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Place Evaluation: Measuring What Matters by Prioritising Relationships

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Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment

Abstract

Placemaking is well documented for its role in fostering place attachment in increasingly dense, diverse and mobile communities, thus leading to positive impacts on health, community participation, civic behaviour and perceptions of safety. However, many projects can fail to achieve long-term benefits. This chapter explores the existing strategies to evaluate place from a socio-ecological perspective and encourages the practitioners to move beyond easily measurable attributes and economic evaluations and incorporate strategies to assess the intangible benefits of place. Given that placemaking aims to trigger an emotional connection between the individual and the place, this chapter will argue that a place evaluation process should assess the relationships developed between the stakeholders and place. Starting from the [human and non-human] community values of place, it proposes the Four Dimensions of Place Framework (FDP) as a strategy to identify key relationships that place processes need to support between the individual (self), the community, the natural environment and the human-made environment in which it is located. If place processes manage to enhance relationships across these four dimensions, the place is successful. Lastly, this chapter uses a case study to illustrate the FDP: The Living Pavilion (1–17 May 2019), a temporary event space and placemaking project at the University of Melbourne. By developing the evaluation strategy for this case study, we show how the FDP can be applied to your projects and that it successfully provides a way to verify if the evaluation process is taking a holistic approach to place assessment.

The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 981-32-9624-4_15

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Change history

  • 05 December 2020

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The tools were collated in a matrix as part of ongoing effort led in by Place Leaders Asia Pacific and the Rating Place Project. The tools included in this chapter are listed in the reference section.

  2. 2.

    Note that the preliminary findings applied are specifically from the first Rating Place workshop conducted with 35 place experts and researchers in Sydney on 24 August 2018. The six indicators highlighted in this workshop differ from the unique aspects emerging from the collated views of 98 experts.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Thrive Research Hub and Place Agency, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Dominique Hes, Cristina Hernandez-Santin, Tanja Beer & Shih-Wen Huang

Authors
  1. Dominique Hes
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  2. Cristina Hernandez-Santin
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  3. Tanja Beer
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  4. Shih-Wen Huang
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Correspondence to Dominique Hes .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Place Agency, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Dominique Hes

  2. Thrive Research Hub and Place Agency, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Cristina Hernandez-Santin

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Hes, D., Hernandez-Santin, C., Beer, T., Huang, SW. (2020). Place Evaluation: Measuring What Matters by Prioritising Relationships. In: Hes, D., Hernandez-Santin, C. (eds) Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9624-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9624-4_13

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

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