When Does a Project Become a Place?
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
Development, heritage, regeneration and peacebuilding projects are remarkably good at celebrating completion.
Buildings are restored. Parks are inaugurated. Museums reopen. Community centres welcome their first visitors. Reports are submitted, donors acknowledged and photographs taken. The language of success is well rehearsed because, in many respects, it is measurable. Budgets are balanced, milestones achieved and contractual obligations fulfilled.
Yet completion and success are not the same thing.
Increasingly, after more than two decades working across architecture, education, cultural heritage and post-conflict recovery, I have found myself asking a different question. Not whether a project was successfully delivered, but whether it became a successful place.
The distinction matters.
Projects have a beginning and an end………Places have a life.
It is tempting to imagine that places emerge naturally once the construction work is finished. Complete the building, open the doors, and the rest will follow.
Experience has taught me otherwise.
The transition from project to place does not begin at handover.
It begins on the first day of implementation.
Every decision made during a project's lifetime either strengthens or weakens the possibility that people will eventually feel the place belongs to them. That is a very different way of thinking about success.
Several years ago I was commissioned to design an urban park in the Old City of Mosul.
Supported by UNMAS, The HALO Trust and the local NGO Al-Ghad, the project sought to transform a site devastated by war into a place where children and families could gather while quietly learning about the dangers of landmines, improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance.
The ambitions were genuine.
Communities were consulted.
The design evolved through dialogue.
Funding was secured.
The park was built.
By every conventional measure, the project succeeded.
A year later, I returned.
The gates were closed.
The grass was dying.
The fountains stood dry.
Municipal vehicles occupied parts of the site.
The children's play equipment had been replaced with cheaper alternatives that became dangerously hot under the Iraqi sun.
Most strikingly of all, there were no children.
Before walking inside, I sat with a local baker across the road. We talked about the neighbourhood before I asked what he thought of the park opposite. He looked across the street and simply said, "The children don't play there."
He had no idea I was the designer.
Those six words remain the most honest evaluation of any project I have ever worked on.
For a long time I regarded the park as a personal failure.
With hindsight, I see something much more complicated.
The project had necessarily been managed remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. My local project manager was navigating political sensitivities, competing interests and fragile post-conflict relationships that I only partly understood from Scotland. Looking back, I now appreciate just how difficult his position really was. He was not simply managing a construction project; he was navigating power, legitimacy and social cohesion in a city emerging from unimaginable violence.
At the same time, I have had to acknowledge my own mistakes.
Projects like this cannot be managed remotely.
I should have been present as an independent actor, able to challenge institutional decisions, build relationships directly and recognise changing dynamics before they became embedded. I should also have thought far more carefully about what would happen after construction. Maintenance plans, governance arrangements, long-term stewardship and shared ownership were not secondary considerations. They were fundamental to whether the park would ever become what it had been designed to be.
The park did not fail because of its design.
Nor because the funding was insufficient.
It faltered because the work of creating the place had barely begun.
I still hope its story is unfinished.
Places, unlike projects, are capable of recovery.
That lesson returned to me recently while visiting the Centre for the Promotion of Heritage in Chenini, southern Tunisia.
Architecturally, it is an exemplary intervention. Respectful of the surrounding Berber settlement, beautifully detailed and rooted in local building traditions, it demonstrates how conservation and contemporary design can work together with remarkable sensitivity.
The project deserves recognition.
Yet walking through Chenini I found myself asking a familiar question.
Had the building become part of everyday life?
Tour buses arrived throughout the day. Visitors stopped at nearby cafés and viewpoints before continuing their journeys. Few entered the heritage centre. The exhibition spaces were quiet. The café stood empty. The women's craft initiative, despite its enormous potential, struggled to attract passing visitors.
This is not a criticism of the project.
It is a reminder that buildings and places are different things.
A building can be completed in months.
A place may take years, sometimes generations.
As Founding Director of the Glasgow School of Art Singapore, I quickly realised that constructing a campus was only one part of the work. The greater challenge was ensuring the school became part of Singapore's cultural life rather than simply another educational institution operating within it.
From the outset, we worked with government ministries, museums, universities, creative industries, businesses and local communities. Public events invited people into the life of the school long before graduation ceremonies or exhibitions. One initiative encouraged residents to discover artworks hidden across the city before meeting the students who had created them. Many remained in contact for years, following the students' progress and attending degree shows.
None of these activities appeared particularly significant in the project plan.
Looking back, they may have been the most important work we did.
We were not simply establishing a campus.
We were building an ecosystem of relationships.
The campus became part of the city because the city became part of the campus.
I have seen similar thinking elsewhere. A heritage project in Iraq invited local residents to contribute everyday objects for exhibition, each accompanied by its own story. Individually, the artefacts held little monetary value. Collectively, they became something far more important. People returned not only to see what they had contributed but to discover what their neighbours had shared. Conversations followed. Pride followed. Ownership followed.
The museum ceased to be simply a building.
It became a shared act of remembrance.
Over the years I have also witnessed the opposite.
Beautiful heritage projects standing empty once the dignitaries departed.
Regeneration schemes that unintentionally accelerated gentrification while alienating the communities they hoped to support.
Professionals confidently declaring, "The locals don't know what they want. We're the experts."
It is an attitude that rarely announces itself as arrogance.
More often it emerges quietly through certainty.
Complexity becomes inconvenient.
Participation becomes consultation rather than collaboration.
Communities become beneficiaries rather than partners.
Yet every project, whether in a stable democracy or a country emerging from conflict, redistributes relationships.
Every stakeholder invited into the room implies another who has been left outside it.
Every intervention creates opportunities for some while unintentionally excluding others.
In conflict-affected societies, these dynamics become even more pronounced. Projects are interpreted politically. They become symbols of inclusion, exclusion, fairness or favouritism. Rumours circulate. Institutions compete. Communities scrutinise every decision. The project is no longer simply delivering infrastructure; it is shaping trust.
The peacebuilding scholar John Paul Lederach once observed that when complexity overwhelms us, we often try to simplify it. We search for quick solutions, settle on single explanations and hold onto them with increasing certainty. Complexity becomes the enemy.
My experience suggests the opposite.
Complexity is where successful places are born.
It demands humility rather than certainty.
Curiosity rather than control.
Listening rather than assumption.
It asks project teams to remain open to changing realities long after construction has begun.
Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that stewardship cannot simply be handed over once the ribbon is cut. Those responsible for caring for a place must become part of the project long before completion. The transition from project team to place custodians is not an administrative exercise.
It is one of the most critical phases of the entire endeavour.
Increasingly, I have come to believe that successful places emerge not because they are perfectly designed, but because they become woven into networks of meaning.
People return because they feel welcome.
Children play because the space belongs to them.
Neighbours gather because they recognise part of themselves there.
Communities defend places they have helped create.
That kind of belonging cannot be specified in a contract.
It has to be cultivated.
Perhaps we have spent too long asking how to deliver successful projects.
The more important question is how we create places that people cannot imagine living without.
Because in the end, the true measure of success is not the day a project is completed.
It is the day nobody remembers it was ever a project at all.
