It’s time to move away from the word “placemaking” to “making place” and “making space”. This concept is discussed from an Indigenous Australian context in a book chapter titled, There’s No Place Like (Without) Country. Making place and making space enables spatial histories, and the reclaiming of sites and stories often overlooked in urban design practice.
This is an academic text in, Placemaking Fundamentals for the Built Environment, and you will need institutional access for a free read. It includes an example of the authors’ experience at the Sydney Olympic Park site. Sydney Olympic Park has documented some of the local Indigenous history.
From the introduction:
We critique traditional placemaking approaches to site, through the Indigenous Australian concept of Country. We contest that a move away from the word ‘placemaking’ is overdue. Instead, we propose a practice of ‘making place’, and further ‘making space’.
This allows overlooked spatial (hi)stories to reclaim sites that they have always occupied. Also it’s for the very occupants and stories that are ordinarily overlooked in urban and spatial design practice. We must look to marginal occupants, practices and writings that challenge the gendered, heteronormative, white, neuro-typical and colonising discourses that dominate architecture.
Placemaking practices employ community consultation, privileging local stories and quotidian ways-of-being in response. However, even these ‘community-engaged’ processes perpetuate marginalisation through conceptualisations of ‘Site’ and what constitutes community.
We present a model for an Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration that offers methods of spatially encountering site within a colonial context. Using our experiences of a collaborative project in the Badu Mangroves at Sydney Olympic Park, we share the overlooked spatial histories and cultures of countless millennia. We have woven together Indigenous knowledge, and design-as-research methodology.
See also Introduction: making Indigenous place in the Australian city from Post Colonial Studies journal.