Episode 2 Transcript

Hi there, my name is Abbey Judd and I work for the nonprofit Civic Arts. And this is Art Nerd City Nerd Podblog. That's right. A combination of a podcast plus a blog. After you listen to the podcast, you can follow up on our website at www.civicarts.org, where we have lots of great content to help expand on today's podcast.

The Art Nerd City Nerd Podblog series is about creative placemaking, which is the practice of using arts and culture strategies to support equitable community development. We'll be talking about how folks like you, artists, arts organizations, community members, or local government staff can serve your communities in innovative and creative ways. Cities all over the country are looking for new tools to address community problems and challenges, and creative placemaking is an opportunity to equitably address those issues.

Civic Arts is an arts and urban planning consulting firm. We envision a world where arts and culture are fully embedded in the way we build our towns and cities, and we're all are invited with their full selves to our civic spaces. On today's podcast, we're going to be talking with Civic Arts founder and executive director, Dr. Lynn Osgood. She'll be sharing about some of the foundational aspects of creative placemaking and how the field has developed over the past 10 years.

On today's podcast, we'll be talking with Civic Arts founder and executive director, Dr. Lynn Osgood about some of the different terms used in creative placemaking, and also within different projects around creative placemaking. Lynn, it's so good to talk with you again. I think last time we talked a lot about what is creative placemaking and you shared with us a lot of examples, and it seems like there are many types of creative placemaking projects. Can you tell us a little bit more about the different ranges of projects that are out there?

Yeah. Hi Abbey, thanks. It's a confusing topic in some way because I think when you think of creative placemaking, you don't just think of one thing. I think all of our reactions when we think of the term creative placemaking is our first thoughts go to murals. And it can definitely be murals, but it's so much more. And it can be so many things from a municipality working to do cultural asset mapping, hiring and working with artists to do arts-based community engagement, creating public space in partnership with designers and artists, working on the creative economy and developing that out so that making sure that the artists in town are very much connected with the larger economic development efforts. That's part of creative placemaking.

It could be a cultural district planning or planning for cultural facilities. Very traditionally, it was cities actually creating and supporting festivals and performances like summer music festivals, which are so important to so many places. And even more traditionally, public art, which has been around for many, many decades and which we're very lucky to have. And so when you think about what are all these projects or how do we think of them as a whole, because that's a huge range to think everything from performances and community engagement to cultural asset mapping to the cultural facility creation, what unites them together is not necessarily that they are any set of specific things, but rather that it's an approach.

That it's this idea that one, we know that our cities and our towns will be much more vital and vibrant and we'll feel much more connected to them if the arts are integrated in some way. But in terms of the projects, what is most important is that the arts and culture are a specific approach that one takes. So when artists are there as part of the team, it's an overall way of approaching a project, as much as it is about the thing that the project produces.

Well, okay Lynn, that's really interesting. So creative placemaking is not necessarily just the process or just the product, but it is the combination of both beyond a mural, beyond just the product of public art, but how artists are involved in the process of making, creating, or envisioning something. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's it exactly.

So, do you have any examples of how that process plays out with just some larger goals within creative placemaking where it's not just about the art?

Yeah, the two projects that come to mind that I think they come to mind because they're actually so opposite in a way. One of them is a project called Irrigate, which happened in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was a pilot initiative and it was created by an arts organization called Springboard for the Arts, and they worked in collaboration with a community development organization called LISC. In this case, it was the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation. And they saw... Springboard, who works with many, many artists in the city, saw that there was huge construction going on on the Green Line light rail system, which runs through six different neighborhoods in Saint Paul. This was going on from 2010 to 2014.

What they noticed or what they knew was that the construction was going to be running through a number of neighborhoods that had actually had a very painful legacy of going back to a community displacement that had happened through the construction of the I-94 corridor. And specifically and historically, black neighborhoods, the Rondo Neighborhood in particular. And so these traumas from decades past were being resurfaced in the infrastructure development that was happening.

And so Springboard asked, "What can we as artists do to help this process happen in a stronger, healthier way?" And because they wanted to make sure that all the local businesses stayed economically resilient, they wanted to support a sense of community strength and identity through this whole process and make sure that the narrative around the development of these infrastructure projects wasn't going right into the previous narratives of trauma. That it was something that could be positive for the community from the community's view point.

So what they did, over a three year period, they created over 150 projects and partnered with over 600 artists and local businesses and neighborhood groups to do all these microscale interventions from animating the spaces in front of businesses to create a traditional ideas of creating murals, creating crosswalks, and utilizing all the skills and ingenuity and innovative approaches that local artists could bring to the problem, really fostering meaningful connections and solutions that were very, very specific. In other words, these weren't "best practices" that were brought in from some other place. These were from the grant created from the ground up.

That's the type of thing where I think you can look at and see like there is a product, there's something that comes out the other end that's really important. What is done on the sidewalks, the performances that happen, the murals that are created, that's really, really important, but what is just as important is the networks that are created, the sense of identity and meaning, and the economic vitality that are brought about through these practices. So that's one example... Like on one end, these microscale interventions that were created in a partnership between an arts organization and a local community development organization.

The other example that I think of is very, very different, but still no less vital in how it came about. And this is with an artist group called Las Imaginistas down in Brownsville, Texas. And they had a project called Taller de Permiso. And what this project was all about was in working with folks, recent immigrants from Mexico, Brownsville has a very vibrant culture that's rooted in its identity as a border town, And within Brownsville, there's a particular neighborhood called Buena Vida, which is a low income neighborhood.

What the artists were finding having many personal connections in the neighborhood was that folks there were having a hard time of making an income when they recently arrived. And the things that they may have done earlier in Mexico weren't translating well to a US context, and specifically around micro businesses and food vending. And what the artists noticed was that the regulations that were in place for food vending that those were important, but they were also a tremendous barrier to the folks that had recently arrived because the point of entry for micro enterprise for food vending was a food truck. And that's at least a $40,000 investment that recent immigrants couldn't afford.

And so what they did was that they as artists, actually started to engage with regulators, with the city council members, with city staff, and started to really dive in and start to look at what exactly were the regulations, were there opportunities to loosen those regulations or change those regulations, and how was it that they as artists could actually be working with the folks in the community to one, create a different narrative around economic success, to highlight the cultural and linguistic strengths that were part of the food culture, and really start weaving all these very day-to-day small solutions into place that scaled into a larger policy initiative.

So I think when you look at that example, what you see is it's a creative placemaking approach because here they were really working with this very specific Buena Vida community to create a better place, a better daily living for everyone there, they approached it through policy. And what came out the other end was both a policy initiative and these microscale carts that people could use. But what they did as artists was really see this in static whole. It wasn't just about one thing or another, it wasn't about the policy or the carts or the training or even the celebration of culture and food, but they really saw that this needed to come together as a whole. And I think that's part of what working with artists and cultural practitioners can bring to a municipal situation is the ability to look at things synthetically and to find meaning on so many levels, even if on the fundamental, it's really tactical and it's about getting things done.

And so with the first example, you mentioned Springboard for the Arts and LISC in partnership, and then for the second example in Brownsville, Texas, you mentioned Las Imaginistas. And do you think that the different position and positionalities that these organizations are coming from are oriented consistently around arts or policy, or kind of just the interplay between the two? How did they learn how to play together?

Well, I think one thing... That's a great question. And I think all of these are about partnerships. Fundamentally about partnerships. That it's about, in this case, it was artists and arts organizations reaching out to others and saying, "Hey, we recognize that this situation that we see in front of us, the impact of infrastructure construction, the impact of regulations that don't allow for micro food vending, we understand these as larger... As not just one small tiny issue, but as a much larger whole." And so in order to really approach that, we need to work with people. We need to work with policy makers, we need to work with community development organizations.

We need to have an artistic response, and we need to have a policy response, we need to have an educational response, and all of these need to come together. And so they recognized their own strengths as artists and arts organizations, and then realized that those strengths actually can be made even stronger when brought into relationship with other folks working in these complex systems that we live in.

Kind of thinking about those systems, and we've talked about community development organizations and arts organizations and community members. How do we understand creative placemaking projects in the context, or from the perspective of local government and how these projects engage with issues that local government might face?

Yeah, I think that's a great question because what we see right now, we had a really exciting time where we're seeing lots of folks from local government entering in and doing local projects, which is great, in all different shapes and sizes all across the nation. When they enter into these projects, I think what they find is that, one, they're exciting, that the community members are excited, the elected officials. At first, they may be skeptical, but then they get excited because they see how much they mean to the community, but they can be complex because what you're doing is you're bringing artists and culture bearers into municipal systems.

And that's different because traditionally, artists have worked with municipal systems in terms of public art, or maybe larger institutions and creating a cultural district, but this is talking about really expanding practice. And so when I think about how to think about creative placemaking, I think back to the old trope that we have in local government about wicked problems. And so the idea of wicked problems came about in the 1970s. And it really identified the fact that folks that were working in policy circumstances, they were working in local government circumstances, were often working with issues where there were many voices that were incredibly complex and that whatever was brought about was going to be messy and perhaps in some ways, even unsolvable because it was so connected. Or interconnected.

Over the decades, this idea of wicked problems has really come to be vernacular inside local government to identify the kinds of problems that the folks face. I find working with that framework, so taking this idea of wicked problems and just changing the framework a little bit helps us understand what creative placemaking problems are all about from a local government perspective. And to do so, I lean on the work of a woman named Jenny Svensson, and she named these projects called extraordinary projects.

So when you look at wicked problems, you know that there's four main characteristics. There's incomplete or even conflicting information or knowledge base, there are many, many voices and perspectives, there are complex connections and to other large scale problems and very deeply interwoven with other problems, and there is a large scale impact of whatever is being decided. So if you imagine even something conquering the issue of affordable housing, you know you'll never have enough knowledge base that there are so many voices involved that it connects to so many other large scale problems, food insecurity, homelessness, and that whatever you do to address it is going to have a large impact or potentially burden on the people you're trying to serve. So that's what defines a wicked problem.

Extraordinary problems is defined by Jenny Svensson said... It has many of the same characteristics. There's multiple frameworks and logic, there's many actors, there's many partnerships, and the processes are many. Sorry, the processes are messy and the impacts are deep. And so this is where I find that local government folks who say like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know if I can work with artists and culture bearers. This is not something I've ever done." I would say, you've already done it because you've already... You know how to deal with wicked problems.

The only difference between wicked problems and these extraordinary projects, or as I think of them, creative placemaking projects, is that one differentiation about the impact because in wicked problems, the impact is because you're working on a policy level often, there's very large scale impacts. But with the creative placemaking projects, it's not so much about the broad and large impact, it's about the deep impact. And it's about approaching these what can be messy processes in order to really ensure that community members are deeply involved, that their voices are heard, and that other and different types of creative solutions can emerge.

So what creative placemaking brings is, from the outside, I would say messy processes, from the inside, I would say they are creative, they are emergent, they are responsive, and the impacts are deep. And in that way, I think local... With that small shift, I think local government folks can be reassured that they've been doing this kind of work all along.

Yeah, that connects so much... It seems like that connects really well with what you were talking about with the examples of being hyperlocal to have that deep impact and to not necessarily have the large, best practice umbrella that everything falls in, but really being that emergent process rooted with culture bearers and artists, which seems like it has a lot of power to it as far as connecting with the local community members and then also speaking to larger issues that they'd like addressed in communities or respected in communities.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just when you bring artists to the table, they're going to shift perspective and create connections that may not traditionally have room within a municipal, a traditional municipal space. And so creating the environment that allows that to happen is so much of what we as planners, as policy makers have to make sure is there in order to have that happen.

So within creative placemaking having all of these intersections of artists and community members and municipalities, can you walk through how arts and culture based practices can be seen in the day-to-day work of local government and then also just within artist's work as well?

I think it's a great question about how this plays out in day-to-day, particularly in a municipal context because I think there can be confusion and evolution. To be fair, if folks are listening to this and have just entered into the creative placemaking world, there is some confusion because there has been an evolution of terms and ideas. And one of the most central ones that folks will come across quickly and importantly so, is this just the name, creative placemaking. This was a term that was first named about a decade ago by two researchers and planners, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and Ann Markusen, when they were looking at what it was that the national endowment the arts were supporting through their Our Town program. And it was this idea of placemaking, but arts-based placemaking. So they termed it creative placemaking.

But very quickly or within a few years, as these projects started to gain more traction and more popularity, more broad funding support from philanthropies and support from communities, there arose a very important conversation around this question, well, is it creative placemaking or is it creative placekeeping? And this central question goes back to this issue that design can be a double... Excuse me, working with the arts can be a double-edged sword. It can be incredibly powerful. It can bring deep connections within a community, it can bring a sense of meaning, it can bring new ideas that have never been there before, but it can also be exploited. The artists themselves can be exploited, the word can be exploited. And this idea of bringing in arts interventions from the outside and "making a place" as if there was nothing there before can be really dangerous.

And so there was one practitioner, Roberto Bedoya, who started to write about enabling the sense of belonging and the necessity of talking about terms like creative placekeeping, and at the heart of such a term is this idea that when working with arts and cultural strategies, because the goal is so often to have deep connections with communities to make sure that their voices are heard, that they are part, from the beginning, part of the solution, that our response as project managers has to be about ensuring that a place is not made, but kept and held and honored and really brought and come into its full self. And so you'll often hear these debates about is it placemaking or placekeeping, and those questions, that's what's at the center of it.

Yeah, it's just... Because place, I think sometimes it's ever evolving, but like the story, or just thinking about Minneapolis, there are places that are disrupted through infrastructure or whatever else and there's almost like a sense of needing to reclaim places and a place healing as well and placekeeping of honoring the culture that exists presently in a location or space.

Yeah, exactly. And how that can be done. I think going in with that perspective is one of the most important things that people can do when they're starting their own creative placemaking projects.

One of the other confusing things that I see is in the juxtaposition of creative placemaking. And I do use the term knowing that because it is broadly understood as a term now throughout professional disciplines. For myself, when I use the term, that idea of creative placekeeping and belonging is embedded within it. So one of the other terms that I think it's mixed up is in this idea of artspace placemaking, creative placemaking and design particularly with municipalities when they're first entering into the equation, because when they see what a project is all about, they say, "Great, we've worked with architects before or designers and we've already contracted with them. We can open up another contract and we can get this place built." And that's a tricky slow. Design is really critically important to helping placemaking projects happen well, but creative placemaking what distinguishes them is actually the artist and the culture bearer that is involved.

And it shouldn't be assumed that a designer or an architect necessarily brings those same talents and perspective that an artist does. They can be very artistically inclined, they may even have their own arts practice, but design, when you look at it as a profession has a way of already... That it's already integrated within a municipal marketplace. Designers know how to contract with cities, they know how to project manage with city staff, they know how to anticipate what will happen in a project and budget for it. And with artists, it's different. Their own professional sphere has not evolved in relationship with municipals sphere. And so taking the ideas of design and putting it on top and just assume that the artist will do the same, can be really, really tricky and sometimes dangerous.

Where I've seen this play out for example, is when local organizations will want to do a creative placemaking project with artists, and they'll put out a call and say, "Hey artists, come up and give us some ideas for what a mural could be at the site." And when you're working with the arts world, you can't do that. You can do that in the design world because the way the design profession works within the market system is that designers and architects can come up with lots of different ideas, but they're going to actually make their money more on the backend with construction documents and project management, but for an artist, their ideas are their capital. So when you're asking them to just, "Hey, make a sketch. Come up with an idea. What would you put on the mural?" That actually goes against the way their own economic systems work because you're actually asking them to work for free and because their ideas are their most important thing.

And so just having an understanding of how these two, how the design world works economically and how the artistic world works economically is really important when beginning these projects, because so often what I see is that municipalities are really excited. They want to do these projects. They want to do them on a large scale. They want to do many of them. So they start at a smaller level, which is great, and they go out to the arts community and they put themselves in a bad position. They start off unknowingly and with the best of intentions saying the wrong thing to the arts community, because the arts community hears their request and says like, "Wait a minute, they want our ideas, but they don't want to pay us? That's not fair."

And so just understanding where folks are coming from is really important. To get all those wonderful effects, just know that arts and design are not synonymous. They can overlap, but having an orientation towards the differences is really important.

Especially, it sounds like with the contracting and how to go about starting those relationships could be really dangerous. Not dangerous, but confusing if this is the first time jumping into those partnerships.

Exactly, exactly. Just proceed with caution. And the best thing you can do, just have an artist there next to you. Pay them to advise you and say, "Hey, we have never worked with the arts community before. Help us understand the best foot forward because we know we're not only doing this project, but we're developing relationships with the arts community here in town. And we want to make sure that happens well." So just to have an advisor by your side and it'll all work out.

Another thing I know we briefly talked on our last episode was placemaking versus creative placemaking and the differentiation between the two.

And this... Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's these are very confusing terms because you have... And placemaking has been around for a very long time. All of a sudden there's this creative placemaking. And I know myself as an urban planner and designer that when I first heard the term, I was like, "Well, we've been doing placemaking for so long. And why is it suddenly creative? We were plenty creative beforehand." But the trick is that when you're thinking of creative placemaking, it's not about placemaking plus art. It's not about doing the regular placemaking project and then adding a mural or adding a performance. That's important and it can be that, but again, it goes back to that distinguishing between are you thinking of arts as a noun or are you thinking of arts as a verb?

In the placemaking plus art, it's the idea that you're going to do your regular placemaking project with the community and the designers and then you're going to add an artistic element. With creative placemaking, what you're saying is you're going to work with artists from the beginning and what you're going to focus on is what are the artspace strategies that can be used throughout the entire process? So that may mean that you may bring in an artist right at the beginning where the ideation is happening because you want their creative ideas at the table as a partner with you as you're thinking through this project.

They're probably going to look at it a little bit sideways from the ways that things will traditionally be looked at, and that's going to add a vibrancy to it. They will probably have different ideas on how do we engage the community and what the significance of the project is about, how you talk about it, how you get others to talk about it, and what types of forms and processes could be put in place to make sure that everyone that's impacted by the project will be involved, the life cycle of the initiative. And so having the artist there with you from the beginning is going to give you those new perspectives that is going to make the project so much different than it would have been if you approached it as just a traditional municipal placemaking project and then added an arts element at the end.

And I'm curious, Lynn, do you think that there is something that within the arts world think through how they go about their work that compliments or really orients artists and culture bearers to working with community members more so than... Or just approaching things in a different way? Not necessarily good or bad, but just allowing a different orientation to municipal projects where they learn that or where that comes from in the arts and culture world?

I think part of it is really our market system. One of the wonderful things about municipalities is their ability to bring ideas to scale. And in that, there's a very complex system between policymakers and electeds and planners and other city staff that are working there as professionals, and that this system is really made to take ideas and make sure that they happen at a large scale. The arts world, for so many reasons of history, has developed outside of that system. Outside of the way that we create policy, the way that we create programs, the way that we do our traditional professional development as planners, as engineers, as even elected officials.

And because of that perspective that comes from a different set of training, a different set of economic circumstances and their own professional way that they work because it's very important to remember artists are some of the best business people that you will meet and they are entrepreneurs, but that's economic system works outside of municipal systems. So when you bring them onboard as partners, you're going to get folks who are just going to look at things differently. And very much because their work often, not always, but often is community-based, they bring in ties and understandings, particularly around issues of equity and justice that are absolutely fundamentally important for what municipalities today are saying they want to achieve that maybe don't have the internal systems, the internal knowledge, the internal processes that can support it to happen. They need partnerships to come in and help them. And fortunately or unfortunately, because these two economic systems developed separately, the artists bring in that perspective that now the municipalities so desperately need.

And so then the question is then how do we figure out on a day-to-day basis, how these partnerships happen? What is the contracting process? What is the project process? What is the community process that happens as they evolve? And it is a wonderful and exciting time in creative placemaking because these projects are happening more and more now, and every city, every town is figuring out their own specific equation. And that's okay because that's exactly where we are in history right now.

So, Lynn, what questions do you want people to be thinking about as we leave today's conversation?

I think as folks head off into their day, what I'd like them to think about is actually something we'll be talking about in our next conversation, which is on this idea of return on investment. When folks in municipal government start doing these projects, so often the first thing that they have to do is justify it to other people. They have to say why this is important, why we should do it, and the language that creative placemaking uses since it has developed from the arts world primarily is different than the language that municipal governments use. And that's starting to change because there's some really wonderful research that's happening, particularly around public health, but finding that specific language that not only resonates in general, but for one's own locality is one of the first things that people often have to confront.

So I would urge listeners just to be thinking, how do you frame things, or how would you frame things around the project that you want to do? How is it that these arts approaches could contribute directly to local government challenges in the way that local government staff feel they're looking to achieve aims and goals? How can we talk about the way that arts contribute to those? And what is perhaps some bridging language that can go between the two languages of these two sectors, the art sector and the municipal sector? And we're going to dive into that a little bit more in the next podcast. So I would just urge people to start thinking about how would they solve that problem and then we can explore it more all together in the next podcast.

Wonderful. Well, we're looking forward to it and we'll talk to you then. Thank you so much Lynn.

Thanks Abbey.

We hope our podcast has been inspiring or motivated you to create your own vision of your neighborhood or community. Join us for our next podcast episode about the ranges of projects and practices happening in the creative placemaking field. Our theme music is provided and composed by the Austin artist, Willie Chappell. Willie Chappell's music can be found on Bandcamp, Spotify, and all places that music is streamed.