Understanding Place in Place-Based Planning: From Space- to People-Centred Approaches

Place-based planning has been applied in the past two decades, and it has started being incorporated into planning policy in the past decade in the Global North. On the other hand, bottom-up approaches applied in the Global South, for example, in informal settlements, embed place-based concepts from their conception. One of the roots of this slow incorporation of place-based planning into policies is the lack of agreement on what a place is and how and by whom it is created. This paper applies a desktop study to answer the following: what are the different approximations of the topics of place and place-making? And how is the concept of place investigated in informal settlements? This paper discusses the different conceptions of place and identifies the two main perspectives toward place-making: space-centred and people-centred approaches. These perspectives share goals but differ in focus on how and by whom places are constructed. This paper also analyses how the topic of place has been addressed when discussing informal settlements and the fundamental disparity in the literature forming the concepts of place (mainly arising from the Global North) and the process of constructing places in the Global South, and how the latter can help inform place-based planning.