Beautiful Communities: Our Visions for Creative Placemaking
“We are knitting communities together with yarns of colors the world rarely sees, beautiful colors, scary, glorious, challenging, risky colors – and that is exactly the yarn we want to use.”
- Marty Pottenger
By Mina Kim
A crescendo of drumming opened “Beautiful Communities: Our Visions for Creative Placemaking” with Resource Team member Scott Oshima guiding hundreds of folks from across the U.S. in awakening the giant catfish Namazu, a Japanese folk creature symbolizing social justice. As Scott explained, by adding “chaos” and “creativity,” we can “imagine a new way of being in our communities…and collectively, really shake things up.”
Throughout the reflective and delightfully zany imaginative journey facilitated by Resource Team members Marty Pottenger, Mark Valdez, and Scott Oshima, this belief in the power of collective creative action repeatedly emerged: that together, we can generate profound shifts in building communities of care and well-being through the arts, culture, and dreaming.
Marty illustrated the six superpowers of “creativity engagement,” emphasizing its abilities such as “tapping into flexible intelligence” and “inspiring the courage to take risks.” Mark shared The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe, a project incorporating theater, dance, and games to facilitate community conversations around affordable housing policies in four cities. He encouraged people to see art as more than a tool for gathering information, but rather, as a way “to offer paths and solutions and opportunities for action,” and to “use the art as an invitation to imagine and make beautiful futures.”
Using the magic of imaginary slides, attendees shared special moments in their creative placemaking experiences and their visions for the creative placemaking field in 2030, which surfaced several shared dreams: 1) Arts and creativity at the core of all cross-sector and community-based programs; 2) artists, culture bearers, and creatives elevated in well-supported leadership positions throughout civic life; 3) a sense of belonging, inclusion, and joy that celebrates people’s cultural experiences; and 4) an intersectional approach to creative placemaking that champions affordable housing, climate justice, and healthy communities for all living beings.
Resource Team members from coast to coast and in between echoed similar visions for 2030 during Scott’s live “weather report.” They forecasted “sparkle flares” igniting movements of creative change, envisioned creative placemaking being less about reacting to or preventing issues and instead “built into the modus operandi of community development,” all with an “80% of inspiration and 20% chance of ‘hail yeah!’”
Check out the beautiful dreams in the full recording, presentation slides, and chat excerpt here:
Workshop cover design illustrated by Jamie Horter