Creative Placemaking with an Economic Development Lens: Lessons Learned

Soulsville USA, south of downtown Memphis, used to be the sort of place where residents might bump into Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding or other stars in the course of their days. Home to Stax Records, the neighborhood attracted some of the biggest names in soul music. By the turn of this century, Soulsville had fallen on harder times, with a poverty rate of 50 percent.

But the Soulsville Foundation and nonprofit investor Community LIFT knew there was a rich cultural history  to build upon in the community. They began working to bring opportunity and vitality back to Soulsville by leveraging that musical legacy. The neighborhood today has new life, with a bustling commercial corridor anchored by the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the “Memphis Slim House,” a musicians’ collaborative space.

CommunityLIFT and the Soulsville Foundation recognized what so many community developers are learning: creative placemaking has valuable benefits for communities. It encourages cultural expression and inclusiveness, creates physical improvements, and provides jump starts to local economies, including small business attraction and job creation. As with so many aspects of community revitalization, however, this is easier said than effectively done.

At LISC, we have been supporting creative placemaking efforts formally through our creative placemaking initiative since 2014, and informally for decades. Creative placemaking is one strategy we use to catalyze economic opportunity in the communities where we work and we approach it with the goal of revitalizing communities without displacing their residents.

Since 2015, LISC has leveraged support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kresge Foundation to provide grants and technical assistance to 16 creative placemaking projects across the country. We have learned a great deal along the way about common challenges in creative placemaking practice and how to address or avoid them. In this article, we review some of the top lessons learned from our intensive focus on creative placemaking in the past few years.

We have found that creative placemaking works best when practitioners:

  1. Commit to it as an organization,
  2. Articulate a theory of change and communicate the value of this work,
  3. Understand and respect the local context,
  4. Build strong partnerships, and
  5. Plan for sustainability.

Commit to creative placemaking as an organization

It’s not unusual for a community developer to take on an art- or culture-focused project as a one-time experiment or a way to achieve a particular objective in the neighborhood. However, true creative placemaking is an approach to the universe of work in the community, encompassing housing, economic development, community engagement, physical revitalization, youth development, and even health and safety. Since this field provides a new way of looking at an old way of working, some community developers find it useful to take a step back and reframe the work they are already doing as creative placemaking and learn to think of themselves as creative placemakers.

Likewise, an organization will be most effective at creative placemaking if it embraces the creative approach in everything it does, and from the top down and the bottom up. While on-the-ground staff may lead the work from day to day, the executives and board ideally will also believe creative placemaking adds value to the entire enterprise. Some community-based nonprofits bring on staff experienced in arts and culture to support their work across the organization. This work is most effective when the organizational leadership invest in building organizational and individual capacity to do new ways of working, and where they encourage new approaches to problem solving.

In San Francisco’s Chinatown, some Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) staff wanted to use creative placemaking in its economic development efforts as a way of placekeeping, to ensure continued opportunity for low-income residents as the neighborhood underwent major changes with the addition a new subway stop. But first, they needed to convince the rest of the CCDC staff of the value of this approach. LISC worked with CCDC to set up peer learning opportunities with other organizations that had used culturally sensitive placemaking to prevent displacement in high-demand markets. Staff from CCDC’s real estate development, asset management and community engagement teams were able to see how creative placemaking could reinforce their departmental goals as well as the larger organizational mission.

Articulate a theory of change and communicate the value of creative placemaking

To be successful in creative placemaking, it’s important for any practitioner first to understand what the organization is trying to achieve and how creative placemaking will help move the needle. They should also be able to explain how this work fits in with the organization’s mission and overall strategies. This allows the practitioners to convey how creative placemaking can enhance all of their work rather than taking the focus away from their mission and core work. The theory of change is also helpful in setting internal indicators for the success of creative placemaking projects and program in the context of the broader work.

Articulating how creative placemaking works and communicating how it adds value helps build a case for support with both internal and external stakeholders. As noted above, sometimes people within the organization need to be persuaded of the value of the approach. More often, it is community members and potential supporters who need convincing. To external audiences such as local funders, partner organizations, the business community, or resident groups, creative placemaking can be an unknown or even threatening topic. Although many of the tenets of creative placemaking are intuitively understandable in principle, many community development practitioners (and even some artists) view the “arts” quite narrowly — as mere ornamentation, for example. Others may already grasp core principles, but not fully value arts and culture in community development on a par with other, more traditional approaches. Practitioners can build support by making it clear how the work will benefit the community and its residents in ways that go beyond the impacts of more traditional revitalization efforts.

New Jersey Community Capital (NJCC), a local CDFI, worked with LISC on its strategy for the Riverview Arts District in Jersey City. NJCC developed communications messages and materials for both internal and external audiences, intended to help potential borrowers, funders, and staff understand the role of creative placemaking for NJCC and its benefit for communities. NJCC staff is now prepared to carry the message to external stakeholders and is even looking ahead at ways to encourage borrowers and potential borrowers to consider incorporating creative placemaking as a way to have greater impact through comprehensive neighborhood development. For instance, explaining the value of creative placemaking to an affordable housing developer fund applicant and encouraging the developer to include a creative placemaking element in their housing project.

Understand and respect the local context

Local context is all-important in community development. In so many neighborhoods where LISC and our partners work, there are long-standing, endemic racial, cultural, social, economic, and political conditions that have produced patterns of mistrust and deeply rooted racial divides between residents and institutions.  Creative placemaking can be an excellent method to intentionally address these challenges, but communities that have experienced decades of disinvestment or have historical reasons to distrust outsiders or new modes of working may meet creative placemaking efforts with skepticism or resistance.

The community engagement process should amplify a range of community voices and respond to their needs and concerns. At its best, creative placemaking is a collaborative, resident-driven process that is done with — instead of to or for — community members. Community engagement efforts that are sincere, robust and ongoing will help practitioners navigate hyperlocal social climates and build stronger community relationships. To this end, it helps to identify artists that have a track record of successful community-based work and will not enter the project with the intention of imposing their vision on the neighborhood.

In Austin, the city parks department created a master plan for city aquatics facilities that included the necessary closure of several facilities due to resource constraints. The parks department staff, however, was keenly aware of the city’s history of segregation, racism, and gentrification surrounding public pools, particularly in East Austin, that left a legacy of mistrust between city government and residents, and was concerned about how the community would receive the new plan. The city reached out to Forklift Danceworks, founded in 2001 as an arts organization that “activates communities through a collaborative creative process.” Forklift helped create “My Park, My Pool, My City,” an artistic residence to foster dialogue between the parks department staff and community members about the master plan process. 

Build strong partnerships

Creative placemaking invariably requires partnerships – between community-based organizations, artists or arts organizations, residents, and often local government. All of these players might have different values, different goals and even different ideas about what constitutes “art.” Therefore, it’s important not only to identify the right partners to work with, but to take the time at the outset to build consensus for any given project or program: What are the goals? Who will play what role? How will decisions be made?  Developing mutual understanding across diverse specializations and sectors (like community development and arts and culture) requires clarifying assumptions, defining terms so partners can speak a common language and clearly identifying roles, responsibilities and success measures for each partner.

In Kansas City, a new municipal Office of Culture & Creative Services (OCCS) tackled the development of an infrastructure plan for the West Bottoms Reborn project, the physical and economic revitalization of a formerly industrial area. In so doing, OCCS integrated artists and artistic practice across city departments involved in the project, including KC Water and the health department. As the project progressed, it became clear that the different departments had different visions and expectations for the project and the process, including the role of artists. LISC offered technical assistance to OCCS and other partners, helping them develop a shared vision of success and understand the what artists can contribute to the planning process. Artists’ contributions can include more than just works of art as part of a project’s end product. They can also frame questions and help shape the process itself and work on complex issues like equity.

Plan for sustainability

To make creative placemaking efforts sustainable, practitioners and their partners must continue to build their internal capacity, strengthen collaborations and extend them into new areas, and cultivate systemic support for the work. This requires practitioners to focus on embedding creative approaches within their organizations and to think about the long-term sustainability of a creative placemaking practice, rather than concentrating narrowly on a set of arts-related deliverables. Ideally, the programmatic creative placemaking strategy will be accompanied by a financial strategy for sustainability, including plans for leveraging onetime grant awards into continued funding from multiple sources. In order to build financial support, practitioners need to gather and share evidence that creative placemaking makes a difference for their communities and constituents.

The Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP) serves youth on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. CRYP hosted an arts program for youth on the reservation, called the RedCan Graffiti Jam, that proved highly successful, but the organization needed a way to create a long-term strategy for its arts programming. LISC assisted CRYP to work with consultants to create a long-range plan for its arts work, with a specific focus on creating a leadership pipeline, building internal capacity, and evaluating and communicating the impact of the arts work. LISC and the other TA providers delivered all of the assistance with the understanding that the context for a Native group serving a Native population is very different than the context for a typical community-based organization.

Creative placemaking for economic development

A final recommendation is to view creative projects through an economic development lens, and vice versa. Arts- and culture-based projects can be a highly effective way to further economic revitalization efforts. The communities where we have supported this work have adopted a diverse portfolio of ways to pursue creative approaches to economic development, including developing cultural clusters, as Community LIFT did in Soulsville. Through marketing, arts entrepreneurship, youth career development, construction or rehab of physical spaces ranging from pop-ups to cultural campuses, community-based practitioners are conscious of the economic promise of their work. Well beyond “art for art’s sake,” community developers are using creative placemaking to accomplish more traditional revitalization goals.

Whether it takes place in rural South Dakota or downtown San Francisco, creative placemaking has the potential to transform communities and the lives of those who live in them. At LISC we have supported this work for many years and we have seen the results. The lessons we have learned – and continue to learn – help strengthen creative placemaking knowledge and practice every day. Learn more about LISC’s creative placemaking program, access our creative placemaking research, and see how the work takes shape in LISC sites.

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