STUDIO BAS SALA
Placemaking tool
What is placemking? And how do you get a placemaking project started? This is the website that helps you find out and answers all your questions. Discover the rich variety of placemaking projects in Rotterdam. Find tips on the tools and resources you can use. Learn from the stories and experiences of passionate residents and professionals who have gone before you. And get started yourself!
We wish you plenty of inspiration and every success in bringing your own placemaking project to life. See you in the city!
Go to the tool: https://www.placemaking.info
The placemaking process
Discover the Placemaking Tool, a digital space full of inspiration about everything related to placemaking. This tool introduces you to a colourful range of projects in Rotterdam and explores how placemaking can enrich a place and make it climate-adaptive.
Dive into interviews with residents, civil servants and professional urban placemakers, and discover the key moments in the placemaking process. Gain insight into the collaboration between residents, urban placemakers and the municipality.
Can't wait to get started yourself? The tool offers practical tips for anyone who wants to become a placemaker. Learn which tools you need to bring people together and turn your ideas into reality.
The interviews
Studio Bas Sala went out into the city and spoke with enthusiastic placemakers in Rotterdam to collect their adventurous experiences and insights. These interviews have been turned into engaging stories that take you through the experiences of the people behind the initiatives.
You'll discover the steps they took and the key moments in their projects. You'll also learn how they green their neighbourhoods, make them climate-resilient and bring them to life.
Meet resident Jan van Halderen and take a walk with him through his green street. Read about Stefan Herwig, the Tuin van de Wijk (Neighbourhood Garden), and his adventures as a professional urban placemaker. And if you'd like to know how a civil servant can encourage placemaking, read the interview with Emil Janssen.
These stories are complemented by a range of other placemaking projects from Rotterdam. They demonstrate the diversity and inspiring potential of placemaking. The projects vary in size, scale and ambition, offering plenty of inspiration for your own placemaking ideas.
The analysis and spiderchart
Placemaking is always tailored to its context and can take many different forms. To gain a better understanding of this, Studio Bas Sala researched academic theories on placemaking and studied a range of projects.
We interviewed project initiators and asked civil servants what they would like to learn to better facilitate placemaking. The projects range from playful, temporary interventions to strategic, long-term initiatives, including creative projects that use art and culture.
The analysis table provides insight into the type of placemaking, scale, initiators, budget and status, as well as added values such as sustainability, inclusivity and well-being.
This overview helps you find inspiration that fits your project and makes it easier to choose the right approach for each place. Below, you can see the analysis table for the Van Swietenhoftuin as an example.
Read more about the analysis table here.
Tools and resources
What resources do project initiators use to make a place climate-adaptive? And what do placemakers do to bring people together? Every placemaking project has its own set of favourite tools, and we've collected them all for you! These tools and resources provide practical ways for you to get started straight away.
We've organised them into convenient categories so you can quickly find what you're looking for. The categories are: Social interaction, Heat, Rainwater, Greening, Sports, Play, Culture, Health, Materials and Communication.
On this page, you can explore all the different categories and tools.
The origins of the Placemaking Tool
What exactly is placemaking? What can you achieve with it, and how does it differ from a traditional public participation process? How can we get started?
These questions were central to the research carried out by Studio Bas Sala and the Municipality of Rotterdam. The conversations revealed that many civil servants do not yet fully understand what placemaking involves and sometimes see it as an all-encompassing buzzword. At the same time, many recognise the value and the many opportunities placemaking offers.
Rotterdam's new Municipal Sewerage Plan (GRP) creates numerous opportunities. When streets are opened up for sewer works, possibilities for placemaking emerge. Placemaking has therefore been explicitly included in the GRP, so that the work can improve not only the sewer system but also create attractive public spaces throughout the city.
To make placemaking more accessible as a method, Studio Bas Sala developed the Placemaking Tool. The tool is an archive full of inspiring information, with a particular focus on sustainability and creating a liveable city in a changing climate. The projects featured in the tool have been carefully selected by Studio Bas Sala.
Design and credits
The website was designed by Studio Bas Sala. The beautiful illustrations were created by Tina Siehoff.
The texts were written by Studio Bas Sala and Kim Zwart. We used ChatGPT to edit the texts, with the exception of the full-length interviews. These have been written, as far as possible, in the interviewees' own words and language.
Most of the photographs come from the personal archives of the people behind the initiatives who were interviewed. We have supplemented these images with photographs of our own.
All images and texts are protected by copyright. In many cases, you are welcome to use them, but please ask for permission beforehand.
