Creating New Potential
JUNE 2024: PLACEMAKING FOR CIVIC IMAGINATION PART III. How placemaking does imagination-work.
One of Gap Filler’s street furniture experiments, the ‘Bubble Seat’. A hidden sensor and machine produce a burst of bubbles when someone sits down.
What is it about placemaking that makes it so good at cultivating imagination?
Well for one, placemaking is about lowering the risk. When things are small-scale with lower budgets, shorter timeframes, temporariness, it makes it easier to involve non-experts, to grow participation and change the sense of WHO is allowed to take civic action, and WHO can be a lead actor (not just the authorities). Placemaking is accessible and equitable. Dancers, librarians, video game developers – anyone might be a civic leader. After the quakes, I heard many comments that people were proud of the way we at Gap Filler ‘just got on and did it’. There had clearly been a sense that this was the government's job to do (or nobody’s), and certainly that people like us with no authority or professional role couldn’t just start making new public amenities and things. Gap Filler’s work shattered both of those internalised assumptions.
Who is allowed to take civic action? At the Dance-O-Mat, dancers can.
Using non-spaces such as blank walls, empty lots, car parks and street corners as places to try out new possibilities for the city changes the sense of WHERE things can happen in the urban environment. Projects such as taking a portable grandstand around the city and commentating on the progress of government regeneration plans change the sense of WHERE civic action can take place.
Where does civic action take place? At the 'Eyes on the City' event series, it takes place anywhere we park our portable grandstand and commentary box.
The high visibility of placemaking and its often playful nature make it contagious. It’s frequently small in scale, which makes it feel achievable and accessible. Lots of people want to take part, and important issues can be addressed joyfully without feeling heavy, onerous or too big and complex to start. Developing a cycle-powered cinema project could be as impactful a way to advocate for cycling as writing submissions on a city transport plan – and is probably easier to attract more supporters to. Projects like this could change the sense of WHAT civic action looks like.
What does civic action look like? A cycle-powered cinema event could be a fun and effective way of promoting cycling.
In post-quake Christchurch, these placemaking projects were led by all sorts of people motivated by all sorts of reasons. Some were angry at the government-led rebuild, some cared about a specific civic issue, some just liked to dance. We made it Gap Filler’s role to ensure that each project was more broadly appealing, and was a piece in a whole constellation of actions that added up to more than the sum of its parts. Even if a project came about because someone just wanted to dance, it played a role in civic imagination and conversations about the future of the city. WHY people chose to lead a project or get involved varied greatly.
Why might people take civic action? As the Open City project demonstrates, sometimes positive civic action can be motivated by indignation (although Coralie doesn’t look terribly indignant here, does she?).
Gap Filler and a mental health promotional campaign called All Right? created an open-sourced database of residents’ favourite free things to do in Christchurch. We hacked an old parking meter so that it would spit out a ticket of some local’s favourite free activity nearby and give step-by-step directions on how to walk there. That idea was instigated on discovering that the city’s tourist information centre would only stock your brochures if you paid them to – so the city-funded info centre was promoting only expensive tourist attractions. We couldn’t believe it, and started scheming an alternative info centre, which eventually became the parking meter project. It was a project motivated by anger and indignance, but it still played a positive role in helping shape a more democratic place.
For all these reasons, placemaking is an invaluable tool in cultivating civic imagination. Even in places - like post-quake Christchurch - where it has been incredibly prominent, it has been woefully undervalued. Over 14 years, Gap Filler received somewhere around $1 million in funding from our local government. That’s a lot of money, and some people will be shocked or outraged by the size of that figure for an organisation that has ‘just’ delivered temporary installations and events.
Albion Square in Lyttelton (see Part 1) cost $2.8 million of local government money, a published figure which doesn’t include the internal staff salaries for time spent on the project. We’re hugely thankful for the funding over the years, and yet it does seem out of whack that the city authorities will feel it’s their role to spend more on paving stones for one relatively minor civic square than for 14 years’ worth of creative community imagining-through-action, especially when local governments in New Zealand have a legislated wellbeing function.
As the hard infrastructure rebuild of Christchurch is increasingly thought of as ‘done’, it is getting harder and harder to run an organisation like Gap Filler here. Our Council funding has been declining each year and is likely to be cut completely; we had to make 80% of our staff redundant several months ago; winding up the organisation is looming as a genuine possibility. If that happened, would we feel proud of what we’d achieved here? Of course. Would we feel content that we’d completed our work? Hardly. It still feels like we’ve barely begun. That is to say: if placemaking and participatory urban prototyping were truly valued and resourced, it could have a much, much larger impact – and one that could nurture a civic imagination to help us as a city and society navigate complex issues and crises in a way that paving stones and online surveys just can’t.
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