Photo: Heather Yaryan

That we are seeing a rapidly expanding focus on sustainable cities is hardly surprising. Cities have become the principal engine of economic growth in a global economy—and they are having a disproportionate effect on the ecosystems of their regions and the biosphere as a whole.

Currently, the pressing nature of climate change and peak oil, together with our long love affair with technology, have made efforts to reduce the impact of cities the central focus of the sustainable cities movement. While critical, meeting the challenge of a deteriorating planet requires more.  It demands that our cities become active contributors to the social and ecological regeneration of their regions. Cities at the forefront of sustainability are recognizing that they need to take up both halves of the sustainability challenge—reducing damage while growing connection to and among the living systems of their place. More

More and more, architects and planners are jumping on the band-wagon of “place” and “placemaking” as a hot new trend in sustainability. While this is good news, it also has the potential of becoming more of the same.  If we continue to see place and placemaking in human centric terms, we will engage in this movement with the same mind that got us into this mess in the first place. What is required, therefore, first and foremost is a metanoia (a fundamental change of mind) in how we view place.

From a living systems view, the phenomena of place and placemaking are not just human processes but rather larger planetary processes in which we as humans have a role to serve. To gain perspective, take the Andean perspective of the process of placemaking More