Principles for place identity enhancement: a sustainable challenge for changes to the contemporary city

Globalization and technological development have contributed to accelerated rates of change and transformed spaces in the contemporary urban landscape. The end result is that on the one hand cities, places, itineraries, customs and behavioural patterns have all come to resemble one another, contributing to an increasing urban identity crisis. On the other, the hallmark of most contemporary cities is now simultaneity and fragmentation. The difficulty of decodifying the new urban scene in order for the city to be planned sustainably led to the PlaceMaker method being set up. This is a method of urban analysis and design which both detects elements that do not feature in traditional mapping and which constitute the contemporary identity of the places, and identifies appropriate project interventions. Starting from these premises, the aim of this paper is to show the PlaceMaker method and the summary of the main experiments which were carried out. The paper concludes with proposal of the “12 principles for place identity enhancement”, designed as checklists for urban projects with place identity at the core.