U - Podcast

Placemaking is increasingly gaining importance in contemporary urban development. From the various perspectives to approach places, the eyelevel-perspective and the visitor journey are useful tools to make places where people feel at ease. The five steps in the visitor journey can be seen as ‘moments of truth’ for a place to leave a good impression on the user. Micro-scale research suggests that successful places are about acupuncture rather than architecture: small interventions like adding color to buildings, providing opportunities to walk, stay and sit and sufficient green in public space can have big effects on the way people experience a place and appreciate it. Professor Gert-Jan Hospers has a chair in Urban and Regional Transition at the geography department of Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is also director of a foundation promoting local and regional development at a human scale. Gert-Jan works in the spirit of urbanists Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl and has written widely about urban