PLACES 2012 (full title: Programming Language Approaches to Concurrency- and Communication-Centric Software) is the fifth edition of the PLACES workshop series. After the first PLACES, which was affiliated to DisCoTec in 2008, the workshop has been part of ETAPS every year since 2009 and is now an established part of the ETAPS satellite events. PLACES 2012 was held on 31st March in Tallinn, Estonia. The workshop series was started in order to promote the application of novel programming language ideas to the increasingly important problem of developing software for systems in which concurrency and communication are intrinsic aspects. This includes software for both multi-core systems and large-scale distributed and/or service-oriented systems. The scope of PLACES includes new programming language features, whole new programming language designs, new type systems, new semantic approaches, new program analysis techniques, and new implementation mechanisms. This year's call for papers attracted 17 submissions, from which the programme committee selected 10 papers for presentation at the workshop. After the workshop, all of the authors were invited to produce revised versions of their papers for inclusion in the EPTCS proceedings. The authors of six papers accepted the invitation, and those papers constitute the present volume.