Radical placemaking : An immersive, experiential and activist approach for marginalised communities

Placemaking is the process where institutions and communities upgrade neighbourhoods and public spaces through physical and creative interventions (Project for Public Spaces (PPS), 2007). Due to limitations of place, time and presence, this process includes a few and excludes many (Arnstein, 1969; Cardinal, 2006). Even then, the excluded and marginalised engage in subtle tactics of resistance (de Certeau, 2011) and produce their city (Jacobs, 1992). This paper proposes the concept of Radical Placemaking as a placemaking tactic of the marginalised where the term ‘Radical’ comes from Paulo Freire’s seminal work ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’(2005). The elements of ‘Radical Placemaking’ are categorised into ‘who’, ‘how’ and ‘what’. Inspired by pervasive games such as Pokémon Go (Vella et al., 2019) and specific to this research, the ‘what’ is a mobile-based immersive and experiential artefact. The 'who' are the co-creators of the artefact: marginalised communities, social justice workers and allies. The ‘how’ refers to the co-creation process that the stakeholders engage in to develop a meaningful digital response to contextual social issues. The goal of the artefact is to immerse the eventual artefact user into the experience of the co-creator while exploring the hybridity of the digital-physical world. This paper draws from existing literature to explore marginality in place and the convergence of mobile technologies such as immersive mobile technologies and digital storytelling to inform the development of the artefact. The paper’s findings are synthesized to create a conceptual framework to enable non-experts to create an ethereal cityscape of stories by engaging the mainstream public in affective, experiential and memor(y)able placemaking. We argue that through the creation of an empathetic situated experience of ‘otherness’(Kapchan, 2016), radical placemaking is a form of slow activism (Robins, 2014) where the digital landscape and place embodies the voice and presence of the excluded. References Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. Cardinal, N. (2006). The exclusive city: Identifying, measuring, and drawing attention to Aboriginal and Indigenous experiences in an urban context. Cities , 23(3), 217–228. de Certeau, M. (2011). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed/Paulo Freire. New York. --London: Continuum. Jacobs, J. (1992). The death and life of great American cities. 1961 Urban Planning. New York: Vintage. Kapchan, D. (2016). Slow Activism: Listening to the Pain and Praise of Others. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48(1), 115–119. Project for Public Spaces (PPS). (2007). What is Placemaking? https://www.pps.org/article/what-is-placemaking Robins, S. (2014). Slow Activism in Fast Times: Reflections on the Politics of Media Spectacles after Apartheid. Journal of Southern African Studies, 40(1), 91–110. Vella, K., Johnson, D., Cheng, V. W. S., Davenport, T., Mitchell, J., Klarkowski, M., & Phillips, C. (2019). A sense of belonging: Pokemon GO and Social Connectedness. Games and Culture, 14(6), 583–603