Place Making: A Sociological Approach

Place Making: A Sociological Approach

Speaker: Alain Bourdin
Time & Date: 13 March 2025, 6-8pm
Location: SDE4-05-Forum
BOA-SIA CPD Points: 2
SILA CPD Points: 2
SIP CPD Points: 2

Please register your interest here.

The term “place making” encompasses a vast array of issues that concern some thirty different disciplines. After the theoretical debates of the 70s, two lines of thought developed in particular: how to make space more attractive and welcoming for visitors or more comfortable and pleasant for residents – or even change its meaning – by mobilizing landscape planning, design, scenography and developing local services; and the participation of local communities in the production of their own space. This last aspect has taken on considerable importance in recent decades, leading to the creation of a truly global activist network.

However positive such movements may be, they do not adequately reflect two essential facts: cities are complex societies, and the relationship between residents and their surroundings takes place on three scales: proximity, lifestyle and destination.  This relationship is built on a process of successive trials and tribulations, which generate a mental burden and require an ability to understand the city that goes beyond the mere spatial dimension, and which constitutes urban competence.

The conference will show how important these elements are and how they lead to a rethinking of place making.

Professor Alain Bourdin taught sociology at the universities of Tours and Toulouse, then urbanism at the universities of Geneva (Switzerland), Louvain (KUL – Belgium) and Paris where he was dean of the Institut français d’urbanisme. He is editor of the Revue Internationale d’Urbanisme. His work  focus on urban heritage (historic districts, industrial heritage), major projects, metropolises, methods and processes of city production. In recent years, he has developed several research projects on what residents expect of their city and neighborhood.

He is currently leading an analysis program on the production of Olympic facilities and the Olympic urban legacy. In 2024, he published (ed) Major French Cities facing Metropolization (Springer).