Placemaking: Seeking our place to belong
Pause for a moment and consider your community or neighborhood. Do you thrive there? Are you attached to it? Do you belong? Those are questions I’ve contemplated since returning from the National Rural Assembly, where I took part in placemaking discussions. While talks there focused on creative planning for rural spaces, I was offered a more urban perspective this week at a Cedar Rapids forum, hosted by the Employee Resource Group Consortium. The event, a diversity forum, featured Katherine Loflin, an internationally known placemaking expert. And, since we’ve been interviewing city council candidates, I’ve been able to add some hyperlocal thoughts to the placemaking mix too. Placemaking involves personal attachment to a place, and strategic leveraging of those attachments. For example, increasing or driving attachment to build shared wealth. [caption…