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Contemporary conceptions of urban life holds a tension between fixed places and the fluidities of action and becoming. Using the redevelopment of four harbour areas in Sweden, the article propose a relational perspective of placing, rather than the either-or duality of sedentarist and nomadic approaches. Placing is a focus upon how planners treat place and mobility, with at least two aspects: the performativity of place and mobility in the planners’ hands; the mobilisation of place. The approach is helpful in enquiries into where and how places are made, rather than trying recover any essential nature of what places are.