Placemaking: What it is, and what it isn’t
I am lucky to live on the fringe of Auckland’s city centre. I love where I live. Yet on my daily walks, I cannot ignore the uneasy feeling that we are watching an area in decline, despite, or perhaps because of, some of the most expensive real estate in the country.
That contradiction is at the heart of placemaking. A place can have wealth, prestige, and high-end buildings, and still feel hollow. Placemaking is not simply development. It is not marketing slogans or glossy brochures. Nor is it a checklist of luxury apartments and lifestyle retail. Placemaking is about people. It is about belonging, comfort, and connection. It is about creating environments where we want to linger, not just pass through.
What placemaking isn’t
Take Ponsonby Road as an example. Once celebrated as a lively village, it is now six lanes of traffic, four for cars and buses, and two more when the parking lanes are considered. Walking along it is noisy, dirty, and uncomfortable. I often find myself turning up the volume on my podcast just to hear over the roar of trucks and buses, sometimes even pressing pause until I reach a quieter side street. That is not the soundscape of a place designed for people.
Meanwhile, new development has been dominated by luxury apartments. These are pitched to investors and the wealthy, not to the young professionals who once gave the neighbourhood its vibrancy. Census data shows a sharp decline in 18–30 year olds in the area, exactly the group that fuels cafes, restaurants, bars, and local shops. As that demographic leaves, the life of the street leaves with it.
Retail tells the same story. Rapid turnover, empty tenancies, and “For Lease” signs are the visible scars of short-term thinking. Ponsonby is still advertised to tourists as a district of high-end fashion boutiques and buzzing hospitality. The reality is increasingly nail bars, vape shops, and cookie-cutter activewear stores. Yes, gems remain, some fantastic restaurants, a handful of boutiques, but they feel like survivors, not anchors. A tourist expecting the “Ponsonby experience” described in a brochure would be disappointed.
This is not placemaking. It is place unmaking.
What placemaking is
Placemaking is not about what you can buy, but about how you feel.
At its best, Ponsonby still offers glimpses of this. The long-standing cafes where staff know you by name. The restaurant owners who ask after your family. The supermarket where, before the recent fire, staff had watched our daughter grow up from newborn to teenager and still ask after her schooling when we shop. These small, human rituals anchor us. They remind us that we belong. When the fire closed that supermarket, we did not just lose a shop, we have temporarily lost a piece of our connection to place.
That is the essence of placemaking: familiarity, recognition, continuity. The city becomes not just where you live, but where you are known.
A vision for Ponsonby
It does not have to be this way.
Imagine Ponsonby Road reduced to a single traffic lane each way, linked to the city by a tram or light rail loop. Imagine footpaths wide enough to spill hospitality onto the street, cafes and bars reclaiming the edge, pedestrians flowing, conversations weaving into the soundscape. Add a separated lane for scooters and bikes, which are already increasing in use, and line the street with trees to soften the air, absorb noise, and offer shade.
But placemaking is also about the materials under our feet. Too often, our footpaths are built with little thought for how they feel or the sense of place they create. Endless asphalt and exposed aggregate concrete may be the default, but they lack identity, soul, and delight. Imagine instead using local stone tiles, materials that root us in place and create a tactile richness as we walk. The very ground could tell us we are somewhere specific, not anywhere. Even on the road itself, the choice of materials matters: the right surface treatments can naturally slow traffic, reducing the need for sign clutter or awkward refuge islands. In this way, materials become not just functional, but an active part of creating safe, soulful streets.
The result? A street you want to stop in. A place to linger rather than rush. A place where traffic noise no longer drowns out your thoughts but where the sounds of laughter, conversation, and clinking glasses rise instead. A place where the mix of people is broad again—young, old, families, students, tourists, locals, each adding their own energy to the whole.
That is real placemaking: designing for long-term community rather than short-term transactions.
A question of diversity
Diversity is not just social, but spatial. If we continue building only high-end apartments, Ponsonby will lose its range of people. A monoculture of wealth creates sterility. Placemaking requires housing diversity, apartments for young professionals, townhouses for families, aged-care options for older residents, rental homes alongside ownership. Without this mix, we lose the spectrum of daily life that keeps streets vibrant.
The vitality of a neighbourhood is measured not by its real estate values, but by its range of voices, ages, and experiences.
Towards places we want to live
Placemaking is not mysterious. It is not something imported from planning manuals or developer visions. It is the simple, ancient art of shaping spaces where human life feels comfortable, connected, and alive.
The formula is straightforward:
Design for people first, cars second.
Prioritise diversity of housing, not just luxury supply.
Invest in long-term local anchors, not short-term tenancies.
Green the streets. Let nature back in.
Nurture rituals of belonging.
If we do this, Ponsonby could once again be a place where I would not need my headphones. Where the sound of trucks and buses would be replaced by the murmur of community. Where I would stop frequently to talk to people I know, to hear multiple languages in the air, to experience the true “buzz” promised to visitors.
That is where I want to live: not in a suburb defined by price tags, but in a place defined by its buzz, its people, its stories, and the soulful spaces that hold them.