How can we avoid placelessness? A phenomenological study of place and place-making with four case studies of landscape design projects in Boston and its vicinity

Both capilalist globalization and modern technology have tended to produce placeless environments which lack the diversity and richness of place experience and profound meaning. How to avoid placelessness and create unique, regional, and meaningful places within the contemporary globalization context has become a great challenge for landscape architects, and in fact, for all environmental designers. This study examines four landscape design projects in Boston and its vicinity, which were designed by four leading American landscape architects--Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., Laurie Olin, Peter Walker, and Martha Schwartz--to see what kind of place they created, how successfully they addressed the issue of place, and what their design approaches were. With insights drawn from the four landscape architects' ideas and their designs examined in this study, as well as the related literature, some issues of a normative placemaking theory are discussed, including conceptions about place, principles of place-making, and general strategies for overcoming placelessness. The study illustrates that the four designed places share some common characteristics: they are unique, original, regional or local, expressive, and hybrid in character. While they all were intended to reflect the specific context of New England and Boston, each designer took a different design approach that has resulted in a diversity of place even within the same region. The study concludes that uniqueness, originality, regionality, expressiveness, and hybridity are the essential qualities of a good place. These qualities should be considered as the basic objectives of place-making. These objectives can be achieved by using regional or local metaphor and by drawing inspiration from art, nature, local history, science, and intellectual tradition. Finally, the study emphasizes that place-making is a process of social production which involves multiple sectors of a society. In order to minimize the problem of placelessness, it is necessary for all parties involved in the process of place-making, including corporate developers, individual consumers, community organizations, and public sectors, as well as planning and design professionals, to commit to create a better place.