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Can art create a more livable place and enhance a community’s quality of life?
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), among others, believes so. NEA believes that art is an essential part of building a strong community, and as important as land use, transportation, education, housing, infrastructure, and public safety.
Communities across the nation are leveraging the arts and engaging design to make their communities more livable by enhancing quality of life; increasing creative activity; developing a distinct sense of place; and producing vibrant local economies that together capitalize on their existing assets.
This is what is referred to as Creative Placemaking.
While definitions of Creative Placemaking vary, here is how Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus define it:
"In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, nonprofit and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, tribe, city or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire and be inspired."
They also believe there are three creative placemaking core concepts, as outlined in a white pager on creative placemaking:
- Strategic action by cross-sector partners
- A place-based orientation
- A core of arts and cultural activities
NEA is not alone in engaging in creative placemaking.
ArtPlace, a consortium of foundations with government agencies serving as strategic advisors, focuses much of its work on creative placemaking. They developed a set of practices for successful placemaking in which art and culture work intentionally to help to transform a place:
- places artists and art at the center of planning, execution and activity
- leverages the creative potential already present in a place
- supports economic diversity in the community
- creates interesting places that capitalize on distinctiveness
- creates a place where people want to go and linger
- contributes to a mix of uses and people that makes places more diverse, more interesting and more active
- fosters connections among people and across cultures
- is always presenting itself to the public and encouraging pedestrian activity
- creates a place where business wants to be
- convinces people that a place can have a different and better future
The national nonprofit, Levitt Pavilions reinvigorates America’s public spaces through creative placemaking and creating opportunities for everyone to experience the performing arts. The Levitt program transforms abandoned, blighted places—whether a neglected and gang-infested park, a dormant downtown, or a toxic brownfield —into vibrant, welcoming destinations where families, friends and people of all ages and backgrounds come together for free, live music. Each Levitt venue is managed and programmed by a Friends of Levitt nonprofit, collectively presenting the largest free concert series in America. In addition, national Levitt has recently introduced a new grant initiative, the Levitt AMP [Your City] Grant Awards, to bring free concerts to small and mid-sized towns and cities across the U.S.
The success of creative placemaking is dependent upon collaborations between various civic stakeholders such as governments, private investment, not-for-profit organizations, artists and citizen groups.
And the Federal Government is joining in on the band wagon. Both HUD and the Department of Education have revised funding guidelines to encourage arts-based strategies as part of the Choice and Promise neighborhood programs.
NEA is helping out as well. To encourage communities to become involved in Creative Placemaking, NEA developed the Our Town grants to fund creative placemaking projects that contribute to the livability of communities and place the arts at their core.
Creative placemaking can be used to help revitalize a commercial corridor. For example, the District of Columbia’s Office of Planning used an ArtsPlace grant to develop Arts and Culture Temporiums in four emerging neighborhoods where vacant and/or underutilized storefronts and empty lots were transformed into artist showcases/villages for three to six months. They brought arts to the community through pop-up art galleries, impromptu dance performances, and the design of colorful urban street furniture. One project was a stretch along 14th Street, NW where the whole community came together to sand, paint and assemble bright blue hippo-shaped planters and a purple and red porch swing along a commercial corridor. The whimsical street furniture helped to activate the street in this transitioning neighborhood.
Commercial real estate developers are also engaging in creative placemaking. The JBG Companies teamed up with Art Whino in Washington, DC for the creation of the N Street Mural Project within the NoMa neighborhood. The project’s mission is to activate a block on N Street using murals as the primary vehicle for activation. JBG, known for its place-making expertise, was inspired by the place-making efforts of the NoMa BID (Business Development District), and wanted to respond by helping to activate and improve spaces prior to their redevelopment.
Local artists can take advantage of vacant lots and underused properties in their communities by transforming them into hubs of activity and prosperity. In St. Paul, the Minnesota Blue Ox artist group came up with a novel idea to transform a 15-acre plot of land on the former Schmidt Brewery into a mini-golf park that also functions as an urban park. Blue Ox Mini Golf is creating an artist-designed mini-golf course that functions as an inviting community space to bring people together for fun, outdoor recreation and art appreciation.
What started out as a way to eliminate graffiti turned into an award-winning project that helps to stimulate a sense of neighborhood pride and collective ownership. The Hayward (CA) Mural Art Program creates artistic representations of Hayward’s rich cultural diversity. The murals invite participation from everyone in the community to create something of value in the neighborhoods where they live. While this program supports multiple blight elimination efforts, beautification, and the promotion of civic pride, its true success shines through in neighborhood enrichment and downtown rejuvenation.
ARTblocks helps Baltimore communities grow an organized plan for transforming the spaces around them into safer, more artful, and livable places that connect people to the environments in which they live. ARTblocks are positive public places created by people for people. An organic sculpture was created in Druid Hill Park in Baltimore to provide a venue for a story hour at the Druid Hill Park Farmers Market and provided the community’s children with an opportunity to learn, grow, and socialize. And the community was invited to come watch it grow all summer.
And lastly, why can’t art be something to sit or play on? Miami artist Emmett Moore created Points of Pine (2014) which is currently sited in Collins Park as part of the Bass Museum of Art’s tc: temporary contemporary program an encourages physical engagement. To complement the park’s benches, the artist decided to create two free-standing platforms, with the idea of making (semi-)permanent ‘picnic blankets’ for visitors.
Hopefully this post has inspired you to think about how art can help transform a space in your community into a vibrant place for the community to gather and enjoy a little art and culture.
What space in your community could create a sense of place with a little art and culture?
