Realizing Opportunities

A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF ARTPLACE’S CROSS-SECTOR RESEARCH

Culminating from six years of research, Arts Place America developed this infographic in order to discuss how the arts and culture sector can support equitable community development in 13 key ways across 10 distinct sectors. Through collaborative and comprehensive research methods, this interactive infographic delves into each topic; ultimately highlighting how creative placemaking is an interdisciplinary field requiring big-picture thinking.

CENTERING CREATIVE YOUTH IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Partnering with Creative Generation, Arts Place America seeks to answer the question: what impact do creative youth have on communities? Through nine case studies, three findings are articulated. This report is meant to show the power of young persons in generating social change, the responsibility adults have in fostering that power, and the potential in empowering young people.

Creative Placemaking: Sparking Development with Arts and Culture

This report explains the benefit creative placemaking confers to developers. It further answers the questions of how developers can plan for and understand the economic incentive for utilizing creative placemaking in their projects.

Handbook for Artists Working in Community

A 116-page resource guide serves as a way for artists who would like to start or enhance their work within communities. The resource is broken into five sections: Artist Groundwork, Community Groundwork, Project Formation, Project Implementation, and Group Participation Tools.

Investing in Creativity

This report examines the financial support and attendant supporting factors needed by artists to succeed. The report explores six identified themes seen as important in fostering artists and, by extension, investing in creativity.

Arts & Culture at the Core: A Look at Creative Placemaking

This publication from 2012 by the NEA highlights creative placemaking efforts from around the country and offers an initial interview as an introduction to creative placemaking.

When Artists Break Ground

This handbook guide created by Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) provides commentary about the unique position arts, creative placemaking, and community development have in rust belt cities. CPAC shares in this handbook 15 themes and practices they developed when working with artists in community development..

Southeast Houston Arts Intiative

This report evaluates the impact of Southeast Houston’s Arts Initiative through four main questions. From 22 interviews and four focus groups, the report examines the challenges the initiative faces and generates lessons for creative placemaking practitioners.

Creative Placemaking and Expansion of Opportunity

From her perspective as senior advisor to The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Programs since 2012, Rosario Jackson provides observations and suggestions on creative placemaking for practitioners, leaders, and funders. Her recommendations include developing a greater understanding about how inequality and meaningful change to address it occur, and including art and culture in their widest definitions as a critical component of meaningful community development rather than as an afterthought. She charges practitioners to be nimble and flexible in developing cross-sectoral relationships and partnerships, and to better communicate successful outcomes from creative placemaking work. On that topic, she advocates for unorthodox research and evaluation methods.

Exploring Our Town

Creative placemaking projects strategically link communities and local governments with artists, designers, and arts organizations to improve quality of life, create a sense of place, and revitalize local economies. This online resource from the NEA of over seventy case studies gives examples from across the nation on how different communities are harnessing the capacity of arts- and culture-based strategies.

Creative Placemaking

This 2010 white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts is an important early resource and codified the term creative placemaking. The report outlines the ways that leaders and participants from different sectors can use place-based art to pursue a variety of positive outcomes, including streetscape improvements, economic activity, and public safety. An early understanding of creative placemaking coalesced in this report, and the field still builds on it and reckons with it.

Irrigate

Irrigate is a practical guide for how to create community-driven development, specifically with community artists. It outlines the steps and tools necessary, and also why community-driven processes are meaningful.

Find an Artist: A Practical Toolkit for Calls, RFPs, and Artist Selection

This toolkit is a practical guide for non-profits, businesses, or municipalities to create formal partnerships with artists. Springboard for the Arts recognizes the importance of cross-sector collaborations and reciprocal relationships with artists in this guide.

Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersect with Public Safety: Identifying Current Practice and Opportunities for Further Inquiry

This scan considers the positive impact of place-based creative activity on public safety. They find that arts-based projects can enhance public safety efforts by promoting empathy and understanding, influencing law and policy, providing career opportunities, supporting community well-being, and contributing to quality of life.

Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersects with Housing: Emerging Practice and Implications for Further Action

This case study explores how creative placemaking activities contribute to the housing sector of community development. The report finds that arts activity can help articulate invisible housing challenges, nourish those who have experienced housing-related trauma, contribute to organizing housing campaigns, create bridges between residents, stabilize vulnerable communities, and generate economic development opportunities.

The CAP Report

This report identifies 30 policy ideas that can help cities better support their cultural spaces. These ideas include cultural space certification, building code, permitting, technical assistance, and financial assistance. Rising rents in Seattle threaten to displace vulnerable communities, despite the contributions these communities make to creating vibrant cultural spaces. This report provides policy solutions to mitigate this displacement.

Native American Creative Placemaking

In this report for the Housing Assistance Council, Immonen points out that placemaking has been a part of indigenous experience for hundreds and thousands of years. She notes that the integration of the arts into whole community lives and activities that creative placemaking represents aligns with indigenous ways of knowing and sense of belonging. The report illuminates a great need for focused funding for creative placemaking for tribal organizations, and increased sensitivity to specific needs and ways of being of indigenous peoples.

Rural Placemaking

Creative placemaking is not just an urban activity. Many leaders and practitioners in rural social and economic development have also embraced the practice. The Housing Assistance Council collaborated with the National Endowment for the Arts and buildingcommunityWORKSHOP to bring resources to support creative placemaking to rural partners. Creative placemaking in rural communities has been used to amplify a sense of home and heritage, to engage marginalized community members, and as a tool for economic development.