NEA report on creative placemaking offers good ideas for cultural professionals and artists
Creative Placemaking is an interesting and informative white paper from the Mayors Institute for City Design at the National Endowment for the Arts. Cultural professionals, civic-minded artists, economic development professionals and urban planners can get a lot of good ideas from it. But be careful when reading it.
The authors highlight impressive numbers to show the benefits of arts-based community and economic development. They talk about the key ingredients to be successful at creative placemaking. And they tell inspiring stories of wonderful projects and places.
You might think that creative placemaking would be easy. After all, the numbers should speak for themselves. If you put the ingredients together, good things should happen. Other places did it, and from what's in the stories, it doesn't seem that hard to repeat their successes, no?
Unfortunately, no. Creative placemaking -- like any kind of community and economic development -- takes patience, persistence, commitment and adaptation. People who are otherwise reasonable may seem irrational when you just show numbers. There is no paint-by-numbers approach to placemaking that works for everyone. (In fact, placemaking is like painting on a moving canvas with paints that fade and blend in ways you can't predict.) Short success stories tend to be glossy. Even when they're not, the combination of things that worked for one place won't automatically work for another.
Placemaking is rarely as easy or as fast as it seems in the slide shows and success stories. But if you're willing to share the time, energy, resources and credit -- and you're willing to be both grounded and flexible -- you'll be more likely to succeed.
Arts Build Communities in partnership with the Bloustein Online Continuing Education Program offers courses in creative placemaking. These courses help you learn skills and get deeper insights into how places connect the arts with community and economic development. You can earn a Bloustein Professional Certificate in Cultural Planning and Development. All of these can help you influence leaders and lawmakers, artists and economic developers.
Upcoming courses in the Cultural Planning and Development track include:
- Building Creative Communities
- Building Sustainable Creative Communities
- Programming Cultural Uses
- Cultural Heritage Tourism
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