Placemaking approach for revitalizing people, organizations, and living environments
Watari Kazuyoshi
Faculty of Art and Design｜Associate Professor
Japanese society was plagued by depression. There was a lackluster atmosphere in the society, and the social environment was exacerbating this atmosphere. That was how we saw it. We were in despair. For the last 40 years or so, we have been trying to find a method to help people find fun and comfortable places as well as to restore an exciting and creative society and environment. We have applied the concept of placemaking to make a new approach for urban environment creation, which adopts a reverse order, contrary to the traditional approach. We have met many compassionate supporters. Our approach prioritizes activity, time, and places followed by morphological design to conform to the framework of the prioritized components. In recent years, we implement our approach to two main areas: social experiments to help government and private organizations prioritize the use of places, and support to set up conditions for public-private partnerships and private-private partnerships aimed at creating new living environments.
