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Place-making practices refer to the ways in which people create and define physical spaces as meaningful and significant through their everyday activities and social interactions.[1] In Ethnography, the study of these practices is often referred to as ‘ethnography as place-making,’ which involves the exploration of the cultural meanings and practices that shape the physical and social environments in which people live. This can include examining how people create and maintain social boundaries, how they express their identities and values through the built environment,[2] and how they negotiate power and control over the spaces they inhabit.

This place in Gröpelingen is made a place through the interaction of the people tending to the urban gardening project. 

1. Pink 2008, 178ff. 

2. See: urbanization 

3. Pink 2008, 190. 

In the interview with Emily Roehl, artist Steve Rowell describes his style in contrast to the more "didactic" approach of land use and documentary photography. Instead, he has come to combine his visual works with sound installations that are meant to unsettle. These sounds are often generated based on air pollution data that he has collected (Roehl and Rowell, 2022, p. 137). Rowell further describes how changes in the development of aerial video and photography technology have shaped his work. In the past, Rowell would rent expensive camera equipment and attach them to a helicopter to generate fly-over images (Roehl and Rowell, 2022, p. 140). Though commercial drones have become available, Rowell says that he soon got dissatisfied with the "slick" images they produce. When using drones, Rowell relies on an angle that faces down or is close-up, creating feelings of uncanniness. These unusual perspectives are combined with split imagery and mirroring to achieve a specific effect: “There’s a value in giving the viewer/listener a chance to distrust the work in the same way there’s value in giving them room to question the work. The landscapes I feature are all altered. What landscape isn’t now? That’s the point.” (Roehl and Rowell, 2022, p. 140).

Steve Rowell is an educator and research artist, currently working on “long-term projects that use image, sound, and archival practice to interrogate the relationship between humans, industry, and the environment” (Roehl and Rowell, 2022, p. 136). Rowell has worked extensively with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, including a comissioned project for which he photographed every petrochemical plant in Texas (ibid, p. 137). In subsequent projects, he has focused on tracing pipelines going from the Alberta Tar Sands to petrochemical communities in Long Beach, California and Port Arthur, Texas. Another recent project focuses on the industrial ecology of Houston's Buffalo Bayou.