March 2021 - Sustaining Place

Place Parts, Episode 18: Landscape Ghosts, with Shannon Nichol

How do we unearth and rediscover landscapes which we can no longer see? Personal and collective memories in defining a place’s culture and character have…

Tidbits and Events, Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character

Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character provides a catalog of techniques that emphasize “bottom up,” resident-based input. Such input includes local history, building forms, natural and…

Place Parts, Episode 17: Understanding the Blends

Today’s episode in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, recalls the look and feel of urban blends discussed in Sustaining a City’s Culture and…

Place Parts, Episode 16: Place Exists, Just Listen

Who says that place is all about engineered or built environments? It isn’t, a point I emphasize many times in Sustaining a City’s Culture and…

First Comes ‘Place-Receiving’

Is there a predicate to “placemaking” where a place is analyzed and mastered? Is that process of immersion, which I so love to emphasize, part…

Place Parts, Episode 15: River, City, and Town

Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character begins with the notion that communities reflect the fusion of everyday life with the various forces and environments common…

Place Parts, Episode 14: Towards Hints of Resilience in Pandemica

When Sustaining Place began late last Spring, I wrote several pieces about the emergence phases from the first English lockdown. There are parallels today, as…

Place Parts, Episode 13: Will the Technology Campus Sustain?

Today, we pose questions based on Vodaphone’s world headquarters in Newbury (and the “Shaw Valley” housing development next door). Post-pandemic, will what is now empty–or…