I recently joined a Space UK panel at the Ministry of Sound in London. Our subject: placemaking. When Jenni Carbins, our panel host, asked me in the week before the event what I’d like to suggest as topics for our discussion I asked if we could discuss banning that word.

Please don’t get me wrong – I’m not against the making of great places. Far from it. What I object to is the definition that the term has come to assume in our industry and the contribution it makes to the delivery of bad places.

To identify placemaking as a subject we should be discussing in our industry is to define it as a skill or, worse, a workstream. That implies that “development” is something else and that as long as you apply some good placemaking skills, all will be well. I believe that there is either good development or bad development. Good development delivers great places and bad development… doesn’t.

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