How the City Speaks to Us and How We Speak Back: Rewriting the Relationship Between People and Place

The places where we live are changing fast, as are our relationships with them. This chapter urges those shaping places to catch up by designing-in and making way for ongoing active exchanges – essential as our connections with cities and streets become multi-directional. The chapter explores the importance of meaning, equity, and a bit of magic, for enabling the best dialogues with the places we occupy. It reflects on the way in which initiatives taken by so many through the recent pandemic fast-forward shifts in how we relate to neighbourhoods, including those we thought we already knew so well. How does a city speak to us? The chapter explores how our diverse bonds with places lead to an ‘urban lexicon’ – as a vocabulary of signs, symbols, and sensations, through which we each connect differently with cities and streets. How do we speak back to a city? We see communities and professionals as place makers – both now trailblazing paths for greater agency and connection through forms of place prototyping and ongoing ‘call and response.’ The very human responses through the tragic COVID-19 pandemic gave placemakers a unique glimpse into different, people-first futures. It’s time, this chapter contends, for placemaking to respond.

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