Book Talk: Place and Placemaking

Join us to celebrate the launch of the new book Place and Placemaking (Routledge, 2026). In the book, over a dozen leading thinkers debate how to position, envision, co-create, and communicate place. This is the first in the Rudy Bruner Center Debates on Urban Excellence book series, produced at the School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo. The book is available for sale in print, and free to access online, in line with the Rudy Bruner Center’s mission to set the broad agenda for urban excellence. 

Today, placemaking is everywhere. From temporary bike lanes to streateries, community murals, and urban agriculture, placemakers promise more nimble, more democratic, more visible, and more rewarding urban change. But where does this growing movement find its place? After all, the social, ecological, and cultural odds are still heavily stacked against those unique environments that give us a sense of connection, belonging, and purpose – in other words, a sense of place. Can placemaking overcome the accelerating erosion of meaningful places in the face of contemporary homogenization, isolation, obliviousness, and polarization? 

Moderated by editors Conrad Kickert, Robert G. Shibley, and award-winning place author Tony Hiss, this book launch asks contributors Tracy Hadden Loh, Ethan Kent, Marc Norman, Dan Pitera, Tim Tompkins, Leonardo Vazquez, Joyce Weil, and Sharon Zukin to debate their views on place and placemaking. Audience questions are welcomed and light refreshments will be served.

Speakers:
Conrad Kickert, Program Director, Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence and Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo.
Robert G. Shibley, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence.
Tracy Hadden Loh, fellow, Brookings Metro
Tony Hiss, author, lecturer, planning and environmental consultant; Visiting Scholar, New York University
Ethan Kent, Executive Director, PlacemakingX
Marc Norman, Larry & Klara Silverstein Chair and Associate Dean, Schack Institute of Real Estate, New York University
Dan Pitera, Dean, School of Architecture & Community Development, University of Detroit Mercy
Tim Tompkins, Fellow, Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University
Leonardo Vazquez, Executive Director, Northern New Jersey Community Foundation
Joyce Weil, Associate Professor, Gerontology, Towson University
Sharon Zukin, Professor Emerita of Sociology and of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center

About the Speakers:
Dr. Conrad Kickert is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning, and the Director of Programs at the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence. Born and raised in The Netherlands, Conrad received degrees in urbanism and architecture at the TU Delft and holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Michigan. He has worked as an urban researcher and designer for various design offices, property developers and non-profit organizations in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Kickert researches the evolving relationship between urban form, urban life and the urban economy. He has authored award-winning articles and books on these topics, including articles for the Journal of Urban Studies and the London School of Economics, an Oxford University bibliography, and several edited and single-authored books with world-leading publishers. Among others, his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, UBER, the Haile/US Bank Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Conrad is a frequent speaker at international conferences and workshops on urban design, urban retail, and urban morphology.

Robert Shibley, FAIA, FAICP is SUNY Distinguished Professor of the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning and the Director of the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence. During his term as Dean from 2011 and 2023, Shibley guided the school to a top position in research generation among the nation’s schools of architecture and planning. As a teacher, scholar, and practitioner of architecture and planning for more than 50 years, Robert (Bob) Shibley has dedicated his career to advancing knowledge-based design and placemaking in service to the public. In recognition of his lifetime contributions to design excellence for the public, the American Institute of Architects presented Shibley with the prestigious 2014 Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture. Shibley has authored or co-authored 17 books – notably including Placemaking: The Art and Science of Building Community; Urban Excellence; and Time Savers Standards for Urban Design – and more than 120 book chapters, government publications, and articles in the professional and academic press. He is co-creator of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, created in 1986 to honor great places. Over the course of over four decades, Shibley has worked with faculty, staff, students, and collaborating publics on over 80 Buffalo-based projects, earning several APA Best Practice and the Best Plan Awards, as well as a CNU Charter Award.  His work is viewed as a model for university-community partnerships in city-making and place-based teaching, research, and critical practice.

Dr. Tracy Hadden Loh is a Fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, where she integrates her interests in commercial real estate, infrastructure, racial justice, and governance. She serves on the boards of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, District Bridges, and Greater Greater Washington. Her most recent writing includes two co-authored chapters in Hyperlocal: Place Governance in a Fragmented World and a series on the future of downtowns, including what to do about public safety and adaptive reuse. Trained as a computer scientist, urbanist, and scholar, Dr. Loh has dedicated her career to creating new knowledge about how neighborhoods, cities, and regions work and putting those insights into practice through community organizing and government service. She has over a decade of experience in policy research and working directly with communities. She also previously served two years on the city council of Mount Rainier, a small town in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

Tony Hiss, beginning with his The Experience of Place: A new way of looking at, and dealing with our radically changing cities and countryside (1990, Knopf), has been presenting the urgent need for adding an experiential approach to a number of world-altering activities, including travel and transportation, in his In Motion: The Experience of Travel (2010, Knopf), and, most recently, protecting global biodiversity, in his award-winning Rescuing the Planet: Saving Half the Land to Heal the Earth (2021, Knopf). The National Recreation and Park Association’s National Literary Award praised his lifetime of “spellbinding and poignant” writing, calling it “often poetic, always real.” Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and author of twelve other books, Hiss was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years, a visiting scholar at New York University for twenty-five years, and has lectured around the world. He lives in New York City with his wife, young-adult writer Lois Metzger.

Ethan Kent is the Executive Director of PlacemakingX. Ethan Kent works to support public space organizations, projects, and leadership around the world to build a global placemaking movement. Ethan has traveled to more than 1000 cities, in 60 countries, to advance the cause of leading urban development with inclusive public spaces and placemaking. In 2019 he co-founded PlacemakingX to network, amplify and accelerate placemaking leadership and impact globally. Ethan has helped initiate and grow over two dozen regional placemaking networks covering much of the globe, while also supporting the PlacemakingUS network, and the Social Life Project. He builds on more than 20 years of working on placemaking projects and campaigns with Project for Public Spaces. Ethan has been integral to the development of placemaking as a transformative approach to economic development, environmentalism, transportation planning, governance, resilience, social equity, design, placekeeping, digital space, inclusion, tourism and innovation. Ethan has keynoted well over 100 top urbanism conferences and helped organize dozens of the placemaking conferences that have most shaped the movement.

Marc Norman is the founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Larry & Klara Silverstein Chair and Associate Dean at New York University, Schack Institute of Real Estate. Previously he was Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the Faculty Director of the Weiser Center for Real Estate at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. Norman is an internationally recognized expert on policy and finance for affordable housing and community development. Trained as an urban planner, he has worked in the field of community development and finance for over 25 years. With degrees in political economics (University of California Berkeley, Bachelors of Art, 1989) and urban planning (University of California Los Angeles, Master of Art, 1992) and experience with for-profit and non-profit organizations, consulting firms and investment banks, Norman has worked collaboratively to develop or finance more than $400 million in total development costs.

Dan Pitera, FAIA, is dean of the Detroit Mercy School of Architecture & Community Development. He is a political and social activist masquerading as an architect. Pitera was a 2004-2005 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2010. Before his dean appointment in 2019, he was the executive director for 20 years at the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC). Under his direction, the DCDC won the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, received the National AIA’s 2017 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, and was included in the 2017 Curry Stone Design Award’s Social Design Circle. Pitera co-led the civic engagement process for the Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning in 2010. DCDC’s engagement process was included in the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum’s exhibition: By The People and the DCDC’s Roaming Table has been added to the Smithsonian Institute’s permanent collection. Pitera has co-authored the book, Syncopating the Urban Landscape: More People, More Programs, More Geographies and co-edited the book, Activist Architecture: The Philosophy and Practice of the Community Design Center.

Tim Tompkins is a nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro and a New York University Marron Institute fellow, where he leads the Sustaining Places Initiative, which focuses on how place-centered partnerships sustain cities. He also teaches urban planning courses at NYU’s Wagner School. Tompkins has worked for over three decades to understand and improve cities, with an emphasis on neighborhood-driven economic development, place management, public art, and public-private partnership Tompkins was president of the Times Square Alliance, one of the nation’s pre-eminent business improvement districts (BIDs), from 2002 to 2020. The many public realm improvements during his tenure included the building of the iconic red steps on Duffy Square and the creation, in partnership with New York City, of the Broadway pedestrian malls. He oversaw the annual New Year’s Eve celebration and created other placemaking initiatives such as the Summer Solstice Yoga celebration and the Times Square Design Lab.

Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, is the Executive Director of the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation. He has been helping enhance communities for more than 30 years as an author, community economic development professional, creative placemaker, educator, journalist, and urban planner. He founded and directed two organizations that helped grow the field of creative placemaking around the United States through innovative convenings and professional development programs: The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking and Creative Placemaking Communities. Both organizations engage people from the worlds of arts, cultural heritage, public policy, and more to explore ways to leverage the power of arts and culture to enhance communities. Vazquez has been recognized nationally and in New Jersey for his work in urban planning, creative placemaking, and social justice. He is the co-editor of “Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities”, and author of Leading from the Middle: Strategic Thinking for Urban Planning and Community Development Professionals. He is a co-founder of the Latinos and Planning division of the American Planning Association (APA) and is an advisor to the APA’s Arts and Planning Division.

Dr. Joyce Weil is an Associate Professor of Gerontology at Towson University. In addition to her body of peer-reviewed articles, and three other books, she is the author of Why Place Matters: Place and Place Attachment for Older Adults (2023) with Routledge. Dr. WeiI is trained in quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods and emergent methodologies. She is associate editor for the Journal of Women & Aging and an editorial board member of the Gerontologist, Gerontology & Geriatrics Education and the Pedagogy in Health Promotion journals.  Dr. Weil is an active member of the Gerontological Society of America  as a co-leader of the Qualitative Research Interest Group, a GSA Mentor,  and she holds the Gerontological Society of America's fellow status, FGSA.

Dr. Sharon Zukin is a Professor Emerita of Sociology and of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on modern urban life and she has widely published on the values and challenges of place in urban life. Her new book, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy (2020, OUP), examines the shaping of the tech ecosystem in New York. Dr. Zukin has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Western Sydney, and Tongji University; and a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received the Lynd Award for Career Achievement in urban sociology from the American Sociological Association and won the C. Wright Mills Book Award for Landscapes of Power (1993, University of California Press).