Jacob Lederman, a 2024-25 faculty fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Flint. His book in-progress, Join the Conversation!: How Placemaking Conquered Community Development, delves into the dynamics of urban planning and the role of professional planners in shaping the communities in which they work. Lederman focuses his research on understanding how these experts perceive their work, how it impacts the neighborhoods they intervene in, and what they believe they are doing for those communities. Stemming from his early academic experiences abroad to his current focus on placemaking and its consequences, Lederman wants to shed light on the complex intersections of urban design, inequality, and community identity.
The Beginnings: A Global Perspective on Urban Planning
Lederman's academic journey began as an undergraduate student studying abroad in Spain, where he first encountered the intersection of urban planning and sociological inquiry. The time spent living abroad sparked his curiosity about how urban policies and planning schemes travel between cities and countries, inspiring his current research strategies. After receiving a B.A. in economics from New York University, Lederman moved to Buenos Aires to teach English, where he spent two years gaining firsthand experience of the city's urban environment and social dynamics. Those years abroad turned into a period of reflection, creating new research questions and giving him a sense of direction.
Lederman decided to move back to the United States and began applying to graduate schools, ultimately getting a Ph.D in sociology from the City University of New York. His research interest was, and still is, rooted in understanding the flow of urban design policies across borders – how, for example, a city like Buenos Aires could adopt urban interventions like the community parks or pedestrian-friendly streets similar to those found in his hometown of New York City.
Placemaking: A Positive Concept With Complex Consequences
A central question in Lederman's work concerns the mechanisms through which urban design policies and practices travel between cities and nations. One of the key findings of his research is the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in promoting urban planning interventions. Many of these INGOs partner with celebrity architects and planners who have a significant influence in the field. These experts collaborate across borders, disseminating planning strategies that impact the urban fabric of cities far from their origins.
Currently, Lederman is focusing on the concept of placemaking, which refers to the process of designing and shaping public spaces to portray community identity and foster local relationships. Placemaking has gained traction in urban planning circles as a strategy to create spaces that reflect the values and needs of residents, often prioritizing diversity, artistic expression (such as murals or public art installations), and the collective vision of the community.
At first glance, placemaking seems to be a promising approach that empowers communities to reshape their environment according to their desires and needs. However, Lederman’s research uncovers a more complex picture. While placemaking projects may aim to revitalize communities by focusing on residents’ desires and highlighting local cultural legacies, they can inadvertently lead to gentrification. As new investments flood into these areas, property values rise, and long-term residents — many of whom were central to the placemaking process — are often displaced. In this way, placemaking, originally intended to protect and celebrate a community’s identity, instead catalyzes changes that threaten the very fabric of that community.
Methods and Insights: Participant Observation and Archival Research
One of the key cases that Lederman investigates is the city of Detroit, where placemaking strategies are becoming widely adopted. The city's adoption of placemaking frameworks has become a prominent example of how urban design can be used in low-income neighborhoods to empower residents, showing them that they have a role in shaping their own neighborhoods. However, this focus on "local government" in the form of city planning and community engagement can, as Lederman explains, lead to the reinvigoration of local markets in ways that displace long-term residents. The process of revitalization can prioritize newcomers, further contributing to gentrification.
To understand how these placemaking frameworks have been implemented in places like Detroit, Lederman conducts qualitative interviews with urban planners, community leaders, and residents at community meetings which all provide valuable insight into how these projects unfold at the local level.
Another technique in Lederman’s methodological toolkit is archival research, which provides a fascinating historical analysis of placemaking and adds depth to his work. Lederman’s archival research into New York City's parks has shown how urban elites (i.e. foundations, wealthy individuals, and powerful institutions) have historically shaped public spaces in ways that residents may not fully recognize. He highlights a park in New York City as a case study in which community members claim the space as their own and celebrate its design as a reflection of their own community spirit. However, archival records from the Rockefeller Archive Center show how urban elites played a decisive role in shaping the park’s design — not the local residents. This finding has led Lederman to rethink how public spaces, including those shaped by placemaking interventions, are often remade in the image of powerful elites rather than being truly reflective of the communities that claim them as their own.
Lederman’s research project also emphasizes the importance of qualitative methods in understanding urban planning processes. While quantitative data might provide broad statistical overviews, Lederman argues that qualitative research is crucial for understanding how certain case studies come to be recognized as examples of "success" in the urban planning field. Rather than focusing solely on numbers or statistical outcomes, Lederman is interested in how these case studies are socially constructed; how they are framed and shaped by powerful actors who have the authority to define what constitutes "best practices" in urban design.
A Teaching Philosophy Rooted in Empowerment
Jacob Lederman’s commitment to education is deeply embedded within his scholarly approach. He views teaching as an empowering process, one that encourages students to critically engage with the material and connect theoretical concepts to their own lived experiences. Lederman strives to create a classroom environment where students are not just passive recipients of knowledge, but are active participants who can talk-back to theories presented by sociologists. For him, it’s about making the material relevant to students and allowing them to use their own communities as a lens through which to critique and understand the theories of urban planning, power, and inequality.
This teaching philosophy is evident in his own scholarship as well. Lederman believes that in both teaching and scholarship there should be an emphasis on thinking about the inner workings of power and the powerful. Asking both students and himself how certain dominant ideas, ones that are often taken for granted or natural in mass society, are in fact shaped by powerful individuals and old institutions. Lederman asks who benefits from these ideas, and who is left out? In his classes, this emphasis on power dynamics and the role of elites mirrors the critical approach he brings to his research on urban planning and placemaking.
