This report serves as a call to action to the arts sector to propagate equitable local economic growth through the “anchor framework” and describes how the arts sector through creative placemaking can foster community development and local economic growth. Through case studies of arts and culture organizations, it discusses the challenges and potential solutions for engagement with and within anchor institutions.

This report offers an examination of how to assess creative placemaking initiatives and, in general, community development strategies that target urban inequality. It offers key takeaways on how creative placemaking affects these kinds of communities.

Animating Democracy’s Continuum of Impact guide defines six families of social and civic outcomes that arts practitioners and their partners commonly aspire to and achieve through creative work. These outcome families articulate ways the arts contribute to making change happen.

Developed by Design Impact, this report looks at the work of over 30 social service organizations to develop a framework for how organizations can confront inequities from a human-centered design perspective. The work looks at the core question – how do we put equity in to practice.

This case study in Boston, MA is a small-scale creative placemaking project that opened up a larger discussion about the “aesthetics of belonging.” It approaches creative placemaking with a goal of revitalization without displacement, grounded in equity. This report shares the context of the neighborhood as well as successes and lessons learned from creative placemaking initiatives.

Creating Place is a multimedia collection of explorations, reflections, challenges, and offerings to the national dialogue around creative placemaking.

Roberto Bedoya impacted the direction of the field with this article, which is critical of what he sees as creative placemaking’s emphasis on neighborhood revitalization and economic development. He points out that without honoring equity, race, and justice at the center of creative placemaking, arts-based practice can easily be misapplied to reinforce existing barriers to opportunity and sense of belonging for marginalized people. He advocates for using creative placemaking to foster belonging and to achieve “strength and prosperity through equity and civility.”

This tool demonstrates the equity components that can be applied to the development of a Cultural Equity Plan. Cultural equity explicitly values the unique and collective cultures of diverse communities and supports their existence in physical spaces, in public policies and investment, and in expression in civic and spiritual life.

In this report for the Housing Assistance Council, Immonen points out that placemaking has been a part of indigenous experience for hundreds and thousands of years. She notes that the integration of the arts into whole community lives and activities that creative placemaking represents aligns with indigenous ways of knowing and sense of belonging. The report illuminates a great need for focused funding for creative placemaking for tribal organizations, and increased sensitivity to specific needs and ways of being of indigenous peoples.

This guide provides practical strategies, precedent, and best practices for municipal and community leaders to use creative placemaking for equitable social and economic development, celebrating community identity, governance, and physical design. Each chapter contains articles and case studies written by different practitioners around the US.