The characters of place in urban design

Placemaking, in the sense of "the art of making places for people", to paraphrase the definition given in By design: urban design in the planning system (Cabe, Detr, 2000), "includes the way places work and such matters as community safety, as well as how they look. It concerns the connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric, and the processes for ensuring successful villages, towns and cities". The city thus becomes the outcome of complex intersections created by a number of operators who modify the system for different reasons. It becomes necessary to identify a microsystem within the macrosystem of the city able to make the urban variants intelligible: place is at once porous and resistant, a receptor for complex interactions. The concept of place, in the sense of a space endowed with unique features which is fundamental for establishing the identity of the contemporary city, is meant as a key concept of urban design. We illustrate the environmental, historic, symbolic, urban, perceptive, anthropological, sociological and psychological characteristics, extending as far as virtual place and non-place. The extension of the concept of place is that of place identity which is considered «not in the sense of equality with something else, but with the meaning of individuality or oneness» (Lynch, 1960, p.8). The concepts of both place and identity will be illustrated in the paper with reference to texts produced by architects, urban planners, sociologists, geographers, environmental psychologists, anthropologists, historian and philosophers.