Placemaking: Urban landscape system management

This paper applies systems and metasystems theory to urban landscape management and urban design, to move beyond the object‐level of design style to the meta‐level of paradigms, professional epistemologies, and urban ecological, physiological and psychological health. It explores: The city as incrementally designed system; the landscape and contemporary architecture as different system types; urban planning and design for placeness and sustainability; natural and human system carrying capacity, urban growth, and system health; external and internal contexts; and hard and soft implementation issues. It speaks for: An urban management hierarchy of meta‐systems, systems and project designers; the management of physical and cultural systems for human experience; and the synergism of human, structural, infrastructural and ecological systems for environmental and human health. It explores the role of design facilitators, and modified innovation‐intervention techniques used to manage healthy, innovative, responsive, sustainable and meaningful urban landscapes. It identifies the tasks of placemakers as system mctamodelers to include the integrated management of complex systems by facilitating second order change that moves the design professions beyond reductionist ‘project driven’ design; the development of management structures and implementation processes; and liaison with professional organizations to define their epistemologies. It also reviews on‐going efforts to manage urban placeness, and new processes for facilitating this management.