A great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone.
—Yi-Fu Tuan
Planners demarcate programmes out of space, while designers and architects give language to those spaces, but it is the community who imbue space with value—creating the prose and poetry of places.
For the past ten years, SANS has worked at understanding and incorporating this process of placemaking into urban strategies that open the value of place beyond a branding exercise for developers and local authorities. Profiling projects over three cities in China, Opening Local Value looks at how we make accessible the social, cultural, and economic value of place, while discussing the strategies' relevance to Aotearoa.
SANS is a place-led-design agency, developing strategies for changing cities. Founded in 2010 by Yijing Xu and Neill Gaddes (both Victoria University Wellington Te Herenga Waka alumni), SANS researches complex systems, facilitates thinking, develops strategies, communicates aims, and implements actions. They employ a human-centred approach to the design of place-led outcomes, believing that empowered communities can create places that nurture social, cultural, and economic value.
The talk will be followed by refreshments.
