What is it about?
This study looks at how communities in South Africa rebuild their sense of place and identity after being forcibly removed under Apartheid. Using Marabastad, a township in Kroonstad, as a case study, it shows how residents use memory, cultural traditions, and everyday practices to reconnect with their neighbourhood and reclaim their spaces. Small acts like storytelling, community rituals, and naming streets are ways people restore community ties and honour their history after years of disruption. The research highlights that planning for public spaces should take local history and culture seriously, recognising the role of community-led efforts in shaping inclusive and meaningful places. This approach can help address past injustices and support long-term social and spatial healing in communities affected by displacement.
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Why is it important?
This work is unique in that it advances a theoretically robust and context-sensitive conceptualisation of social placemaking, a dimension of placemaking that remains underdeveloped in current scholarship. Through foregrounding cultural memory, heritage, social identity, and colonial legacies, the study demonstrates how place-making practices extend far beyond physical interventions—particularly in communities shaped by forced removals and historical displacement. This approach is especially timely as planners and policymakers in South Africa and other postcolonial settings increasingly confront the need for socially grounded, community-led transformation strategies. For JPMD readers, the paper provides both a new conceptual lens and an empirically grounded argument for why culture, identity, and history must be integral to placemaking practice, thereby enriching the journal’s ongoing conversations on place, belonging, and urban change.
Perspectives
What I found most satisfying about writing this article was the opportunity to give conceptual visibility to the social dimensions of placemaking—dimensions that are often overshadowed by physical design approaches. Having worked closely with communities carrying the scars of spatial injustice, I have long felt the need for a clearer vocabulary to describe how identity, heritage, and memory shape everyday place experience. My personal hope is that this publication encourages planners and practitioners to look more closely at the lived textures of place, and to approach placemaking with greater cultural sensitivity and humility.
Wessel Strydom
North-West University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Conceptualising social placemaking in spatial planning: a South African case study, Journal of Place Management and Development, September 2025, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jpmd-09-2024-0105.
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