Facilitating Processes

Creative Placemaking Work in Local Government

Geared towards local government managers, this resource serves as a guidepost for municipal managers towards generating or creating creative placemaking efforts. It addresses creative placemaking’s main tenets while combatting misconceptions. Through an interactive tag system and case studies, readers are able to engage with this resource to understand creative placemaking’s ability to generate opportunity and provide solutions towards equity and community development.

Handbook for Artists Working in Community

A 116-page resource guide serves as a way for artists who would like to start or enhance their work within communities. The resource is broken into five sections: Artist Groundwork, Community Groundwork, Project Formation, Project Implementation, and Group Participation Tools.

Southeast Houston Arts Intiative

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.

Continuum of Impact Guide

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.

Inside Artist Municipal Partnerships Blog Salon

This online resource contains blog posts written by both artists and local government workers who have been involved in municipal artist in residence programs across the US. It contains lessons learned directly from the people involved in the programs.

Empowering Young People to Make Their Place

This report is a case study of a project in Brooklyn that works at the intersection of creative placemaking and public safety. In this project, young people from the community-led most of the planning and implementation processes, which ensured that communication with the community would result in something that they were actually interested in.

Social-Practice Residencies Toolkit

This online toolkit connects to a network of resources about social practice artist residency programs. The links to case studies are particularly useful as a way to learn from other projects, and reflections by artists who have participated in social practice residencies are also great learning tools as well as inspiration for why this work matters and can make a difference.

Planning & Designing Arts-Based Civic Engagement Projects

This toolkit provides a framework for thinking through a plan for arts-based civic engagement and dialogue projects. It guides artists and community organizers through a series of questions and is most helpful for early in the project development phase when going from an idea or a need to a real project.

Mapping the Landscape of Socially Engaged Artistic Practice

This report gives an overview and some examples of the role of a socially-engaged and community-based artist, differentiating them from a studio artist, for example. A social practice artist uses art, activism, and community engagement to work towards community and/or local government goals.

Artists Working In and Within Municipal Governments

This resource explores some of the ways that artists can be embedded within local government structures and processes through case studies of municipal artists.

An Artist’s Way of Seeing: Community Engagement in Creative Placemaking

This highly approachable article from Shelterforce tackles the misconception of the artist as an individualist by sharing stories of community-engaged artists.

Irrigate

Irrigate is a practical guide for how to create community-driven development, specifically with community artists. It outlines the steps and tools necessary, and also why community-driven processes are meaningful.

Field Guide for Creative Placemaking in Parks

This resource answers the question “How does creative placemaking make for better parks?” through interviews and real-world examples. It provides a loose framework for planning and implementing these types of projects.

Creative Placemaking: Knowledgebase Collection

This Knowledge Center portal from the American Planning Association allows you to search for resources that provide background and policy guidance on creative placemaking. You can also filter search results by various graphic and demographic characteristics.