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.
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.
This report explores the potential for arts and cultural activity to contribute to community sustainability and resilience, in climate adaptability, energy, water, land, waste, and toxic pollution. The report finds that arts-based activities can help spark public demand by making environmental issues feel personal and real, build community capacity and agency, connected large-scale, abstract issues to personal experience, enrich and activate the built environment, and nurture sustainable economies.
Bloomberg Associates, 2021
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.
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.
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.
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.”
This tool demonstrates the equity components that can be applied to the development of a Cultural Equity Plan. Cultural equity explicitly values the unique and collective cultures of diverse communities and supports their existence in physical spaces, in public policies and investment, and in expression in civic and spiritual life.
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.
This guide provides practical strategies, precedent, and best practices for municipal and community leaders to use creative placemaking for equitable social and economic development, celebrating community identity, governance, and physical design. Each chapter contains articles and case studies written by different practitioners around the US.