PLACEMAKING - URBAN LANDSCAPE SYSTEM MANAGEMENT

This paper applies systems and metasystems theory to urban landscape management and urban design, to move beyond the object-level of design style to the meta-level of paradigms, professional epistemologies, and urban ecological, physiological and psychological health. It explores: the city as incrementally designed system; the landscape and contemporary architecture as different system tapes; urban planning and design for placeness and sustainability; natural and human system carrying capacity, urban growth, and system health; external and internal contexts; and hard and soft implementation issues. It speaks for: an urban management hierarchy of meta-systems, systems and project designers; the management of physical and cultural systems for human experience; and the system of human, structural, infrastructural and ecological systems for environmental and human health. It explores the role of design facilitators, and modified innovation-intervention techniques used to manage healthy, innovative, responsive, sustainable and meaningful urban landscapes. It identifies the tasks of placemaker as system metamodelers to include: the integrated management of complex systems by facilitating second order change that moves the design professions beyond reductionist project driven' design; the development of management structures and implementation processes; and liaison with professional organizations to define their epistemologies. It also reviews on-going efforts to manage urban placeness, and new processes for facilitating this management.