RETRACTED ARTICLE: Placemaking as an approach for innovative urban renewal practices: community gardens in Berlin

Abstract

This study examines the creation and use of meaningful public spaces in community gardens through activities focusing on ‘placemaking’, a multifaceted approach to the design of urban spaces. As a process of adding value and meaning to the public sphere through community based revitalization projects, placemaking aims at creating an innovative vision around the spaces that people consider as important to their daily life and experience. The need for ‘making better places for people’ calls for a strong involvement of local communities and implies the rethinking of disciplinary paradigms, a critical reflection on the role of urban planning and the experimentation of innovative place-based approaches. The results from an investigation of two community gardens in Berlin outline how they help build cohesion and vitality in a community, contributing to the generation of bonding, bridging social capital. Community gardens and the involved placemaking processes, as the research in Berlin confirms, seem to have a potential for social urban development in practice and the creation of urban place quality.