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This chapter examines the opportunities and pitfalls of integrating transport planning with urban design and place-making strategies, using design thinking as a way to address many of the ‘intractables’ associated with implementing transport policy. We argue for a focus on the substance and consistency of macro level strategy alongside the significance of creative and consistent micro level interventions. We position our argument alongside smart city debates, aiming to reinsert into these a more ‘ordinary’ approach that celebrates the significance of intervention in ‘ordinary neighbourhoods’ through the deployment of ‘ordinary technologies’ (benches, quality pavements) to create more livable cities and neighbourhoods. We concur that planning is a form of knowledge in action but choices over what counts as knowledge and how it is used and deployed are highly significant. In doing so, and to better secure citizen buy-in to the transformation of public space, we argue for an approach centred on co-design to counter planning orthodoxy that subverts people’s everyday needs to the paradigms and embedded routines of regulatory systems.

The introduction advances a theoretical framework for interpreting how New Chinese Cinema auteurs shoot on-location as a mode of “place making,” the experiencing and imaging of rural shooting locations as places. Drawing from poststructural cultural geography, production culture studies, environmental psychology, and critical tourism studies, I demonstrate how production environments are more than blank canvases, but places where cultural meanings are being continually contested. As cultural elites, auteurs make coherent disorienting social changes by engaging in production as lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage. The rural is thus a stage for auteurs to perform their aspirations for social activism, while location shooting constitutes an embodied and performative practice through which auteurs make meaningful sense of their ever-shifting and often precarious roles of authorship. Consequently, images and representations of the rural in the resulting films cannot simply be classified as signifying one cultural logic or another. Rather, they bear traces of the institutional politics, social tensions, and geopolitical ambivalences negotiated by auteurs during production, thus confounding distinctions between the ideologically complicit and subversive, a reductive binary too often mobilized by scholars when periodizing Chinese and Taiwanese film histories.

Rowheath Park at Bournville (from 1921) and the Hills and Dales Park, the Old Barn Club and Old River Park, made for NCR employees between 1906 and 1939, are highly significant to the history of corporate landscapes in terms of their scale and the sophistication of their designs in a factory context. A comparison of these parks, designed by landscape architects Cheals of Crawley, and the Olmsted Brothers respectively, reveal differences in the cultural, symbolic and stylistic approaches to landscape design in the two nations, including what it was possible to achieve in the suburban landscapes of Britain and the United States and in the beliefs, desires and expectations of the factory worker and his patriarch in what the landscape could provide for them. In context of corporate recreation, the scale and sophistication of these gardens and parks were astonishing and unprecedented. Their landscape architects succeeded in projecting local and national landscape identities through design, thus creating spaces that heightened employees’ sense of belonging to the region and to the corporate community.

Chapter Six confirms the findings of chapter Five, via an examination of the dispute over the name of the town that is either Pointe au Chien or Pointe aux Chênes. Place naming is an important part of place-making: those who name a place are the authentic stewards of the place. The chapter traces the history of the confusion and shows that the long-standing dispute seems to pattern along ethnic lines today. However, via an examination of many factors, including the linguistic landscape, storytelling, and a consideration of semantics, it becomes clear that both groups lay claim to the same space, using the same means to do so. Because place is so closely tied to personal identity, the competing goals of the two sub-groups results in the need to characterize the place differently. The dispute over the name is not a dispute over boundaries or stewardship, but rather over characterization.

Chapter Eight considers the stories told in the process of place-making. It focuses on the history of land loss in the Lafourche Basin via personal accounts of recent storms and land loss and of the hurricanes that destroyed vibrant communities such as Last Island or Chenière Caminada. These are the stories people tell when they create place in Terrebonne-Lafourche; it has been so for generations. The stories are presented in the words of the residents themselves. The chapters shows how these stories invoke both land and language, and a subsequent showcasing of the stories told about language demonstrate that people speak of the disappearance of land and of the language in parallel ways; the disappearance of both has thrown this into sharp relief and demonstrates that place is both physical and aural space made meaningful.

This chapter develops the book’s analytical framework and situates the monograph within the field of studies on migration and religion. It argues that ritual performance can be used as a ‘cultural prism’ to shed new light on important themes in anthropological research on migration: social networks, processes of place-making, and the reproduction of practice. The author claims that migrants’ relations to place can be understood by examining their notions of relatedness to others. She further discusses the change and continuity of social practice in a migration context. The final part of the chapter introduces the 15 months of fieldwork among Iraqi women and their families and it discusses the methodological and analytical implications of the author’s approach.