Placemaking in rural new gateway communities

Placemaking, or the process of becoming intimate with ones′ surroundings, can serve as an indicator of immigrant integration. This article contributes to the scholarship of geographically sensitive immigrant integration with empirical research that documents the quality of localized placemaking. The dichotomy of ‘lived’ and ‘facilitated placemaking’ is introduced to differentiate between how newcomers begin embracing a new place and what governments do to engage people in governance. In a community undergoing rapid demographic change, i.e. a new gateway, the two kinds of placemaking impact newcomer empowerment. After examining the relationship between place and empowerment in the context of immigrant integration, we present an approach for testing placemaking and its findings from research conducted in central Iowa. Data collected from a series of community-based mapping workshops reveals that Latino participants engage in more, and different, placemaking than their non-Latino counterparts.