The Art of Authenticity: Why 'Context' is the Most Important Ingredient in Placemaking

When a public space feels truly great, it doesn’t feel like an accident. It feels inevitable. It belongs. It doesn’t feel like it’s been dropped in from outer space. This feeling is the result of authentic placemaking, an approach that grounds the design in the history, culture, and physical environment of its location.

In this episode of The Placemakers, I sat down with Ben Newell, a Principal with Arcadia Landscape Architecture, to discuss the key ingredients of successful public spaces—and why his experience building cities from a “grain of sand” in the Middle East led him back to the vital importance of context in Australia.

The Most Important Ingredient is People

While designers often focus on the physical form, Ben argues that the most important ingredient in a successful public place is actually people. Without people, a place is merely a space. The key is creating spaces that people feel comfortable in, want to inhabit, return to, and bring their friends to.

How do you include people in the design? It varies. Sometimes it involves extensive community consultation to discover aspirations. Other times, it’s about observing how people use existing spaces to understand what makes them work—or not work.

From Speed to Context: The Lesson of the Desert

Ben’s early career experience working on large-scale projects in the Middle East profoundly shaped his approach to design. Building cities from scratch in the desert—starting from a single grain of sand—highlighted what was missing. There wasn’t really a focus on genuine placemaking; it was more about speed and quantity, not quality.

This experience brought one lesson into sharp focus: the importance of context.

When Ben came back to Australia, he began to focus on designing places that were deeply grounded in their local environment. This involves:

Using local materials.
Incorporating local plants.
Responding directly to the local climate.

What is an ‘Authentic’ Place?

An authentic place is one that truly feels like it belongs. It responds to the layered history, culture, and physical environment of its location.

Ben cites the Barangaroo project in Sydney as a prime example, which tried to reconnect the city with the harbor, using sandstone and native vegetation to feel distinctly Sydney.

The good news is that clients are becoming more receptive to this approach. They increasingly understand the value of good placemaking, recognizing that it adds economic, social, and environmental value to a project, creating better social outcomes and an uplift in property values.

The Power of the ‘Fine Grain’

When looking at places people admire globally, there is often a unifying feature: the small things.

It’s the “fine grain” of the design—a beautiful piece of art in a laneway, or the thoughtful blending of new architectural fabric with the old. Successful placemaking often involves adaptive reuse, repurposing existing infrastructure to bring people back and draw out the existing character of a location. Examples like the High Line in New York or Fish Lane in Brisbane repurpose existing infrastructure.

The Biggest Challenge: Getting the Right Team

The single biggest challenge facing the industry, according to Ben, is forming the right team from the very start. Successful placemaking is about collaboration—a “melting pot of ideas” between a diverse group of professionals: