Alexa Gonzalez shifts urban design from placemaking to placekeeping, emphasizing community voices and long-term engagement to reshape public spaces in ways that truly reflect and benefit those who use them.

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Cities are sites of aspirations and identities, and ‘play’ can be a means for fostering community engagement. Architect and urbanist Joanne Cheung critiques the prevailing forms of community engagement, suggesting that they are often paternalistic and fail to adequately consider the agency of individuals and communities.

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1. Distinction between Placemaking and Placekeeping: Alexa emphasizes the importance of “placekeeping” over “placemaking,” arguing that the latter often disregards existing community values and can act as a vehicle for gentrification.

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Alexa Gonzalez is a Colombian-American urban designer, placemaker, and Spatial Justice Advocate. She is the Founding Principal of Hive Public Space, an urban design and placemaking/placekeeping studio based in New York City. She brings over a decade of experience designing and transforming public spaces into socially and culturally inclusive environments. 

She believes in the power of public spaces and strives for her work to create memories and connections while evolving each community’s identity and sense of belonging. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University in New York. Alexandra is an Obama Leader, a core organizer for Design as Protest. a member of the board of the Association of Community Design (ACD), a member of the Alliance for Public Space Leadership (APSL), and a Design Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces.

“Our approach is truly about placekeeping. It’s about finding, amplifying, and really, keeping the local artists, the local business, the local stories. And that is really what defines a place. And that’s what we’re trying to bring in with our work. Because Very often we understand also that placemaking is seen as a Trojan horse for gentrification. that’s why often why there’s issues with trust And it becomes purely about aesthetic and it doesn’t connect with people. We really want to honing on the place keeping again and encouraging this idea of multi generational activity of sharing knowledge, sharing ideas, and sometimes even sharing the bad things, right?”

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