Placemaking as Unmaking: Settler Colonialism, Gentrification, and the Myth of “Revitalized” Urban Spaces

Abstract

Leisure scholarship that operates within traditional frames celebrates placemaking as an inherently good, participatory, and emancipatory process. In doing so, the bulk of leisure scholarship fails to account for the ways that placemaking is complicit in the historic and pervasive violences of systemic racism, settler colonialism, gentrification, and socioeconomic elitism. Working through the case of Goudies Lane, a recently place-made space in so-called Kitchener, Ontario, we demonstrate how humanist approaches to placemaking predicate erasures and perpetuations of these violences. We argue that thinking differently may allow for a more engaged, equitable scholarship that accounts for the reality that every placemaking is always already an unmaking of something, and that these unmakings perpetuate racialized and socioeconomic injustices under the guise of a collaborative, participatory process of “revitalization” and “progress.”