Creative Placemaking

Research, Theory and Practice

Cara Courage, Anita McKeown, Cara Courage, Anita McKeown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351598590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector.

If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.

Section 1

Evolving Ecologies

1 Creative placemaking

Reflections on a 21st-century American arts policy initiative

Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus

Abstract

The US National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town initiative and its philanthropic counterpart, ArtPlace, emerged in 2010/2011 in response to a 1990s crisis in national arts funding and retreat into economic impact advocacy. We recount the Obama administration’s arts policy leadership and their ‘creative placemaking’ approach. We analyze two ongoing challenges – diversity and displacement – addressing how to broaden participation by people and communities of color and avoid displacing low-income residents and small businesses. We review the indicators approach initially embraced by National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace for evaluation, exploring its conceptual fuzziness and challenges of spatial scale, suitable data, and exogenous counterforces. We recap the spread of the creative placemaking ethos, celebrating its invitation to artists and arts organizations to use their artistic creativity for the good of their communities.

Introduction

The creative placemaking rubric frames a decade of new work by the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)¹ and its companion philanthropic consortium, ArtPlace.² Both organizations fund locally initiated community and economic development projects with arts and culture at their core. They also fund knowledge-building exercises (the NEA) and field scans (ArtPlace.) Designed by the President Obama-appointed team at the helm of the NEA, the initiative’s intent has been to celebrate and embed arts and cultural capacity in neighborhoods and communities, contributing to prosperity (jobs, small-business income), social wellbeing, public safety, and stability. Both funders encourage arts organizations and artists to preserve and enliven places by using their visual, musical, speech, writing, and acting skills for and in conjunction with larger publics. Since the publication of the NEA-commissioned White Paper Creative Placemaking (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010), interest in this approach has spread to many countries and their small as well as large cities. For example, the Czech Republic’s Prague/Pilsen Year of Culture adopted creative placemaking as its overarching theme (Markusen, 2014; Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus, 2015), and the South Korean national arts agency translated the original Creative Placemaking document into Korean. In this reflective essay, we employ a political-economy point of view, charting the challenges that almost eliminated the NEA in the 1990s, the subsequent advocacy shift towards the economic impact of the arts, and the emergence of the NEA’s Our Town³ initiative in 2011. We take policy initiatives, their rationales, and their implementation seriously, placing them center stage.

Creative placemaking deliberately conflated the creative class approach of Florida (2002) with decades of progressive community-culture-based placemaking, offering US advocates of greater public engagement in arts creation and presentation new channels for accomplishing this. The initiatives, and the financial and organizational power behind them, prompted productive debates about the roles of artists and arts organizations as well as the potential for coalitions and their interventions to gentrify neighborhoods and in doing so displace long-time lower-income residents and the commercial activities that served them. We probe the issues of displacement and racism in detail as unanticipated challenges for communities and funders, citing pertinent examples and offering policy solutions.

In a following section, we address the considerable evaluative challenges for funders and placemakers, especially given cultural diversity and placekeeping priorities. Part of the ‘creative’ in creative placemaking is precisely this – that the fruits may emerge very differently than initial intentions, just as we see in funded science projects all the time. Engaging partners and stakeholders in conversations about what success looks like and for whom can be useful in helping people move beyond fuzzy concepts into what they actually hope to accomplish. Creative placemaking evaluation sometimes confronts difficulties accounting for conflicting agendas of participants: the development industry (often quite powerful locally), artists, art organizations, neighbourhood leaders, and elected officials regarding creative placemaking projects. However, evaluators face steep challenges surrounding good, grounded research that can produce comparative data across localities. We also discourage evaluation efforts that attempt to winnow out winners from losers.

Overall, the NEA Creative Placemaking and companion ArtPlace initiatives have significantly improved the general public’s view of the role of artists and arts capabilities to serve their communities while making substantial contributions to community stabilization and cultural engagement in many places. The two funders are now placing more emphasis on long-term integration of arts and culture into comprehensive community development. They are also encouraging greater grassroots participation as a priority in their criteria for awarding funding. We remain hopeful that debates about diversity, displacement, and evaluation are generating positive changes in the design of the funding streams and outcome assessments. Certainly, following a decade of these initiatives, creative placemaking efforts are incorporating many more people of all types in the debate over who, how, and why we should support arts and cultural activity. Will creative placemaking disappear if the NEA is defunded and ArtPlace gracefully shuts its doors at the end of its ten-year tenure? We argue that it will not, but that its varieties and protagonists have and will continue to morph. We are optimistic about its long-term contributions and hopeful for greater gains for long discriminated-against racial and immigrant groups, for greater public participation, for a flourishing of participatory arts, and as Bedoya (2013, 2014) demands, ‘placekeeping’ as enduring features.

Creative placemaking as cultural policy shift

Beginning in the early 1990s, US cultural policy endured a Congressional rebellion that nearly eliminated its National Endowment for the Arts, a modestly funded federal agency that supported individual artists and arts organizations directly and passed a significant share of its funding to state- and local-government arts agencies. Several NEA-funded performance and visual artists were responding to the AIDS crisis in their work (Killacky, 2011, 2014), prompting a Republican Congress to savage the NEA budget. Corporate and private philanthropic support for the arts declined as well (Kreidler, 1996). Bill Ivey, President Clinton’s Chair of the NEA, argues that this implosion was also due to elitist attitudes and aesthetics that had driven NEA funding away from popular culture (Ivey, 2008).

The response of the arts community was timid. Rather than defend the artists in question, the national arts advocacy organization, Americans for the Arts (AFTA),⁴ and its state-level counterparts turned to economic arguments. AFTA continues to publish studies showing how arts spending generates income and jobs for states, localities, and the nation (e.g. Americans for the Arts, 2016). Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) generated considerable interest among journalists and state and local public officials, despite forceful critiques of the book’s theoretical and empirical quality (Markusen, 2006; Markusen et al., 2008). Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts (McCarthy et al., 2004) championed the arts’ intrinsic contributions. Complementary pioneering work offers evidence and methods for estimating the arts’ intrinsic value to participants and society generally (Brown and Novak-Leonard, 2007; Lord, 2012), and a new Animating Democracy publication (Borstal and Korza, 2017) offers a way forward to value aesthetic contributions in an ‘arts for change’ approach.

New leadership for the National Endowment for the Arts

In 2009, President Obama appointed Rocco Landesman, a Broadway theatre owner and producer, as his new Chair of the NEA. Upon taking office, Landesman faced a pitifully small budget, a prickly Congressional climate, and a cultural world dominated by large institutions and philanthropies. Landesman, owner of four theatres on Broadway and producer of path-breaking productions such as The Producers and Angels in America, the first Broadway drama dealing with the AIDS crisis, brought deep experience with commercial arts practices to the role. Moreover his deputy, Joan Shigekawa, the long-time Rockefeller Foundation⁵ Arts Program Director, was known as a silo-buster, reaching out to non-arts colleagues, embracing a more elastic notion of ‘the arts,’ and persisting in innovative arts grants despite push-back from traditional arts institutions. Shigekawa introduced Chair Landesman to academic research demonstrating that neighborhood-embedded arts produce positive results for communities’ jobs and business income, quality of life, public safety, and diversity (Stern and Seifert, 1998, 2007, 2008). Landesman and Shigekawa called their approach ‘creative placemaking.’ Landesman believed the arts in America were broadly viewed as elitist and left-wing. He coined a new slogan, ‘Art Works,’ which had triple meanings: the making of art (plays, books, paintings, compositions); how art works to move people; and the contributions of the arts to economic and social life. Together, they strategized how the arts could help America emerge from the throes of the recent Great Recession. Why not ask arts organizations and artists to walk out of their doors and studios and use their creative skills to work with partners to reinvigorate and help rebuild neighborhoods and communities? Why not tailor NEA funding to such partnerships?

Naming their initiative Our Town, they invited us to write a research-based White Paper to introduce it to their constituencies, Congress, and the public. Given only six to seven months to complete the study, we scanned the nation for mature cases of what could be dubbed ‘creative placemaking,’ analyzing characteristics and challenges. Senior Deputy Chairman Shigekawa asked that our case studies reflect the many dimensions of place diversity: older industrial cities, youthful suburban-style cities, small towns and ethnically distinctive places. And that diverse art forms (music, visual art, performance, design) be represented across the case studies. She also sought cases with cross-sector partnerships: at a minimum, one public and one non-profit organization. From these, we designed an analytical framework for understanding the creative placemaking process and its challenges. Chair Landesman requested that we estimate the national contribution of the arts to the national economy in our White Paper. This was daunting, given that the national income and product accounts don’t have a category dubbed ‘arts and culture.’ We used prior research we’d conducted exploring artistic occupational concentrations in industrial sectors to roughly estimate the arts’ shares of both GDP and net exports (Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus, 2013). Subsequently, the Research Director of the NEA, Sunil Iyengar, worked with the Bureau of Economic Analysis⁶ to produce annual cultural industry series: for example, in 2012, the arts generated $1.1 trillion in GDP and 4.7 million jobs, more than construction or agriculture (National Endowment for the Arts, 2013).

By the time the Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus’ study, Creative Placemaking (2010), was unveiled, Landesman and Shigekawa had put in place the design elements for the Our Town funding initiative. They required that every application must be submitted by a partnership that includes at least one public-sector agency and one non-profit, one of which must be an arts organization. They were clear that this didn’t mean simply a mayor’s or arts leader’s sign-off on a proposal, but major buy-in and a firm commitment of money and staff time from all partnering organizations.

Multiplying the arts’ loaves and fishes

In a complementary form of market research, Landesman, from the day of his arrival at the NEA, began touring the country to test the waters for Our Town. Alerting the press in advance and flanked by local arts leaders, Landesman pitched the stellar contributions of art and culture to mayors, journalists, and the public. In turn he listened to those he engaged with, bringing intelligence back to his team’s strategic conversations. Throughout his chairmanship, he travelled around the country at least two of every four weeks as he sought to take the pulse of the nation’s diverse communities, from major cities to tiny hamlets, gathering intelligence that would help the NEA to fashion its funding criteria and continually redesign the initiative.

Immediately following his move to Washington, Landesman began to leverage his tiny budget. ‘Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was,’ Landesman was fond of saying. ‘Money, in our case, was to be found across other federal agencies and in the private sector.’ Harnessing his producer talents and regarding himself informally as of Cabinet-level stature, he began dining with the Secretaries of the large, wealthy agencies – Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and those governing health and human services, labor, environmental protection, and national defense – pitching to them how arts and culture could help them with their missions. ‘The talking point stopped being “what you can do for arts,” to “what the arts can do for you,”’ explained Landesman in a 2015 interview with us. Rather than asking HUD or DOT for more money for the arts, he’d offer ‘let us help you build more attractive light-rail stations and more vibrant communities.’ Several large agencies began to incorporate the arts into major grant programs. With the US armed forces, the NEA pioneered creative arts therapy for active-duty military suffering traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic distress.

To expand the NEA’s effectiveness, Landesman and Shigekawa approached the presidents of major American fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction Curating research, theory and practice
• SECTION 1: Evolving Ecologies
• SECTION 2: Dialogical Ecologies
• SECTION 3: Scalable Ecologies
• SECTION 4: Challenging Ecologies
• SECTION 5: Extending Ecologies
• Index