The Power of Placemaking
Learn more about the unique role that community-led placemaking initiatives play in cultivating collective wellbeing.
Download the report and accompanying resources to make your own case for placemaking!
This is an online space to foster togetherness, joy, and connection; a space to expand our collective imagination around placemaking and continue learning and evolving together. The pandemic has unleashed the resourcefulness of communities across Canada as they support their members through challenging circumstances. Let’s keep building back better!
Canada’s Placemaking Community is devoted to:
We hope you find inspiration, share knowledge, and discover/share activities and events.
“The surest way to make great public spaces is Placemaking—the conscious act of fostering communities that allow everyone to thrive, prosper, and enjoy themselves in inspiring settings” Build Back Better, Together (Kent, Madden, & Davies, 2021)
Canada’s Placemaking Community works to share inspiration using stories and events, facilitate knowledge exchange, connect like-minded community leaders, and amplify activities taking place at the local level across the country.
To help you learn and discover how placemakers across Canada are building vibrant local communities and creating a sense of belonging.
To create and share a crowd-sourced resource library to support, inspire, and help bring your placemaking projects to life.
To foster a network of placemakers and community-builders across Canada who are committed to building vibrant and accessible public spaces.
To facilitate greater access to local events and gatherings across the country in order to bring people together.
Throughout the pandemic, community-builders from across the country have been using resourcefulness and creativity to strengthen communities and rebuild public space. The Healthy Communities Initiative, a over $60-million investment from the Government of Canada, supports this work toward transforming public spaces in response to COVID-19.
Via the Healthy Communities Initiative, the government of Canada has funded over 1000 pandemic-responsive placemaking projects to date. Canada’s Placemaking Community builds on the creativity and inventiveness of the over 6000 local organizations that applied and an even bigger network of practitioners across the country in an effort to build a nation-wide placemaking community.
Canada’s Placemaking Community is organized and curated by the Healthy Communities Initiative team at the Canadian Urban Institute along with our partners: Community Foundations of Canada, 880 Cities, Network for the Advancement of Black Communities, National Association of Friendship Centres, Jay Pitter Placemaking, Park People, Vivre en Ville, MaRS Discovery District, Canadian CED Network, ICLEI Canada, and the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience.
This project is funded by the Government of Canada.
