Chapter 14: Adapting Placemaking to Climate Change: Redefining the Placemaking Diagram

Successful public spaces necessitate ongoing adaptations to address the evolving challenges posed by contemporary urban systems. There exists a probability of further effects related to climate change, including heightened temperatures, intensified Urban Heat Islands, and increased frequency of temperature disparity waves. These modifications have the potential to impact the range of human thermal comfort in public spaces, so directly affecting their levels of viability. The primary objective of this chapter is to establish a set of design guidelines that can effectively mitigate the impact of changes in human thermal comfort on urban environments. This chapter integrates this result into a universal instrument known as “The Place Diagram.” The instrument in question has been developed by the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) to assess both present and future developments in public spaces, as well as to quantify the criteria for determining their success. The methodology employed in this chapter involves a desktop analysis of data obtained from a comprehensive review of both classical and contemporary literature pertaining to the philosophy of public space. It is anticipated that the results will serve as a catalyst for the advancement of the extensively utilized public space diagram.