The Power of Placemaking: Redesigning Public Spaces

Hans Karssenberg (1970) is founding partner of STIPO, an impact first team for better cities. He leads complex urban area development towards human scale, great public space, mixed use, sustainable and inclusive community building. He works on placemaking, place led development and long term place management, connecting top-down long term strategies with short term bottom-up initiatives, always in close co-creation with all stakeholders. As part of his work for STIPO, he is author and initiator of the international knowledge program The City at Eye Level. He is board member and initiator of Placemaking Europe, the global network PlacemakingX, and the investment fund for placemakers, Stichting Stadmakersfonds. www.placemaking-europe.eu

Vivian Doumpa is an Athens-based urban planner and geographer, with a specialisation in (creative & inclusive) placemaking. She has international experience on placemaking and citizens’ inclusion and participation in urban planning, especially on matters of public space and neighbourhood revitalization. Throughout her work she integrates aspects of socio-cultural management, non-formal education, community building and systemic change. She coordinates the local office of STIPO, an international team for urban development with offices in the Netherlands, Italy and Greece, and is a board member of Placemaking Europe network. She enjoys working on various scales, from neighbourhood level to strategic and international one, while experimenting with different topics, varying from creative and cultural economy to urban mobility and circular economy. Her heart compass is defined by two aspects, music and people, which -when followed- lead her to unexpected paths and projects related to music performance and communities in the urban scene.

Carolina is an argentine architect dedicated to urban planning, specialized in walkability. Master’s Degree in Master Laboratorio de la Vivienda del siglo XXI (U. Politécnica de Catalunya). In 2012 he founded Urbanismo Vivo, a dynamic and multidisciplinary urban consulting team that seeks to strengthen the link between people and the city from a local and human perspective. Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. She has been a representative of Jane’s Walks Buenos Aires since 2012, is a regional leader of the Placemaking X network and member of Placemaking Latin America. She is co-founder of Ciudades Comunes. She worked in the Ministry of Transportation in Buenos Aires in Pedestrian Interventions.

Milagros Hurtig (Argentina, 1990) has extensive experience working in participatory processes for urban regeneration and is a researcher in the field of placemaking, citizen participation and gender-sensitive planning. In Buenos Aires, she has been part of the Urbanismo Vivo collective, focused on the creation of inclusive and active public spaces. Milagros is also co-founder of the collective urban.femina, a platform that explores and researches urban dynamics from a feminist perspective. She has worked as an urban and gender specialist for superwien, an architecture and urban planning office based in Vienna. Milagros holds a degree in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires and a master’s degree in urban studies from the University of Vienna, Vrije University of Brussel, University of Copenhagen, and the Complutense University of Madrid. She is now PhD Candidate for NTNU University (Norwegian Technical and Science University) exploring the challenges governments face to systemically embedded placemaking into city making and concerned on how to improve inclusivity of marginalised groups into these processes. She is curious about the collective process of imagining and co-designing more just and sustainable urban futures for all.

Laura Sobral is an architect and urban planner who began her activist engagement as part of the Right to the City movement, focusing on public spaces in São Paulo, Brazil. She is currently developing her PhD on the mobility of public policies for public-social cooperation at the universities of Lisbon and Vienna. Laura is the author of the book Doing it Together – cooperation policies for the city co-governance, edited in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Laura is co-founder of the civil society organization The City Needs You Institute, which works internationally with experiments and arrangements for the shared management of public spaces. She is a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.