![]() Harnessing creativityĬreative placemaking connects traditional economic placemaking with arts and cultural strategies. Placemaking began as an economic development strategy focusing on “ economic districts,” but recent shifts also call for thoughtful and sensitive social impact focusing on what residents and commuters want, like cultural activities, accessible parks, and healthy and sustainable food sold at farmers markets. Walkable, safe, comfortable and dynamic public spaces and buildings are key components to the creation of spaces where “people want to live, work, play and learn,” as Michigan State University urban planner Mark Wyckoff argues. The paper argues that successful cities need destinations: strong communities with distinct identities to help attract new residents, businesses and investment. More recently, the Project for Public Spaces published a Primer on Placemaking in 2022 titled “What if we build our cities around places?” Placemaking entered into the urban planning vocabulary in a 2010 white paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa for The Mayors’ Institute on City Design. Rather, urban planners and community leaders rely on proven techniques that bring them together with community members to practice what urban planners call placemaking, creative placemaking and placekeeping. ![]() Successful projects like this one don’t just happen. Consider as just one example Underground at Ink Block in Boston, a project that transformed an ordinary underpass into a place where neighbors come together to honor shared histories and play, connect and create community surrounded by outstanding street art. Public art projects are at the center of many revitalization projects, and they are crucial to the fabric and vitality of their communities. Places and spaces in which visitors and residents can convene and connect, be entertained, engage creatively, and find experiences that expand and challenge imaginations. Accessible transportation, diverse housing stock, good schools and jobs, to name a few. The answer is, many elements working together. Or, as urban planner Maria Rosario Jackson – now serving as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts – asks: What makes “a just place where people can thrive”? Art can help present the values that communities want to project and protect as a way of maintaining and creating great places to live. Public art is one way to highlight and honor our shared spaces even as we reshape them. I teach fine arts classes at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey, where I was raised.Īs an artist, I believe that it is important to preserve diverse communities with unique characteristics. I’m an educator, arts administrator and public policy fellow who has worked with Fortune 500 companies and exhibited my own photography nationally. By creating infrastructure that attracts new development, some of these projects will likely support gentrification. President Joe Biden’s 2023 budget proposes a US$195 million increase in the Community Development Block Grant program that targets development in 100 underserved communities. How to have the positive effects without the negatives isn’t obvious. This process is known as gentrification, and while a neighborhood “upgrade” can bring new vitality, diversity and opportunity, that is a win only if existing residents and businesses are not forced or priced out. are at risk of losing their historical identities as new people and businesses move in, displacing residents and affecting the fabric of the community. It’s an important question to ask now, I’d suggest, since many communities across the U.S. How can neighborhoods gentrify without erasing their heart and voice?
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