Creative Placemaking Is More Than Just Murals

Recently the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published an issue of their Community Development Innovation Review  (CDIR) focused on “Transforming Community Development through Arts and Culture.” If you think it strange that a Federal Reserve Bank should be devoting an entire 200 page issue to this topic, a few years back I wrote about a Non-Profit Executive Transition Toolkit published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.  Some interesting things related to non-profit arts come out of these banks periodically.

I am only about a quarter of the way through the CDIR issue which is comprised of many short pieces by different arts, cultural and community development professionals around the country. There was a piece by Paul Singh from NeighborWorks America, (page A49) an organization he describes as providing capacity-building resources to 250 community development organizations nationwide.

What caught my eye was Singh’s list of challenges organizations face “in pursuing creative community development.”

• Insufficient understanding of the potential value of creativity, cultural expression, and artistic practice to community development
• Difficulty demonstrating and articulating the impact of creative community development
• Struggle with identifying arts partners and developing shared expectations and frameworks
• Need to avoid gentrification-led displacement and promote inclusion
• Difficulty in securing financial resources

Even though I generally advocate for staying away from discussing the utilitarian or prescriptive value of the arts, (e.g. add art to solve X problem), the fact that people even had difficulty providing justification on that basis points to a need for people in the creative field to become more skilled at discussing the value of arts and culture. Ideally, the area in which people become most adept is explaining the value for its own sake–why they enjoy it; what it makes them feel or think; how it contributes to personal growth; how sharing the experience with others strengthens bonds with family and friends.

But again, acknowledging that we live in a society which has evaluates everything in the context of utilitarian, neo-liberal value sets, it is prudent to be skilled in carrying on a discussion in those terms so you can introduce the idea there are other ways of measuring value.

Singh expounds a bit on where organizations in NeighborWorks network meet some obstacles:

Many network organizations that we spoke to shared that their early efforts were limited by preconceived notions of what constitutes “art” or “creative placemaking.” They initially tended to prioritize artistic products (e.g., the archetypal mural project) over partnerships with artists that could yield creative ways of addressing a range of problems. Community developers can also be risk-averse, which can limit receptivity to creative processes that delve into ambiguity or the unexpected.  External models and examples that can expand the vision are often required, along with an internal champion who pushes boundaries, to introduce and keep creative community development at the forefront of an organization’s strategy.

I was really hoping he would provide some concrete examples about what type of approaches had worked in different communities, but much of what he indicated needed to be done was general and theoretical. In some instances, I got the impression that implementation of some strategies was so new there hadn’t been time to let them work, much less collect data on their effectiveness.