Why We Map Places, Not Just Spaces
Layer.studio’s Director of Urbanism, Danny Crump, recently explored the reality of 'Pride in Place' in the Landscape Institute's journal, Landscape.
At Layer.studio, we believe that Pride in Place is not simply a set of projects, but rather the deep connection people feel to where they live and their determination to make it better.
To do our jobs properly, we have to map place, not just space. Too often, space is handed over to designers as nothing more than a polygon on a GIS layer with a deprivation score attached. While data and GIS mapping provide a diagnostic starting point to reveal patterns regarding health, green space, and opportunity, it is the intersection between data and lived experience that tells the real story of a neighbourhood.
We read a neighbourhood through three distinct lenses:
- Physical Setting: The scale, landmarks, and buildings.
- Activity: The vitality, enterprise, play, and general hanging about.
- Meaning: The legibility, symbolism, and language of a space.
The public realm matters because it is where everyday life becomes shared life. A park, for example, can simultaneously be a shortcut, a memory, a play space, or a symbol of neglect.
Through our work with neighbourhood boards and local authorities in places like Rochdale, Hartlepool, St Helens, Rossendale, Wigan, and Bury, we have learned that pride is always present before a single project starts. It already lives in local identity, heritage, independent businesses, and schools. Nobody needs landscape professionals to invent local pride; they just need us to listen.
Landscape professionals possess a rare combination of skills across spatial planning, green infrastructure, placemaking, engagement, and health. However, true place-led regeneration asks for a shift in posture from our industry.
We must act as place finders, community translators, and delivery-minded enablers. Our role is to reveal what is distinctive about an area and celebrate the authentic local life that is already there. At its best, this approach turns ordinary landscapes into places that are loved, resilient, and stubbornly cared for—shaped with people and nature at their core. This is exactly where pride begins.
