Creativity Against Bureaucracy: Placemaking at the Edges of Europe

In this discussion led by Placemaking Europe, a group of expert practitioners from Bulgaria, Serbia and Slovenia will share their experiences of leading placemaking approaches against bureaucratic constraints to create more human centred, beautiful, playful, healthy and connected places.

A powerful concept, placemaking brings together physical and activity-based disciplines in an integrated way. The aim is to strengthen the connections between people and the places they share where our common public space plays a vital role.

Placemaking is a challenge to conventional urban planning and many creative bureaucrats are instinctively “placemakers” without even realising it – setting the conditions for citizen participation projects to co-create a better built environment with incentives for climate-friendly mobility systems, or funding urban renewal programmes to improve community health and wellbeing. To make this happen often means working around bureaucratic systems and collaborating with community activists to develop creative solutions to shared public problems.