Why Care? Reframing Practices that Shape Place Futures

Abstract

This dissertation explores the people and practices that shape place futures. Many professional fields go into shaping places such as placemaking, place branding, and heritage practices. Each of these spheres brings different knowledges, norms of practice and goals. Civil society actors also shape the future of places through participation in place planning and everyday activities. However, differences in language, priorities and professional expertise create challenges for connected and holistic approaches. A lack of clarity about what place planning activities are and what they should achieve is compounded by the fact that actors may care for a different idea of what their place is or should become. To bridge these differences and pay attention to competing ideas of the place in question, a conceptual reframing is required.

To address this, the thesis employs the concept of care as an analytical framework to study the actors and practices, their motivations and relations, that shape place futures. This framework is applied to two empirical case studies in Sweden and the UK. The different scales of the case studies demonstrate the importance of situating actors within their temporal, spatial and institutional contexts. Through the application of the analytical framework the study demonstrates that the care concept provides two benefits: firstly, it directs our analytical attention in new ways to examine the values and relationships underpinning place planning practices that might otherwise remain implicit. Secondly, the care framework provides an integrative frame to both bridge differences between place planning paradigms and recognise the role of everyday practices in shaping the place. Through an iterative dialogue between theory and practice this research demonstrates that the care concept is a way forward in rethinking approaches to place futures.