2025 Theses Master's

The Music of Placemaking

Hammad, Mumtaz

This thesis explores how performances of music can be used as a form of placemaking, in site planning for public spaces within cityscapes, advancing crucial planning projects of spatial justice, holistic urbanization, community participation, and public space recovery. This study will conduct a site specific analysis of the General Grant Memorial in uptown Manhattan in respect to the site’s historical significance and theoretical frameworks of: ephemera and engagement to examine how performative activations of music can create ‘invisible’ infrastructures of public space which enhance civic participation and spaces for collective memory building within the built environment.

In offering a dense methodology, new interventions in urban planning emerge that incorporate musicality into placemaking, as a potentially citywide project of public space recovery after 2020, with potential implications of cultivating civic culture throughout the rest of the city and community building within these third spaces that are audiovisual by design. Through referencing theoretical, historical, and participatory approaches, this study advocates for greater institutional support of performance initiatives in public spaces, revitalizing civic culture within the city.