Investing in Creativity

This report examines the financial support and attendant supporting factors needed by artists to succeed. The report explores six identified themes seen as important in fostering artists and, by extension, investing in creativity.

Arts & Culture at the Core: A Look at Creative Placemaking

This publication from 2012 by the NEA highlights creative placemaking efforts from around the country and offers an initial interview as an introduction to 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

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.

Continuum of Impact Guide

Animating Democracy’s Continuum of Impact guide defines six families of social and civic outcomes that arts practitioners and their partners commonly aspire to and achieve through creative work. These outcome families articulate ways the arts contribute to making change happen.

Metathemes: Designing for Equitable Social Change

Developed by Design Impact, this report looks at the work of over 30 social service organizations to develop a framework for how organizations can confront inequities from a human-centered design perspective. The work looks at the core question – how do we put equity in to practice.

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.

Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities

This report introduces the important role of arts and cultural spaces, particularly for low- and moderate-income communities. Rosario Jackson discusses some considerations and logistics in the creation of artist-driven spaces in these 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.

Creative Exchange

A collection of creative placemaking toolkits and case studies to learn from others on the ground. Some toolkits focus on specific creative placemaking toolkits, while others are more general. This is great resource for seeing the wide variety of ways to document projects and learn from each other.

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.

Inside Artist Municipal Partnerships Blog Salon

This online resource contains blog posts written by both artists and local government workers who have been involved in municipal artist in residence programs across the US. It contains lessons learned directly from the people involved in the programs.