Resources

Creative Placemaking

What is creative placemaking?

The intentional integration of arts, culture, and community-engaged design strategies into the process of equitable community planning and development. - Art Place America

Creative placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities. Creative placemaking requires partnership across sectors, deeply engages the community, involves artists, designers and culture bearers, and helps to advance local economic, physical, and/or social change, ultimately laying the groundwork for systems change. - National Endowment for the Arts

both an overarching idea and a hands-on approach for improving a neighborhood, city, or region, placemaking inspires people to collectively reimagine and reinvent public spaces as the heart of every community. Strengthening the connection between people and the places they share, placemaking refers to a collaborative process by which we can shape our public realm in order to maximize shared value. More than just promoting better urban design, placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution. - Project for Public Spaces

 

Five Components of Creative Placemaking

  1. The work needs to be ultimately place-based, meaning that there is a group of people who live and work in the same place. It can be a block, a neighborhood, a town, a city, or a region, but you need to be able to draw a circle around it on a map.

  2. Concern for community conditions for everyone who lives in that place, with identification of community development changes to benefit all.

  3. How can artists, creative entrepreneurs, arts organizations, and arts activity help move forward the change that has been articulated for this group of people?

  4. Evaluation: how do you know that change has happened?

  5. Repeat, adapt, collaborate, and persist.

Strategies for Success

  • Focus on community assets – human, financial, social, economic, educational – and on a diverse mix of opportunities and access to creative opportunities for all

  • Proclaim investment in creative assets as part of civic agenda

  • Inventory arts and cultural assets

  • Support investment in creative infrastructure

  • Arts education is key

  • A creative place is built and nurtured through a great quality of life: investment in downtown revitalization projects, affordable housing, community engagement, vibrant street life.

  • Persistence, patience, optimism, and a sense of humor will go a long way to keep actions moving forward.  Community development is not a linear, smooth, or finite process.

Resources

Creative Economy Resource Center

Create Wisconsin’s collection of resources on the creative economy to help inspire and guide your work.

Our Town

Creative placemaking grants from the National Endowment for the Arts

Creative Placemaking Research KnowledgeBase

Resource collection from the American Planning Association

Rural Prosperity through the Arts and Culture Sector

An action guide from the National Governors Association

Creative Placemaking Research and Resources

From the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA)

Creative Placemaking

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Development Investment Review, December 2014

The Creative Placemaking Public Resources Guide

This resource helps community development practitioners, artists, and arts and cultural organizations survey the landscape and decode the language of federal government funding opportunities that might support creative placemaking efforts.

What is Creative Placemaking?

Defined by Americans for the Arts

Artspace

A Minneapolis based organization whose mission is is to create, foster, and preserve affordable and sustainable space for artists and arts organizations.

Projects for Public Places

Create community-powered public spaces around the world.

Bridging Divides, Creating Community: Arts, Culture, and Immigration

Researched and authored by John Arroyo, PhD, AICP, this report explores how arts and cultural practitioners have long been and may increasingly be partners in helping to achieve community development goals.

How Art Can Renew a Community

The Atlantic, October 2, 2019

The Future of Creative Placemaking

An interview with four leaders in the field, A Blade of Grass, 2018

Our Creative Roots:  The Arts and Development in Rural America,

WESTAF (Western States Arts Federation), November 29, 2016

How to measure outcomes of creative placemaking

Mark J. Stern, University of Pennsylvania, 2014

Models in WI