Creative Pedagogies for Placemaking Training in Territorial Planning Science: a Transnational Overview

Education in the 21st century is facing many challenges due to the rapid development of technologies, data overflow and the call for interdisciplinarity to achieve more sustainable results. Teaching staff dealing with placemaking have a critical role to play in the formation and education of future generations of planners. They should apply learning and research approaches based on a sensitive and comprehensive understanding of academic, technical, social, environmental and artistic elements that require bespoke techniques and an ever-changing curriculum. However, the formal education of architects and urban planners should be reframed to deal with the real-world places and needs of local communities, as well as community initiatives, local knowledge and organizational and creative capacities towards transformative experiences. The concept of placemaking emphasizes the need for strengthening connections between people and the places they share, considering for this purpose the active involvement of the local community. This chapter presents several cases of project-oriented and place-based learning approaches from Brazil, Israel, Portugal and Serbia. It intends to discuss how the use of placemaking pedagogies can enrich the learning process of all involved. The analysis of cases allows us to highlight that some of the interesting experiences in placemaking resulted from community initiatives, which are not always anchored in formal/statutory planning procedures. This poses the challenge of how to translate such locally rooted processes, methodologies, results and knowledge into a creative and innovative pedagogical training approach. Bringing planning students to local communities and exposing them to different proposals and needs calls for revisiting seminars, studios and classes – both the design and programmes to fully integrate the community and firmly anchor local resources in these training activities. In this approach, the crucial benefits are strengthening and enlarging the context for learning and enabling universities to serve as catalysts for urban revitalization and making places more tailored to people.