Masking Visible Poverty through ‘Activation’: Creative Placemaking as a Compassionate Revanchist Policy

Abstract

Creative placemaking strategies are widely adopted by urban planners, local governments, and business communities in hopes to revive economically struggling urban areas. These strategies seek to attract pedestrian traffic by facilitating arts and cultural activities in underutilized urban spaces. While these are seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial urban design strategies, I argue that a particular creative placemaking tactic called ‘activation’ is a compassionate revanchist policy that is touted as a caring approach but, in practice, functions to mask visible poverty to advance a capital project in a revitalizing urban space. Drawing from a case study of a downtown revitalization project in London, Ontario (Canada), I show how a private placemaking consultant narrates and legitimizes this policy to city councillors as well as how the downtown business association rationalizes and enacts activation strategies. This demonstrates that private placemaking consultants are powerful actors who transfer and legitimize simplistic spatial solutions as a panacea to a local ‘urban crisis’. Activation does not resemble punitive tactics that exclude and criminalize homelessness, it rather aims to dissolve the homeless within the fabric of the revitalizing urban environment.