This handbook guide created by Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) provides commentary about the unique position arts, creative placemaking, and community development have in rust belt cities. CPAC shares in this handbook 15 themes and practices they developed when working with artists in community development..

This report evaluates the impact of Southeast Houston’s Arts Initiative through four main questions. From 22 interviews and four focus groups, the report examines the challenges the initiative faces and generates lessons for creative placemaking practitioners.

This report outlines the lessons learned from two case studies in St. Paul: Frogtown Green and Urban Flower Field. It goes through a lot of the nuts and bolts of creative placemaking projects in vacant spaces.

This is a case study of a program that combines social services with cathartic arts activities to enhance re-entry conditions in Philadelphia, with the goals of improving quality of life and public safety. It is one example of the link between creative placemaking and public safety. This report shares project successes and lessons learned.

This report identifies seven ways that creative placemaking contributes to equitable transportation development: generating creative solutions for entrenched transportation problems, making streets safer for all users, organizing transportation advocates, engaging multiple stakeholders for an inclusive process, fostering local ownership, alleviating the disruptive effects of construction, and healing wounds and divisions.

This scan considers the positive impact of place-based creative activity on public safety. They find that arts-based projects can enhance public safety efforts by promoting empathy and understanding, influencing law and policy, providing career opportunities, supporting community well-being, and contributing to quality of life.

This case study explores how creative placemaking activities contribute to the housing sector of community development. The report finds that arts activity can help articulate invisible housing challenges, nourish those who have experienced housing-related trauma, contribute to organizing housing campaigns, create bridges between residents, stabilize vulnerable communities, and generate economic development opportunities.

This report explores the potential for arts and cultural activity to contribute to community sustainability and resilience, in climate adaptability, energy, water, land, waste, and toxic pollution. The report finds that arts-based activities can help spark public demand by making environmental issues feel personal and real, build community capacity and agency, connected large-scale, abstract issues to personal experience, enrich and activate the built environment, and nurture sustainable economies.

“Cultivating Creativity” examines the potential for the arts to contribute to food systems and agriculture activity and change. The report finds that art can be used in food systems interventions to honor identity and heritage, address and heal community conflict, transform community spaces, drive equitable food development, preserve and reclaim food and farming traditions, and help facilitate community-led processes.

This field scan focuses on the intersection of creative placemaking and public health. It outlines the direct and indirect benefits that arts and culture can have on public health, which can be helpful for convincing municipal leaders to take on a similar project.

This field scan shows how water leaders (utility managers, public officials, farmers, river keepers, business leaders, manufacturers, community leaders, philanthropy, etc) have turned to artists and cultural leaders to achieve their goals in creative and potent ways. It provides recommendations, case studies, and potential outcomes for working at this intersection, which can be helpful for convincing municipal leaders to take on a similar project.