Places in the Making, a new report from MIT’s department of urban studies and planning (DUSP), argues that the process of making a place is as important as the place itself. With this fresh take on “placemaking,” MIT planning and urban design professor Susan Silberberg, who teamed up with a few of her graduate students, along with Aaron Naparstek, the founder of Streetsblog, has written highly readable, well-organized report worth exploring.

Placemaking first appeared in the 1960s as a “reaction to auto-centric planning and bad public spaces.” In their intro, they write: “Place-making as we now know it can trace its roots back to the seminal works of urban thinkers like Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch and William Whyte, who, beginning in the 1960s, espoused a new way to understand, design and program public spaces by putting people and communities ahead of efficiency and aesthetics. Their philosophies, considered…