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

Exploring the Ways Arts and Culture Intersect with Public Safety: Identifying Current Practice and Opportunities for Further Inquiry

This report describes the range of activities at the intersection of public safety and arts and culture, outlines a theory of change, and provides recommendations for further consideration. Through interviews with experts in the field, this research found that art in the public safety sector promotes empathy and understanding, influences law and policy, provides career opportunities, supports well-being, and advances the quality of place

Placemaking for Cities : Pilot project on the transfer of good practice in community-led placemaking

This report provides an account of the main outcomes of Placemaking 4 Cities (P4C) project and offers critical evaluation of process as well as content of this pilot project in good practice transfer (GPT). In doing so this report draws together detailed descriptions and assessments of the transfer process from learning logs, the mid-term review and exit interviews with P4C participants. The learning logs and the mid-term review are attached in a separate appendix entitled ‘Supporting Documents’. The first part of the report is concerned with an analysis of the results that were achieved. It begins with a presentation of the good practices and anticipated outcomes defined in the baseline study and compares these to the actual results and outputs achieved. The good practices that were adopted and adapted through the transfer are presented at the end of this section. We then review the methodological approach that was adopted to facilitate the GPT, focusing in particular the preparation and executing of the peer review which was central to the transfer process. This is followed by an attempt to assess the impact of the P4C pilot for participating cities of the medium and longer term and the report concludes with a number of recommendations about the design and delivery of future GPT networks.Final Published versio

\u3ci\u3eThe Center of the World\u3c/i\u3e

A body of water is often seen as a serene place of relaxation, but just under the surface, aquatic life bustle around. This creative narrative will spark your imagination into having you believe that you are placed in the shoes of a wandering student as you encounter this great entity, known as the Bryant Pond. This journey will allow you to free your mind, and let it wander as you get lost in your own imagination. Have you ever wondered how certain things came to be, such as out-of-place objects in an environment that could have naturalistically been put there, but has a very small probability of actually being real nature? The Bryant Pond is located at the center of the university campus, and is an eye-catcher as you meander around. The pond acts as a waypoint for students, allowing them to navigate the campus with ease. Surrounding the pond are various forms of the environment, ranging from trees, to grass, to weeds and reeds around the perimeter of the pond. Since the pond is a secluded area inside of the campus, how did aquatic marine life come to be in this sort of environment with no connecting bodies of water? This would allow nothing to get in or out, unless an outside factor was to come into play. Fish swim around in the pond, and that draws the question on how they got there since there are no bodies of water connecting. Birds could have been the primary individuals that caused the influx of these marine creatures through transporting eggs in their feathers, or us humans could have planted them there to reconstruct a replica pond. Knowing and “Understanding the way that fish are dispersed in remote bodies of water is important for the maintenance of biodiversity”[1], and it can expand the wildlife that lives on Bryant’s campus. Maybe the bigger question is, what relationship do we have with the environment, and what do we do to appreciate what it has provided for us? [1] “Dispersal of Fish Eggs by Water Birds – Just a Myth?” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, February 19, 2018. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180219103258.htm

People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement: Taking Stock of the Place Initiative

This report serves as a point of entry into creative placemaking as defined and supported by the Tucson Pima Arts Council's PLACE Initiative. To assess how and to what degree the PLACE projects were helping to transform communities, TPAC was asked by the Kresge Foundation to undertake a comprehensive evaluation. This involved discussion with stakeholders about support mechanisms, professional development, investment, and impact of the PLACE Initiative in Tucson, Arizona, and the Southwest regionally and the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data to develop indicators and method for evaluating the social impact of the arts in TPAC's grantmaking. The report documents one year of observations and research by the PLACE research team, outside researchers and reviewers, local and regional working groups, TPAC staff, and TPAC constituency. It considers data from the first four years of PLACE Initiative funding, including learning exchanges, focus groups, individual interviews, grantmaking, and all reporting. It is also informed by evaluation and assessment that occurred in the development of the PLACE Initiative, in particular, Maribel Alvarez's Two-Way Mirror: Ethnography as a Way to Assess Civic Impact of Arts-Based Engagement in Tucson, Arizona (2009), and Mark Stern and Susan Seifert's Documenting Civic Engagement: A Plan for the Tucson Pima Arts Council (2009). Both of these publications were supported by Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, that promotes arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change. Both publications describe how TPAC approaches evaluation strategies associated with social impact of the arts in Tucson and Pima County. This report outlines the local context and historical antecedents of the PLACE Initiative in the region with an emphasis on the concept of "belonging" as a primary characteristic of PLACE projects and policy. It describes PLACE projects as well as the role of TPAC in creating and facilitating the Initiative. Based on the collective understanding of the research team, impacts of the PLACE Initiative are organized into three main realms -- institutions, artists, and communities. These realms are further addressed in case studies from select grantees, whose narratives offer rich, detailed perspectives about PLACE projects in context, with all their successes, rewards, and challenges for artists, communities, and institutions. Lastly, the report offers preliminary research findings on PLACE by TPAC in collaboration with Dr. James Roebuck, codirector of the University of Arizona's ERAD (Evaluation Research and Development) Program

When Artists Break Ground: Lessons from a Cleveland Neighborhood Partnership

This report is a review and lessons from the Artists in Residence program, a collaboration between CPAC and Northeast Shores. The organizations invested $2.2 million in a 3-year period into artist-neighborhood relationships in the Waterloo area in North Shore Collinwood. The report shares how the process worked: its strengths, its shortcomings and third-party recommendations and reflections. A wealth of data supplements the report to illustrate changes in neighborhood residents' perceptions, traction among audiences and changes to the neighborhood's landscape