LAUSR

Introduction: inclusive placemaking The 4th Institute of Place Management (IPM) International Biennial Conference series took place at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, from 7th-8th September 2017. This is the second time the conference has been held in Manchester, adding to previous events in London and Poznan (Poland), and building on experience the IPM has gained through collaboration with other international conferences held in Berlin, Bogota and Utrecht. The primary themes of the previous three IPM conferences – “Town centre management”, “The business of place” and “Sustainability, liveability and connectivity”– have acknowledged that the improvement of places draws frommultiple disciplines, and the synthesis of this knowledge exists in many guises. By bringing together academics, policymakers and practitioners working in place management and placemaking, the IPM’s International Biennial Conference aims to facilitate the development of theoretical, practical and policy insights into making places better. To this end, this year’s conference had “Inclusive placemaking” as its overarching theme. Placemaking as a concept has been with us for several decades now. As with many terms, it entered our language as a neologism, only to be taken over and integrated into the vocabulary of several spatial disciplines. Whilst we should accept that there are fads which come and go in the use of academic terminology, usually this kind of broad acceptance and adaptation means that the concept fulfils an existing need. As with most neologisms, especially when espoused enthusiastically by numerous disciplines, placemaking quickly lost any clear conceptual contours it may have had and became rather fuzzy. Today everybody talks about – and many actually practice – placemaking, but what they do, exactly, remains vague. This, of course, may not always be a problem; on the contrary, it can even prove to be a useful operationalisation of a term. However, in creating a conference on “Inclusive placemaking”, there was a need to define what should be included, and what should not. The conference qualified placemaking with the predicative inclusive, thus emphasising the participatory strands of placemaking thinking and practice. Whilst it may be hard to agree what placemaking is, our delegates knew what placemaking is not – there was strong consensus that placemaking must not be top-down, exclusive or authoritarian. Inclusive placemaking investigated countless ways through which collectives and individuals constitute places: