What Working Internationally Teaches Us About Placemaking

A Place Leaders Asia Pacific 'Member-to-Member Connect' reflection

When young placemaker, creative producer, and new member Dylan Goh (City People) put a question to the Place Leaders network:

“What are the opportunities and challenges of working on placemaking projects internationally?”

... we reached out to our network and four international practitioners (and Dylan himself) shared reflections that varied in style but offered several common themes: humility (our favourite placemaking word!), context, cross-border learning, and the (often) underestimated complexities of communication, governance and partnership.

1. Placemakers are 'Context Engineers'

For Madeleine Spencer (The Place Institute) from Santa Ana, California, international projects face both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. Placemaking is about the relationships, systems and cultural 'logics' that influence a place long before a designer arrives:

“... we must embrace the idea that our role is no longer to impose control, but to facilitate relationships within a living entangled ecosystem of human, machine, and environmental interactions.... It requires us to develop a nuanced understanding of the symbolic orders, material structures, and energetic economies at play within different cultures."

Madeleine compared Singapore and the United States to show how governance cultures can set the ‘rules of the game’ for placemakers.

• In Singapore, the government plays a central, proactive role in urban planning, employing strict zoning laws to ensure efficient land use and cohesive mixed-use developments. This top-down approach facilitates the creation of integrated public spaces that prioritise sustainability and functionality.

• In contrast, the U.S. employs a decentralised, community-driven approach where local governments and communities have significant autonomy in decision-making, leading to diverse placemaking practices that can vary greatly across cities. While this encourages innovation and local character, it can also result in fragmentation and inconsistencies in public spaces (where projects are also heavily dictated by funding access - also unevenly distributed).

Placemakers must understand these values, rhythms, and decision-making structures,

"... community engagement in the U.S. is often more robust, allowing local voices to shape projects significantly, whereas Singapore's public consultations, though growing, are predominantly government-directed."

These contextual differences influence how public spaces are developed and experienced in each region.

International practice also gives us access to diverse cultural narratives, but only if we let those narratives lead, rather than treating them as decorative layers on a pre-set design idea. We've all seen a design that was 'technically' perfect but then fail because it misread the cultural and local economies of a place.

"Ultimately, successful placemaking will depend on our ability to redefine our objectives from efficiency to viability, creating conditions that adapt and flourish over time. By prioritizing the contextual foundation of our projects - one that nurtures relationships and supports a continuous dialogue among all stakeholders - we can transform public spaces into thriving environments that reflect and honor the complexities of their communities”

2. Global Connections Help Us Learn (and Unlearn) Faster

For Ethan Kent (PlacemakingX), based in Brooklyn, New York, placemaking is always local, but it becomes stronger when it’s connected globally. Every country leads placemaking from a different perspective or cultural tradition, and those differences can help us check our own assumptions.

“Much of my work as an American is preventing other countries from making the mistakes we’ve made and helping them leapfrog what is possible.”

... but it’s also about learning from those places in return. Australia and New Zealand have taught Ethan more than anywhere about how placemaking can scale with government and build capacity across sectors.

Ethan says the 'healthy isolation' of Australasia, combined with tendencies for people from the region to travel, has enabled the region to maintain a learning posture and synthesize the best of so many parts of placemaking globally.

Over 20 years and dozens of trips, Ethan has seen councils and communities across Australasia adopt practices that took U.S. cities many years (and tears!) to figure out, often because people here are a bit better at admitting when something isn’t working and go looking for a better model. Humility (that word, again!) accelerates innovation:

“Australia and New Zealand still make the same mistakes as America but they admit it faster and then more openly seek better solutions.” 

Ethan says that international placemaking matters because no single country has the full picture. We’re all strong at different things, and we also all have blind spots. From his perspective, Australia and New Zealand have become laboratories for how governments can support placemaking without smothering it:

"Australia and New Zealand is where I’ve actually learned the most about how placemaking can scale with government and how government can start to build capacity and collaboration for other sectors."

3. Partnerships Are ‘Project Infrastructure’

City People worked with Singapore’s National Arts Council on the 2025-2035 Public Art Study so Dylan offered his own insights in answer to his question, with the key take-away being: placemaking, whether international or local, succeeds or fails on local partnerships.

“It was imperative that we could speak authoritatively to the cross-section of bureaucrats, developers, producers, fabricators, curators, artists and community members.” - Dylan Goh

What made the experience work?

Leveraging local knowledge networks and expertise by forming a local advisory group and working collaboratively with local staff with specialties in public art, architecture, visual arts and placemaking.

What tripped them up?

It didn't so much as trip them up, but Dylan reflected on the need be be conscious of a culture that prioritised a focus on potential loss and gain, risk mitigation, and measurable impact, and addressing these placemaking considerations first.

What did they wish they knew before starting?

Check your biases, even materiality! Dylan shared that climate has an impact on the durability of materials in public art; e.g., wood, plastic and composite metals have shorter lifespans. This places a greater importance on materiality choices and / or durational considerations (e.g., temporal public art interventions) in a tropical climate.

International placemaking requires humility (again!) and adaptation, and in ways designers may not anticipate.

4. EU Cities@Heart Playbook

A fourth contribution came from Suzanne Pergal, Tourism & Cities Project Manager at Métropole du Grand Paris. Her work focuses on city-centre management. Working in the Greater Paris region, Suzanne interacts with placemaking not as an isolated discipline but as as a part of a coordinated approach to managing dense, historic, economically vital city centres.

"We have a broader focus on city centre management and that includes Placemaking.” 

Suzanne shared the newly released European guide, 'Cities@Heart Playbook - A policy Guide to Transform Your City Centre', which shows how placemaking is increasingly included in broader urban management systems/governance structures across the EU. There's also its companion, the 'Cities@Heart Toolkit - 10 tools to manage your city centre'. These are great pieces of work.

In the Cities@Heart Playbook, placemaking can have a number of roles:

• a lever inside strategies for local commerce

• a tool for strengthening residential life

• a methodology for creating/building inclusive public spaces 

• a contributor to city-centre identity, and

• a participatory mechanism inside shared governance

5. Common Threads in Global Placemaking

A final perspective came from Roz Palmer (who has worked in New York and Sydney), highlighting that some of the biggest opportunities and challenges of international placemaking are familiar because they are inherently human.

“I think many of the opportunities and challenges [of placemaking] are global: how do you get ALL of the right people at the table to define and then accomplish the placemaking goals?”

Roz also said that understanding what came before - sometimes stretching back millennia - is essential:

“How do we respect/celebrate/callback what the place has been - or what placemaking has already occurred - on the site? If you're working on an international project, how do you make sure you've connected with the people who would bring that wisdom to the project?”

Roz also warned of a narrowing definition of placemaking in some contexts:

“I think the mainstream definition of placemaking is narrowing to events and pop-up activations. One challenge there is to ensure that while we find creative, commercial ways to fund these projects, we also retain public space as PUBLIC.”

Roz also shared that when placemaking is more permanent, such as nature-based solutions, finding funding for maintenance is just as important as funding for delivery. Using the example of Greenstreets (here's its open data portal) in New York City, Roz noted that when well-maintained, they support biodiversity, cool the city, and bring beauty but - when neglected - it’s hard to argue they offer much placemaking value.

Roz also kindly offered to speak further with Dylan. Thank you, Roz!

Different But Same

You get a Karate Kid reference for reading this far! 🙂 Mr Myagi's observation about fundamental similarities despite individual differences.

What did we take away from these wonderful practitioners who shared their thinking?

To us, international placemaking's challenges and opportunities are rooted in the inherently human-centric nature of placemaking. Through different cultural rhythms, governance structures, or climate realities, placemaking is always about people: everywhere, in every language, in every climate.

• humility before assumptions

• curiosity about systems because the ‘usual’ is not universal

• local expertise is a non-negotiable

• the people closest to the place must lead

• patience with governance

• remembering the whole story of a place

• keeping public spaces genuinely public

• ensuring ideas are maintained beyond launch day

• collaboration helps regions avoid repeating each other’s mistakes

At the same time, each country, city, and culture brings its own 'dojo' (to keep that Karate Kid analogy going!): its own moves, rules, and rituals.

The world and the work is richer for that.

As Place Leaders Asia Pacific continues to deepen its relationships across the region, from emerging voices to international thought-leaders, conversations like this are why our network exists: to share knowledge and build the practice of place.

If you’re a Place Leaders Asia Pacific member and you’d like to ask your question as part of our Member-to-Member Connect, we’d love to hear from you. Email us hello@placeleaders.com

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