RDEV40840

Placemaking is an integrated approach to the planning, design and management of urban spaces. This module focuses on the particular challenges for towns and villages as the economic engines of rural areas. Placemaking encompasses a multi-faceted and participative approach to the sustainable development of towns and villages and the wider countryside. The module will take a ‘people-centred' approach to the development of sustainable communities by examining how all the elements of places work together for rural vitality. These include the interaction between housing, retail, cultural, heritage, leisure, and employment uses, nature, quality public realm, community facilities, design and standards, and open space.

Placemaking is increasingly being recognised as the key to creating and supporting socio-economic eco-systems in both urban and rural areas, where people want to live and work, drawing on pools of skilled employees, a wide choice of housing and employment options, as well as a broad range of other ‘lifestyle’ opportunities, including leisure activities and a variety culture and entertainment options. A key challenge for placemaking exists in less developed urban centres and more peripheral, less accessible and rural places, from where many young people move away for educational purposes, but don’t return to live or work. These places are in need of a particular set of skills that can understand the needs of localities while planning for their sustainable future.

Challenges for rural towns, villages and open countryside include an ageing population due to out-migration, which has the potential to result in lost capacity to be self-sustaining over time. Successful places, large and small, urban and rural, in Ireland and internationally, show that through planning, people-centred approaches and carefully targeted policy-led investment, under-performing locations can become really successful places that people are drawn towards.