‘Placemaking’ is gaining popularity as a term for the practice of engaging people to create places they love, that reflect their identity, vision, needs and desires. It is fundamentally about creating good places with collaboration as a core tenet of that process. To be successful placemaking must centre on community-based participation, involving a broad range of stakeholders and engaging and empowering the community to participate.

The concept of placemaking is central to our mission at Harvest Digital Planning, which aims to empower citizens to actively shape their cities and communities. By introducing digital technology into placemaking as a means to engage and empower, it sits comfortably at the intersection of people, place and technology, where we love to work.

The City of Port Phillip in Melbourne (Australia) is one city that is embracing digital methods in their placemaking activities. Port Phillip is a municipality rich in history and culture, with a highly engaged population that cares deeply about the area’s past and its future. Any vision for change and development in the City must include its citizens in the conversation to obtain buy-in and to ensure a future that takes into account local values, priorities and concerns.

Taking on board the oft-recited placemaking motto that ‘people are the solution, not the problem’, the City has established a place-focused digital initiative called Love My Place. This site outlines the City’s approach to placemaking, gives an overview of key placemaking activities and events, and contains two place-focused sub-sites for key local areas: Fitzroy Street and South Melbourne (and a soon to be Waterfront Place). Each of these sites represent iconic locations with rich histories that engender a great deal of meaning with locals.

Within each place site, a general structure includes the following key components:

• an outline of the overarching place vision, to be refined through the placemaking process
• presentation of local histories and crowd-sourced ‘street stories’ that let people learn about the past and express their personal connection to place
• news updates to keep people in the loop with changes and improvements to the area
• promotion of physical events that activate the place and encourage them to meet and interact with each other and City officials
• a range of tools to collect data on people’s ideas,’ priorities, needs and attitudes.

What makes these sites unique is the commitment to a placemaking process that is agile in nature and maintains a virtuous circle of feedback and intervention. Ideas are collected and reviewed, a physical intervention is implemented, the intervention is evaluated, and the process starts again.

The first round of feedback from citizens used by the City was an ideation process that crowd-sourced ideas on ways to improve each area from its citizens. These ideas were reviewed and categorised in a transparent way with ideas being classified as ‘In progress’, ‘A good chance’, ‘Needs more work’, and ‘Not yet possible’. Subsequent interventions will likely flow from this ideation process.

In addition, a fresh and elegant design theme adds visual interest to the sites, breaking free from a generally ‘dry’ corporate government brand to motivate and inspire participation. The designs are locally appropriate and seek to establish an emotional connection with the end user.

From a technology perspective, the websites are built on our digital engagement software The HiVE, and take advantage of the platform’s multi-domain capabilities to provide unique web addresses and design experiences on the front-end. However, the sites share a common back-end, with the City’s broader digital engagement site Have your Say.

This ensures that all data collected through the placemaking activities are stored within the City’s single repository for citizen feedback, despite the end user not even knowing that the two sites are related.

The Love my Place initiative is still in its early days, but is already yielding results for the City. It provides an interesting case studies for cities looking to expand their placemaking activities and widen the scope for public involvement in the place making process using digital tools and techniques.