ARTS-BASED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Through arts and culture, communities grow more connected, healthier and more resilient.

Think of your favorite place. What makes it such a great place? Is it the quality of the people who live and work there? The look and feel of the place? The activities that you can do there? Probably some combination of all of those, right?

Around the country and the world, community members, artists, community development practitioners, and civic sector professionals use the power of the arts and culture to celebrate, create, and preserve great places and lift up the people who live, work, and play in them. Arts and culture can contribute positively to connections between people, economic opportunity, health outcomes, sense of place and belonging, safety, and so much more. 

In this conversation, it’s critically important to be mindful of who gets invited to the table – if not considered thoughtfully, art can potentially exclude or displace marginalized community members. Arts and culture in equitable community development centers and lifts up all members of a community. At their best, art and culture help whole communities thrive.

Key Concepts

• This work is often called “creative placemaking,” which we take to mean using art and culture to support or celebrate a community or place socially, physically, or economically. 

• Artists, community members, foundations, researchers, and professionals are constantly improving on how to do this work well. Many resources (including those listed below) offer suggestions for best practices and examples of successful projects.

• Leaders in the field realize that it is critical to prioritize equity, race, and justice in arts-based community development projects in order to avoid causing harm to marginalized communities. In that spirit, some practitioners include “placekeeping” in addition to placemaking since many communities where development projects and programs occur already possess important assets, networks, history and culture. Here at Civic Arts, we sometimes use “creative community development” (originally suggested by NeighborWorks America).

• Arts and culture help achieve and amplify outcomes in a variety of community development sectors and topics. Field scans point to promising cross-sector partnerships in housing, safety, transportation, food systems, environmental sustainability, and more.

• At the center of this work is a belief that art and culture are essential elements of community development work, and that in order to produce better outcomes and more resilient communities we must avoid treating them as separate or an afterthought.  

  
  

key resources

Creative Placemaking
Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa
2010, National Endowment for the Arts

This 2010 white paper 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.  

How to Do Creative Placemaking: An Action-Oriented Guide to Arts in Community Development
2016, NEA

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.  

Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging
Roberto Bedoya
2013

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.”

Creative Placemaking and the Expansion of Opportunity
Maria Rosario Jackson
2018, Kresge Foundation

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.

ArtPlace Sector Scans

ArtPlace America teams with partners to produce “sector scans” that explore best practices in applying arts-based strategies to a variety of community development topics. These guides are valuable deep dives into the promising cross-sectoral applications of arts-based community development. Sector scans released so far have assessed the potential for creative placemaking in transportation, housing, public safety, environmental justice, and community food systems, with more to come. The impacts that these reports point to vary from discipline to discipline. One consistent theme is the potential for community development practitioners to work through the arts and culture to ground complicated ideas, actions, and initiatives in community members’ lived experiences and personal narratives.

Cultivating Creativity: Exploring Arts & Culture in Community Food Systems Transformation
Arts & Food Systems

“Cultivating Creativity” examines the potential for the arts to contribute to food systems and agriculture activity and change. The report finds that art can be used in food systems interventions to honor identity and heritage, address and heal community conflict, transform community spaces, drive equitable food development, preserve and reclaim food and farming traditions, and help facilitate community-led processes.

Farther, Faster, Together: How Arts and Culture Can Accelerate Environmental Progress
Arts & the Environment

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.

Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersects with Housing: Emerging Practice and Implications for Further Action
Arts & Housing 

This case study explores how creative placemaking activity contributes 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.

Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersect with Public Safety: Identifying Current Practice and Opportunities for Further Inquiry
Arts & Public Safety

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. 

Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan
Arts & Transportation

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.

Other Resources We’re Excited About

Rural Voices: Rural Placemaking
Housing Assistance Council

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 building community WORKSHOP 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.

Native American creative placemaking Housing Assistance Council

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.

Community Development Investment Review: Creative Placemaking
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

In the Creative Placemaking issue of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Development Investment Review, disciplinary thought leaders map out the intersection of creative placemaking and community development, specifically economic development. Articles point to the arts as a driver of innovative and equitable economic development opportunities. Many articles also consider the challenges of defining and measuring creative placemaking’s impact.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Axel-Lute, Miriam. “Bringing Together Arts and Community Development.” Shelterforce, January 11, 2017.

Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance. “Cultural Mapping: A Handbook for Developing a Creative Placemaking Tool.” Jacob France Institute, July 2017.

Borrup, Tom. “Creative Placemaking: Arts and Culture as a Partner in Community Revitalization,” 2016, 22.

“Building Community Resilience through Placemaking.” Creative Placemaking for Comprehensive Community Development. Enterprise Community Partners, n.d.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “Creative Placemaking.” Community Development Investment Review 10, no. 2 (2014).

Hardy, Juanita. “10 Best Practices for Creative Placemaking,” n.d., 9.

Housing Assistance Council. “Rural Placemaking: Making the Most of Creativity in Your Community.” Rural Voices 2, no. 2 (Summer 2017).

Liu, Jeremy. “CDCs and Creative Placemaking: Who Should Learn from Whom?,” n.d., 3.

Metris Arts Consulting. “Creative Placemaking on Vacant Properties: Lessons Learned from Four Cities.” Center for Community Progress, n.d.

National Endowment or the Arts. “Exploring Our Town.” NEA, n.d. https://www.arts.gov/exploring-our-town/.

US Water Alliance. “Advancing One Water Through Arts and Culture: A Blueprint for Action.” US Water Alliance, 2018.

Vazquez, Leonardo. “Creative Placemaking: Integrating Community, Cultural and Economic Development.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2474862.

Walker, Christopher, Anne Gadwa-Nicodemus, and Rachel Engh. “More than Storefronts: Insights into Creative Placemaking and Community Economic Development.” Pittsburg, PA: LISC, 2017.

Wilbur, Sarah. “It’s about Time Creative Placemaking and Performance Analytics.” Performance Research 20, no. 4 (July 4, 2015): 96–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2015.1071046.