Creative Placemaking: Building Partnerships to Create Change

Arts, artists, and creative strategies can be critical vehicles for planning to achieve social, economic, and community goals. Creative placemaking is one type of arts-led planning that incorporates both stakeholder participation and community goals. Yet, questions exist around who participates in the creative placemaking process and to what end. Our study discusses a case where a state-sponsored workshop brings people from diverse backgrounds together to facilitate community development and engagement through creative placemaking. In particular, the event discussed in this study highlights how a one-shot intervention can reshape perceptions of creative placemaking held by planners, non-planners, artists, and non-artists. Our study also shows that while pre-workshop participants tended to identify resource-based challenges, post-workshop participants focused more on initiating collaborations and being responsive to community needs. The different attitudes before and after the state-sponsored workshop demonstrate the importance of facilitating stakeholder understanding and engagement for successful creative placemaking

Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

Creative Placemaking Case Study: North Collinwood

This case study on the North Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, illustrates how Creative Placemaking, the deliberate integration of arts and culture into comprehensive community development, can serve as a critical catalyst in forming equitable living and working solutions for all the social, economic, and racial constituencies of a neighborhood.  In this post-industrial neighborhood, Creative Placemaking helped reverse local population decline, rebuild a central commercial corridor around arts businesses, and restore a positive identity to the neighborhood.

Creative Placemaking Case Study: Brookland-Edgewood

This case study illustrates how Creative Placemaking, the deliberate integration of arts and culture into comprehensive community development, can serve as a critical catalyst in forming equitable living and working solutions for all the social, economic, and racial constituencies of a neighborhood. It also shows how Creative Placemaking depends on collaboration across several different sectors, each with different goals, mind-sets, work styles, and skills. In the Brookland-Edgewood case, the multi-sector network of stakeholders included a forward-thinking government agency, a visionary nonprofit, a private developer, and the existing residents of a disadvantaged neighborhood

Creative Placemaking as a Mechanism for Community Revitalization: A Case Study of the SALT District in the Near Westside of Syracuse, New York

The purpose of this single qualitative case study was to identify the effects of creative placemaking interventions on the stakeholders of the SALT District in Syracuse, New York, and to explore how creative placemaking may help to revitalize other economically and socially blighted communities. Using the PolicyLink research and documentation framework to facilitate discovery, the researcher sought to understand the effects of creative placemaking on the people of the Near Westside. The participant sample included 12 stakeholders and their perceptions of creative placemaking in their community of Syracuse, New York. In addition to renovating warehouses and creating resident workspace for artists, the inquiry revealed that the initiative has created access to people and services, and it has created income-producing assets. Consistent with other research on the benefits of the arts, agency, self-efficacy, and empowerment emerged as a significant finding in the data. Arts participation and engagement, and representative leadership emerged while crime, as a result of the creative placemaking decreased. All 12 participants felt the initiative constructively impacted the area in some way. However, all of the participants thought it fell short of its promise. This research considered the impact of creative placemaking strategies on stakeholders of the Near Westside of Syracuse, through the lens of that community’s 50-year battle with systemic, perpetual poverty and scarcity. One recommendation for future research on creative placemaking in impoverished communities is to consider positioning similar studies with an eye toward urban thriving and elevating diversity as a value within the practice

The Kresge Foundation Arts & Culture Program: The First Decade

This paper explores The Kresge Foundation Arts & Culture Program's evolution over the last decade from capital challenge grants, capitalization and community arts, to Creative Placemaking. Designed primarily but not exclusively for peer funders, it tells the high-level story of the complexities involved in navigating change; and articulates Kresge's distintictive brand of Creative Placemaking to assist, inform and guide those who may find value in our transition. It is the first in a series of Creative Placemaking white papers to be published throughout 2018

Measuring the Outcomes of Creative Placemaking

This paper was delivered by Mark Stern at a transatlantic symposium on the arts and artists in urban resilience held in Baltimore in May 2014. With the topic of creative placemaking outcome measurement, Stern took a step back to talk about the outcomes problems of creative placemaking. The focus of the talk was on the problems of conceptualization and measurement of the ways that creative placemaking can influence a place and the people who live, work, and visit there. The presentation had five sections: 1) the controversy over outcomes of creative placemaking; 2) the potential contradictions in its conceptual foundation; 3) how economic impact and creative economy approaches have addressed the question of measurement; 4) SIAP\u27s approach to space and place; and 5) implications for policy and grantmaking

Fostering Community Through Creative Placemaking

This project involved a creative placemaking event hosted on the Laurier Brantford campus in Brantford, ON. The purpose of the event was to engage students and residents in the creative placemaking process, and measure how this engagement could lead to an increased sense of community and belonging. Data collection for this project included participant observation, surveys, photos, and the signs created by participants. Through the data collected at the event, it was concluded that engaging in creative placemaking did increase sense of belonging among participants, and respondents cited mental health benefits as well

Adaptation of Social Attributes of Place in Creative Placemaking towards Social Sustainability

Creative placemaking emerges as an evolving field of practice that leverages the power of arts, culture, and creativity to serve the community’s interests. Scholars have conveyed the values and benefits of creative placemaking in dealing with social issues and formulating agenda for urban transformation. An extensive review of the literature was conducted to understand the significance of social attributes of place in supporting creative placemaking strategies. A systematic search process yielded 14 articles from 121 documents that have been analyzed systematically. The review found that the social attributes of place generate social opportunities and community-led creative placemaking as catalysts for sustainable urban regeneration.Keywords:Creative placemaking; Social attributes; Social sustainability; Urban regenerationeISSN 2398-4279 ©2020 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ajqol.v5i18.20

Place Vibrancy and Its Measurement: Construct Development, Scale Development, and Relationship to Tourism

Arts and culture (AC) serve multiple roles in society. Over the last 10 to 15 years, the process of using AC to achieve community development goals has been labelled as creative placemaking. Creative placemaking programmers originally considered the broad concepts of livability and vibrancy to the goals of the programs and began developing indicators to measure them. However, thought leaders considered these endpoints to be too nebulous, and grantmakers responded to the criticisms by halting efforts to develop overall indicators. Other researchers have begun to use place vibrancy as a variable in other contexts. This set of studies is an extension of the initial line of inquiry for using vibrancy as a measure of creative placemaking. I propose that place vibrancy is a construct that can be measured through a psychometric scale, which might serve as an indicator for economic development efforts, such as tourism