Placemaking

The wealth of information surfacing about cities and placemaking is extraordinary. Or is it just that I’m tuning in?

Maura Gast, a friend who runs the destination marketing organization in Irving, TX, put me on to a website last week that is extremely useful. It is the Project for Public Spaces.

I also got some airplane/airport reading time last week and read Who’s Your City?, Dr. Richard Florida’s new book. It is an easier read than his earlier book on the Creative Class, and it is loaded with extremely useful information and research on the importance of cities and “places.”

A couple of years ago I went to a conference on place-based tourism. I had never heard the term and began to use it. Now it seems to be a very popular term surfacing in a lot of books. This often happens to me. Makes me wonder if the term was always there, and I just wasn’t listening.