The Pipeline to Better Placemaking: Using Digital Realities to Observe, Teach, & Engage in the creation of Place

Abstract

Quality “Places or Commons” are evaluated by their number of occupants, who is coming there, how long they are staying, and, most importantly, how often they return. Whether the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, or Mainstreet USA, our places represent who we are as a community. While one could evaluate success by gathering financial numbers from surrounding businesses, they would fall short of the “why” people are there. Immersing your investigation around the “why” a person returns to a place and stays beyond a single reason will start to tell the story of the Place. Place = People + Built Environment. The Community will come, only if you create with “them” at the start of conceptualization. Using the community as a collective owner in the design process, both directly and through human behavior observations, leads to a design for a regenerative and redistributive commons-based economy or a Community’s Place. We have created the Pipeline to Better Placemaking. A six-stage platform using digital realities to Observe, Teach, & Engage in the creation of Place. The innovation or uniqueness of this pipeline is in the interactive collection of local knowledge. We are measuring both the built environment and human behavior. Our team has been collaborating with the university psychology department on how to observe human behavior, the computer science department to program multiple prototypes from the ground up, the planning department to better understand zoning laws, and finally, the architecture department to observe the built environment and conceptualize community focused places.