Placemaking is often referred to as an art in the theoretical background. Like the production of art, the process and result of placemaking should produce an emotional reaction in viewers or users — a connection to a physical place. The success of placemaking efforts will depend on the degree to which a high-quality, welcoming place is produced, one where people want to be and gather. Project for Public Spaces highlights that an effective Placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, ultimately creating good public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well being.

Our network will test and further develop the Placemaking method in different target areas and with different target group in four different countries (Ireland, Finland, Spain and Hungary) with very different cultural attitudes. Thus the biggest challange for our project is how to engage efficiently local communities and citizens in the Placamaking process to have good public spaces.

During our project we intend to focus on the following questions:

- Who are the most suitable stakeholders and which is the best way to engage them? How to sustain their engagement?

- How to analyze a place?

- How to encourage local people to use better the existing places?

- How to generate deep-rooted visions?

- How to do things wothout money? Let's find 10 things in each target area to do with less than EUR 1000/100/10!

- How to explore design options vs planning?

- Moving forward from stakeholder group management to place management.

- Upscaling pilots to policy! How to generate an impact on policy-making and especially on European development policies?

The representatives of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council found the Placemaking method identified during the SURE study visit in Belgium so strong, that they started to deal with this topic in an international context as well as on local level.

They organised a conference about Place Making and Place Branding on 6-7 March 2012 in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland with the following title: www.destinationcreation2012.com. Further info: http://www.dunlaoghaire.ie/wp-content/uploads/DLR-Destination-Creation-A4-DS-21.pdf.

Working in partnership with Project for Public Spaces (PPS) Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has delivered Placemaking training seminars aimed at building the capacity of local actors to engage in placemaking actions.

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has developed a number of public spaces drawing on the principles of placemaking one of which has received a national award(civic square at the metals).

Building on the bottom-up principle of involving citizens in decision making processes about their public spaces and animation of public spaces, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council has established a Estate Management Programme in twelve communities within their County.

A Social Development and Inclusion Committee has been established in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to provide ongoing co ordination, leadership and networking at a county level. Membership includes social, economic and community organisations.

With the Placemaking for cities project we intend to continue this work. By collecting different attitudes and approaches partners will face with implementing local Placemaking processes, we will be able to use the Placemaking method in our local environment more efficiently.

The main driving factor of the partnership to establish such a project is the preparation for the new programming period, in which the former LEADER approach will be referred to as "Community-Led Local Development" (CLLD). For 2014 to 2020 CLLD will remain a possible option under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF), and these funds are essential for smaller cities in order to support urban renewal processes. By transferring and adapting successfully the Placemaking method as a living lab (where end-users can co-create any public place), partners intend to be flagships of developing urban renewal projects with efficient participatory techniques.

Therefore we think that putting the Placemaking method into European context is absolutely innovative and new, and therefore the project will have a strong focus on mainstreaming the results at the end. We intend to find a detailed path for each of our partners how to channelize the lesson learnt to the appropriate development bodies.