In the softened rhetoric of ‘place making’ master planning appears to recognise the value of human attachments in the production and maintenance of sustainable designed environments. The drive to privatise public space and control public behaviours appears to retreat in favour of multi-actor engagements with sense of place, while broadly ecological models of integration appear to offer an attractive program for community involvement and environmental literacy.

But how real or deep are these developments? LA is inescapably tied to the rhetoric of its presentation; its spatial and temporal arrangements embody stories of place and place making. In a neoliberal environment it is unlikely that a post-functionalist commitment to articulating pluralist senses of place can have real traction. In Australia, the narratives invoked to interpret designs on place are further problematised by the coexistence of Aboriginal philosophies of place making in which the phrase ‘places made after their stories’ is anything but rhetorical.

Infrastructure development, supported by ever more powerful inputs from the computational sciences and nanotechnology, largely ignores LA’s call to consider multiply-scaled, area responsive and culturally diverse environmental designs. In this situation, we ask whether the LA profession is equipped to articulate the new stories of place making that emerge when the fate of the world is directly linked to the abstraction of function from human meaning. Is the concept of ‘place’ any longer a useful trope, or is it simply the relic of a governmentalist ideology of enclosure that is abstracted from any ecological notion of interconnectivity. If ‘place’ is to be invoked, what discourse adequately communicates such attributes as temporality, relationality or atmosphere?

Our panel members will engage in a discussion that brings insights from phenomenological and Indigenous descriptions of being to the LA profession’s critical responsibility to reconnect design to a larger care for the environment, one in which the symbolic affordances and emotional identifications offered are a catalyst for the growth of creative communities able to exercise lasting stewardship over their living space. In this, the functionalist language of the design brief and the design response may have to yield to a new engagement with the poetic, the gestural and the choreographic.