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.
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.
Planning & Designing Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects
This toolkit provides a framework for thinking through a plan for arts-based civic engagement and dialogue projects. It guides artists and community organizers through a series of questions and is most helpful for early in the project development phase when going from an idea or a need to a real project.
Mapping the Landscape of Socially Engaged Artistic Practice
Artists Working In and Within Municipal Governments
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
Lessons from the Field: Reflections on Rural Placemaking
Guide for Business Districts to Work with Local Artists
Field Guide for Creative Placemaking in Parks
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
Art Beyond Bars
This is a case study of a program that combines social services with cathartic arts activities to enhance re-entry conditions in Philadelphia, with the goals of improving quality of life and public safety. It is one example of the link between creative placemaking and public safety. This report shares project successes and lessons learned.
Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan
This report identifies seven ways that creative placemaking contributes to equitable transportation development: generating creative solutions for entrenched transportation problems, making streets safer for all users, organizing transportation advocates, engaging multiple stakeholders for an inclusive process, fostering local ownership, alleviating the disruptive effects of construction, and healing wounds and divisions.
Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersect with Public Safety: Identifying Current Practice and Opportunities for Further Inquiry
This scan considers the positive impact of place-based creative activity on public safety. They find that arts-based projects can enhance public safety efforts by promoting empathy and understanding, influencing law and policy, providing career opportunities, supporting community well-being, and contributing to quality of life.
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.
Farther, Faster, Together: How Arts and Culture Can Accelerate Environmental Progress
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.