Community Placemaking – Brazil
I worked the NGO, Axis Mundi, to complete a community placemaking project in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Salvador, Brazil. Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and well-being.
In line with these ideals, we lived and collaborated with the community to plan, design and build a public space consisting of benches, tables, built in drums, and a shading overhang. We worked with key community stakeholders to understand their culture and needs. We used local resources and focused on community participation throughout the decision-making and design process.
We also focused on youth engagement including visioning exercises where we asked them to draw anything they could imagine in the space. The kids loved to draw so we asked them to decorate the blue and green banners for the shading overhang. We knew that if the kids worked on the project, then they would build self confidence as well as value and maintain the space. Another objective was on preserving current site for laundry, so we integrated poles with attachments for the clothes lines.
I was awarded the Judith L. Stronach fellowship for projects that initiate the development of hands-on projects that help to advance change in the way people interact with the world around them.
