Creative Placemaking

Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa
National Endowment for the Arts, 2010

Resource Overview

This 2010 white paper 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.

Key Sections

Conceiving Arts-Based Opportunities

Page 3-4 introduces the value of arts and cultural investments on economic development, livability, and sustainability.

Page 5-7 addresses some questions like: What is placemaking? How do creative strategies help achieve placemaking goals? What does “creative city” mean? What does creative placemaking look like at different scales?

Page 8-14 discusses how creative places and creative industries go hand-in-hand and contribute to economic development. It analyzes the cultural industry in the US quantitatively using census data.

Page 15-17 introduces some of the major challenges to creative placemaking, all of which are still true a decade later.

Page 18-22 highlights some key factors that make creative placemaking projects successful. Many of these key factors are centered around artist partnerships with municipal entities, the private sector, nonprofits, and the community.

Page 24-54 shares fourteen in-depth case studies of creative placemaking projects around the US.