Definition
What is citymaking?
Citymaking is the craft of shaping a city, not only its buildings and budgets, but the decisions, institutions, culture and everyday habits that determine what a city becomes. It treats a city as something continually made by the people who live in it, not something delivered once and maintained thereafter.
Placemaking, defined
Placemaking is the practice of shaping a specific public place, a street, a square, a waterfront, a market, the ground floor of a tower, around how people actually use it, rather than around its plan alone. It starts from observation: where people linger, what they avoid, which corners fill at dusk. Its test is simple and unforgiving. Do people want to be there?
Good placemaking is specific. It works with what a place already has, its trade, its shade, its noise, its history, and adds rather than replaces. It is measured in months and seasons, and it can be done by a small group with modest means.
Where citymaking goes further
A city can be full of excellent places and still be a difficult city. Placemaking works at the scale of a place; citymaking works at the scale of the whole, how land is held, how risk is priced, how permissions are granted, how a city talks about itself, who gets a hearing and who does not. It asks the prior question: what is a city for?
- Scale. Placemaking shapes a site. Citymaking shapes the conditions that produce sites.
- Timeframe. Placemaking is judged in seasons. Citymaking is judged in decades.
- Instrument. Placemaking uses design and programming. Citymaking also uses governance, finance, culture and civic imagination.
- Author. Placemaking can be led by a team. Citymaking is necessarily collective, no single actor holds all the levers.
Citymaking and urban planning
Urban planning allocates land, density, movement and infrastructure. It is indispensable, and it is not the same thing. Citymaking asks what those allocations are for: who the city is being made comfortable for, what behaviour it rewards, what it quietly forecloses. Planning is one instrument of citymaking, not a substitute for it.
Why we call it an art
Cities resist optimisation. The same intervention succeeds in one neighbourhood and fails two streets away, because the difference lies in trust, timing and the people involved. Citymaking is therefore closer to a craft than a method: judgement built up through practice, exchanged between practitioners, and tested against real places.
The Art of Citymaking is an annual residency where people who shape cities compare what actually worked, in the open, with the failures included, on real ground rather than from a stage.
In practice
The Art of Citymaking is an annual residency that puts the question on real ground. The first chapter was held in Singapore in June 2026; the second, Ground Truth, lands at Dhun in Rajasthan in November 2027; the circuit returns to Singapore in 2028.
Each chapter reads a lived place against a theory of the future city, and leaves something behind on the ground it visited.