Recovery of Iconic Places The Importance of Placemaking in Town Planning

Abstract

A response to the crisis of civic architecture in the
postwar period, the placemaking aims at reconciling man with his
community and his city. Nowadays, creating such places is still
needed to support formation of the modern civil society.
To understand the process of designing unique places, it is
particularly useful analyze some of the successful placemaking
projects which do adapt former industrial sites to a new cultural
function and which can sometimes be referred to as recovering of
iconic places, giving a new life to the historically important places.
This is, for example, the case of placing the European Solidarity
Centre on the grounds of the famous Gdańsk Shipyard or reusing a
vast area of a former coal mine to raise a modern cultural district in
the city of Katowice. To create these unique places, as the analysis
proves, the architects have taken into account the indications
originating from the site analysis and have incorporated them into
the design, balancing them with contemporary architectural and
technological solutions. Derived from the character of their
particular locations, the unique places are not only public spaces, but
can sometimes become icons for the local society.