Using Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment (A&E) District as a case study, this reports aims to provide best practices in sourcing community data and to evaluate the impact of creative placemaking.
Investing in Creativity
Arts & Culture at the Core: A Look at Creative Placemaking
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
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.
Continuum of Impact Guide
Metathemes: Designing for Equitable Social Change
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.
More Than Storefronts
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
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.