Creative Placemaking in Transition Part 1
A Look Back
Check out Part 2: A Look Forward here.
Johanna K. Taylor and Andrew Zitcer
Over the last 15 years, creative placemaking has become a core strategy of US cultural policy and practice. It can be defined as a set of place-based interventions designed to foster community development with art centrally included in the process.1 Recently, the field of creative placemaking has found itself facing a number of external and internal challenges. External challenges in the US context include the COVID-19 pandemic, racial reckoning, political polarization, economic uncertainty, and climate change. Internal to the field, creative placemaking weathered the sunsetting of ArtPlace America, one of its largest institutional funders and champions, and now lacks a central organizing entity. In this essay, we ask: how have the last several years changed the methods and scope of creative placemaking practices, as understood by leading practitioners and funders? How are arts and design today collaborating across different sectors, and what tactics are they mobilizing in their work? We will address these questions over the course of this essay, as well as in a second essay on the future outlook for creative placemaking as a policy and planning tool.
Our goal is to inform practitioners and funders of the changing nature of creative placemaking and the continued importance of work in community-based, justice-informed, artist-centered, equitable community development2, even as the field is realigning and changing. We aim to lift up the voices of people across the field, those who have done and continue to do work loosely affiliated with what can be considered creative placemaking, during the years when ArtPlace, the NEA, and the Kresge Foundation (among others) were active in shaping this policy area.
This project is a follow-up to a recent report published by Drexel University’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation that formed a quantitative and qualitative picture of creative placemaking circa 2019-20, with a focus on how projects were financed (Debold, Zitcer, and Pinsky 2020). Among its many findings, the report found that catalytic investments by funders such as the NEA, ArtPlace, and Kresge made possible the financing of creative placemaking projects, yet projects still required an average of 5-7 additional funders to bring them to fruition. Grantees also leveraged a variety of cross-sector partnerships and substantial amounts of their own internal resources. The report offers recommendations for the future of financing creative placemaking.
For this new project, we began by re-interviewing the same subjects as that earlier ArtPlace- and Kresge-funded research report, asking them to reflect on the changes that have occurred over the last several years. Additional interviews (21 in total) expand this lens to include the funders, practitioners, and field builders working to shape new spaces through which creative placemaking practices extend today. GIA Reader has published on creative placemaking before, notably in a 2021 project that brought together many of the field’s leading thinkers for reflections on the future of the field. Those reflections demonstrated that creative placemaking was already in a time of transition, and events in the years that followed only made that transition more intensely felt.3
Looking back: 2020-2023
2020-2023 has been a time of tremendous turmoil and challenge for the world at large, and for our interviewees, it was no different. Interviewees spoke about challenges related to the political and racial climate in the United States, the Covid-19 pandemic, and more. Nicole Crutchfield, Fargo, ND’s director of planning and development, spoke poignantly about her role as an “accidental leader” in the local struggle to build a community around racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. St. Louis-based artist Juan Wiliam Chavez spoke of the need to support artists as caretakers, as well as those experiencing financial precarity and mental health challenges amid the pandemic and beyond. Practitioners and funders reacted to the immediacy of the moment and dedicated themselves and their resources to people in place in ways that transcended a narrow definition of creative placemaking and embraced the ideals of creative and cultural democracy, as Karin Goodfellow, who runs the City of Boston’s Artists-in-Residence Program, explained it.
One of the biggest internal changes within the creative placemaking field was the sunsetting in 2020 of ArtPlace America. ArtPlace, particularly in its later years, acted as a “neutral party,” according to Kresge Foundation’s Regina Smith, and a “convener” or connector for practitioners and communities, according to Michael Rohd from the University of Montana’s Co-Lab for Civic Imagination. Even though the end of ArtPlace was planned, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US in March 2020 made wrapping up its work in the final year even more challenging for staff and partners. The 10-year funding horizon was predetermined, though some people involved saw the potential for extension; according to some interviewees, ArtPlace could have continued in one form or another to hold this central space in the field. However, after ten years of hard work, it is questionable whether ArtPlace could have retained key personnel past 2020 and might have needed to recalibrate its approach.
According to former Executive Director Jamie Bennett, in addition to making grants to projects, ArtPlace was about field building, expanding the mindsets of funders, and creating new pathways to support arts outside of typical spaces to enable the work. Yet, according to Danya Sherman, the project-based funding was critical, helping ArtPlace shape the practice of creative placemaking by lifting up efforts across the country. After 2017, the organization's focus shifted to participatory grantmaking in the form of the Local Control, Local Fields initiative. ArtPlace also focused on field building, based on Bridgespan Group’s Strong Field framework. As part of building a strong field, ArtPlace engaged in funding and research that sought to embed the work of creative placemaking in a variety of places, from higher education to transportation and local government. Since the end of ArtPlace, interviewees felt that the connector space is no longer occupied by a group prepared to advance the ideas and ideals of equitable creative placemaking.
Still, creative placemaking persists in several places, most notably the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town program, which recently opened up its technical assistance offerings to a public audience in partnership with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). The NEA also changed Our Town’s guidelines to extend eligible partner organizations to include local governments as well as quasi-government entities, as well as encouraging applicants to connect their projects to themes of transportation, health, and climate change. The growth in this cross-sector work is addressed in more detail in the second essay in this series.
Language and Reality
Still, our research questions whether creative placemaking is still a coherent field of practice in 2023 and beyond. As we began to unpack the question, we wondered: How do we describe this work? Since Roberto Bedoya advocated for “placekeeping” as an alternative framing to placemaking in a 2014 article, the question of terminology has persisted. It came up frequently during our interviews. What difference does it make if we have consistent nomenclature? The debate matters because if creative placemaking is to persist as a field of practice, practitioners need to decide how to use language and the ramifications of that language to frame reality.
We learned that today, fewer people use the term “creative placemaking,” though the term does still resonate with many. Danya Sherman, a community development and arts consultant who worked on the ArtPlace Research team for five years, noted that the term emerged from researchers and funders rather than creative placemaking practitioners and that many community development and cultural equity organizations and programs used the term because it aligned closely enough with important and underfunded aspects of their work and would unlock new funding streams. Danya explains, “I do think language for this critical work at the intersection of arts, community development, and equity is important, but I am not sure we have it yet,” and that the naming – creative placemaking or otherwise – can help infrastructure to be built around this important work.
“Placekeeping” had its defenders, like Victor Rubin, former PolicyLink Vice President for Research, who felt that placekeeping means maintaining historically important and current communities, and signals an anti-displacement goal. Michael Rohd saw the shift to placekeeping as beneficial, seeing it as a way to be in the community development space while problematizing it.
Though they might not use the term creative placemaking in their own work, some interviewees, like Stanford University’s Deborah Cullinan, align with the “spirit” that carries the work of creative placemaking forward as a practice, if not as a discipline like “theater” or “dance.” Jamie Bennett was not necessarily attached to calling it creative placemaking, but believed in the core values and goals the term represents: art and equitable community development. Leonardo Vazquez, formerly of Creative Placemaking Communities, believes that the term has been adopted by many practitioners in the field, from elected officials and others, and that it should be retained. For Rubin, the reason to keep the term “creative placemaking” is to show how it has transformed from the early days of a focus on economic development.
Comprising a Field
The final question for this article reflects on the ways in which creative placemaking has either been embedded into other fields or retains an identity as a field of its own. Over the last two decades, NEA, Kresge, and ArtPlace coordinated their work to build a field through investing in fellows at national community development organizations (such as LISC, Transportation for America, and PolicyLink), making knowledge building grants to national service organizations, and more. ArtPlace created a matrix that related it to fields like education, public safety, and economic development. It issued a series of reports that served both a documentary and advocacy purpose and were grounded in partnership with players in those sectors, some of whom received investments to catalyze change. This work, designed to add teeth to the Strong Field framework, continues to bear fruit in places like the US Water Alliance, where Arts and Culture Program Manager Erica Rawles is working on integrating arts into the entire organization so that it is not a standalone program element.
Some interviewees, including Michael Rohd, expressed concern that, even as the field got more resources and benefited from a more complex analysis, it became co-opted by practitioners who did not take into account a justice orientation.
“According to Creatives Rebuild New York’s Maura Cuffie-Peterson (formerly of ArtPlace), the fields of architecture, design, and planning have taken up creative placemaking and used it primarily to spur economic development, leading some practitioners to want to distance themselves from the work. ”
Donna Neuwirth of the Wormfarm Institute sees creative placemaking as an important pathway to cross-sector partnerships through more general asset-based placemaking efforts in an opportunity to foreground the power and significance of the “creative” approach. Not everyone sees this work in the same way. A question thus remains about the risks of diffusing the model. Regardless of approach, should we be excluding anyone from practicing creative placemaking in ways that are meaningful to their communities? This tension can only be resolved through further deliberation as a field.
In our next essay, we will explore the future of creative placemaking, looking at trends and emerging developments from the perspective of our interviews. We will return to the question of creative placemaking’s status as a field of practice and advance some program and policy recommendations.
1Zitcer, A., Hawkins, J., & Vakharia, N. (2016). A capabilities approach to arts and culture? Theorizing community development in West Philadelphia. Planning Theory & Practice, 17(1), 35–51.
2 Jackson, M. R. (2019). Creative Placemaking: Rethinking Neighborhood Change and Tracking Progress. Kresge Foundation; Jackson, M. R. (2021). Addressing Inequity Through Public Health, Community Development, Arts, and Culture: Confluence of Fields and the Opportunity to Reframe, Retool, and Repair. Health Promotion Practice, 22(1_suppl), 141S-146S; Solomon, J. (2021, December 14). A Brighter Future: ArtPlace America & Equitable Development, A Reflection. Grantmakers in the Arts. https://www.giarts.org/blog/janera-solomon/brighter-future-artplace-america-equitable-development-reflection
3 The authors thank the interviewees for their time in participating in the research and for reviewing drafts of these articles. They also thank Jason Schupbach for his time and expertise in offering productive editorial and content feedback.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Andrew Zitcer is an associate professor at Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, where he teaches Arts Administration & Museum Leadership and directs the Urban Strategy graduate program. His research interests explore economic and cultural democracy. His first book, Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism, was recently published by University of Minnesota press. A forthcoming volume, Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life (co-edited with Tom Borrup) will appear in 2024 from Routledge.
Johanna K. Taylor is Associate Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her work is grounded in a core value of art as catalyzing force in advancing justice in daily life. Taylor’s research explores questions of cultural equity through the intersection of art, community, policy, and place including in her book The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement. Taylor is co-founder of CAIR (Cross Sector Artists in Residence) Lab, a creative collective dedicated to building more just places through arts-led, cross-sectoral collaboration. Before turning to academia, she spent over a decade working as an arts administrator.
