Artplace America started out with the goal, “to amplify the power of the arts in building healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities”. As a result of this goal, they funded nearly 300 creative placemaking initiatives across the country, generated landmark research, and brought together a diverse community in 10 years. This book, offered either online or as a made to order physical copy, contains the story of how Artplace America achieved so much within their 10-year time limit.
Art & Gentrification Archive
The relationship between arts activity and urban gentrification and displacement is perhaps one of the most visible and most deliberated topics in cultural planning, due in no small part to how nuanced and complicated the relationship can be. The community development journal Shelterforce has been a hub for this conversation, having published many articles that address this nuanced topic. Keli A. Tianga’s 2017 article “Art in the Face of Gentrification” illustrates how certain art and cultural activities or activities by practitioners without ties to the community can be perceived as aligning with or accelerating displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, and also how – seemingly paradoxically – artistic and cultural visibility and strength may be one of the most powerful tools for low-income communities of color fighting to stay in place.
Arts and Planning Toolkit
The Massachusetts Metropolitan Area Planning Council consulted state and national advisors to develop this “Arts and Planning Toolkit” to guide planners and other government staff through impactful integration of arts and culture into their work. The toolkit provides background and best practices on a wide variety of topics from cultural planning and space activation to socially engaged art practice and arts district development. The resource provides policy specifics on topics such as zoning and permitting, public sector arts funding, and artist residencies. National best practice case studies illustrate the impact of these activities.
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.
Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities
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.
Toolkit Toolkit
Creative Exchange
Inside Artist Municipal Partnerships Blog Salon
Social-Practice Residencies Toolkit
This online toolkit connects to a network of resources about social practice artist residency programs. The links to case studies are particularly useful as a way to learn from other projects, and reflections by artists who have participated in social practice residencies are also great learning tools as well as inspiration for why this work matters and can make a difference.
Mapping the Landscape of Socially Engaged Artistic Practice
An Artist’s Way of Seeing: Community Engagement in Creative Placemaking
Irrigate
Municipal-Artist Partnerships
Find an Artist: A Practical Toolkit for Calls, RFPs, and Artist Selection
6 Reasons Why Artists Should Collaborate with Government
Creating Place: The Art of Equitable Community Building
Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging
Roberto Bedoya impacted the direction of the field with this article, which is critical of what he sees as creative placemaking’s emphasis on neighborhood revitalization and economic development. He points out that without honoring equity, race, and justice at the center of creative placemaking, arts-based practice can easily be misapplied to reinforce existing barriers to opportunity and sense of belonging for marginalized people. He advocates for using creative placemaking to foster belonging and to achieve “strength and prosperity through equity and civility.”
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.