
MIT DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING
Since the 1960s, placemaking has grown up. What began as a reaction against auto-centric planning and bad public spaces has expanded to include broader concerns about healthy living, social justice, community capacity-building, economic revitalization, childhood development, and a host of other issues facing residents, workers, and visitors in towns and cities large and small. Today, placemaking ranges from the grassroots, one-day tactical urbanism of Park(ing) Day to a developer’s deliberate and decades- long transformation of a Denver neighborhood around the organizing principle of art.