Building partnerships to support creative placemaking

This research was conducted by Jamie Levine Daniel and Mirae Kim at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and Georgia State University, USA

Summary

This paper describes the outcomes of a workshop on creative placemaking which brought together ‘local community leaders, planners, economic developers, tourism or cultural administrators’. Creative placemaking ‘intentionally leverages the power of the arts, culture, and creative initiatives to implement changes in communities’. It is designed to foster ‘livability’, ‘diversity’ and ‘economic revitalisation’ of towns and cities as well as rural communities. A major challenge for creative placemaking is getting local people to agree on shared goals and find affinity between different disciplines and organisations. People entered the workshop attuned to the resource challenges of creative placemaking, yet they left committing to develop networks and brainstorm ideas. This story of one workshop in rural Indiana ‘highlights the impact that short interventions can have in educating communities about creative placemaking and fostering the collaborations necessary for such implementation’.

The paper focuses on a workshop led by the Indiana Arts Commission in the US

Attendees to the day-and-a-half-long workshop completed surveys on registering and completing the programme. This resulted in 110 pre-workshop surveys and 74 post-workshop surveys. The surveys revealed that coming into the workshop, attendees highlighted economic development as their primary concern, which was also what they perceived to be the objective of most creative placemaking projects.

Attendees highlighted three main challenges for creative placemaking

The first was finding necessary resources, the second was getting community buy-in and the third was securing political or governmental buy-in. Just under half of the attendees left the workshop with plans to establish formal and informal networks within their communities to explore creative placemaking projects.