Economic 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.

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.

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..

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.

Building Beyond Policing

This is a case study of a creative placemaking project that worked with local law enforcement officials to turn an underutilized space into a public amenity and allow for positive engagement between community members and law enforcement officials. The project also incubated local businesses and created local jobs.

Guide for Business Districts to Work with Local Artists

This guide provides strategies for partnerships between artists and business districts to address a wide variety of goals. It outlines the typical steps in creative placemaking project planning and implementation but geared specifically to potential ROIs for business districts.

Creative Placemaking Toolkit for Counties

As public funding becomes increasingly strained, counties must search for and employ new strategies to improve their communities and local economies. NACo, in partnership with Americans for the Arts launched the Creative Counties Placemaking Initiative to support counties as they work to identify and strengthen ways to integrate arts into solutions to local challenges. The Creative Placemaking Toolkit for Counties is a web resource with recorded webinars and conference sessions as well as links to useful tools for counties, particularly related to the impact of arts and culture on local economies and potential funding opportunities. It is most helpful to county governments and rural governments who know a little bit about creative placemaking already and are looking to expand their local economies through the arts.

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.

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.”

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.