Placemaking, in the sense of ‘the art of making places for people’, to paraphrase the definition given
in By Design: Urban Design in the Planning System, ‘includes the way places work and such matters as community
safety, as well as how they look. It concerns the connections between people and places, movement and urban
form, nature and the built fabric, and the processes for ensuring successful villages, towns and cities’. The city
thus becomes the outcome of complex intersections created by a number of operators who modify the system for
different reasons. It becomes necessary to identify a microsystem within the macrosystem of the city able to make
the urban variants intelligible: place is at once porous and resistant, a receptor for complex interactions. The concept
of place, in the sense of a space endowed with unique features that is fundamental for establishing the identity
of the contemporary city, is meant as a key concept of urban design. We illustrate the environmental, historic,
symbolic, urban, perceptive, anthropological, sociological and psychological characteristics, extending as far as
virtual place and non-place. The extension of the concept of place is that of place identity which is considered≪not
in the sense of equality with something else, but with the meaning of individuality or oneness≫. The concepts of
both place and identity will be illustrated in the article with reference to texts produced by architects, urban
planners, sociologists, geographers, environmental psychologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers.

• The characters of place in urban design