EPISODE 1 Transcript
Today we get to talk with the Executive Director of Civic Arts, Dr. Lynn Osgood, about Creative Placemaking. Lynn, thanks so much for being here today.
Thanks for having me.
Can you briefly share a little bit about yourself, and how you found yourself in the role of creative placemaking guru and working in creative placemaking in your work and professional life?
(00:51) It started about 10 years ago, and it was a moment in time in my professional career when I knew I was very interested in arts-based community development, and that there was really no one in Austin who was doing things like I wanted to do as a planner - so I decided to form an organization. Luckily, I had a business partner, Sarah Gamble, who walked along that journey with me. But 10 years ago, it was really hard.
We tried to talk with people about arts-based strategies, but we really got a lot of cross-eyed stares at what we were talking about. And our first project was not too sexy. It was about a toilet. It was a beautiful toilet. It was down along the Town Lake Trail, which is really the belly button of our city. They were building these really wonderful restroom facilities, and as city property, they needed community engagement. So we worked with them to create an art strategy where we made a 30-foot timeline that told the history of the trail, and had people write their memories of the trail. In one weekend, we got over 1000 comments. And in those comments, you could see people's entire life cycle on the trail from conception, to labor pains, to birth, to first steps, to first bike ride, first kiss, marriage proposal, all the way to death. In that you get a real sense of what the trail was really about in people's lives. We were able to bring that information to the designers who were trying to figure out, what is the significance of place in what we're doing, even if it's just a restroom? It is that element of place that is so important. But we have to admit our first project was about a toilet. So that was my beginning.
That's so funny. Because it seems like with creative placemaking, or arts-based cultural strategies, a lot of folks will think about painting or murals or pop up concerts or things that fall more into the “traditional arts” category. But creative placemaking seems to be a big tent. How would you define creative placemaking?
(03:23) I think that's one of the wonderful shifts that we're starting to see. Traditionally, when we talk about the arts, and when we talk about them in a city context, or municipal context, or planning context, the arts are often all over on the side. They are silo-ed. It's like, “Oh, that's that art stuff,” or, “oh, we'll have a cultural district.” There's this "thing-ness" about it. The thing that people are starting to see (and there are just amazing projects on) is this shift from thinking about arts as a noun, as this thing, to thinking about arts strategies as a verb. It is about the mural, it is about the performance. But it's actually even more about harnessing arts and cultural strategies to help you reach other goals. It's the transportation department or the mobility authority bringing in artists and culture bearers to help them reach their goals for ridership. It's the parks department in this COVID-19 moment bringing in artists and culture bearers to communicate to people about public safety and social distancing, in ways that are different and that reach broader audiences in deeper ways. And that's so important. I think the important thing is it's not just about process, because the actual product that's created is just as important - but it's “both and.” What you get at the end is not just art for art's sake. It's actually art and cultural strategies for the community’s sake. And those community goals and needs are held together in traditional ways in parks departments, and transportation departments and neighborhood development departments.
Wow. So there's a lot of different partners - arts and another department working together. Would you say that there's some sort of formula for creative placemaking? Or what are the main components that you would break down for someone entering the field?
(05:38) When I think about creative placemaking, there are three things that I think are absolutely essential:
It needs to be cross-sector, which means it's all about partnerships.
It always is about place in the deepest and broadest of ways
And it's always about goals, beyond art goals.
In terms of partnerships, a lot of times you'll see in creative placemaking literature that it's all about cross-sector relationships. And it's really about saying, “hey artist and culture bearer and arts organization - come into this conversation with us and the parks department”. And that artist is going to say, “you know what, you need someone from public works and someone from watershed, because the perspective that they're going to bring is going to be a deeply embodied and community-based perspective.” It’s going to be much more holistic than we often allow ourselves in municipal processes. And I say this as an urban planner. So it starts with this cross-sector partnership with the arts, but then it opens up into, "Hey, you know what? To really solve this, we need lots of other people at the table and lots of perspectives - professional and community."
The second element is that creative placemaking is always about the place itself - its narrative, its history, its stories - but also its people. I think that's where the conversation has really expanded and even exploded over the past decade. There is this real understanding that a place is about its people. And it's not just about the stories themselves - it's about people telling those stories and listening to those stories and receiving those stories and retelling those stories. I've seen lots and lots of creative placemaking projects happening all across the nation, and the ones that resonate and shine from the inside are the ones that come with this deep understanding about what the place is, who the people are, and how they continually make that place and recreate it on a day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year way, and create capacity for that to happen.
Then we come to the part about creative placemaking being about larger goals. Communities don't get together and say, "Hey, we want to form our identity,". They have their identity. We're not looking to create a marketing plan. They want to solve issues of housing. They want to solve issues of safety and mobility and open space and access. Creative placemaking and art strategies - working with artists, arts organizations and culture bearers - allow you to get at those key fundamental community challenges and opportunities, just in new ways and with new people at the table.
I love what you're saying about the narratives with place. It seems like there are multiple narratives in any given place, and there could be some tension around those narratives as well. Is there a textbook example of creative placemaking, that touches these three points, that you could walk us through?
(09:26) I think there are a lot of beautiful examples about deep, deep practices in forming community. One thing that's really important when we're thinking about placemaking, in that way, is to bring in the work of a person named Roberto Bedoya, who works in Oakland, California. He talks about dis-belonging and the ability of artists to help you not just articulate stories, but to create a larger sense of belonging to a place and to each other. I think that perspective is really, really important because he also talks about how working with arts strategies is a double-edged sword. It’s something that folks always need to enter into carefully. You don't want to assume that artists are going to work for free - they are professional people that have jobs, and art is their job. You also you don't want to monetize a community, or what Bedoya calls "place-taking." Trying to put the identity of a place in a box can do more harm than good. He uses the place the term "place-keeping", which is recognizing the relationships that exist in the community, the creative expression that happens within the community. It proceeds forward with a deep understanding that the arts and cultural strategies that are used always need to be looked at in terms of how they can add to the community that is already there, and not exploit either the artists that are involved or the community itself.
So, you were asking me for a specific example. There's one that I think of that is absolutely classic that helps you to really understand "what is creative placemaking all about?" But I think there are these deeper issues involved and so for folks that are interested in those deeper issues, I would highly recommend looking at the work of Roberto Bedoya.
But going back to your question about a classic example of creative placemaking. One that's great to enter in on because--and I love this one-- it's such a great diagram. The one that I always like to talk about first off is the Farm Art Dtour, which happened in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. This project is still ongoing, and was started by farming artist couple Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas who live in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. They were artists that came from Chicago, and they decided in their own personal journey and path that they needed to move to a more rural setting. So they did, and they started farming. They realized as they began to understand their neighbors and the economy of farming, that there was this real disconnect in the conversations between their friends in Chicago, and the lived experiences that were happening in these farms.
What they did was they took a traditional - and we know it well here in Texas - this traditional weekend driving route where you drive around and you visit different sites and you buy different crafts and you eat at different local places. These have an annual cycle and they're choreographed, and you can get maps. They looked at it through the eyes of artists and they brought other artists in. And it wasn't just about going to these different points and buying crafts and having food, but it was actually imbuing it with a whole new way of looking at the landscape. They would bring in opera singers to sing in the fields so that you would have this experience of singing in the field and hearing these beautiful voices cascade over the hills. They brought in public visual artists who made these absolutely mesmerizing installations in the birch groves that are all around in this Wisconsin topography.
What was wonderful was that because of the work that they did, because of the permission that they gave to be creative in the landscape, the farmers started being the artists themselves. So, they would do things like use their mowers to carve messages into the sides of the hill, like "TRUTH" or "HOPE". So that you're driving around in these beautiful hilly landscapes of Wisconsin, and you suddenly turn around and you see "HOPE" emblazoned across the field. You see silage bags, you know, these big long silage bags that are there for the cow feed - one year they are a monarch caterpillar, the next year they are a profusion of butterflies, and all sorts of things.
It became a tour not only of the professional artists that came in and did these wonderful evocative pieces, but also their collaboration with local farmers who were doing their own wonderful evocative pieces. Then they coupled it all with a fermentation festival, in saying that creativity is about fermentation. Creativity is about letting this admixture come together in wonderful ways. And through beer and through pickles and through cheese, we are all going to celebrate fermentation. So the whole thing became a celebration.
I love that example as a first one because it took a very traditional, what's often thought of as an economic development strategy to coordinate people to go around and buy crafts and eat in local places. But it completely infused it with the arts. It brought out the creativity of others, and layered it with new ideas that have actually now become tradition within the area.
So, it's firmly building off of that place. It's very much about cross collaboration with these artists and farmers and fermenters and worm farmers, and also has arts woven throughout. That's pretty fascinating. But you're right. Like when you mentioned economic development, it seems like that often becomes the narrative that is told about the fermentation festival. But it seems like it has a lot more dimensions than just that.
(17:21) What we're seeing today is that there's a lot of these projects that are initiated on many levels - city staff initiate them, community development organizations initiate them, arts organizations initiate them. But at this early stage, it was artist-initiated. Ten years ago, it was the norm that these projects were coming more out of the arts community, where artists were saying, "Hey, we see all these community challenges in front of us. We've got ideas!". In their own scrappy way, they entered into it, and then realizing, "oh my gosh, to really get this done, this is really complex. So we've got to bring together the county, we've got to bring together the town, we've got to bring together the health inspectors, and everyone from Chicago and artists from all over to the table to figure out the formula." It wasn’t intended, but it was an economic boom for the area, the local sales have increased. There is more tourism and all of that. The networks to do this, to do it again, to do it in a sustainable way, to have community members at the table figuring out what this needs to be - that investment was a sustainable investment because it's ongoing.
Right. Well, I'm curious about creative placemaking as a field - and you mentioned that the beginning of creative placemaking conversations were about 10 years ago-- how has this field emerged today and where did it begin?
(19:11) Yeah, that's a great question because I think there can be a bit of hubris involved in thinking, "Oh, this stuff is new". It’s not new at all. The idea of art strategies coming into the way that we develop our cities and our towns is as old as humankind. We've always done it. You can think back to Greek civilization, that theater was actually used - in a collective way - to help think about the issues of the day, and to create a reason and a venue for talking about the difficult and layered issues that people were experiencing within the polis. You can think of the cultural expressions that are imbued in every culture - Aztec culture, Teotihuacan in Mexico City. These ideas that place is actually representative of who people are on so many cultural, spiritual, social layers. That's who we are as human beings. I think we lost that for a little while.
But what has reemerged is that over the past 10 years, it has entered into the professional conversation in great, wonderful ways. Because we have traditional ways that we build our systems in our cities - we figure out our bond funding, we figure out the way that's going to be communicated with the public. We figure out how different departments are going to implement the funding or the general funding. And we have wonderful programs and cities produce incredible ways of holding the community together. And that's all in place. And then suddenly, the artist comes along and says, "You know, what? Looking at the same thing, I think we have some new ideas". And I think the origin story of creative placemaking itself, as a term, is helpful in just sort of understanding, if this is just like human nature, why is it that we're suddenly talking about this in a professional development context?
The way that I think about, there are lots of different origin stories of this. A number of years ago, a gentleman named Rocco Landesman was the producer of the Broadway show, The Producers. He became the director of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). As a Broadway producer, he knew exactly how to bootstrap projects, how to pull resources out of thin air and make it happen. When he got into the NEA, he saw that so many of his counterparts and other federal agencies actually had funds that could go for the arts and realized that the conversations around the arts were actually quite siloed. So, within the NEA, they created the Our Town Program, which is really now sort of an anchor to so many of these processes that happen on a municipal level. When it first started it was run by a gentleman named Jason Schupbach. They decided when things were first starting that they were going to require that if these arts-based community development funds were to be given to communities that they needed to identify a partnership between artists and municipalities. That structure for grants actually then led to what I think surprised them was that it worked. It worked really well. And people still needed to figure out like, well, how is this going to work? We haven't done this before. But then they discovered that it actually made sense, that there were mutually held goals. And there were ways that artists and culture bearers and arts organizations could come into these community development equations.
So that really started off what we now think of as "creative placemaking". It's a term that was first identified by Anne Gadwa-Nicodemus and Anne Markusen, that's widely available online. And I think what's wonderful and what I love about creative placemaking is that within the field itself, if you go inside and look at all the conversations, everyone is always interrogating, "Is that the right term? like "No, that's not the right term". In a wonderful arts way, the field is constantly self-examining, and trying to figure out, how do we do this right in a way that meets all of our desires for equity and inclusion, and deep community engagement and making sure that whatever is done is authentic and not exploitative? Those are always ongoing conversations.
And today it is so poignant to think about what it means to do that in an equitable way, with a mind towards justice, and thinking about what that looks like with Roberta Bedoya’s term creative "placekeeping". There are some other terms that are used synonymously with creative placemaking, correct?
(25:24) Yeah, and I think that's one thing at this moment in time that we're in that's really important to hold - how important these arts-based strategies are towards a larger approach for equity and diversity and inclusion. As a planner, I was trained in very specific ways to engage the community. But those ways aren't necessarily the right ways for getting people to the table, for allowing them to have an authentic voice, for building long term relationships. They do get data. And the really good ones actually do help achieve a community consensus. That's really hard. But for the most part, they are not deeply inclusive of our whole communities, and the ability to speak in a language that's not "city talk", to talk about issues in an authentic way. Again, I will call this out myself as a planner. It's not coming from me. I need partners. I need people that I can work with side by side that can help me. I may know the issues and I may understand them in all sorts of different ways and complexities. But my ability to engage the community, and to bring that to them in a way that will hold a conversation, and make sure that whatever is decided about - like what the city is going to do, or what a community development organization is going to do - is actually going to truly respond. That's a partnership equation. And those are skills that I don't necessarily have, that I need to walk with others to get that done well.
Speaking of partnership equations, how do you see cities and municipal governments approaching creative placemaking? What are some common misconceptions that come up when you're having these conversations about creative placemaking as a consultant or as an educator?
(27:58) The wonderful thing that I see is that these practices are booming all across the nation and people are really excited about them. Part of the reason is that people have been ready and are already going for years on placemaking initiatives, which are really important because that sets the stage to say, "the places that we have are really important and we need to invest in them, we need to make them vital and vibrant, and we need people to feel like those places are theirs". And, that's great, because that says like, "Yes, we have a starting place for this conversation". I think the trick is that many people understand creative placemaking as simply placemaking plus art.
Can you say a bit more about placemaking versus creative placemaking? What are those differences?
(29:07) Right, exactly. Creative placemaking is different because it's not just traditional placemaking with arts as an add on. It's actually doing placemaking, but then the "yes and". Placemaking, yes. And then doing it with arts and cultural strategies. When you do this, it actually shifts the way that you look at things a little bit. The way that traditional placemaking very much focuses rightly on place, creative placemaking looks at place and all the relationships that are embedded within that. It really brings a focus into engagement and how the people of the place are the manifestation of that place. I think people's expectations about outcomes, project outcomes, can shift between placemaking and creative placemaking.
I think within regular, traditional placemaking we think of pop-ups or we could think of like a great street. And again, those outcomes are very, very physical and tangible and in creative placemaking, yes, you think about those physical tangible places. But again, it's also about the people and the processes of getting there and how those people are going to work for continuing to create and recreate those places as we do. I think in traditional placemaking, there can be ways of talking about the markers of success. Sometimes there are branding conversations that come up, sometimes it's talking about visitor attraction or place identity, assuming that you do want visitors and residents to experience it together. But in creative placemaking it is about how these places are created, specifically with the community members, and it's for them.
Also a key difference is around sustainability, because often placemaking can either be about these very large scale infrastructural projects, or they can also be about these quick pop-ups. Creative placemaking, because it is so much based on the networks and the relationships that are formed, can lead to a longer sustainability of the efforts in terms of the programming, in terms of the maintenance, in terms of the eyes that are watching that project and taking care of it.
It seems like creative placemaking has really wide-reaching effects and connections with community and the arts and culture that composes community and the people that make up communities. And there are some really great applications as far as participation and trust building. What other things do you want to leave our listeners with for today's conversation about creative placemaking?
(32:39) Leaving this conversation I would say, just be curious. A great resource you can go to, there's a wonderful philanthropy called ArtPlace America. They've got a ton of projects on their website. There's the Exploring Our Town website, which has over 70 case studies and just seeing what kind of things are out there.
And if people are interested in this kind of work, I would ask them to imagine, "how would you do a regular project?" A project that you were doing like "you have to make a play scape in your local park". Or you have to figure out how it is that this new sidewalk design is going to happen. Just imagine that project and then suddenly imagine an artist standing next to you. And think of all the ways that they could help and contribute to that, to be your partner. It may be about making something beautiful in the space. Absolutely. It may also be about ways to engage the community into thinking about what that place should be about. It could also be about engaging the community to form the networks that are going to help with the programming of that space later on. It may be about helping the city or the organization communicate about what that space is about, authentically. To say, "this park is about this community and let us help you find the words for that". And so that's what I always think about -imagine what you're already doing. Don't change a thing about that. But then imagine suddenly that there's an artist or culture bearer that's there next to you, making it really interesting, and what opportunities are in that. Then after you spend some time and imagination into that, go and talk with someone in your creative community, because I promise you, if you go and offer those imaginings, they'll respond right back with their own and that's the start of a conversation. And that's where these projects begin.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for this conversation. Lynn. I look forward to many more to come.
Thank you, Abbey. Appreciate it.