What is your favourite place? Feeling attractive to a place or not depends on whether you feel a sense of connection. In this course, you discover why and how we find places liveable or visitable. Through interventions, you will design attractive and flourishing places.

What is it all about?
Within this minor you will analyse and create future proved places incorporating new technology by simultaneously  ensuring equality, accessibility, and stakeholder engagement. Placemaking is a set of tools and processes to bring a community right in the centre of transforming where they
live. Drawing on social, economic, cultural, political, and environmental domains, placemaking helps to improve and shape a location - either through physical or digital interventions. This may range from communal gardens, art murals, community libraries or pop-up events with the aim to improve a neighbourhood, city, or region. Placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine a public place as the heart of the community to live, work and play in. Within this minor the multidisciplinary team inspires you to become a placemaker of tomorrow.

Working within an international context
Within this minor you have the opportunity to work with national and international industry partners and communities. We invite guest lectures from Ryerson University Canada, Amsterdam and Partners, the Faroe Islands, Slovenia, or the European Commission. Destination Shaping require carefully designed and governed collaborative processes. This involves local residents, communities, and different stakeholders to elicit the locally available strengths and promote well-being and liveability of visitors and residents. A dedicated team of interdisciplinary coaches and experts will guide you through this minor. The course draws on latest theory and practical experience by means of lectures, exciting international case studies ranging from marina planning to community development in India and field trips within Europe.

Future perspective
Depending on your personal background and development, you will have the opportunity to work as a community builder, spatial experience manager, design thinker, innovator, or urban planner in municipalities, public bodies or consultancies or landscape architects and planners.

• Gaining a basic understanding of the concepts of Placemaking and Shaping Destinations
• Being able to apply methods, concepts, and principles to analyses public space as an Urban       Designer
• Understanding and applying the theoretical concepts and models of Placemaking, marketing       and branding
• Formulating informed responses to socio-economic challenges by understanding policy making,   governance, as well as adopting new policies, technologies, and new institutional forms to       manage growth and change
• Reflecting on the relationship between destination governance and sustainability
• Providing basic advice to destination-based stakeholders on how to optimize the customer           experience in relation to the available tourism product offer

Intake / selection for BUas students
Open for all year 3 students from all academies, we aim for an interdisciplinary mix of different backgrounds
Propaedeutic certificate obtained

Admission requirements for external students
Open for students from Tourism Management, Urban Design, Leisure and Event Management, Architecture, Social Sciences, Anthropology
Propaedeutic certificate obtained

Study material and readings will be provided in class. We do not work with a specific book but require students to make use of the library, databases and online material. A field trip to an international destination might be possible (depending on travel restrictions). An alternative case study in the Netherlands will always be provided.

A variation of group and individual assessments are applied in the modules including oral examinations (advisory talk, panel presentations), consultancy/advisory reports and assignment portfolios. We often work with external commissioners and include their expertise in the assessment. You will be coached and advised by BUAS lecturers and external professionals of the field.