Congratulations on signing up for this course and welcome!

This a concise course for professionals, packed with all the essential information and advice on place-based projects and place improvement activities. It aims to help you to:

1. Realise the benefits of collaborative, iterative, place-based approaches
2. See the opportunities for placemaking in a range of contexts
3. Set up a project for success
4. Save time and reduce the risks

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Communicate the opportunities and benefits of a placemaking process
2. Properly engage external stakeholders and the community
3. Confidently lead a placemaking project

The role of place professionals is to help the place to thrive and enable the local businesses, residents, community groups and visitors to play important roles in this process.

This course will teach you some of the essential skills for seeing and better understanding the world around you in different ways.

You'll learn that one of the biggest opportunities for improving social, economic and environmental outcomes in urban areas is better diagnosing the *real* problems and the approaches needed to address them.

"As humans, we seem to be hard-wired to see the world in terms of discrete problems we can solve. Our brains are always breaking things down to their component parts, looking for ways to fix them. We are constantly seeking greater and greater simplicity.

And that works for maths problems, or engineering problems. You solve the component parts of the problem — no matter how many there are — until the whole fits together perfectly. 

The vast majority of problems government addresses are ‘complex’ problems. How to reduce crime. How to educate our children. How to increase prosperity and keep people healthy. There is no one right answer to these problems — there are just better or worse situations we find ourselves in."

Jeffrey Allen

Most urban problems are misdiagnosed as 'complicated problems', requiring detailed analysis by specialists, long reports and expensive masterplans. When that approach doesn't work, we try the same approach again, again and again. 

Place-based approaches seek to work with complexity, rather than in spite of it.

The course will explore this and many other important topics to help you to lead the process of creating better places, supporting local businesses and stronger communities.

Get your personal Certificate of Completion

People who complete this course will receive a personalised Certificate of Completion, endorsed by Town Team Movement and PlacemakingX, to recognise your knowledge.

Remember to press the “Complete and Continue” button in the top right-hand corner after you have finished each lesson and task, including the final “Download your Certificate of Completion” section.

Once you press the “Complete and Continue” button in the final section, you will be issued with your own personalised Certificate of Completion.