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PlacemakingX went live in June with a mission to accelerate the placemaking movement globally. Shaped by over 100 prominent urbanist leaders, networking public space champions in many corners of the world, PlacemakingX is now ready to turn urbanization upside-down to lead with people-powered places.
The placemaking movement gained strength and resiliency this year through stronger locally-defined learning and advocacy networks and locally-organized convenings. The first official public launch of PlacemakingX was in Valencia in June at Placemaking Europe's conference. We then launched in 9 other cities on 5 continents, with each event further boosting and informing regional and global placemaking movements.
Existing regional networks advanced, with new ones emerging in India, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East North Africa, Colombia, the Nordic nations, and the United States. PlacemakingX is now 100+ leaders and 600+ advocates from 65+ countries.
Collectively, networks of place-focused multi-sector leaders around the world are challenging co-option of placemaking by illustrating the power of building authentic community capacity for genuine placemaking.
PlacemakingX was launched with a common mission, vision, and goals by a diverse group of urbanist leaders. The movement’s growing momentum in forging short-term, low-cost, public-space actions is increasingly being leveraged to support broader systemic change and collaborative capacity building. Successful models of Place-led governance, financing and development are now emerging to sustain and scale the wide impacts of placemaking.
The movement is increasingly being defined as placemaking by communities not just for communities—evolving from professionals drafting place-sensitive plans to communities creating place-driven actions.
The place focus is also evolving urbanism from producing livable communities that correlate with cost of living and culture of passive consumption, to growing lovable places that can help achieve livability more inclusively, affordably, and expediently.
As the regional networks continue to be formed and strengthened, PlacemakingX will start to focus on the agendas that unite and energize these leaders and networks and bring in new partners for exponentially increasing impact.
We are just beginning to uncover the many ways a focus on place can turn upside-down how we all collaborate to unleash the change we need to both realize our human potential and sustain humans in our only habitable place. We need to harness all that we can give to make this critical movement happen.
