Placemaking Week 2024

The workshop session is relevant to place-making practitioners, because it will involve a discussion on how to tap into creativity to explore the nuances of the complexities of racism, and the influence on connection to place and history. We will delve into our lived experiences as a tool of self-discovery that informs how we tackle the systemic approaches to create equitable spaces in service to justice.  The facilitator of the session has used the power of storytelling to shift the culture of centering dominant narratives of people and seeking to invite in experiences instead. She works to spread narratives globally that equity by design is needed to counteract a systemic designed oppressive structure that based the existence of humanity on skin color. This notion also impacts other intersectional ways of identity, and has shifted power from collective community thinking to individuate ways of existence, which are not sustainable. She also advocates through speaking and writing opportunities that shifting to indigenous ways of being is necessitated for systems that are human-centered, and choices of structurally under-resourced people should be the center and baseline for decision-making and not the dominant narratives. Participants will be invited to comment about their lived experiences, solicit how they apply creativity in the work, and introduce the approaches of tapping into the art of poetry through: (1) lived experiences, (2) sensory experiences, and (3) Oríkìs, which are praise poetries of the Yoruba people in Nigeria. By working together collectively among colleagues, participants can identify ways of working that help tap into our shared humanity. After all, collegial exchange supports our enthusiasm for placemaking and placekeeping, in our efforts to transform inequitable systems.