INTRODUCTION

Creative placemaking happens when artists and arts organizations join their neighbors in shaping their community’s future — working together to produce beneficial, place-based outcomes. This practice is at its best when it is locally defined and informed and centers the people who live, work, and play in a place. The term “creative placemaking” was introduced to American communities in 2010 through a white paper authored by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. While artists’ involvement in cultivating communities stretches back to the earliest civilizations around the world, this paper summarized two decades of creative placemaking in the United States, with an emphasis on the role of the arts in livability and economic development. Over time, practitioners of creative placemaking have increasingly pushed the boundaries of traditional community planning and development and have demonstrated the effectiveness of building creative, cross-sector, interdisciplinary solutions to local challenges. Today, as the field of creative placemaking rapidly grows in rural, Tribal, suburban, and urban communities across the United States, the conversation has grown to encompass many other ways arts and culture can address community planning and development issues. The people and organizations who do this work are also more diverse than ever: they operate across sectors, strive to achieve a range of human-centered outcomes, and include everyone from artists to residents to teachers to professional community planners. Creative placemaking does not necessarily seek to make places more “creative” — instead, it empowers artists and their neighbors to creatively address local challenges and opportunities. Success in creative placemaking can be measured by the ways artists, formal and informal arts spaces, and creative interventions contribute to sustainable beneficial outcomes for communities. To support and advance this way of working, ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) was established by the National Endowment for the Arts as a collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions to position arts and culture as a core sector of community planning and development. Much of the work of community planning and development can be organized into 10 core sectors:

AGRICULTURE & FOOD ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION & YOUTH ENVIRONMENT & ENERGY HEALTH HOUSING IMMIGRATION PUBLIC SAFETY TRANSPORTATION WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

Inherent in each of these 10 sectors are specific goals and desired outcomes, and a particular set of strategies and tactics to achieve them. By exploring how arts and culture can contribute to positive place-based outcomes in each of these sectors, ArtPlace aims to develop open processes, shared languages, and common aspirations. The goal in this work is that communities continue to benefit from the powerful, cross-sector synergies generated by today’s creative placemaking practitioners.