By Emma Arnold –
We always visit my father’s grave on important days—his birthday, Christmas, and my parents’ wedding anniversary. It is a ritual: my mother, sister, and I walk up the hill to visit his grave. My mother cleans the grave, my sister and I arrange candles in a heart shape, and sometimes we decorate a small Christmas tree with gingerbread cookies for the birds to eat. Once the grave is set, we stand together, my mother in the middle with her arms around us.
My sister often questioned the need for these visits, preferring memories tied to other places that, for her, felt more representative of who he was than this rectangle of earth. For my mother, though, the grave symbolized something profound. To her, it is a focal point for her grief and love, a place where we could share stillness. This tension encapsulates the paradox of the grave: it is both nothing and everything. It is not my father, yet the act of revisiting transforms it into something meaningful. The grave is a void, representing an absence while paradoxically becoming a site of presence through repeated acts of care. The cleaning, decorating and standing together are not about the grave as a physical space but about performing our shared loss.
A few years ago, my still-living grandparents chose to secure their final resting place near my father’s, ensuring we would never lose our way. Passing my grandparents’ future grave along the way often made my sister and me giggle; it was so typical of them to plan and make things easier for us, even in death. What was once just a patch of soil next to my father’s grave has become something more.
My father died before I was born, and by the time I turned 24, the act of walking up that hill had etched itself into me. If there were a blueprint of my footprints, the paper would glow with the paths I had worn into the earth—a map of grief and love.
Perhaps these are examples of placemaking—how unnoticed space becomes a place through layers of personal and cultural meaning. It is not the space itself that matters, but the continuous cycle of revisiting, rethinking, and reengaging with it, layering meaning upon meaning until the space becomes a place. A grave, much like a public square or a park, is not inherently meaningful; it becomes meaningful through the rituals and relationships that unfold around it. The process of placemaking, like visiting the grave, is fundamentally a process of meaning-making.
As an intern at Placemaking Europe (PE), I now study this act of meaning-making on a larger scale. PE connects theory and practice through its annual Placemaking Week Europe (PWE), a gathering of designers and urbanists who share ideas and collaborate with municipalities. PWE 2024 was overwhelming yet resonant, celebrating community and possibility while exposing the tensions inherent in the practice.
PWE reminded me of Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias—spaces that disrupt the everyday and encourage reflection. Much like heterotopias that prompt us to take a moment to consider different aspects of existence, such as mortality in the example of cemeteries, the PWE experience in Rotterdam turned the city into a heterotopic exploration of placemaking. The streets told stories of destruction and renewal, with post-war architecture and contested neighborhoods highlighting the tensions between the past and the present, inviting participants to think critically about these dynamics.
Much like the ritual of mourning, placemaking is caught between its idealistic aspirations and the harsh realities of the world it seeks to transform. Rotterdam illustrates these tensions. “Placewashing,” for instance, uses the language of inclusion while masking displacement and inequality. Temporary parks, art installations, and pop-up businesses enliven neglected spaces. However, in the process they often also pave the way for redevelopment that marginalizes vulnerable communities. Also vacant lots turned into green spaces, artist-revived buildings, and trendy establishments reflect this duality. While dynamic, these projects are often co-opted by institutional agendas that prioritize profit over equity. Spaces intended to be inclusive can eventually cater to those with more resources, sidelining others and raising questions about who truly benefits from placemaking.
The discussions at PWE felt repetitive at first. They circled around themes of sustainability, inclusivity, and community engagement. However, what initially felt redundant proved to have a purpose. The repetition mirrored a process of returning to familiar ideas and reinterpreting them from new angles. Furthermore, just like my family’s cemetery rituals created a lasting connection to the final resting place of my father, repeated acts of engagement in placemaking foster connections to space.
Repetition creates meaning by layering actions and ideas over time. In mourning, the act of returning to a grave draws meaning from its emotional weight, as personal grief and love imbue the space with significance. In placemaking, meaning is created through repeated, intentional actions, like turning a vacant lot into a community garden. In these actions significance emerges from shared efforts and the ongoing transformation of the space. For instance, a vacant lot does not become a community garden through a single act of planting; it is the ongoing care—watering, weeding, harvesting—and the repeated gathering of people that imbue it with meaning. Through such repeated acts of care spaces become places.
Emma Arnold is a master’s graduate in Social and Cultural Anthropology of the VU.