Page 10 - Toolkit

NEW PERSPECTIVES FROM THE NATIONAL CREATIVE PLACEMAKING SCENE
Examples of “Creative Placemaking” implementation can be found across time and geography. The landmark term came in 2010 and has since seen a wide range of research, practice, funding, writing and reworking. Big players in the recently titled field include:
1. Kresge Foundation
2. ArtPlace America
3. National Creative Placemaking
Consortium
4. Project for Public Places
5. Brookings Institute
6. Americans for the Arts
7. National Endowment for the Arts
and many others...
A multitude of unrecognized community efforts and nonprofits have always been doing this work. The “discovery” of the practice is similar to Christopher Columbus finding America. Before academics and consultants named the field, it was already a long- existing, , practiced, and honored act.
This work was not discovered nor did it suddenly appear when the term, Creative Placemaking hit the scene. There have always been artists, embedded in communities, doing their work, connecting people, improving properties, creating culture and acting
as unrecognized, undervalued “first investors” in neighborhood revitalization, sense of place, social connectedness, preserving or newly presenting unique cultures, interpreting social justice issues and contributing to local quality of life.
Undercapitalized “bottom-up” grass-roots efforts have always existed in disadvantaged and marginalized communities. However, much research and funding comes from “top-down” approaches where mainstream, dominant social forces with access to capital, political power and academic voice have the means to choose what to recognize and sanction.
Community artist activists who work in neighborhoods, create indigenous, local networks and deeply recognize the complexity of the social landscape where they live and whom they live among. Additionally, they have expressive and communication skills that can lift-up,
illuminate and explore what has been disempowered and disenfranchised.
Dominant culture extolls the persistent and damaging modern myth that imagines an artist, alone in a studio, who is discovered and glorified in museums. That myth
is an unattainable, useless rarity, mainly reserved for
few white men, who are lauded by upper classes. Meanwhile, society undervalues how our everyday lives are resplendent with the works of visual artists, musicians, designers, writers, sculptors, dancers, cooks, filmmakers, actors and others who make the visual, auditory, functional pleasures of almost everything with which we all have always interacted, across all cultures.
The field of Creative Placemaking, with all its faults and potential, brought an accepted language, quantitative proof and research to inform broader understanding
of the multiplicity of art, culture and Creative Entrepreneurialism’s role in both community development and the economy.
Beyond city planning, Creative Placemaking facilitates inventive uses that inclusively highlight local physical, cultural, and social identities. (*Project for Public Spaces) Further, the exploration in the field of Creative Placemaking has revealed new ways of looking at community health, shared prosperity and social equity.
Art and Culture are inseparable and an integrated core in the workings of society. The nature of art and culture are not separate or dismissible, nor is it only relegated to the starving individual painter or high-end museums. Language, festivities, food, dance, architectural
design, technology and every other aspect of a just, equitable, healthy society see art and culture as wholly foundational and integral.
By far, the single most important paradigm articulated in research about Creative Placemaking is to reveal, reiterate and illustrate the critical importance of bottom- up, intersectional approaches that include marginalized voices and combine multiple sectors who vary in
their approach to the determinants of all aspects of sustainable, equitable community wellness: culturally, physically, spiritually, psychologically sociologically, economically, environmentally, intellectually and systemically.
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