One weekend afternoon in the summer of 2021, newly vaccinated, we go to meet a friend in Prospect Heights. COVID has kept us so close to our neighborhood uptown that it feels like an adventure. We're there for one of the days of the new and popular Open Streets program on Vanderbilt Avenue. People are everywhere—and restaurants are everywhere. It seems that if a storefront isn't a restaurant, it's a bar. Or a cupcake shop. Or an ice cream parlor. It's overwhelmingly fun. But also remarkably expensive. We sit outside and enjoy ourselves in a way we haven't since before March 2020. But it feels like visiting a place I've never been before. Down Vanderbilt Avenue, huge apartment buildings rise. There's no pizza place, no roti shop, no bevy of nail and hair salons; only the pet store and the supermarket—stalwart Met Food, now renovated and called Foodtown but run by the same wonderful people—remain.
One sunny Wednesday in 2023, my family and I get off BART at MacArthur. Down Mac-Arthur Boulevard, the Carl's Jr. and motel signs still stand tall. Nearing the station, our view is dominated by a new twenty-four-story apartment building. Walking out of the station, it's the same but different. No giant parking lot, but it's dark in front of the station because apartment buildings rise up in front of us. Telegraph Avenue feels familiar. There's a bike lane, some traffic calming, a new doctors’ office. The giant florist, the churches are all there. New signs tell us we're now in “the historic Temescal Telegraph district.” Who knew? The sky is, as always, blue. The motel is no longer pink. Painted a hipster grey, it became a boutique hotel and is now housing for formerly homeless veterans. As we walk toward our old apartment on Thirty-Sixth Street, I'm struck by the gaping hole in the roof of the First AME Church. What felt like the most solid of buildings now feels frail. Patches of blue sky surround the cross on the pediment. The doors are boarded up. A big fire—turns out it was in February—has closed the oldest Black church in the East Bay. Down Thirty-Sixth Street, to much-loved Mosswood Park, whose sign has been painted over to read “Ohlone Land.” Trash is strewn across the entrance. Just inside the park, there's a small encampment of people in tents behind the ball field. The temporary replacement for the community center and the old Moss house sit locked up tight. A man walks across the weedy and gently sloping lawn, swinging a golf club. He finds his ball in the tall grass and takes a swing. It's impossible to see where the ball winds up.
I have never been bored by anyone's answer to the question “Where would you take me on a guided tour?” I never know what will come out of someone's mouth, nor what surprising connections between people will emerge. Each tour makes clear the complex, contradictory people we all are.
It may seem unimportant that all these tours keep me interested, but making visible our complexity surely is not; most media does the exact opposite. To come back to that rankling question about purpose from so many years ago, how can we use the placework we've seen throughout this book? Or, to put it another way, what if we continue to ignore the essential work everyday places do for people?
We know that to ignore the importance of placework, to fail to consider how cities are really lived, often leads to, as psychologists Lynne Manzo and Douglas Perkins write, “negative unintended consequences, such as neighborhood demolition and dissection for highway construction and urban renewal.” 1 That result is perfectly obvious from everything my tour guides have told us; and if we're honest, it's also clear that those consequences are not always unintentional or impossible to predict.
If we agree that experiencing these negative consequences, these dissections, is bad and that justice is crucial, then we need to grapple with the fact that “in an urban century,” as Lorena Zárate, my friend and former president of Habitat International Coalition América Latina, writes, “the meaning of justice will necessarily include all the dimensions of social life: political, economic, cultural, spatial and environmental.” 2 Zárate goes on to say that in the just city, “the goal of the economic activities is collective wellbeing.” Well-being. The goal of the city is its inhabitants’ well-being. Not the city as an investment vehicle, not towers inhabited by global capital, but the city as doing necessary work for people to become themselves, to become community—for the city to work for people, for the city to do placework.
As we've seen, placework is a way to think about these spaces as well as an argument that everyday places are important, particularly for the ways in which people negotiate their individual lives with connections to the larger world and the development of their own worldview. People have a right to a city that works for them, not a city that works them; they have what philosopher Henri Lefebvre and later cultural theorist David Harvey famously called the right to the city, which Harvey defined as the “right to change ourselves by changing the city.” 3 People need (sometimes expected, often surprising) places in which our complex and contradictory identities can find shelter and be worked out. People in communities of multiplicity and of contested spaces need places where they negotiate difference, both to better know themselves and to better function as a community.
It seems so simple to say that cities are for people, that they are the places where we become ourselves, where we build capacity to be with others in a society. Yet it clearly bears repeating because very few of our policies act on these ideas. This is not to pit cities against rural spaces or towns, but rather to say that cities, towns, the places where we gather, these must be planned for and valued as spaces for people, rather than as spaces for capital. Placework is not a how, it is a why. It is why making changes to planning, to the way we care for cities and their people, is essential.
I write this conclusion in 2024. Throughout this book we've cycled through time—the long histories of these two neighborhoods connecting to the small stories of their residents, the multiple moments and touchpoints in the guided tours project over the last twenty-four years—and now we're no more at an end than the year 2000 was a beginning.
While political crises are ongoing, the norm in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, I remain most concerned about the crisis of place and of dialogue. Much has been written about a “post-fact” time in the wake of leadership across the globe—Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Putin in Russia, Modi in India—that has led to divided societies wherein stating facts seems to have very little bearing on many people's opinions. While infuriating, I think this is where we can learn most from my tour guides and from the places in which they were able to build themselves and then share themselves with people they did not know and may not have agreed with. The job of placework seems more crucial, and more threatened, than ever.
We could be at an inflection point; at the very least, we're clearly at a moment of crisis. We're at a moment where simply stating a truth is seen as an impossible betrayal of the now, a threat to individual people's day-to-day lives: Why else might some white people feel threatened by the very statement, acknowledgment, that slavery existed and was core to America's founding?
We're also in a moment where polarization simplifies and dulls identity and individual stories. When so much of our time is spent on protecting our most basic human needs to stay alive—regularly being challenged by lawmakers, corporations, and police—we lose the ability to share and protect the parts of us that are the most human. We are losing the places that facilitate our sharing of the weird, specific, funny, surprising parts of ourselves—the sharing that helps us genuinely connect, and the things about people that have kept me interested in asking for guided tours for over twenty years.
Yet we can't throw up our hands and give up, we can't say it's too hard to solve, that placework is too hard to quantify or apply. It isn't. It just requires a different way of thinking about what cities are for. It's not impossible to put into practice. We can use placework to consider how to actively create better cities, rather than only mitigating the effects of changes that happen to cities. What if we were to reimagine urban planning as a process based on the work that places do for people, and the process of people's dwelling in place?
Civil society organizations in the global south have done extraordinary work putting these ideas into practice—creating concrete ways to get to the city we want, in part by seeing the city as a habitat, a coalescing of the elements people need for well-being. This global idea was codified by a coalition of civil society organizations as the UN World Charter on the Right to the City,4 and was put into practice in the 2010 Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City / La Carta del Derecho a la Ciudad, described by the city's mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, as “the most ambitious goals of what [our] city should be.” 5 All decisions made in the city, the charter tells us, should have the goal of deepening inhabitants’ rights to their city, moving them closer to “the city we want”—la ciudad que queremos.6 To get there, the charter maps six necessities: a full exercise of human rights, the social function of the city and of property, a democratic management of the city, the democratic production of the city, the sustainable management of commons and resources, and, finally, the democratic and equitable enjoyment of the city.7
At the level of landscape architecture and town planning, there are further concrete examples. Landscape architect Jeff Hou and his Transcultural Cities cowriters call for a transcultural placemaking, using a framework that enables places to “engender diversity, hybridity, and cross-cultural learning and understanding.” This framework calls for specific actions that echo many in this book, like “supporting everyday sites of interactions . . . [and] ways of sharing experience and supporting dialogue.” 8 Even more on the ground, landscape architect Randolph Hester has used the lived meanings of places in his “sacred site mapping” for the replanning of the North Carolina town of Manteo, and his later work in Design for Ecological Democracy.9
All of these strategies, frameworks, and mappings suggest an urban planning that prioritizes residents’ right to well-being in their cities, their rights to cities that do essential work for them. If followed, they result in real policies: from creating long-term housing affordability with the knowledge that stable homes support lives, to reckoning with the systems like unequal education funding or the lack of universal healthcare that uphold spatial segregation. They require the creation of real small business protections like commercial rent stabilization that support longer tenure, and zoning changes to allow small businesses in residential neighborhoods, which suburban-influenced planning banned in many American cities in the mid-twentieth century.10 They would make cultural spaces free, and fully fund and expand public libraries. And that is just a start.
There is much we can do, and the reason to do it isn't that equity, justice, and fairness are simply the right way to behave. The reason to do it is existential. The work that everyday places do, that policies prioritizing a right to the city would support, this work is what enables all of us to become ourselves, to be a functional society. Without this, we are nothing but consumers, data to be bought and sold, nothing more unique than what the artificial intelligence that trawls our online detritus can create. If we want to be human, we need placework. Without it, we can't get to the cities we need.