activities. So this needed union is the topic that I intend to explore in my blogs posts.
My initial posts will focus on my own evolving efforts to think terrapsychologically and act in a way that yields fruitful creative placemaking. But I will hope to engage in dialogue with others sharing similar interests, the better to articulate what the marriage of these two fields might mean in the future.
To close this post, I do wish to offer one reservation that I have about the term "creative placemaking." Like the more general term of "placemaking," this term subtly suggests that places are made not born. In other words, it implies that the placemaker enters an arena of meaningless "no-place" and makes it into a meaningful "place." This is a dubious presupposition. In fact, everywhere is a place with a history and a personality. So my caveat when working with fellow city planners goes something like this: "Place honoring needs to precede placemaking." Terrapsychology specializes in place honoring, which is why it is so important for creative placemaking to glean from terrapsychological insights.
