Community Development

Arts Data in the Public Sector

Bloomberg Associates, 2021

Resource Overview

For public sector arts agencies / departments who want to use data to improve their service provision, this guide offers practices from around the country that leverage data to better serve grantees, promote equity in service delivery, and demonstrate the impact of arts and culture.

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 Work in Local Government

Geared towards local government managers, this resource serves as a guidepost for municipal managers towards generating or creating creative placemaking efforts. It addresses creative placemaking’s main tenets while combatting misconceptions. Through an interactive tag system and case studies, readers are able to engage with this resource to understand creative placemaking’s ability to generate opportunity and provide solutions towards equity and community development.

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.

Overlooked Anchors: Advancing a New Standard of Practice

This report serves as a call to action to the arts sector to propagate equitable local economic growth through the “anchor framework” and describes how the arts sector through creative placemaking can foster community development and local economic growth. Through case studies of arts and culture organizations, it discusses the challenges and potential solutions for engagement with and within anchor institutions.

Rethinking Neighborhood Change and Tracking Progress

This report offers an examination of how to assess creative placemaking initiatives and, in general, community development strategies that target urban inequality. It offers key takeaways on how creative placemaking affects these kinds of communities.

A Pathway to Connect Communities

This case study highlights how stakeholders used creative placemaking techniques to turn an unused rail corridor into an active, safe, and inclusive space for local residents. The purpose is to show how creative placemaking techniques can be used to extend into diverse communities and enhance public safety and quality of life.

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.

The Validating Arts & Living Indicators Study

This report examines if the NEA framework of arts-and-livability indicators reflects the truth of livability within communities. Through an examination of six NEA-funded “our towns” creative placemaking efforts, the Urban Institute offers small conclusions about the public’s perceptions on what data is relevant towards examining creative placemaking efforts and whether that data reflects their community accurately.

Financing Creative Placemaking

Drexel University’s Lindsey’s Institute for Urban innovation produced a report and an interactive dashboard examining creative placemaking’s economic impact on communities. Through case studies, the report focuses on how creative placemaking initiatives funded and financed their respective projects and provides their prediction and recommendations for how creative placemaking can move forward. The interactive dashboard breaks down this data further allowing users to view funding streams for specific arts practices.

Empowering Young People to Make Their Place

This report is a case study of a project in Brooklyn that works at the intersection of creative placemaking and public safety. In this project, young people from the community-led most of the planning and implementation processes, which ensured that communication with the community would result in something that they were actually interested in.

Lessons from the Field: Reflections on Rural Placemaking

This report contains some brief case studies of rural placemaking projects across the US, particularly related to housing.

Creating Change though Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development

This report outlines how two movements – equitable development and community-centered arts and culture – are working to strengthen each other. It is a survey of both fields through interviews, case studies, and policy studies, going sector by sector, and focuses on the policies and funding opportunities that can help expand both fields.

Bridging Policy and Placemaking to Activate Vacant Properties

This report outlines the lessons learned from two case studies in St. Paul: Frogtown Green and Urban Flower Field. It goes through a lot of the nuts and bolts of creative placemaking projects in vacant spaces.

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.

Do You See Yourself in Upham’s Corner?

This case study in Boston, MA is a small-scale creative placemaking project that opened up a larger discussion about the “aesthetics of belonging.” It approaches creative placemaking with a goal of revitalization without displacement, grounded in equity. This report shares the context of the neighborhood as well as successes and lessons learned from creative placemaking initiatives.

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.”