Placemaking Week Europe 2025: an event of reflection, inspiration and learning
We are happy to have once again been part of Placemaking Week Europe, held in late September in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Our colleagues Samir Amin, Rebecca Baugh and Taliah Dommerholt worked with Jade Juillet from SINGA Bruxelles and Ester van Steekelenburg from Urban Discovery to run an interactive session exploring the role of storytelling with communities as a way to unlock community knowledge, influence decision making, alter societal structures and build new futures in historic places.
Under the title The Spirit of Place: Storytelling, Systems of Power, and the Future of Historic Environments, the session included the following presentations from our team: Futures Storytelling, with lessons from the DUST project; Creative Arts Methodologies for Inclusive Land Use Planning, with insights from PLUS Change; and Storytelling for Participatory Exchange, from UP2030 and DUST.
Our key takeaways from the session were:
– Storytelling helps people connect, understand, and act – but we must stay alert to who tells the story and whose voices get left out.
– Good storytelling isn’t about ownership — it’s about empathy, representation, and co-creation.
– Storytelling in historic or diverse places isn’t “too complicated” — it’s a way to bridge past and present, tradition and transformation.
The event’s agenda was packed with amazing sessions and great conversations. Our team’s highlights included being inspired by Jenny Andersson to think about culture in new ways, meditating and reflecting on modes of inclusion with the InclusiveCity project, and talking long into the night in Reggio Emilia’s stunning Piazzi.
We look forward to coming back next year for more inspiring discussions!