Creative placemaking

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.

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