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Why Creative Placemaking?

Arts, culture, and design are essential to building strong communities where all people can thrive. Creative placemaking happens when artists, arts organizations, and community development practitioners integrate arts, design, and culture into community work—by placing the arts at the table with other sectors, such as agriculture and food, economic development, education and youth, environment and energy, health, housing, public safety, transportation, and workforce development.

Creative placemaking demonstrates the ways in which artists, culture bearers, and designers can help to:  

• Bring new attention to or elevate key community assets and issues, voices of residents, local history, or civic infrastructure;

• Inject new or additional energy, resources, activity, people, or enthusiasm into a place, community issue, or local economy;

• Envision new possibilities for a community or place—a new future, a way of approaching a new opportunity, overcoming a challenge, or problem-solving;

• Connect communities, people, places, and economic opportunity through physical spaces or new partnerships and relationships; or

• Honor traditions shaped by the lived experience of a community’s residents, such as music, dance, design, crafts, fashion, cuisine, and oral expression.

Creative Placemaking and Systems Change

Creative placemaking projects explore innovative solutions for local challenges. Collectively, they lay the groundwork for systems change where art, culture, and design are at the heart of every community. As local leaders see how cross-sector partnerships utilizing art and creative placemaking strategies improve outcomes, they replicate and extend those approaches.

As we have seen in the Our Town program, where nonprofit entities partner with local government, creative placemaking work can have catalytic and rippling impacts across communities. These cross-sector partners bring the connections and learnings from this work into their own spheres of influence thereby broadening the messages and deepening the impact in social, economic, and physical ways.

Creative placemaking projects can manifest systems change in diverse ways, such as establishing new and sustained cross-sector partnerships, shifting institutional structure, practices, or policies, replicating or scaling innovative project models, establishing training programs, or disseminating informational resources to support the creative placemaking field. 

Learn more: NEA Theory of Change and Our Town Logic Model

Top: Praise House Project, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Atlanta, GA. Photo by Julie Yarbrough Photography LLC.