What is your favourite place? And what makes you feel comfortable in this place? In the Inclusive Placemaking minor you will discover why certain places are irreplaceable, and learn how to design places where people feel welcome to live, learn, work, and play.

What is your favourite place? Feeling attracted to a place or not depends on whether you feel a sense of connection with it, and on the emotions, memories and experiences that you associate with it. In this course, you will discover why and how we find places liveable or visitable, and why certain places are irreplaceable. Through interventions, you will learn how to design quality places, i.e., places where ‘people want to live, work, play, and learn’.

What is it all about?
Within this minor, you will learn how to improve and shape a location by means of interventions, either physical or digital ones. While these interventions can benefit various stakeholders, for example, by enhancing the well-being of local residents, increasing visitor satisfaction, attracting (international) human talents, contributing to the environmental sustainability of a destination, the central point is the community that lives in that location: any intervention needs to be designed starting from them, the community as experts.

Placemaking is a set of tools and processes to bring a community right in the centre of transforming where they live. Drawing on social, cultural, urban, 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 involved in placemaking for the future.

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 lecturers from our partner universities in the Netherlands and abroad (e.g., TU Delft, St Joost,  Universidade de São Paulo, etc.), or the European Commission.

Inclusive Placemaking requires effective stakeholder collaboration as well as a distinct multidisciplinary and inclusive approach from a deeply-valued holistic perspective, catering to people as its main focus.

This involves local residents, communities, and different stakeholders to elicit the locally available strengths and promote well-being and liveability of residents and, as a consequence, of visitors too. 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 the Blind Walls Gallery to community development in South America and a field trip 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, consultancies or landscape architects and planners.

• Gaining a basic understanding of the concepts of Inclusive Placemaking and of Designing Community-Centred Destinations
• Being able to apply research methods, concepts, and principles to analyse public space as a Designer (e.g., mapping functional and social use of public space, Stakeholder Analysis and Stakeholder Engagement)
• Understanding and applying the theoretical concepts, the process, and models of placemaking
• Understanding the rationale behind and use of interventions (whether designed or art-based)
• Reflecting on what a community is and how a community can be actively and directly involved in the placemaking process
• Becoming aware of the implications that such a process has (might have) on the further community development
• Providing basic advice to destination-based stakeholders on how to optimise the community experience in relation to the available cultural and environmental resources.

Open to students from Tourism, (Urban) Design, Leisure & Events, Architecture, Social Sciences, Anthropology, Geography, Humanities

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 is part of this minor. An alternative case study in the Netherlands is always provided for those who cannot join the field trip abroad.

A variation of group and individual assessments are applied in the modules including poster presentations, a reflection report, and a portfolio.

We often work with external commissioners and include their expertise in the assessment. You will be coached and advised by lecturers of Breda University of Applied Sciences and external professionals of the field.

Topics
The overall goal of this minor is that students will acquire the relevant understanding in dealing with and responding to socio-economic and environmental challenges in placemaking by designing interventions that make ‘better places’ together with the local community. They take a distinct multidisciplinary approach, including:

• Design thinking
• Narrative Design and storytelling
• Comparative Case Studies
• Mapping functional and social use of public space
• Stakeholder analysis, stakeholder and community engagement
• Interventions, prototype development and testing

Structure of the minor
The minor consists of four modules and fieldwork

Module 1 Understanding Placemaking (6 credits) = 4 weeks

• Definition of the process of placemaking
• Getting to know your neighbourhood in the city
• Learning some urban design tools

Module 2 Creating Placemaking (7 credits) = 4 weeks

• Creative placemaking toolkit
• Community engagement
• Interventions and their design
• Designing an intervention for your community

Module 3 Realising Placemaking (4 credits) = 2 weeks

• Concepting and prototyping
• Building your intervention

Module 4 Assessing Placemaking (4 credits) = 2 weeks

• Defining the impact of an intervention
• Assessing the impact of the intervention on the community

Fieldwork (in an EU country (destination to be defined) or in the Netherlands) (7 credits) = 1 weeks

• Inspirational field trip in a culturally different context

A detailed planning is provided in the student course manual.

Teaching methods
The teaching methods vary per module and lecturer. We offer a variety of

• Workshops
• (guest) lectures from industry and academia
• the flipped classroom
• independent study 

International context
We work in an international environment and in groups with students from various backgrounds. Part of the teaching staff is non-Dutch and has extensive international experience in the tourism, urban design, and the leisure industry and in a placemaking context. The topics and cases covered are largely presented from an international perspective.

Costs
For the field trip abroad, there are costs involved (for travel, accommodation and activities on site)