What is place keeping in urban design?

Place keeping is the practice of uplifting and preserving the existing cultural and contextual magic of a location, rather than assuming a new place is being made from scratch. It focuses on keeping the memories and stories of a place alive for future generations.

What is the Indigenous Placekeeping Framework?

It is a five phase living model used by Tower Architecture Collective to ensure authentic cultural representation. The phases include alignment, place based research, engagement, co-design, and celebration.

What are design drivers in architecture?

Design drivers are core principles or North Stars established during the co-design process. They ensure the entire project team, including contractors, understands the cultural significance behind specific design choices so they are not accidentally removed during construction.

Place Keeping vs Placemaking: Embedding First Nations Stories in Urban Design

When we build modern cities, we often overlook the deep cultural histories embedded in the land itself. Wanda Dalla Costa is an architect, educator, and proud member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. As the founder of Tower Architecture Collective, her work centres on indigenous place keeping and life centred design.

In this episode of The Placemakers, we discuss how architecture can serve as a vessel to tell cultural stories and why the concept of “place keeping” is an essential evolution for modern urban design.

Key takeaways for urban designers:

The Reality of Place Keeping: You cannot make a place that was already there. Place keeping is about uplifting the existing magic, context, and landscape.
The 90/10 Rule for Engagement: During community consultation, architects should spend 90 percent of their time listening and only 10 percent talking.
The Importance of Design Drivers: Establish four or five clear North Stars to guide the consultant and construction teams, ensuring authentic cultural teachings are not lost during the build.

🎧 Listen to the Episode
We discuss the shift from place making to place keeping and how to genuinely co-design with First Nations communities.

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📄 Accessibility & Reference
Prefer to read? Download the full word-for-word transcript of this interview.

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What is ‘place keeping’? In Australia and globally, the term “placemaking” is widely used by developers. But for First Nations communities, this terminology can be jarring. “I can’t make a place. The place was already there,” Wanda explains.

Place keeping is a reaction to the idea that an outsider can come in and simply make a place. Instead, it is about trying to understand and uplift the beauty and magic of the context, landscape, and materiality that already exists. It ensures that the memories of a place are kept alive for future generations.

The Indigenous Placekeeping Framework To achieve authentic representation, Wanda’s team uses the Indigenous Peacekeeping framework, a living model with five distinct phases.

It begins with an alignment phase to uncover broad, nonspatial aspirations, such as job creation or the use of spiritually significant local materials. This is followed by place based research to build cultural fluency, and then an engagement or validation phase where the team sits with user groups to actively listen.

After co-designing with the community, the final phase is a celebration, where the gathered research and transcripts are packaged into a storybook and given back to the community as a legacy document.

A major challenge in cultural urban design is ensuring that deeply meaningful elements are not engineered out of the project. Wanda uses “design drivers” to prevent this.

These are four to six core principles that act as North Stars for the entire team of consultants and contractors. For example, if a contractor wants to straighten a misaligned floor pattern, the design drivers explain that the lines align with the solstice sunrise and carry a profound cultural teaching that cannot be altered.

What Australia can learn is that Canada is currently leading the way in inclusive design. In recent years, the Canadian government integrated a policy requiring an indigenous architect on every major urban development.

To catch up, Australia needs to prioritise increasing the number of Indigenous designers so they can shape the field from lived experience. Wanda also advocates for a deeper integration of environmental psychology and human centred design. We must move beyond creating generic, homogenous aesthetic styles and instead create environments that offer relatability, inclusion, and cultural warmth.