By Stephen Burton | Featuring Timea Szoke, PhD Researcher in Regenerative Placemaking
For two decades, the design professions have been learning to build with less harm: lower emissions, less waste, fewer resources. It is necessary work, but it sets a modest bar for a public place. A park, street or plaza that simply takes nothing away is not much to aspire to.
Regenerative placemaking asks a bigger question. What if a public place could leave its community, and the living systems around it, better off than it found them? In this episode of The Placemakers, I spoke with Timea Szoke, a placemaker, facilitator and researcher who has spent the past decade leading participatory projects, festivals and artistic interventions in public spaces across Europe. She is now pursuing a PhD in regenerative placemaking at the International University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and she shared what the idea means in practice.
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We explore what regenerative placemaking really means, how it differs from sustainability, and where practitioners can start.
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[Download Transcript (PDF)]Regenerative placemaking brings together two fields that Timea describes as “quite complementary”. Placemaking contributes its creative, bottom-up and community-focused approach. Regenerative design and development contributes a more demanding aim: to move beyond not causing harm and leave the environment “a little bit of a better place after we leave it”, or better still, to stay on as a long-term steward of the places we work in.
The thinking has deep roots. Regenerative design draws its inspiration from how living systems renew themselves, and architect Bill Reed argued that the sustainability conversation needed to shift from sustainability to regeneration. Timea points to regenerative agriculture as the most familiar picture: a grower cultivates the soil and, in doing so, leaves it more fertile and more nourished. The open question, and the one her research explores, is what the equivalent looks like in streets, squares and parks.
She is also clear about what it is not. It is not a rejection of sustainability, and it is not a brand new practice. Many placemaking projects already work this way without using the label. The term gives practitioners a more holistic lens on work they are already doing, and a way to check whether they are addressing everything that is present in a place.
Timea is wary of turning this into a contest, and she warns that “regenerative” risks becoming a trendy buzzword if it is used without changing how projects are delivered. The differences are best seen side by side:
| Sustainable approach | Regenerative approach | |
| Aim | Balance what we extract and what we give back, for example carbon neutrality. | Leave the place, its people and its ecology better than we found them. |
| Relationship | Often an exchange of inputs and outputs. | Reciprocity, which is not transactional and shapes the attitude we bring to the work. |
| Time horizon | The life of the project. | Long-term stewardship where possible. |
| Practitioner | An external expert delivering a scope. | A participant who is present and brings their own story. |
The idea of reciprocity, Timea notes, comes from many Indigenous knowledge systems. She also points practitioners to a model developed by Village Well in Melbourne, which breaks a place into around seven aspects where regenerative thinking can be applied. Village Well’s Gilbert Rochecouste has been a guest on The Placemakers.
Timea frames her research around relationality, and it gives placemakers a lens they can use on any project. She asks how a public space can foster or strengthen four kinds of connection:
Together, they push back against the isolation and individualism that shape so many of our cities. A project can be judged by a simple question: which of these relationships does it strengthen, and which does it ignore?
The centrepiece of Timea’s PhD is a pattern library, a collection of the socio-spatial practices found in regenerative initiatives that could become a mix-and-match toolkit for practitioners. Her focus is on small gestures that strengthen the four relationships, because the design side of placemaking is already well documented.
Community gardening shows how much one practice can do. Working with our hands builds our connection to ourselves. Sharing the load builds relationships with neighbours, because someone has to water the tomatoes when you are out of town. Learning how soil and plants behave deepens our connection to the land, and the insects that arrive connect us to wider life. Sharing food through programming works in a similar way.
Timea shared a Melbourne example of how far a small gesture can travel. A single resident placed a few plants outside their door. Years later the whole street is green and lively, local businesses have benefited, the community has come together, and the local council has backed similar efforts elsewhere. Long research and long projects both call for the same habit, she says: “you have to celebrate the small wins”.
Timea’s most challenging question for practitioners is “Am I really present there authentically?” In academia, she sees a contradiction between the desire for objective, quantified knowledge and the fact that researchers cannot separate themselves from their work. The same is true for designers, planners and policymakers. Our biases, backgrounds and previous experiences of place come with us.
Her answer is to work with them. In a Power of Place learning journey, Timea learned to apply every exercise to herself first. Before researching the story of a place, participants wrote the story of themselves, looking for the patterns that show where they can be most useful. It positions the placemaker less as an expert and more as a social practitioner and facilitator, a role that is still uncommon in Australian practice.
When I asked Timea for one first step, she suggested widening the frame. These are the practical moves that came out of our conversation:
Timea’s hope for the future of placemaking is a field that nourishes all life and all kinds of connection, with more reciprocal relationships and less extraction. That is a good measure for any public place: does it leave more than it takes?
Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, or download the transcript above to read along.
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