Placemaking Reflections

When I agreed to spend the week at YIP as a contributor, I was eager to visit this small town in Sweden that was bringing people together from around the world to think differently together. While my days are often consumed with pressing questions of how we design processes for participatory community development that meets the needs of our global demand, I did not realize that YIP would offer an opportunity to draw from my range of experience to contribute to a growing international youth movement.

A vision for a healthy, connected civil society

The moment I arrived, I was immersed into a thriving community overflowing with shared meals, informal conversations, public talks, and special events. Every interaction with YIP organizers and YIP-ies was filled with thoughtful intent. Each contributor had the freedom to present what we considered to be the critical tools young people might need to design and implement real change. My seminar was called Placemaking: Design for Social Justice. We identified and analyzed the forces affecting places around us and used this analysis to build a vision for a healthy, connected civil society.

Healthy, joyful, and just public places

I asked questions: Tell us about a place that has been important to you. That’s easy: home, grandmas, the beach, the oak tree, the local coffee shop. What are the characteristics that define these places where we are valued? We explore the role place plays in shaping our identity, our daily experiences and even our ideas. Many talked about their experience at YIP as a critical place in their path.

They asked questions. Why is place important? Why do I do what I do? I tell my story. Places have marked me. Places teeming with life, love and struggles. I know why place is important to me. The most important places in my life were dispossessed and threatened. The square in my hometown, the squat in New York City, the youth center we created – these are my personal love stories of people and places.

I know why placemaking is important to me. I have witnessed the power of creating community. I have joined others in collective action and direct organizing. We have utilized research, education, and training. The reward is healthy, joyful, and just public places.

Up the stairs to Hasse’s office

As our global challenges escalate it is crucial that we build the capacity for complex thinking. In the face of aggressive global forces of removal called predatory planning, I work to facilitate and support community processes that build healthy, just and sustainable places. This work is a form of resistance, but also a generative process of creating equity and justice. We find it in grassroots efforts of youth and, community organizers, in official policymaking among city planners or in international efforts for peace and human rights. The challenges are not to be underestimated but the successes along the way are sweet.

We explored how we are capable of or prevented from shaping the places around us. Structural inequality affects access to and inclusion in public space, public systems, and decision-making. Is this true even in beautiful Järna? After three days of Placemaking class, we head to Järna to apply what we have learned about public space. Some biked, others walked, hitched, or bussed to town where we converged near the ICA supermarket.

We proceeded to march through the park, across the cemetery, and up the stairs to Hasse’s office, a local architect and chair of the town council who has agreed to our visit. In his office, the class discovered a master plan process underway in the city.

They asked questions. They raised concerns about access, equality, and sustainability. The lack of “places for young people to go and be” was highlighted. YIP has made Järna into an international destination for youth. There is power and potential in that.

We explore an abandoned building that a group of artists wants to fix up and establish a shared place for art and artmaking. We talk to some people at the bus stop. We hear different perspectives.

Not bad for one week!

We begin to build relationships and build a process to follow up: a meeting with the architect of the master plan to discuss the need to include young people in the process, a date with the artists about a potential art action, research on existing plans and projects locally.

We track down statistics on regional use of the Culture House and ideas on how to connect the resources in the Antroposophic center just down the road to the town of Järna. And just like that the group became directly engaged in a process of placemaking in their public sphere. Not bad for one week!

This is precisely the kind of capacity builder I want to be: to help people use clear analysis to identify what unique assets their places hold in common and what needs and gaps exist. They can then mobilize to build the places they dream about here and now. I see YIPees doing this, moving fast, impacting multiple arenas, and I celebrate the possibilities!

In the end, the week held a special significance for each of us as YIPees, contributors, staff, and as local residents. More importantly, it continues to hold implications for the places around us. I learned from the YIP-ies that distinct themes running through many of the workshops from different contributors.

Many contributors spoke of the crisis affecting our current environmental, social, political and economic systems and the need to prepare for an uncertain future. It is not coincidence that many of us identified facilitation, process and design skills needed to create new forms of education, communication, and connection so that we can all do our part to ensure that another world is indeed possible.

A strong foundation has already been built by this group of committed people. Now they are growing an international network of creative changemakers determined to make a real impact on the world. One place has always beckoned to me: Wherever there is a small group of committed people trying to change the world, that is a place I will be. That is a place I will call home. Thank you Järna, for offering me a home.