Episode 3 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.

Abbey Judd: In our last few episodes, we've talked about what creative placemaking projects are all about and how similar and different they are from other projects that local governments might partner on. But Lynn, we've talked a lot about the different types of projects, what those might be beyond art. I'm excited to see how they grow with art and kind of the concept we talked about last week.

Lynn Osgood: I think that's such an important part of it all because there are the projects that cities and local governments work on and creative placemaking projects can very much just be part of that rhythm. I think the magic that they bring is that they bring a different way of engaging community, engaging in processes of ideation, of engaging with partners. And so it's never a question of either/or, but it's more of a question of how do we bring these two ways of working together so that our projects that we do for our communities can be that much better

It seems that art can give us a better understanding about what those projects could be about - even adding art into the transportation project, into the public health questions. Can you help us think through some of the different steps that people in municipal government need to think about before starting these projects?

I think you bring up a really good point because that's often a tripping point for people when they start off thinking with creative placemaking projects is they think of say murals like, "Oh, let's do something about art." And we're going to focus on we're going to make a mural. And the wonderful thing about bringing in artists and arts organizations and cultural bearers as partners in local government projects, is that they do, they can create something beautiful in the physical realm or performance or some type of piece of beautiful work. But the real strength of it comes from bringing folks on as partners very early in the process and as you were saying, and addressing other community needs. So maybe it's transportation, maybe it's public space, maybe it's food systems. So that mural suddenly becomes about something.

Going back to the mural - maybe the larger question is about the food systems and food access within a local community and that mural actually becomes about a celebration of local recipes, local favorite food and starts to get at the dimensions and layers of our very complicated world but in a way that is beautiful and connected and in partnership with the community and with organizations in the community.

Absolutely. So as somebody coming from local government, how does a creative placemaking project approach differ from a typical municipal project management? Bringing in the artist and having that larger understanding, absolutely. But it seems like the “nuts and bolts” management pieces would have to also be very different.

And it can be. And I think the trick is figuring out how they work alongside because you know at the end of the day, artists are business people. They have to be, they make their things, they sell them, they sell their ideas, their work and so they're very used to working in project management pipelines. But I think the trick is, is sort of recognizing that local government has a very specific project pipeline, and generally one that starts really big and then goes to this final completion of a project.

Artists are often going to bring in different ways of approaching a project that can serve alongside and in parallel with. So for example, you can imagine in a local government context that a city will start with a large scale, comprehensive planning process, and they'll identify, say, the need for a park. And then there's going to be a bond that's created and there's going to be a large set of money if it comes forward. And so all of a sudden you have a million, a million and a half dollar project, and then there's an RFP that's put out and then they're going to hire designers and construction professionals and the project is going to move forward and Oh, let's make sure we get a mural in there.

And that's great. That's great. Like no one should stop that process. That's good. And in many ways it really identifies what local government is really good at, which is taking these community needs which would identify it in the comprehensive plan and creating large scale projects and getting not just one done, but many done. And that's really important.

But at the same time, that kind of comes into the conversation we had last week about the art being more of the icing on the cake versus within the batter of how art can really further that comprehensive planning process or connect or be a part of that larger conversation on the onset.

And that's it. And I love that analogy - it's not the frosting on the cake, it's the flower itself. And that's the goal, because when working with artists and culture bearers and arts organizations, very often where the difference comes in is about how risk and uncertainty is managed. That within a local government system, there's plenty of changes that happen along the way but because these are large scale organizations that are working with taxpayer dollars, things have to be planned and transparent and ideally as efficient as possible. And artists are business people and they want generally the same things but they also bring the capacity to be there in the moment to see things in new ways, to bring a deeper understanding and meaning to the work that's being done. And that often means that they have to make room for emergent conditions.

And those can be emergent conditions in terms of relationships. They can be in terms of the physical project. I think a really tangible example that an artist once told me, this was an artist, Jackie Brookner who worked in Fargo, North Dakota. And I asked her once, she did many things as an artist, but one of the things she did was sculpture. And I asked her, "As an artist, how do you approach your work?" And she said, "Well, I put out a base and then I take a piece of metal and I add it to the base. And then I stand back and I look at it and I try to understand what needs to happen next. And then I add something else. And then I stand back and I look at it and I try and decide, well, what needs to happen next?"

And by doing that, then she eventually comes to a whole understanding of what the piece is and it emerges out of that step by step process. Now, all artists work differently, but in general, bringing in artists and arts organizations brings in a receptivity to the emergent conditions. And this plays out a lot with relationships with community. It's not necessarily about getting the most numbers of people that you can, but it's about ensuring that you have quality relationships with the people that you are interacting with and that you were doing so in a step by step process. I think that what we can see with the impact of that approach is in the work that Jackie Brookner was doing in the Fargo project.

Nicole Crutchfield, who runs their planning department and who originally hired Jackie said she thought that they were going to hire them for a five-month engagement project. Many years later, they were still working with the same tools and techniques and ways that Jackie was engaging the neighborhood and the infrastructure. They have their water retention basins, and Jackie was helping them look at it ecologically, along with dialogue with community residents. And what Nicole says is that what really amazed her was after working so many years with Jackie, what they realized was that they had actually internally developed what she calls an adaptive capacity, the ability as staff to pivot and change to meet the needs of the moment.

What was really compelling was when talking with Nicole after our first public health pandemic started, because she said she was able to go to her staff and say, "Now, remember when we were working with Jackie, we didn't have... The end result didn't have to be in mind. We could change to meet the moment and we did, and we got a better project for it," and realized that they had internalized a new way of working that was helping them meet the uncertainty of the world that we live in today.

So it seems that creative placement projects that have the arts and municipal partnership, there are multiple ways of working through a project or a project coming together, but there's almost that super power of being able to merge the two of the larger system and then that relational capacity in that example that you just gave.

I think that's a great one, because fundamentally they were working on infrastructure projects. They were looking at how do we take these? Like the city of Fargo is one of the flattest places on earth, and they have an incredible number of water detention areas and that could be closed off to people. And they really wondered like, "How do we make this both socially and ecologically vibrant?" And so they work step by step to figure that out. So at the end of the day, it was still an infrastructure problem. They just approached it in different ways.

With two different project management styles coming together.

Exactly.

I think this is a really helpful way to think about municipal projects, and re-imagining what that could be with artists. And as I'm listening to you describe them, there's another thought that comes to mind. How do these projects actually come together? I would think it's not the typical local government project creation process and it has a little bit more of that risk or uncertainty, or kind of relationship building that needs to happen before you can even begin in this process.

It is. And I think that's why one of the fundamental components of a good creative placemaking project, of any creative placemaking project, is partnership. And that having that person that you can walk alongside with and always be in communication with ensuring that the two different ways of engaging the problem can walk side by side is really the key. You need that good communication, that open communication that push and pull to try and bring these two ways of working together. It's baked into the definition of creative placemaking creative. Creative placemaking sort of by its definition is an artist or arts organization, a culture bearer working in partnership with a community development or municipal organization. And in that diagram is a partnership then what that partnership is focusing on is not necessarily a piece of art, a mural, but they're focusing on an issue that they both care about.

Again, it's a community issue - it could be access to a public space, it could be community food deserts, it could be issues of racial inequality or public health. But together, they're going to bring their two sets of strength to deal with this common issue that they're both holding, recognizing that they actually can't get the fullness of results that they want without each other.

It sounds wonderful. I'm all on board. It seems also that's just a very difficult partnership or reality to cultivate when it comes down to logistics of how to set up the tasks within each kind of segment of the project. Are there ways to approach that you've seen be really effective or key themes of how successful partnerships emerge?

I think a lot depends on context. Sometimes, there might be a creative placemaking project that happens that an arts' organization starts. That's great. They will generally have more flexibility than a city department will and can really help to create a scope that can emerge step-by-step often in conversations with a philanthropy that's supporting it, who hopefully are open to more emergent results. That's one situation. That's a lovely one. Sometimes it can be a community development organizations. They may be a little bit stricter on how processes evolve, but have a little bit more breadth for improvisation than cities do.

What we have found is that if a local government organization is actually the one that is starting and funding the creative placemaking project, it does become that dance of making sure that all the regular systems stay in place, but that there is then constant communication out to say, city managers or council members or department leads that there will be, and what we have found that it helps to break it up into discrete places. Places where maybe they're not going to start with the end in mind per se, or they may say, "We think we're going to have a mural, but we're not sure. And we're actually going to let them see our conversations with the community, help us to decide the end product."

And that can be so important because when a city comes forward and says, "We've got the answers," that can really bristle a community, really rub them the wrong way. You want to make sure from the beginning that you're saying "We're focused on a problem and together we're going to find a solution. And what we hope in this project is that we can not only approach it in traditional policy ways and project ways, but also through arts strategies as well. Maybe it is a mural, maybe it's a performance. Maybe it's a public ad campaign that's done digitally, or even with wheat pasting around the neighborhood."

There's lots of different ways to approach it and the project just recognizes, "Hey, if we just go at it our normal way, we're not going to get there." So, for a municipal project, sometimes that means - and this gets to budget. If this project is emerging from a local government context and they're the ones that are leading it, then you have to be creative with where and how funds get spent and sometimes look at things in different ways. We've done projects locally, where we have worked with the city and used outreach dollars and marketing dollars to paint a cistern with a mural about the water system, because this was for a local school that was developing rain gardens and looking at the larger watershed issues.

And the city knew that they wanted outreach, that they wanted to communicate with people about the project, and we brought on an artist to create a mural on the cistern, but they did it with the kids and the parents and you know what, the results were the same. The challenge was communicating about the watershed and the water system, but instead of having just flyers that wind home in a Thursday folder, we had a community celebration and an event and a longstanding mural and the flyers too. Those were there too.

So you're saying that the arts and culture enters the budget in a lot of different ways. It's not always a line item, but it is found in those other sections of the budget.

Right. And that's the trick. Yes, have some funds at the end for the product that's created, but then keep looking upstream. Look as far upstream as you can to identify ways that funds may typically come out or come forward within a project. But maybe that's an opportunity to actually bring on artists as partners to do things as new ways. If the goal is getting the word out, how would an artist do that? If the goal is working with the community to come up with ideas, how would an artist do that? Maybe that scope from a design contract is taken out and actually brought in very early on to work with an artist absolutely at the beginning.

And then the other key thing is because it is looking at issues outside of just arts themselves, let's go back to the example of the food system, then it leaves open possibilities to bring in funding from other sources, because it's not just about art. It's not just about having the paint put on the wall. It's about addressing these larger community needs and that opens up a wealth of community philanthropic funding that the city may not have been able to partner with if it was just framed as a mural .

I just want to return to a point that I think we've had in previous conversations of bringing an artist throughout that process and not just for the product piece of a mural or whatever it is. We also have to pay them for their time early in that relationship building process as well.

Yes, and I think that's a really, really critical component and it gets at one of the fundamental parts of creative placemaking projects - the dimension of equity that is the foundation of their work. And that equity equation happens in many ways, but one of the most fundamental ways is making sure that artists are paid for their time. This is a tricky thing for folks in local government because very often folks in local government are used to working with designers. Now design and the arts are very creative professions and so I don't want to value one is more creative than the other, but I do want to qualify them as has having different financial systems and financially working differently in relationship to municipal government.

So for example, a designer, you can throw out an RFP and require them to come back with a rather extensive set of ideas and diagrams and renderings. And they know that, yeah, they're going to invest one heck of a lot of time and effort into creating those ideas knowing that they may not get the project, because they know that they'll get enough projects and that most likely their compensation will really come more on the back-end because the projects are so big with project management and construction documents and construction monitoring and all of that. Artists don’t work with the municipal system in the same way. So for artists, their capital is their ideas. So for a city to go and say to artists," Hey, why don't you all just give us your ideas for say like an art box, and we're going to choose the best one and we’ll only pay the artists' whose design we choose."

That's not going to go over well in the art community, because the way they earn their money is through their ideas. So they're not going to make it on the back end with project management or construction documents or all of that. And so when working with artists, it's really important that they be honored for what it is that they bring to the equation. And because we value art in different ways than we do say, a transportation project or a city street or wherever it is, sometimes we think that like, "Oh, well, they just do it because they love it. And that they can volunteer their time." That also has a deep issue of equity that needs to be addressed upfront and figuring out how artists are paid for their time as professionals is a really critical part of the equation.

Right? Well, especially if the artist is sharing their relationships or they're seeking more narratives, it seems like there's a lot at stake that may not always be seen in a monetary value, but should be acknowledged for that relational work of ground-truthing in a community. And then also in just being a part of shaping the project.

Yes. Yeah, from the beginning. I think of what I saw the environmental movement go through many years ago when they started talking about what is the actual value of trees. And because within our municipal systems, we just didn't have a way to value. It's not that we didn't value trees, but it just wasn't built into the system. And so environmentalists actually started going and figuring out the financial benefit that each tree adds to an urban environment. I remember walking around and seeing here in Austin, the price tags put on trees. This one was worth $45,000. This one was worth $87,000 because of the ecological benefits that it gave to the city. All of that was in a reaction to the fact that the traditional ways of looking at the world through a municipal lens didn't always value what was there and contributing.

And I think we're at a point in this evolution of working with artists and arts organizations in relationship to our municipal system that brings that same issue to the fore. "Hey, we need this work. We need to work in partnerships, the ability to connect with the community to bring meaning, to bring forward issues of identity, to bring creative thoughts and ideas, that's deeply valuable, and we really need it." But yeah, maybe we don't have it built into our system yet and we're going to have to find some creative ways to do that, to honor it and to make sure that it's there.

Absolutely. Thinking about the tactical ways that municipal projects can work with artists, do you have an example that could speak to what that looks like on the ground?

One that comes to mind that is a great example for folks who are starting off with creative placemaking work is an early one called Project Willowbrook. And it was by an artist named Rosten Woo in LA County. I love this example because it is so clear how it arose out of a need. This was in Willowbrook, which is a location in LA County, which is between downtown Los Angeles and Compton. Because of this particular location, it needed a really powerful space for economic and urban renewal projects and development to keep happening. And often without the community at the table, without addressing community needs and creating economic pressures on current residents that would force them out. And so along with that, the place had been just planned to death. And so people had extreme planning fatigue.

But the County recognizing that any public project needed public input - you couldn't stop that process. And when the University of California was looking to reopen a hospital in 2009, they needed to do community outreach, but they knew they couldn't do it in the typical ways, because people were exhausted. So they hired artist Rosten Woo. And what was so elegant about what he did was that he started a cultural asset mapping project and many of the tools that he used were typical planning tools. He held stakeholder interviews and focus groups, and did a survey but he also did other techniques. They had arts jam sessions that were led by local artists. They had pedestrian scale billboards and they had two artist salons and workshops that people did.

The focus of this was not on the problems but on the strengths of the community. Those cultural strengths may never have reached municipal GIS map. They were that quirky garden that was there on the corner of the two streets that everyone knows and is run by the dear woman who has lived there for decades and is actually a neighborhood treasure, or the tree where everyone knows that that's where you turn to get to the big route. And it's not going to end up on a GIS map, and yet it is in everyone's map of who they are and where they are - that tree is always there. And the stories that they would tell about themselves and the neighborhood is it has changed and grown and changed again. Rosten worked to capture those and then put them in both a workbook and a book.

So he used traditional techniques. There are traditional research outreach techniques and nontraditional techniques, but all with the focus of starting with where's the neighborhood coming from, who are they? Where is this need? What is the big question of what this neighborhood is all about? And from that then it was a breath of fresh air for the neighborhood who had been planned to death and over-engaged. Suddenly here is Rosten asking folks just simply, who are they? What do they value? And what is the essence of who they are as a neighborhood? The county saw this and recognized that yes, these are the starting points that we need for our projects. It's not necessarily about always having the idea from the outside, that will come, but we always have to make sure that that is in dialogue with where people are coming from in the first place. And it's not just giving that lip service. It's about giving it time and space and the ability to come into the world in a way, in this case, in the way artists Rosten Woo was able to do it by making these beautiful books.

Well, I think that also speaks to an important point of art and creative placemaking strategies can also open up more conversations around equity, but also the dimension of creative placemaking that allows for equity to be a key component of the practice. Can you tell us more about what you see in equity through creative placemaking projects and how that can help ground local government work as well?

I think this is definitely the question we are all asking so deeply today and I think creative placemaking is a very critical part of the answer to those larger questions. And one of the reasons that it is an answer is because creative placemaking bringing in artists and arts organization and culture bearers, not just at the end, but all the way at the beginning of the project, as initial partners that the perspectives that artists and arts organizations bring in. They're going to bring in the ability to engage the subject at hand with deep empathy in terms of deep relationships, in terms of moving forward with the idea that the networks and the relationships are equally important to what is being created. And ways to honor that, just like Rosten Woo did through the creation of beautiful work. Again, it could be a mural or a performance, music, digital art, whatever it is. But that so much of the equity equation is about letting voices be heard and not only heard but acted upon and for those concerns that are brought forward.

And so giving space for that to happen is absolutely essential to any project equation. The problem with our municipal systems is that we are so geared to doing these large scale projects and we, again, we know the answer. We know where we're going because we know the final answer when we start and that may not always be the best formula for really addressing deep issues of equity, structural racism because what often we need is to look more closely at the systems that we do work with and for that we need to make space, and artists and arts organizations and culture bearers, that's what they can do and do so well and bring their strengths to what it is that the communities that we are all trying to build together.

Lynn thank you so much for this tactical and thoughtful approach today. Is there anything else that you'd like to add for our pod blog?

I think as folks just start going out to their days, I think a lot of people in local government think, "Oh gosh, I would love to do a project, but I don't know what it could be." What I would actually urge is to think of the idea that you love and the thing that you really want to see happen in the world. And then before you plan out the project and figure out the budget and all that, go talk with an artist, go talk with a colleague in an arts organization and present the thing that you love, the thing, the idea that you're bubbling with and say and ask them, "How do you see this?" And start that conversation going.

And just as colleagues, as friends, but to start hearing it through with different ears and seeing it through different eyes and then letting those ideas bubble and emerge together. And then we'll just have, after that first coffee, make sure if you keep working with folks that you do honor their time professionally, but do reach out as soon as you can and talk with artists and your community, because they're going to bring you ideas and perspectives that probably may not pop up at work. And that's a good thing.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Lynn, and look forward to continuing to learn about creative placemaking with you.