Design for Urban Resilience: A Case of Community-led Placemaking Approach in Shanghai China

This paper presents a recent design activism initiative named Open Your Space in Chinese urban context. The project aims to help the urban community acquire a better sense of sustainability, comfortability, and accessibility to public space, where citizens, place managers and local government could connect together through socially engaged and participatory process. The paper advocates the design initiative influence of public space in culture, social context and social system, analyses how to use public space design intervention strategies to modeling resilient community mechanism. By synthesizing ideas of resilience, the paper uses the community-led placemaking approach in order to create the third place and a new paradigm of spatial and social resilience.