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Urban Planning (ISSN: 2183–7635)
2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182
DOI: 10.17645/up.v4i2.2018
Article
Reconstituting the Urban Commons: Public Space, Social Capital and the
Project of Urbanism
David Brain 1,2
1Division of Social Sciences, New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL 34243, USA; E-Mail: brain@ncf.edu
2Centre for the Future of Places, KTH—Royal Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
Submitted: 17 February 2019 | Accepted: 15 April 2019 | Published: 30 June 2019
Abstract
This article outlines a framework for connecting design-oriented research on accommodating and encouraging social inter-
action in public space with investigation of broader questions regarding civic engagement, social justice and democratic
governance. How can we define the “kind of problem a city is” (Jacobs, 1961), simultaneously attending to the social
processes at stake in urban places, the spatial ordering of urban form and the construction of the forms of agency that
enable us to make better places on purpose? How can empirical research be connected more systematically to theories
of democratic governance, with clear implications for urban design, urban and regional planning as professional practice?
This framework connects three distinct theoretical moves: (1) understanding the sociological implications of public space
as an urban commons, (2) connecting the making of public space to research on social capital and collective efficacy, and
(3) understanding recent tendencies in the discipline of urban design in terms of the social construction of a “program of
action” (Latour, 1992) at the heart of the professional practices relevant to the built environment.
Keywords
design-oriented research; urban commons; public space; social capital
Issue
This article is part of the issue “Public Space in the New Urban Agenda: Research into Implementation”, edited by Michael
W. Mehaffy (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), Tigran Haas (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), and
Peter Elmlund (Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Sweden).
© 2019 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).
1. Introduction
Over the last 30 years, the idea of public space has occu-
pied a central place in both the critical theory and every-
day practice of urbanism. This has become even more ev-
ident with the release of The New Urban Agenda by the
United Nations, emphasizing the importance of public
space and “cities for all” as a core component of a project
of sustainable development (United Nations, 2016). The
apparent erosion of public space by privatization and se-
curitization has been regarded as symptomatic of issues
related to economic inequality, racial and ethnic exclu-
sion and environmental injustice. The repair and revital-
ization of public space has at the same time come to ap-
pear as a critical site where those issues are manifested
in behavior and experience, and where there are oppor-
tunities for significant intervention. The revitalization of
public space has become a central piece in efforts to cre-
ate cities that are safe and supportive of the kind of so-
cial cohesion necessary to sustain an inclusive, just and
resilient society.
For those with a professional interest in the design
and planning of cities, growing interest in public space
is an opportunity to bring renewed relevance to their
expertise. Over the last half of the 20th century, plan-
ners and policy makers have struggled with social prob-
lems such as concentrations of poverty, neighborhood
decline, disinvestment and gentrification. Where eco-
nomic justice might be considered “above the pay grade”
of the ordinary professional planner, the project of creat-
ing safe, comfortable and inclusive public spaces encom-
passes achievable goals with at least a rhetorical connec-
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 169
tion to broader social issues. In public space, complex so-
cial issues of power and inequality can be engaged in-
directly and in safely delimited ways, comfortably sub-
sumed in the immediate practical problems of design
and management.
There are two contradictory reasons for the grow-
ing attention to public space, however. The first is its
relationship to the idea of placemaking as an approach
to attracting both investment and population to the ur-
ban environment. At the same time, the re-making of
places sits problematically at the intersection of issues of
power, economic inequality, environmental justice and
the “right to the city”. As cities have confronted the con-
sequences of stark economic inequality, ethnic diversity
and unevenly distributed environmental risks, traditional
public space has been steadily eroded by privatization
and securitization. The reason seems clear: the physical
and the social qualities of the city have been undermined
by urban decay, disinvestment and problems that go
with deepening inequality. In public space, the poor and
the powerless become visible, and their mere presence
comes to be seen as a problem. The practice of placemak-
ing occupies a political space where the police powers of
the state are both activated and called into question.
We have a hopeful perspective that regards the re-
pair of urban public space as a key to repairing the mate-
rial and social environment of the city. And a critical per-
spective that highlights the way the repairs themselves
become part of the problem, manifesting the essentially
contested nature of urban public space and ultimately
the dominance of powerful interests in a remaking of the
city that systematically serves some and excludes oth-
ers. Both perspectives share the idea that the quality and
character of public space is essential to the quality and
vitality of urban public life.
On both sides, the discussion of public space has of-
ten relied on unexamined normative assumptions and
anecdotal accounts, rather than systematic considera-
tion of available empirical research. This is understand-
able, given the gaps in the literature. Activists and pro-
fessionals have an expressed interest in evidence-based
approaches to transforming places, but the empirical fo-
cus in this work is necessarily narrow and often relies
on borrowed and underdeveloped theoretical ideas. The
academic literature that does take on the broader issues
tends to be relatively disconnected from practice, both
because its specialized focus means that it doesn’t take
up questions relevant to practitioners and because it may
call the relevant practices into question in a manner that
practitioners find unhelpful.
While planners and activists alike have focused on
the implications of Jane Jacobs’ insightful observations,
there has been less attention to Jacobs’ argument that
American cities have suffered from a fundamental lim-
itation in the way planners have understood “the kind
of problem a city is” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 428). Ironically,
Jacobs’ advocacy of the city as a complex and emer-
gent phenomenon that can’t be reduced to invariant rela-
tionships between variables has inspired reform in plan-
ning that draws on many of her insights but has largely
missed the point of her critique of the reductive tenden-
cies in the supporting research. Limitations in thinking
about public space have resulted from a combination
of liberal preconceptions and methodological assump-
tions derived from regarding public space as what Jacobs
called “disorganized complexity” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 430).
The purpose here is to suggest a framework for con-
necting the design-oriented research on accommodat-
ing and encouraging social interaction with investigation
of broader questions regarding civic engagement, social
justice and democratic governance. There are a number
of questions underlying this effort: how can we simul-
taneously attend to the social processes at stake in ur-
ban places, the spatial ordering of urban form and the
construction of the forms of agency that enable us to
make better places on purpose? How can public space
be connected more systematically to theories of demo-
cratic governance? Complete answers to such questions
extend well beyond the scope of this article. An imme-
diate concern is a narrower question of connecting aca-
demic research to practice: How can current sociological
perspectives contribute to understanding the potential
contribution of placemaking and public space to creat-
ing more resilient, equitable, and ecologically responsi-
ble cities?
This framework involves three theoretical moves that
are not usually connected: (1) understanding the soci-
ological implications of public space as an urban com-
mons, (2) connecting the making of public space to re-
search on social capital and collective efficacy, and (3) un-
derstanding recent tendencies in the discipline of urban
design in terms of the social construction of a “program
of action” (Latour, 1992) at the heart of the professional
practices relevant to the built environment. Key contra-
dictions in the literature on public space can be sorted
out by bringing the discipline-based formation of agency
into focus. For whom, by whom and according to what
practical logic do we make places in the contemporary
urban landscape?
The concept of an urban commons is not a new idea,
but it is generally used somewhat superficially, as if it
were a simple matter of shared access to space or re-
sources. From a sociological perspective, the idea of a
commons emphasizes a public realm that entails a nor-
mative order and a relational web that is both spatial and
social. The concept of social capital can help to clarify the
social processes that constitute a commons in this sense,
connecting at the same time to contemporary empirical
work regarding the foundations of effective democratic
governance (Putnam, 2000). Less directly, social capital
can also be connected to the visual and spatial order of
the built environment (Sampson, 2013). Finally, the con-
cept of a ‘program of action’ is a way to bring into analyt-
ical focus the implications of situating professional prac-
tice at the intersection between built form and social pro-
cesses. As an illustration of this point, close analysis of
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 170
the example of the New Urbanist movement highlights
possibilities and critical challenges associated with re-
structuring professional practice around urbanism as a
normative project.1
A neo-liberal logic has been built into much of the
conventional thinking about public space, and it is im-
portant to note at the outset that a professional reform
movement is severely limited in its ability to transcend
a logic that has been deeply institutionalized in its field
of operations. This neo-liberal logic is implied by the un-
derlying conception of public space, as well as in the
preference for private sector and market-oriented solu-
tions, a preference that is structurally defined and ide-
ologically reinforced in the contemporary political econ-
omy of place. In order to transcend the limits of this logic,
a sociology of public space can move beyond regarding
it as a site for social interaction to exploring the active
making of places itself as political practice and as poten-
tially a critical component of contemporary “civic innova-
tion” (Sirianni & Friedland, 2001). Focus on a civic ideal
has been reflected in academic work on social capital,
following Putnam (2000); implied in the reform of plan-
ning practice under the banner of the New Urbanism in
the US (Brain, 2008); and called out explicitly in fund-
ing initiatives from the non-profit sector (see, for exam-
ple, the Center for Active Design, 2018). By re-thinking
public space as a form of civic practice that has material
and spatial dimensions, it is possible open new avenues
for research that offer theoretical and practical leverage
on problems related not only to the design and manage-
ment of public space, but to challenges we face in demo-
cratic governance of cities.
2. Public Space as a Research Problem
Michael Sorkin introduces a volume on the erosion of
public space with this claim: “The familiar spaces of tra-
ditional cities, the streets and squares, courtyards and
parks, are our great scenes of the civic, visible and ac-
cessible, our binding agents” (Sorkin, 1992, p. xv). Such
claims are often the justification but not the focus of re-
search on public space. The most well-known research
on public space falls along a line that runs from Jane
Jacobs’ anecdotes to William Whyte’s methodical obser-
vation of “the social life of small urban spaces” (Whyte,
1980). Throughout the literature, the concept of pub-
lic space contains a useful but problematic ambiguity,
as discussions slip from physical space to interactional
space, and from an image of public sociability as char-
acterized by Jacobs and others to an image of the idea
of the “public realm” as a distinct field of social action
(Arendt, 1958; Weintraub, 1995). These conceptions cut
across political perspectives on the “grand dichotomy”
of public and private, from the liberal/economistic dis-
tinction between the state and civil society to the “re-
publican virtue” tradition that regards the public realm
in terms of “political community and citizenship, analyti-
cally distinct from both the market and the administra-
tive state” (Weintraub & Kumar, 1997, p. 7). This last
move—from public space to the public realm—reflects
the ways in which ideas about public space contain both
deeply rooted liberal conceptions, and a critical impulse
toward transcending that impulse.
Much of the design-oriented research follows
Whyte’s lead, engaging in behavioral observation, inter-
views, surveys and other tools to capture an empirical
representation of “user” experience and behavioral out-
comes. Gehl and his colleagues, for example, have pio-
neered careful observation of qualities of public space
associated with accommodating activities that people
find necessary, those that might be “optional”, and those
that are “social”, and to be distinguished from the more
utilitarian activities (Gehl, 2011, pp 11–12). This kind of
research finds its most prominent academic home in en-
vironmental psychology, its unit of analysis typically the
behavior of individuals in a social setting defined only as
interaction with others. Although a broader significance
suggested by theoretical discussions from Arendt (1958)
to Sennett’s “fall of public man” (Sennett, 1974) is of-
ten assumed, the dominant line of research effectively
avoids confronting underlying political questions regard-
ing the connections between “public space”, “public life”
and the public realm.
In contrast with the design-oriented literature, criti-
cal writing on public space is focused on its characteris-
tics as essentially contested terrain, as both the site and
sometimes the focus of conflicts rooted in structures of
power and economic inequality, as a space of displace-
ment and spatial exclusion in which underlying social
contradictions are revealed and confronted. Such criti-
cal perspectives have benefitted from ethnographic ap-
proaches that enable rich and detailed exploration of the
historical context and the complex layers of meaning at
stake in the way such conflicts are played out in urban
settings (Low, 2000). Where the tendencies toward secu-
ritization and privatization suggest the possible “end of
public space”, struggles over the “right to the city” point
to its on-going importance (Kohn, 2016; Mitchell, 2003).
A discourse of rights, however, can easily fail to escape
from the core political dilemmas of liberalism—it is ulti-
mately merely the other side of the logic that produces
the problems it intends to solve.
Clearly the critical literature on public space tells a
somewhat different story from the hopeful threads that
run from Jacobs to Gehl, much less the activist organi-
zations such as the Project for Public Space. The design-
oriented literature reduces public space to a problem of
shaping the behavior of individuals—encouraging social
interaction by maintaining a safe, comfortable and lively
setting that draws individuals and encourages them to
1This article is part of the issue “Public Space in the New Urban Agenda: Research into Implementation”, edited by Michael W. Mehaffy (KTH Royal
Institute of Technology, Sweden), Tigran Haas (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), and Peter Elmlund (Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson
Foundation, Sweden).
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 171
linger. In pursuit of empirically defensible and eminently
practical lessons, this literature aspires to identify dis-
crete patterns of cause and effect, of intervention and
outcome. On the other hand, the critical literature tends
to defend the idea of public space by focusing on struc-
tural conditions and conflicts that interfere with its pre-
sumed normative functions, and on the erosion of those
normative functions as a manifestation of the broader is-
sues of structural power. The form and character of the
space are only contingently relevant, with primary con-
cern given to the underlying structures that determine
the dynamics of group conflict.
3. From Public Space to the Urban Commons
The gaps and contradictions in the research literature
leave us between the horns of a practical dilemma. The
positive revitalization of public space, intended to en-
hance urban livability, is associated with gentrification,
displacement and exclusion. Where public space is de-
fined in terms of access and visibility, the problem of free
and open access becomes a problem of social control. If
public space is defined in terms of open access, its safety
and comfort often come to depend on restricting who
uses the space and for what purpose. These contradic-
tions are at the heart of common conceptions of pub-
lic space.
Securitization and privatization are regarded as erod-
ing public space, and yet these two tendencies are pre-
cisely the logical solutions to the problem of public space
when conceived as a problem of uses and rights in a free
society characterized by cultural and class diversity. Al-
though neo-liberal urban reforms are often cited as the
culprit in the erosion of public space, they are logically im-
plied by a conception of public space as an open-access
resource. As a domain of ‘users’ to be accommodated,
public space is reduced to a collection of individual rights
to be asserted and defended without addressing under-
lying political questions regarding the social and institu-
tional conditions under which rights are negotiated and
recognized. Contemporary responses to the perceived
problems of public space follow a logical trajectory with
roots that go back to Bentham’s panopticon—the dark
side of the progressive impulse at the heart of classi-
cal liberalism (Bentham, 1988; Foucault, 1995). In the
face of conflicts around the limits of legitimate police
power, cities resort to environmental manipulations in-
tended to discourage undesirable uses and people by
increasing surveillance and installing hostile accommo-
dations (e.g., uncomfortable benches to discourage loi-
tering, random sprinklers to discourage sleeping in the
grass). When policing and environmental design both
prove insufficient to achieve the desired outcomes, pri-
vatization is the obvious strategy for expanding the range
of legitimate authority to control and exclude.
The classical liberal conception of the public realm
is reflected in the idea of the “tragedy of the com-
mons” (Hardin, 1968). Hardin argued that there is an in-
escapable problem implied in any situation where there
is open access to a resource held in common owner-
ship. Given a world of actors oriented to optimizing their
self-interest, the individual benefits of over-exploiting a
common resource under the condition of open access
outweighs the individual’s share of the common cost of
harm to that resource. Hence the tragedy: the inevitable
destruction of the commons (defined here as common
resources not encumbered by private interests) when
we assume a condition of individual freedom. When the
problem is formulated in this way, there are only two
logical solutions: either strong regulation to protect the
shared resource, or privatization in such a way that those
who reap the benefits also bear the burden of the costs,
and thus have an incentive to invest in protection, con-
servation and/or replacement of those resources.
There are two issues with this framing of the prob-
lem of public space. First, what Hardin describes is not
a problem of the ‘commons’, but a problem of open-
access resources. Even so, there are a variety of institu-
tional responses to the management of “common pool
resources” that go beyond the stark choice offered by
Hardin (Ostrom, 1990). Secondly, although there are
some aspects of public space that might be treated as
a problem of open access, the essential quality of public
space is not in fact defined by common pool resources.
Key qualities of public space have to do with the emer-
gent qualities constituted by the cooperative nature of
co-presence and shared use.
A key part of the enjoyment, usefulness and mean-
ing of public space is the way it embodies a normative
order (Lofland, 1998). Those aspects of public space that
are a manifestation of the public realm in the broader
sense are not a common pool of resources that can be
depleted but a domain of action the value of which is
embodied in the norms, patterns of action and shared ex-
pectations sustained through shared use. To the extent
that use undermines rather than sustaining the condi-
tions necessary for such sharing, public space might be
reduced to the problem framed by Hardin’s tragedy of
the commons. To the extent, however, that public space
constitutes a public realm, questions of rights and usage,
surveillance and social control, and power and domina-
tion are subsumed within a broader fabric of social rela-
tions in political society.
Newman’s (2015) ethnographic study of popular mo-
bilization around the Jardins d’Éole in Paris offers con-
crete examples of the way a fabric of social relations
can be manifested in public space, in the context of a
diverse society. A project to transform a former indus-
trial site into an environmental park became the focus
of neighborhood activism during its planning, the site of
collective action when completed, and a spatial manifes-
tation of a popular politics that Newman describes as
“part of a broader reimagining of what nature, the city,
its citizens, and political contestation mean at a funda-
mental level” (Newman, 2015, p. xv). Mobilization of a
marginalized population of West African and Maghrebi
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 172
immigrants took the form of “manif-festives” (Newman,
2015, p. 48), events that combined political expression
with carnivalesque celebration. Newman argues thatthis
transformative collective action connected global envi-
ronmental concerns with local issues of health, safety,
and housing. In this way, activists created “a strength-
ened political consciousness of the ‘neighborhood’ as a
force in favor of democracy” (Newman, 2015, p. 61), and
went beyond addressing injustices “to forge a ‘civic ecol-
ogy’” (Newman, 2015, p. 36). In the context of the politi-
cal culture of French republicanism, with its tendency to
regard multiculturalism as social fragmentation and ghet-
toization, a spatially constructed neighborhood identity
became a legitimate way to assert collective claims on
behalf of “les gens du quartier” (Newman, 2015, p. 46).
Where it is common for urban redevelopment
schemes to entail “displacement and exclusion”,
Newman sees a different outcome in this mobilization.
The interchange between the top-down interests of the
French state in transforming a contaminated industrial
site into a showcase of French commitment to environ-
mental issues, and the local struggles of an immigrant
community in a marginalized neighborhood, produced
a “radically vibrant urbanism” (Newman, 2015, p. 198).
It is “vibrant” not because of a neutral sociability, but
because of the web of engagement that emerged out of
conflicts and the creative engagement of the inhabitants.
The concept of a civic ecology, then, refers to the way
spatial constructions allow for productive expressions of
both identity and difference.
Newman suggests replacing the typical concept of
“public space” with the concept of an “urban commons”.
His usage goes beyond the superficial idea of the com-
mons as a space of open access, emphasizing that its
character and consequences are the result of a complex
process of social and political mediation (Newman, 2015,
p. 198). Where the vitality of public space is typically un-
derstood in terms of peaceful and orderly social inter-
actions, Newman characterizes the urban commons as
a “convergence between conflicting interests, projects,
and mediations that can even by marked by acrimony
as the boundaries between public/private are blurred”
(Newman, 2015, p. 199). More precisely the boundaries
between public and private, between particularism and
civic or national identity, are negotiated as a practi-
cal matter. This “radically vibrant urbanism” is actually
the on-going project of social and political order, acted
out and mediated in constructions of space and place,
through an engagement with the built environment.
4. Public Space as Civic Ecology
The sociological literature offers theoretical as well as
empirical support for the idea of a civic ecology, identi-
fying social processes that operate in and through spa-
tial practices and the representational qualities inscribed
in built form. This support is not always obvious, how-
ever. Within the discipline of sociology, one tends to find
research in public space rather than research on public
space as a distinct socio-spatial phenomenon. Rejection
of the functionalism of the Chicago School urban sociol-
ogists of the first half of the 20th century has left sociolo-
gists suspicious of any suggestion of a functional or deter-
ministic relationship between spatial ecology and social
order. The resulting gap in the discipline’s attention has
only gradually been rectified by the return to interest in
the social production of space and place (Gieryn, 2000).
In addition to the avoidance of ecological perspectives,
Lofland (1998) observes that sociologists have been slow
to accept:
The idea that the public realm could be the setting
for genuine interaction, the idea that individuals who
have no personal relationship with one another—
who are strangers to one another—the idea that such
persons could, in any sociologically meaningful sense,
interact. (Lofland, 1998, p. 26)
There are prominent exceptions, of course, in work ex-
ploring the orderly processes of interaction in public
(Duneier, 1999; Goffman, 1963). Lofland draws a key in-
sight from this line of inquiry: that human activity in the
public realm depends on shared norms and expectations,
on patterns of action that are sometimes implicitly rather
than explicitly cooperative, and that it is comprised of
regular forms of interaction that are not simply an im-
poverished version of what happens in more intimate
personal relationships. The public realm is constituted by
normatively constructed interactions that sustain a pat-
tern of social relations of a qualitatively distinct type. As
a distinctive “social territory”, the public realm is a “re-
lational web” that involves persons and places (Lofland,
1998, p. 51).
If the public realm is understood as a relational web
that includes relations between people, relations be-
tween people and places, and relations between peo-
ple mediated by place, it is possible to draw a signifi-
cant theoretical connection to the concept of social cap-
ital. This concept has a long history in the social sciences
but has been popularized by Putnam (2000) and others
who have developed empirical measures and correlated
its presence to positive outcomes ranging from civic en-
gagement to reduced crime and even improvements in
physical health. What is often lost in the popularization
of the concept, however, is that social capital is an at-
tribute of social life embodied not simply in the trans-
actions between individuals but in the emergent prop-
erties of a web of associations that constrain and enable
those transactions.
In some of the work on social capital, it is defined in
terms of the characteristics of social networks that en-
hance the rational individual’s capacity to act (Coleman,
1988). Lin offers a vivid definition of social capital as re-
sources embedded in a network: “your friend’s bicycle”
(Lin, 2001, p. 56). At the other end of the theoretical
spectrum, Bourdieu emphasized the extent to which so-
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 173
cial capital, as any form of capital, has value precisely be-
cause it is not evenly distributed (Bourdieu, 1986). For
Bourdieu, the importance of social, cultural and educa-
tional capital is their role in the reproduction of class
differences, in a way that is missed by the methodolog-
ical individualism often associated with network theory.
Where social capital has been regarded as a feature of
social networks, or when it becomes a structural vari-
able accounting for individual health or status attain-
ment, the tendency has been to lose sight of a key point
in Putnam’s work: that empirical measures of social cap-
ital are measures of the community’s associational cohe-
sion related to the collective capacity for self-governance
(Putnam, 1993).
Sampson (2013, p. 38) notes the tendency for social
capital to be conceived narrowly as “embodied in the so-
cial ties among persons”. In this regard, he suggests, so-
cial capital theory doesn’t move far from the older “so-
cial disorganization” theories in explaining such things as
crime and neighborhood disorder. Sampson finds, how-
ever, that the density of ties doesn’t necessarily corre-
late with lower crime rates or other indications of social
disorder. For this reason, he introduces a theory of “col-
lective efficacy”, focusing not on the presence of ties but
on measures of social cohesion and shared expectations
for social control (Sampson, 2013, pp. 151–152). Collec-
tive efficacy “elevates an active view of social life that
goes beyond the accumulation of stocks of personal re-
sources, such as those found in local ties or civic mem-
berships” (Sampson, 2013, p. 153). According to this the-
ory, “repeated interactions, observations of interactions,
and an awareness of potential interactions that could be
invoked all establish shared norms (a sense of ‘we’) be-
yond the strong ties among friends and kin” (Sampson,
2013, p. 153).
Sampson and Raudenbush (1999) argue that the
causal process underlying a variety of correlations, in-
cluding those that have supported the so-called “broken
windows” theory (correlating visual and social disorder),
is precisely a process by which associational life becomes
a thing sui generis, with emergent properties. Sampson’s
conception of social capital manifested as collective ef-
ficacy refers to a quality of associational life that tran-
scends the specific associations and is linked to place, in
three ways: first, it is an empirically observable charac-
teristic of neighborhoods and not necessarily correlated
with social characteristics of residents as individuals. This
argument is reinforced by evidence regarding the effects
of “ecological networks”, social connections that are me-
diated by connections to place (Browning, Calder, Soller,
& Jackson, 2017). Second, it correlates with persistent
rates of civic engagement events in a neighborhood (e.g.,
rates of significant civic memberships are correlated with
rates of civic engagement a decade later), as part of a net-
work of neighborhoods (Sampson, 2013, pp. 238–239).
Finally, it is linked to the perceptions of visual order in a
neighborhood. In this context, the visual order (or disor-
der) of the neighborhood is an objectified form of collec-
tive efficacy, the way we recognize and confirm our per-
ception of the underlying social order (both within and
between neighborhoods).
On the basis of systematic observation of neighbor-
hoods, Sampson found that it is the perception of visual
disorder and not the systematically observed frequency
of the signs of disorder that correlate most closely with
such things as crime, suggesting that both crime and vi-
sual disorder are related to collective efficacy as a dimen-
sion of the spatial logic of neighborhoods. Others have
explored the importance of place-based visual cues in
the construction of urban social order (Suttles, 1972). In
his critique of modern cities, Sennett (1991) describes
visual and spatial perceptions of order and disorder in
the city as the “conscience of the eye”, a more or less de-
veloped (or impoverished) capacity for visual and prac-
tical engagement with a normative order. In his evoca-
tive account, a personal stroll through New York neigh-
borhoods becomes an exemplary engagement with col-
lective life.
Accounts of urban settings from Jacobs to Sennett
emphasize the complexity of the social patterns that
comprise urban places, noting the way urban places ac-
commodate an array of interactions from “durable en-
gagements” to “fluid encounters” (Blokland, 2017) and
that may be characterized by a mix of concerns that
range from instrumental interests to sociability, in set-
tings that range in character from private and parochial
to public. Blokland describes community as consisting
of “practices in which we convey a shared positioning,
develop shared experiences, or construct a shared nar-
rative of belonging” (Blokland, 2017, p. 88). We often
focus on the ways that narratives of belonging are con-
structed as narratives of exclusion, but narratives of so-
cial distinction can also be simultaneously narratives of
belonging. The concept of the “civic” is precisely a narra-
tive of belonging that reflects sharing a commitment to
place across the boundaries of differentiated groups.
To the extent that discussions of public space get
caught up in the logic of the “tragedy of commons”, they
are caught within the dilemma associated with the para-
doxical “logic of collection action” (Olson, 1971), and
stuck therefore with a limited definition of the problem
and an even more limited range of solutions. Escape from
this dilemma requires introduction of a theory of institu-
tions and organizations, not just individual interests and
transactions. This is precisely the point where Putnam
introduced the concept of social capital in his account
of the foundations of a civic tradition (Putnam, 1993).
Putnam quotes Geertz’s observation that “cooperation
is founded on a very lively sense of the mutual value
to the participants of such cooperation, not on a gen-
eral ethic of the unity of all men or an organic view of
society” (Putnam, 1993, p. 168). According to Putnam:
“most forms of social capital, such as trust, are what
Albert Hirschman has called ‘moral resources’—that is
resources whose supply increases rather than decreases
through use and which become depleted if not used”
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 174
(Putnam, 1993, p. 169). The sociological importance of
public space, one might conclude, lies in its character as
an urban commons where the most essential shared re-
sources might be “moral resources” that reside in built
form, in place itself as a form of social capital, and as a
medium for social processes of conflict and mediation.
Social capital, then, is an aspect of the urban com-
mons as a relational web, dependent not just on close in-
terpersonal ties but on the ways in which people are em-
bedded in a relations that span social distance from the
most personal to the most impersonal relations. It is a
quality of public life that is experienced in concrete asso-
ciational contexts, manifested as norms of trust and reci-
procity that carry over to others with whom one is not
directly connected, and infused in the common world
of strangers encountered in public space. With this in
mind, we can see that the project of what has come to
be called ‘placemaking’ in the professional jargon can be
understood as a process of negotiating the inscription
of narratives of belonging in spatial form and practices.
Although this is often a contested process, Newman’s
analysis points to the ways that the processes of contes-
tation, manifested in engagement with space and urban
form, can produce an overarching relational order.
5. The Project of Urbanism as a Program of Action
One of the characteristics of any professional discipline
is that the practitioner is trained to deliver certain kinds
of solutions to certain kinds of problems. This implies a
practice of defining problems in terms of the kinds of so-
lutions the practitioner is prepared to offer. Such a prac-
tice depends on a disciplinary formation embedded in
the matrix of institutions that define and sustain the pro-
fessionals’ field of operations and authority. In this set-
ting, practitioners elaborate a “program of action” (Brain,
1993; Latour, 1992) that defines the site, those aspects
of the site that are potentially in play, the practices of
producing authoritative definitions of the problem, and
the rhetoric of justification that ultimately authorizes a
professional discipline.
For example, we can trace the outlines of the pro-
gram of action that shaped professional engagement
with the processes of urban development in the early
20th century. At the turn of the century in the US, as
part of the effort to make sense of changes associated
with urbanization, industrialization and immigration, the
Chicago School sociologists defined urbanism as a distinc-
tive object for sociological investigation. Starting with
empirical exploration of social problems like the con-
centrations of crime, poverty, alcoholism, and juvenile
delinquency, they built a theoretical conception of ur-
banism as a human ecology (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie,
1925). It was not accidental that Chicago School sociol-
ogy developed concurrently with the broad pattern of ur-
ban reform associated with the Progressive Era and the
early formation of an administrative state with tendrils
of power reaching deep into social life.
As social scientists sought to define the city as an
object of knowledge, this project was part of a general
turn to technical expertise and professional authority in
addressing social problems. Professional city managers
were to displace machine politics from the business of
civic administration. Professionalized social workers re-
placed the explicit class dynamics of the “charitable visi-
tor” with an authority that was part of the incorporation
of social welfare functions into the operations of state
power, linking social science to social service (Lubove,
1965). In the first decades of the 20th century, we see
the shift from the “city beautiful” to the “city functional”,
from a focus on visual and symbolic order to a focus on
the city as a functional system and planning as the ratio-
nal administration of that system. In this historical con-
text, urbanism was defined a field of operations for tech-
nical rationality, to be informed by scientific knowledge
and wielded by professionals whose discipline could im-
pose an objective and practical order to the problems of
managing growth and change in the city (Boyer, 1990).
By the late 20th century, professions involved in the
planning and design of the built environment had be-
come part of a division of labor deeply embedded in a de-
velopment regime comprised by the organization of finan-
cial capital, the business models and routines of the devel-
opment industry, a regulatory apparatus that reflected 50
years of bureaucratic accretion and political compromise,
and a set of political expectations associated with the lib-
eral “procedural republic” (Sandel, 1996). The program of
action associated with professional planning was formed
within an institutional matrix that defined the jurisdic-
tion of public-sector planners, shaped business models re-
lated to a market for the professional consulting services,
and set conditions for the professional division of labor
as well as the technical languages and boundary objects
that enabled cross-disciplinary communication. Clear ex-
amples of the embedded program of action are recogniz-
able in the practices of Euclidean zoning, at the intersec-
tion of the police powers of the state and the dynamics
of a market for land (Levine, 2006).
Within this institutional matrix, the division of profes-
sional labor associated with the production of the built
environment both distributes agency and obscures struc-
tures of power. It also disconnects professional author-
ity and practice from the experiential and social interac-
tional dimensions of the construction of place, as each
practitioner focuses on discrete and specialized prob-
lems within the division of labor rather than on an in-
tegrated process that engages places as concrete net-
works of people and things. Compare a traditional public
space produced as the direct expression of power with
the modern suburban landscape in the US. A public space
that is designed in service to institutionalized power is
a stage on which social life is played out but also an ex-
pression of a relationship of power, in symbolic form but
also in the making of the place. Berezin (1997), for ex-
ample, has explored the dramatizing of urban spaces by
the Italian Fascists as part of the construction of their
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 175
power. Mukerji (1997) explores the ways the power of
the French monarchy was not only represented but con-
stituted in the form of the gardens at Versailles. In a dif-
ferent but parallel fashion, a four-lane arterial roadway
lined with big-box retail set back behind large fields of
parking and fast food restaurants on out-parcels mani-
fests other forms of authoritative action and reproduces
networks of power. Such spaces are an alienated and
obscured but effective manifestation of power in which
its workings disappear in a web of distributed authority
and instrumental rationality. Furthermore, a neo-liberal
logic is built into this institutional matrix, in so far as the
division of labor involves routinized collaborations be-
tween technical experts and bureaucratic officials, in a
context defined by the foundational conditions of the lib-
eral state and markets for land, labor and capital.2
Both popular and professional responses to the de-
cay of American cities and the failures of urban renewal
programs of the early 1960s indicate the beginning of sig-
nificant shifts in urbanism as a practice over the course
of the following decades. Reception of Gehl’s earliest
work on public space (1966–1971) points to a turn to the
idea of “place” out of a dissatisfaction with the abstract
formalism dominating modern architecture. The emer-
gence of “advocacy planning” in the US points to doubts
and pressures underlying efforts to reconfigure the pro-
fessional program of action in the 1970s and 1980s.
The formation of the Congress for the New Urbanism
in 1992 reflected the coalescence of a number of profes-
sional reform tendencies organized around a critique of
the dominant patterns of suburban development, a nor-
mative understanding of urbanism and a design-centered
program of action. Given the multiple institutional lay-
ers and interlocking practices of the contemporary devel-
opment regime, the movement found itself developing
modes of practice that moved against the grain of the
dominant institutional arrangements at different levels.
Both critics and advocates of the new urbanism often
miss the implications of the critique of bureaucratic ratio-
nality in modern planning, as well as the implicit social
agenda that has been at the core of the movement (Brain,
2005). In addition to identifying the economic, social and
environmental consequences of “sprawl”, and behind ef-
forts to recover a nostalgic imagery of traditional places,
New Urbanists focused on the unintended consequences
of a highly rationalized system that combined bureau-
cratic rigidity with the fragmented perspectives of spe-
cialized expertise. A focus on urban design brought new
centrality to their professional role, while they mobilized
a normative theory of urbanism in the effort to re-orient
planning practice to substantive rather than procedural
concerns, focusing on human experience, quality of life
and an encompassing (if vaguely defined) conception of a
sense of community. Peter Katz, the first executive direc-
tor of the CNU, characterized the new urbanism as an “ar-
chitecture of community”, articulating a design-centered
program of action as a re-forming of human settlements
around the social character of places (Katz, 1994).
The key point here is the logic of this strategy, not
necessarily its substance. If we look beyond the specifics
of New Urbanist projects to the underlying conception
of the project of ‘urbanism’, it is apparent that New
Urbanist practitioners found themselves pushing against
the limits of the conventional development regime while
ultimately remaining embedded within the institutional
structures that sustain a professional practice in the con-
text of the contemporary political economy of place
(Logan & Molotch, 1987). Four central ideas run through
New Urbanist practice, with implications for a program of
action: (1) the neighborhood as the crucial unit of analy-
sis and planning practice, (2) the interconnected patterns
of urban form at different levels of scale, from the build-
ing to the block, block to the neighborhood, neighbor-
hood to city, city to region, (3) the varied articulation of
the relationship between public and private as a defining
component of place, and (4) the crucial role of shaping
transportation and mobility as a shaping of opportunities
for social engagement. A universalized conception of the
neighborhood was privileged as a humane scale at which
to understand the import of space and place to a pat-
tern of human interactions and relationships. The con-
cept of the urban transect framed the importance of the
linkages between built form and social life at different
levels of scale, in terms of an ecology of places (Duany &
Brain, 2005).
New Urbanist principles give particular attention to
the importance of what they refer to as the public realm,
understood in terms of the way the articulation of public
and private (e.g., in building frontages) defines the char-
acter of public space and manifests a practical responsi-
bility of private actors for the shared world of the street.
Pedestrian orientation and multimodal mobility reflect
the idea of extending the web of human-scaled relation-
ships from face-to-face interactions in public spaces of
the street to a broader civic and even regional connec-
tivity. This orientation toward transportation is set in
direct opposition to the mid-century modernist notion
that part of being modern is to design for functional effi-
ciency, with particular regard to movement. The impact
of the emphasis on place and character in transporta-
tion planning has been most dramatically evident in the
shifting program of action of traffic engineers (Institute
of Traffic Engineers, 2010).
In New Urbanist practice, concern for public space
is focused on the idea that the private realm should be
arranged in a manner that constitutes a common world,
with cumulative and mutual benefits. In addition to set-
ting aside land for parks and plazas as well as civic uses,
all private interventions are expected to be mindful of
their cumulative effect on their shared setting. Hence
the quintessential spaces of urbanism, in this perspec-
tive, depend on the way buildings define and give dis-
2In this sense, a neo-liberal logic is manifested in the tendency for reformist solutions to accept the conditions of a capitalist market, and generally to
look for ways to move toward policies directed at private rather than public action.
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 176
tinctive character to the ordinary space of street and
sidewalk.3This conception is manifested in New Urbanist
form-based codes as a guide to developing neighbor-
hoods and towns (Parolek, Parolek, & Crawford, 2008).
The effect of a form-based code is to establish a range of
defined responsibilities to the common world that any-
one choosing to build in the community is expected to
take on. In other words, form-based codes regulate the
private realm in terms of its role in defining public space.
A normative understanding of urbanism is reflected,
then, in two components of New Urbanist practice. First,
buildings are expected to contribute to the character
of a street, to reinforce the structure and identity of a
place, and to enact a shared responsibility in sustaining
the quality of a built environment. Second, the quality
of urbanism depends on a complex orderliness that can
emerge from the diverse contributions of many individu-
als, over time. Just as one of the satisfactions of the so-
cial life of public space is the experience of social order
in unplanned encounters, in the accomplishment of so-
cial order even in the face of the unexpected disruptions,
the New Urbanists have sought to cultivate an apprecia-
tion of urbanism as a practice of creating and sustaining
places over the long term, of managing change and con-
serving the sense of identity, coherence and continuity—
the work, as they say, of many hands, rather than a de-
sign to be attributed to a single author or a technical
achievement dependent on an overarching authority.
If this logic could be fully translated into a re-
configuration of the relationship of professional disci-
pline to social and political practice, the implications are
potentially profound. The focus on design enables gath-
ering up the fragmented domains of expertise relevant
to urban development under a guiding vision grounded
in a discipline of urban form. From the standpoint of the
sociology of the professions, it can be seen as an effort
on the part of design-oriented practitioners (originally,
those trained as architects) to assert dominance in the
division of labor of expertise in planning. For our pur-
poses here, the point is that the capacity of the designer
for integrative problem-solving, when reconceived in the
context of engagement with the substantive concerns of
citizens and stakeholders, is intended to provide the dis-
ciplinary basis for intentional achievement of a norma-
tive urbanism. This begs a whole series of questions, of
course, regarding the nature of that engagement with
citizens and stakeholders.4However, it also contains the
seed of a substantive politics of placemaking.
New Urbanist practitioners, in the face of political
and economic resistance to their goals, found them-
selves stepping back from conventional reliance on
technical authority in order to find external political
leverage necessary to carve out a new role. As a re-
sult, practitioners sought a different relationship to the
clients/users/citizens of the city. Such a concept of ur-
banism as a particular kind of design problem, requir-
ing substantive exchanges with non-professionals as well
as between the practitioners of relevant expertise, sug-
gests a shift in the locus of agency associated with the
production of urban space, and looks to ground its prac-
tices in the formative aspirations of a community (rather
than the technical issues of civic administration). This
tendency appears in the New Urbanist re-invention of
the tradition of the charrette (originally distinctively as-
sociated with architecture) as a collaborative design pro-
cess that requires engagement in real time with com-
munity members, elected and appointed officials, and
other experts (Brain, 2008). Although early successes of
a charrette-based process quickly gave way to a scaling
back and routinization in practice, it nonetheless raises
the question of how one might create a space for gen-
uine and inclusive collaboration in the formation of an
intentional urbanism. Even the modest successes of the
process with respect to building consensus around de-
sign solutions suggest the ways that a design vocabulary
and approach can become part of the way people think
about public space as a manifestation of a civic politics in
which the boundaries of private interest and public good
can be negotiated as a practical matter.
Ultimately, however, the very success of the New
Urbanist movement, and its ability to articulate a
rhetoric of justification that has become a kind of ortho-
doxy in public sector planning in the US, has meant that
practitioners have been compelled to craft an accommo-
dation with the dominant institutional and ideological ar-
rangements of American urban development—i.e., the
organization of capital in the development industry, the
regulatory apparatus associated with the liberal state,
and the division of professional labor among experts. Al-
though there are currents of concern for issues of social
and environmental justice in New Urbanist discourse, for
example, these concerns are blunted and often washed
out entirely in settings where the logic of neo-liberal re-
form holds political and economic sway.
In many respects, the New Urbanist movement has
been a beneficiary of the failures associated with the
policies of urban renewal of the 1960s. By offering a
marketable image of urbanism associated with a vari-
ety of social benefits, the movement could provide com-
pelling justification for policies that turned from the
much-criticized “top down” responses to urban decline
to the strategic enlistment of private capital and market
dynamics to spur reinvestment and redevelopment. This
aspect of New Urbanist success has been the focus of
much of the criticism leveled at New Urbanist projects.
Even so, the success of this rhetoric of justification has
also depended on its ability to evoke a narrative of urban-
ism as a collaborative project, in terms that have had the
3Obviously the New Urbanists cannot claim a monopoly on this idea. The point is that it forms a critical piece of the New Urbanist account of urban
placemaking.
4Even the language here is problematic, of course. Both “citizen” and “stakeholder” have been associated with drawing boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion from such processes. Referring to people as “users” has other problems.
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 177
capacity to engage and resonate with community mem-
bers. In the absence of a clear articulation of a civic poli-
tics linked to this project of urbanism, however, rejection
of top-down policy solutions slips all too comfortably into
neo-liberalism.
David Harvey (2000, p. 169) has suggested that the
New Urbanism “does battle with conventional wisdoms
entrenched in a wide range of institutions (develop-
ers, bankers, transport interests, etc.)”. He writes: “It at-
tempts intimate and integrated forms of development
that by-pass the rather stultifying conception of the hor-
izontally zoned and large-platted city. This liberates an
interest in the street and civic architecture as arenas of
sociality” (Harvey, 2000, p. 169). At the same time, he ob-
serves that New Urbanists have put too much faith in the
ideal of community without coming to terms with “the
darker side of communitarianism” (Harvey, 2000, p. 170).
Harvey also points out that many of the mistaken pre-
sumptions of the New Urbanists—the lack of clarity that
comes with the conflation of neighborhood and commu-
nity, the difficulty with resolving problems that occur at
different scales, even the difficulty addressing underly-
ing structural challenges—have to do with the fact that
“the ‘new urbanism’ must, if it is to be realized, embed its
projects in a restrictive set of social processes” (Harvey,
2000, p. 173). This constraint, however, is predicated on
the extent to which its practices remain embedded in the
institutional arrangements that sustain a particular ma-
trix of professional disciplines—both the fee-for-service
consultancies and the integration into the administrative
state. The analysis here suggests that there might be an-
other way for this to play out. The effort to materialize
what Harvey calls a utopian vision—or what we might re-
fer to as an urban ideal—suggests a pragmatic concep-
tion of community that can be productively aligned with
current sociological thinking regarding social capital.
The tension between this urban ideal and the pro-
cesses for its realization have manifested as internal con-
tradictions and struggles within the New Urbanist move-
ment, illuminating core contradictions in the embed-
ding of a professional practice of urbanism in a broader
development regime. In the last few years, these con-
tradictions have motivated several tendencies that at-
tempt to move beyond the conventional limits of pro-
fessional planning and urban design. It has been man-
ifested in the emergence of tactical urbanism (Lydon
& Garcia, 2015), and in the initiatives for Lean Urban-
ism (Dittmar & Kelbaugh, 2019) and incremental devel-
opment (Brain, 2019). The contradictions are far from
resolved but appear with growing clarity. Lean Urban-
ism, for example, has not always confronted the impli-
cations of what becomes at times a libertarian distrust
of the bureaucratic state. With respect to tactical urban-
ism, its significance has tended to shift as it has moved
from the creativity of unsanctioned “guerilla” interven-
tions toward being reduced, in the worst case, to some-
what cliched gestures with only superficial connection to
bottom-up engagement.
A critical limitation of the New Urbanist movement
has been its tendency to oscillate between top-down
policy intended to manipulate market outcomes and
bottom-up faith in the market itself—essentially, in po-
litical terms, the inability to move past the limits of con-
temporary liberalism. In the US, this tension is reflected
in the arguments between the advocates of “Smart
Growth” who focus on policies intended to incentivize
different development patterns, and the advocates of
traditional neighborhood design who focus on design-
ing compact neighborhoods that can offer people that
choice. Neither top-down policy nor design-based ap-
proaches are able to take up the underlying structural
issues that are rooted in the political economy, nor are
they able on their own to find a way out of this bottom-
up/top-down dichotomy. Those who operate in the do-
main of policy, as well as those who operate in the do-
main of a market for professional services, are struc-
turally constrained when it comes to confronting the fun-
damentally political character of the normative urbanism
to which they aspire. To a large extent, this can be under-
stood as a problem of agency.
Even with its shortcomings in practice, the norma-
tive theory of urbanism at the heart of the New Urbanist
movement implies what Sandel (1996) has referred to as
a formative vision that points beyond its limits as a pro-
fessional movement and suggests a connection with ef-
forts to re-create the foundations of democratic political
capacity, in and through self-conscious and (one would
hope) inclusive practices of placemaking. Such a norma-
tive theory of urbanism implies situating a practice of de-
sign in explicit relation to the native processes of social
connection to place, and to places as a way to sustain so-
cial meaning. This is not an easy thing to accomplish, and
has generally produced a reductionistic tendency, if for
no other reason than the need to shore up a professional
role. The New Urbanist movement has highlighted some
of the challenges in its efforts to resolve issues that might
seem exclusively the specialized domain of urban design-
ers: for example in the effort to come to terms with the
idea of tradition, and the difficult relationship between
self-conscious formal intentions and vernacular building
(Krier, 2009). Even the idea of the new urbanism as ‘neo-
traditional’ might be read as an urge to go beyond nos-
talgic references toward engagement with the social pro-
cesses of constructing meaning over time. New Urbanist
work has brought some of the dilemmas of design to the
surface, although it has fallen short of the potential for
to play a more profound transformative role.5
6. Conclusion: Urbanism as a Political Project
At the heart of the New Urbanist project, even where it
falls short of its aspirations, one can identify a call to heal
5The discussion of so-called “everyday urbanism” has also recognized the importance of bottom-up processes of placemaking but tends ultimately to
lack the transformative capacity associated with the critical components of any sort of utopian vision (Chase, Crawford, & Kaliski, 2008).
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 178
the disruptions of the urban commons as a spatial real-
ization of social connection and collective intentions, dis-
ruptions that have been the result of the way institutional-
ized patterns of urban development in the 20th century
have fragmented the processes of placemaking. Implied
in a normative conception of urbanism, New Urbanist or
otherwise, there is a recognition that the way we articu-
late the intersection of public and private space in the city
is a consequential enactment of a structure of social rela-
tions. It can be structurally and institutionally determined,
an artifact of a history that operates over our heads and
behind our backs, or it can be more or less the product of
intentional and self-conscious action. The theory and re-
search cited above suggest that the way we give form to
urban space is not simply a cause of behavior, but itself a
form of human action that embodies social relationships.
In this respect, design matters because it is itself a form
of action involving a process of making significant choices
and inscribing intentions in a visual and spatial order. It
matters what kind of intentions are presumed to be rele-
vant and possible, as well as for whom and by whom they
are to be articulated and implemented.
The idea of placemaking has gained wide currency
since Gehl first used a focus on place as a starting point
for articulating a practical alternative to the abstraction
of modernist architectural practice (Gehl, 2011). As a con-
cept, placemaking is often invoked precisely because it
allows for a slide between different dimensions of place
without necessarily being compelled to clarify how they
are (or are not) related. This also helps to avoid the
question of agency in placemaking—who is doing what,
for whom?
This conceptual slippage is apparent in a lot of the
talk by activist organizations. The Project for Public
Spaces describes “placemaking” as “a collaborative pro-
cess in which people come together to create vital pub-
lic spaces that bring health, happiness, and social con-
nections to their communities (Project for Public Spaces,
2018, p. 40). When they break down the 11 principles
of placemaking, the first principle is “the community is
the expert” (Project for Public Spaces, 2018, p. 43). How-
ever, this principle simply reflects the circular insight that
places that engage people are places that the people oc-
cupying them are engaged in making. What is really at
stake in the formation of placemaking as a program of
action? How is such a practice constructed and situated
in the matrix of institutions on which it inevitably de-
pends? There are, as we can see, many ways in which it
can go astray from the ostensible goal of inclusivity, eq-
uity and empowerment.
Arefi (2016) has sorted placemaking into a three-part
typology of needs, opportunities and asset-based ap-
proaches. Placemaking can be a response to local needs,
as when a government chooses to build a settlement
to accommodate rural-to-urban migration, or it can be
a response to an opportunity, as when squatter settle-
ments form as a direct response to the same needs
(Arefi, 2016, p. 6). The asset-based approach has grown
out of the work of community organizers who have rec-
ognized that community resilience and prosperity are
best served by cultivating social, economic and politi-
cal capacity from within a community, rather than rely-
ing on either experts or outside institutions to address
needs (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993; McKnight, 1996;
McKnight & Block, 2010). This approach has been artic-
ulated in direct opposition to the needs-based approach
to social problems by conventional social service agen-
cies and the liberal state.
Arefi’s typology identifies different modes of agency
associated with each type of placemaking. The first dis-
tinction is between the top-down agency of govern-
ments or other organized entities, typically relying on
technical experts, and agency mobilized from the bot-
tom up, relying on local knowledge. The asset-based
approach reflects a third way, in which agency is con-
stituted by social connection that activates assets al-
ready present in the community in ways previously un-
recognized, underutilized or simply not accessible in a
manner relevant to the community’s needs and aspira-
tions (i.e., the skills and knowledge of individuals, the
resources of organizations and associations from busi-
nesses and churches to civic associations, and the as-
sets available through public and private institutions).
An important aspect of this approach is that it avoids
a misleading dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up re-
sources, allowing for communities to use the power of
association to mobilize assets in a manner that also op-
timizes their capacity to take advantage of external con-
nections and partnerships with institutional actors who
bring resources, broader connections and access to ex-
pert knowledge (i.e., connections that Putnam refers to
as “bridging” social capital).
From the sociological perspective presented here,
the urban public realm is a relational web of people and
places, and a moral resource of civic life sustained by
the formation of social capital and sustaining the foun-
dations for collective efficacy as well as relational narra-
tives of belonging. It is constituted by the ability to give
objective form to the quality and character of collective
life across the range of social encounters from private to
public, with all their conflicts, ambiguities and complex-
ities. This sociological conception parallels the idea of a
civic ecology that is realized in relations and interactions
mediated by their inscription in built form, and poten-
tially activated by engagement in the processes of giving
intentional form to places. It is more than a domain in
which individual action is aggregated, more than just a
space of pedestrian traffic and sociability. It is a norma-
tive universe that is sustained by the action within it. If
public space is reimagined as an urban commons under-
stood in terms of the social structures and processes that
shape and sustain it, we need to re-think what we imag-
ine ourselves to be doing when we seek purposefully to
create, improve or revive urban public space.
In the research on public space that focuses on the re-
lationship between design and behavior, the agency and
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 179
the authority of the designer are assumed rather than ex-
amined. Critical and ethnographic studies of public space
situate the formal intentions of designers and other so-
cial actors in the context of structures of power and con-
flicting interests, in the context of broad cultural pat-
terns, and in relation to historical contingencies. There
is a significant gap between research agendas that focus
on the social character of place and those that regard
place as a material and spatial phenomenon with social
and behavioral impact. One way to bridge that gap can
be understanding the formation of the socio-technical
program of action that enables placemaking to become
a self-conscious practice, and that constitutes the disci-
pline and role orientation of the professionals involved.
The practices of design involve a certain set of skills
and expertise in a process of articulating self-conscious
and purposeful choices in the built environment. Such
practices might be integrated more deeply with the prac-
tices of asset-based community development, in the con-
text of a theory of public space as civic practice that
self-consciously articulates the connection of social rela-
tions to place. Toward this end, design-oriented research
needs to draw on the insights from research that links the
production of visual order/disorder with the formation
of social capital and collective efficacy.
Typically, the professional practitioner relies on link-
ing expert action to technical rationality, framed within
a discipline that offers a rhetoric of justification for pro-
fessional solutions (and particularly situated definitions
of the problem). A program of action that conceives of
urban design in terms of a normative theory of urban-
ism reinforces its potentialas a civic art—not in the older
sense of artists acting in service to civic goals, but de-
sign as a process that engages the narrative building pro-
cesses and production of symbolic capital in the urban
setting as sites of contestation and mediation in diverse
communities. In this way, design practitioners can help
to activate a civic sensibility, to motivate and inform civic
innovation, in and through the integration of the practi-
cal perspective and boundary-crossing resources of the
outside expert with local knowledge in a reflexive and
critical fashion.
We might ask, then: what kind of design practice
would make this self-conscious and purposeful, a forma-
tive project that is also inclusive, a city that is both for all
and by all? This is perhaps the most significant promise
at the heart of the turn to placemaking: the possibility
of an intentional urbanism capable of transforming pub-
lic space into an urban commons. This research needs
to bring into focus the active connection between pro-
fessional discipline, cultural traditions, historical condi-
tions, and the purposeful engagement of citizens. If it
is possible to liberate, as Harvey suggests, the physical
space of the city as a domain of sociality, what might
it take to re-configure planning practice around urban-
ism as a domain in which design intelligence becomes
part of broader processes of civic engagement and polit-
ical action?
Acknowledgments
Research on the New Urbanist movement was supported
by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Humanities (Grant number FB-34882-98) and a grant
from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts (1998).
Conflict of Interests
The author declares no conflict of interests.
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About the Author
David Brain studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati before an interest in urban issues led
him to a PhD in Sociology at Harvard University. His research and publications have focused on ar-
chitecture, urbanism, and the connections between place-making, community-building, and civic en-
gagement. He is currently a Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies at the New College of
Florida, and a Research Associate with the Center for the Future of Places, KTH, Stockholm.
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 2, Pages 169–182 182