Placemaking & Placekeeping
Gateway communities often place as much value on the their unique character as they do on the surrounding natural amenities. A strong sense of place, including their “small town feel," is extremely important to these communities. A sense of place happens intentionally, through the ways that a community interprets and shares its history, designs and maintains its built environment, and protects and provides access to recreational opportunities and natural landscapes.
Below you will find resources for helping take stock of your community values and ways to ensure their protection. Do you have any questions or is there something missing that you would like to see here? Please reach out to liz.sodja@usu.edu.
Resources & Tools
Main Street America Network helps to breathe new life into the places people call home. The Main Street Resource Center has a broad range of member resources, including signature Main Street Approach handbooks and guides, and newly released revitalization toolkit.
Written by professionals with many years of experience navigating the complexities of billboard and sign ordinances, it offers definitions, guidance and key considerations, a checklist for creating robust and defensible ordinances, and links to additional useful resources.
To learn more about the primer, check out the GNARly Blog introducing the primer and how it came to be.
In November 2020, USU Research Landscapes did a webinar and workshop with Jake Powell, regarding how a community can start finding their sense of place and what makes them special. The webinar also had an accompanying workbook. Click below to watch.
Despite primarily serving a metropolitan area, the Wasatch Front Regional Council's Form Based Code template is a helpful primer for communities looking to create an appearence in line with their community's character, while maximizing commercial and residential flexibility.
The template site includes a visual library of examples of form-based codes, access to InDesign template files, videos, and an example project using the template.
Planetizen offers online courses to community planners and leaders around key community development areas. "Interpreting Places and Spaces" gives a background on "Interpretation," the art of revealing historical, cultural, or natural stories about place. As visitors move through a heritage building, trail, park, forest, or downtown square, they might want to know: why is this place important? What is memorable or interesting about it?
This course requires a subscribe to Planetizen Courses.
The Rural America Placemaking Toolkit is a resource guide to showcase a variety of placemaking activities, projects, and success stories across rural America. USDA Rural Development has made investments in placemaking since 2020, and entered into a cooperative agreement with University of Kentucky’s Community & Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky (CEDIK) in 2022 to host the first ever Placemaking in Small & Rural Communities online conference. CEDIK developed this website as a way to highlight the importance of placemaking in rural communities, as well as provide comprehensive resource that will be regularly updated to feature new projects, activities and successes from rural America.
So you’ve got a design idea – now where do you start? The Citizens' Institute on Rural Design hosted this webinar in February 2020 on pre-development and fundraising to learn about the crucial first steps in starting a design project. The webinar covered the nuts and bolts of considering the history of a project site, identifying key community members and stakeholders to the project, and setting up a fundraising strategy and was part 1 of the Citizens' Institute on Rural Design (CIRD)'s Rural Design Webinar Series. For more information on CIRD, visit
Research & Case Studies
THE MERCED RIVER TRAIL - MARIPOSA COUNTY, CA - DOWNLOAD
Approved in March 2023 but beginning in 2018, Mariposa County led the development of the Merced River Trail Vision Plan to articulate locally supported priorities to guide implementation of this inter-agency federal priority. Through extensive stakeholder engagement led by the Merced River Trail Community Working Group, the County solicited and synthesized local input into a vision statement, goals, and recommended project actions for ensuring that the trail is built, programmed, and maintained in ways that support Mariposa County’s diverse preferences and perspectives for the trail and landscape.
Additionally, in 2020 Headwaters Economics wrote an analysis describing the benefits of the Merced River Trail for Mariposa County’s economy and businesses, quality of life, and public health. To learn more about the process of developing the river trail, check out this webinar about the unique community engagement process they undertook to complete the trail's identity.
