Routledge Studies in Human Geography

CREATIVE PLACEMAKING
RESEARCH, THEORY AND PRACTICE
Edited by
Cara Courage and Anita McKeown
Creative Placemaking

This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting

grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and arts-
led spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book
brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative
placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and
policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010
White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne
Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector
and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued
through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes
with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next
ten years for the sector.
If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizen-
led agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This
book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resi-
lient processes.

Cara Courage is an arts and placemaking academic and practitioner and is Head of Tate
Exchange, Tate’s programme and spaces dedicated to socially engaged art and the role of
art in society. Her book, Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (2017),
presents case-study research on social practice placemaking. Cara has also completed a
project as Research Adjunct on the metrics of creative placemaking with Thriving Cities,
an initiative of University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and
continues her own social practice arts in place projects.

Anita McKeown is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher working in creative

placemaking, Open Source Culture/Technology and STEAM (science, technology, engi-
neering, arts and mathematics) education. Anita works for Art Services Unincorporated
(ASU), an itinerant strategic platform which co-creates local-scale interventions that are
context-responsive and ecologically sensitive, arising from extended relationships with
people and place. ASU’s interventions are underpinned by the permacultural resilience
framework and practical toolkit, a critical praxis for Creative Placemaking, trialled in
London, Dublin and New Mexico (2008–15). Anita’s current research includes codesres:
Co-designing for resilience in rural development through peer-to-peer networks and
STEAM.
Routledge Studies in Human Geography

This series provides a forum for innovative, vibrant, and critical debate within
Human Geography. Titles will reflect the wealth of research which is taking place
in this diverse and ever-expanding field. Contributions will be drawn from the
main sub-disciplines and from innovative areas of work which have no particular
sub-disciplinary allegiances.

Place, Diversity and Solidarity

Edited by Stijn Oosterlynck, Nick Schuermans and Maarten Loopmans

Towards A Political Economy of Resource-dependent Regions

Greg Halseth and Laura Ryser

Crisis Spaces
Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe
Costis Hadjimichalis

Branding the Nation, the Place, the Product

Edited by Ulrich Ermann and Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik

Geographical Gerontology
Edited by Mark Skinner, Gavin Andrews, and Malcolm Cutchin

New Geographies of the Globalized World

Edited by Marcin Wojciech Solarz

Creative Placemaking
Research, Theory and Practice
Edited by Cara Courage and Anita McKeown

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routle-

dge-Studies-in-Human-Geography/book-series/SE0514
Creative Placemaking
Research, Theory and Practice

Edited by Cara Courage

and Anita McKeown
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Cara Courage and Anita McKeown;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Cara Courage and Anita McKeown to be identified as the
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Contents

List of figures viii

List of contributors ix
Preface xiv
Acknowledgements xvi
List of abbreviations xvii

Introduction: Curating research, theory and practice 1

CARA COURAGE AND ANITA MCKEOWN

SECTION 1
Evolving Ecologies 9

1 Creative placemaking: Reflections on a 21st-century American

arts policy initiative 11
ANN MARKUSEN AND ANNE GADWA NICODEMUS

2 Spaces of vernacular creativity reconsidered 28

TIM EDENSOR AND STEVE MILLINGTON

SECTION 2
Dialogical Ecologies 41

3 Turning local interests into local action: Community-based

art and the case of Wrecked! On the Intertidal Zone 43
DOMINIC WALKER

4 Arrivals and departures: Navigating an emotional landscape of

belonging and displacement at Barangaroo in Sydney, Australia 56
SARAH BARNS
vi Contents
5 A case for human-scale social space in Mumbai 69
ADITI NARGUNDKAR PATHAK

SECTION 3
Scalable Ecologies 81

6 A rural case: Beyond creative placemaking 83

MARGO HANDWERKER

7 Creative placemaking in peri-urban Gothenburg: Mission

impossible? 94
MICHAEL LANDZELIUS AND PETER RUNDQVIST

8 A conversation between a collaborating artist and curator:

Placemaking, socially engaged art, and deep investment in
people 109
JIM WALKER AND SHAUTA MARSH

SECTION 4
Challenging Ecologies 125

9 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for

placemaking 127
TORANGE KHONSARI

10 Place guarding: Activist art against gentrification 140

STEPHEN PRITCHARD

11 Outros Espaços: Apathy and lack of engagement in

participatory processes 156
LUÍSA ALPALHÃO

SECTION 5
Extending Ecologies 171

12 Towards beauty and a civics of place: Notes from the Thriving

Cities Project 173
ANNA MARAZUELA KIM AND JOSHUA J. YATES

13 From indicators to face validity to theory – and back again:

Measuring outcomes of U.S. creative placemaking projects 187
SUNIL IYENGAR
 Contents vii
Conclusion: Moving into the beyond – What’s next for creative
placemaking? 200
ANITA MCKEOWN AND CARA COURAGE

Index 213
Figures

4.1 Families using the vintage typewriter in Arrivals and Departures,

Barangaroo Cutaway, 2015 58
4.2 Former residents and maritime workers projected within Barangaroo
Cutaway, with shipping containers as ‘Storyboxes’. Arrivals and
Departures, Barangaroo Sydney, 2015 59
6.1 M12 Studio (2016). The Breaking Ring. On view at the Center for
Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, New Mexico 88
6.2 M12 Studio, with Onix Architects (2015–2016). Last Chance
Module Array (Modules No. 4 and 5). Last Chance, Colorado 90
7.1 Apartment building in the Hammarkullen neighborhood with
a windowless concrete gable remade into a public work of art:
Every time I look up I feel happy, when I look down I’m sad, by
the British artist Ben Eine 99
8.1 What is our work: Big Car Collaborative takes a holistic approach
to its work, seeing placemaking as a strategy for reaching
important, broader goals with communities 114
8.2 Why is this work so important: It’s all about the ‘why’ or
the motives behind placemaking in the view of Big Car
Collaborative’s team. Putting it in words helps clarify and
guide the work 119
11.1 Outros Espaços project online archive 160
11.2 Escritório de Rua interviews with local residents 163
11.3 Conversas no Sofá, interviews with and by Beja II’s residents
about the history and future of the neighbourhood 163
11.4 Renata conducting interviews with the local residents 168
13.1 National Endowment for the Arts (2015), The Arts and
Livability Indicators 191
13.2 National Endowment for the Arts (2017b), Our Town’s Theory
of Change 196
13.3 National Endowment for the Arts (2017b), Our Town’s
Logic Model 197
Contributors

Luísa Alpalhão is a London- and Lisbon-based architect and artist and founding
member of the architecture, art and design platform atelier urban nomads.
Luísa has an MA in Architecture and Interiors from the Royal College of Art
and is currently a PhD candidate at The Bartlett School of Architecture,
University College of London, with a scholarship from Fundação para a
Ciência e Tecnologia. Her research consists of developing a methodology for
the making of participatory processes that can potentially become a pedago-
gical tool for the inhabitation and understanding of urban shared spaces.
Sarah Barns is a creative producer and researcher working across urbanism,
placemaking and experiential media. She co-directs the Sydney-based media
arts and design practice Esem Projects, and is a Research Fellow at the
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Sarah has led
the creation of over twenty permanent and temporary installations across
Australia and New Zealand, and continues to advise public and private
agencies in fields spanning public art, urban strategy and community engage-
ment. Her research has been published across a range of journals including
Space & Culture, City Journal, Senses and Society and Architectural Review,
among others.
Tim Edensor teaches Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan Univer-
sity and is currently a visiting scholar at Melbourne University. He is the
author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and
Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality
(2005) and From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017) as
well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010). Tim has written
extensively on national identity, tourism, ruins and urban materiality, mobi-
lities and landscapes of illumination and darkness. He is currently writing a
book about stone in Melbourne.
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus is a leading voice in the intersection of arts and
community development. Her company, Metris Arts Consulting, provides
planning, research and evaluation services to reveal arts’ impacts and help
communities equitably improve cultural vitality. Recent Metris projects span a
x Contributors
case study of how a creative space in Zimbabwe fosters activism to a planning
process that integrates arts and culture into the work of a community devel-
opment organization with 250 affiliates. Since 2012, Nicodemus has been
recognized as one of the USA’s 50 most influential people in non-profit arts in
WESTAF’s annual peer-nominated list.
Margo Handwerker is the Director of the Texas State Galleries and a researcher
member of the M12 Collective. She is the co-author of A Decade of Country
Hits: Art on the Rural Frontier (2014).
Sunil Iyengar directs the Office of Research & Analysis within the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), an agency of the US government. He is
responsible for overseeing studies, program evaluations and analyses about
the value and impact of the arts. Among his accomplishments at the NEA has
been establishing a research grants program– with a special track for experi-
mental and quasi-experimental study designs – and a ‘Research Labs’ pro-
gram fostering transdisciplinary partnerships between researchers and arts
practitioners. He chairs a federal Interagency Task Force on the Arts and
Human Development, has edited dozens of NEA research publications and
data visualizations and has led the development of the National Archive of
Data on Arts & Culture, a free data repository available at www.icpsr.umich.
edu/icpsrweb/NADAC/.
Torange Khonsari is an academic and practitioner specialised in citizen-led city
development. She co-founded the art and architecture practice Public Works
(2004), an inter-disciplinary practice working in the threshold of participatory
art, architecture, anthropology and politics that tests and implements the
academic research undertaken at The Cass, London Metropolitan University.
Khonsari is a Consultant on the Specialist Assistant Team (SAT) of the Mayor
of London on community development and cultural curation in regeneration.
She is Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University where she runs MA
Design for Cultural Commons. She has been a Consultant to UN Habitat on
sustainable development.
Anna Marazuela Kim is a Research Fellow of the Thriving Cities Lab at the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, where
she advances research on the role of art and aesthetics in civic thriving. Kim
is an art historian and cultural theorist who writes and lectures on our complex
relation to images and their continuing ethical challenge, from Plato to the
digital age. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and
member of several international research groups. Currently she is a Visiting
Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at University College
London.
Michael Landzelius is Director of the Urban Safety and Societal Security
Research Center (URBSEC) at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers Uni-
versity of Technology. He is Associate Professor, positioned at the Department
 Contributors xi
of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. He did his PhD in
Conservation of Built Environments, with an approach shaped under a post-
graduate year studying Geography at University of California Berkeley and
Syracuse University. Michael also spent two years as a postdoc in Geography at
the University of Cambridge. In addition to his present role as URBSEC
Director, he is Project Leader in a four-year research project entitled Reconci-
liatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations.
Ann Markusen is Principal of Markusen Economic Research (annmarkusen.com)
and Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include
Creative Capital Artists Look Back (2016); City Creative Industry Strategies
(2012); Creative Placemaking (2010); Native Artists; Crossover: How Artists
Build Careers across Commercial, Non-Profit and Community Work (2006);
and Artists’ Centers (2006). Markusen, who has a PhD in Economics from
Michigan State University, was Professor at Minnesota, Rutgers, Northwestern,
California Berkeley and Colorado Universities; Fulbright Lecturer, Brazil;
White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University; Bousfield Distinguished Profes-
sor, University of Toronto; Harvey Perloff Visiting Chair, UCLA; UK Fulbright
Distinguished Chair, Glasgow School of Art; and is currently a member of the
National Advisory Board Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.
Shauta Marsh is a co-founder of Big Car Collaborative, formed in 2004. From
2011 to 2015 she was Executive Director of the Indianapolis Museum of
Contemporary Art (iMOCA). There she curated and/or organized more than
forty exhibitions with artists including LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tony Buba,
Trenton Doyle Hancock and Richard Mosse. She returned to Big Car in
March 2015 as a Commissioning Curator and Program Director for its new
headquarters, Tube Factory artspace. Since opening the 12,000 square foot
museum/community center hybrid, she has worked with artists Carlos Rolón,
Jesse Sugarmann, LaShawnda Crowe Storm, Mari Evans, Pablo Helguera,
Scott Hocking and many others.
Steve Millington is a Director of the Institute of Place Management and a Senior
Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. Work-
ing in partnership with key industry stakeholders and local centres, he is a co-
investigator on two major research projects analyzing town centre change and
development in the UK: ESRC-funded High Street UK2020 and Innovate-
funded Bringing Big Data to Small Users. Steve is co-editor of two edited
collections, Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (2009) and Cosmopolitan Urban-
ism (2005). He has published research on several facets of placemaking,
including lighting and place, and the relationships between football clubs and
their localities. Formed in 2006, the Institute of Place Management is the
international professional body that supports people committed to developing,
managing and making places better. The concept for the Institute was devel-
oped by the Manchester Metropolitan University and the Association of Town
Centre Management in the UK.
xii Contributors
Aditi Nargundkar Pathak is an architect and urban designer. She leads the
placemaking initiative The Urban Vision, enabling the use of public art in
plazas and designing human-centric streets and innovative plazas in Indian
cities. She has led and completed multiple demonstration projects creating
small social spaces which have changed the safety, aesthetics and use of the
city’s public spaces. She is a visiting faculty in various colleges of architec-
ture and urban planning in Mumbai.
Stephen Pritchard is a Fine Art Tutor at Northumbria University. He recently
completed an AHRC-funded research-based PhD entitled Artwashing: The Art
of Regeneration, Social Capital and Anti-Gentrification Activism. He is an art
historian, critical theorist, activist, writer, curator and community artist. His
interdisciplinary approach to research is grounded in post-critical ethnography,
radical art history, Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Critical Urban
Theory. He has presented papers internationally, lectures widely and has had
several journal articles published to date. He also was commissioned by The
Guardian to write an article entitled ‘Hipsters and Artists are the gentrifying
foot soldiers of capitalism’ in 2016. Stephen is also a member of the Move-
ment for Cultural Democracy and Artists’ Union England, and is a founding
member of Isla99, Artists Against Social Cleansing and Socially Engaged and
Participatory Arts Network. He has worked in the arts since 2007 and founded
the community arts organisation dot to dot active arts CIC in 2013.
Peter Rundqvist has for many years been part of the City Council administra-
tion of Gothenburg, developing and leading different EU-financed sustainable
urban development projects. He is a sociologist specialised in the field of art
and culture related to social cohesion and migration in contemporary urban
development processes.
Dominic Walker is a cultural geographer at Royal Holloway, University of
London. His research explores the interface between art, politics and science
in contemporary environmental humanities discourse. Walker presented papers
at the Royal Geographical Society (2015, 2016, 2018) and American Associa-
tion of Geographers (2016) annual international Geography conferences,
alongside guest lectures in Pittsburgh (2015) and Exeter (2014, 2015). He
has collaborated with several international artists, and was a Visiting Research
Fellow in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art (2015) and the Center
for PostNatural History (2015). He has published in Society and Space (2015)
and has a further two papers awaiting submission to the journals GeoHuma-
nities and Area.
Jim Walker is CEO of Big Car Collaborative, an Indianapolis, Indiana-based
nonprofit social practice art and placemaking non-profit. Walker serves as
lead artist on Spark Placemaking, a Big Car program bringing engagement-
based public programming and people-focused design to communities. He
also leads Big Car’s work to utilize cultural strategies to support equitable
revitalization in long overlooked neighborhoods south of downtown
 Contributors xiii
Indianapolis. Walker – who received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in
Asheville, N.C. – has worked as a teacher, journalist, designer, and public
artist. He also currently teaches in the University of Indianapolis Social
Practice Art and Placemaking graduate program.
Joshua J. Yates is a cultural sociologist and social entrepreneur whose work
bridges the worlds of academic theory and social practice. He is currently
Research Director of the Thriving Cities Lab, an initiative of University of
Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, where his scholarly work
focuses on the changing paradigms of civic life in 21st-century urban
contexts, and Chief Executive Officer of the Thriving Cities Group, a non-
profit organization equipping cities to cultivate their civic capacity and civic
infrastructure through community-centred data, technology and advice.
Preface

This book has arisen from a transatlantic conversation between eponymous

creative placemaking conference sessions at the Royal Geographical Society,
Exeter, 2015, and the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco,
2016. These sessions worked to unpick the notion of creative placemaking and
offered a practitioner-led critique and examples of practice in conversation with
an academic- and research-based discourse. As placemaking practitioners and
researchers, we both felt that the arts-driven placemaking sector had reached a
moment in both maturity and breadth where it demanded critique and a deeper
understanding of practice, requiring in turn a meaningful and dynamic dialogue
between theorists and practitioners. If creative placemaking is to contribute to
places-in-the-making (Silberberg, 2013) and encourage citizen-led agency, new
conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies will be required, advocating
transdisciplinary, resilient processes and new models of theory and practice. This
book aims to be part of that sector development.
Creative placemaking is often addressed as a subset of placemaking and is
commonly, and this book would argue, reductively, recognised for the instru-
mentalised potential of art to contribute to regeneration and revitalisation. Such
an approach has little engagement with the heritage of non-object arts, design or
architectural practices, those situated interventions and durational practices that
have emerged over fifty years of ‘arts in place’ and in much placemaking
spanning both the social and public realms. This book works then to interrogate
a populist or sector vernacular definition and understanding of creative place-
making and to extend its definitions and understandings through both academic
and practitioner voices. As a still-nascent field, emerging from a US policy
platform, creative placemaking is still evolving, yet enacted at a global scale. A
review of key funders from 2010 to 2015 by co-editor Anita McKeown revealed
that the majority of creative placemaking projects were artists’ live-work spaces,
cultural quarters, landmark arts centres or monumental public artworks. This
focus does little to advance the field or present emergent praxis, which is
systemic in its approach. The book aims to address this deficit by representing
a range of practices across themes that are pertinent to the social or public realms
and to signal progressive changes to future challenges. A range of scholars and
artist-scholars present socially practiced, co-produced and citizen-led placemakings
 Preface xv
as an inside-out response rather than simply a bottom-up need or desire or top-
down imposition, with artists, participants and a range of creatives and other
professions forming ecologies of practice.
The chapters in this book don’t all agree with each other – it is not our
purpose to form a consensus, but to give a platform to a diverse cohort of voices
across the maturing creative placemaking sector, and to prompt the reader into
their own critique, reflection on their own practice and position in the sector. We
embrace differing perspectives and opinions in the construction of our conference
session and this book, each chapter in dialogue with others and inviting further
research and debate, which we hope will have a life beyond the publication. We
are honoured too to have the reflexive voice from the founding of creative
placemaking and from its practice, offering a mix of first- and third-person
narrative, conversation and reflection, a reflection itself on the nature of a
critiquing enquiry and of the prominence of the active placemaker, a ‘thinking
through doing’ and of practice-based research. With professional practices in
social practice curation (Cara), as an artist (Anita) and as placemakers (both), we
took a curatorial approach to the conferences sessions, and have done so again
for this book. This approach is discussed in the opening chapter.

Both UK and American English feature in this publication, recognising the voice of
contributors and direct quotes from other texts, artists and project participants.

Reference
Silberberg, S. (2013) Places in the Making: How placemaking builds places and commu-
nities. MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning [Online] Available at: http://dusp.
mit.edu/cdd/project/placemaking (Accessed: 13 August 2015)
Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors for their dedicated work and
inspired contributions to this book, as well as the team at Routledge. Thanks are also
due to the Royal Geographic Society, UK, and the Association of American
Geographers, USA, for giving an ongoing platform to bring arts into geographical
contexts and organising the conferences that were the beginning setting of this
publication. We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge two of our
valued session contributors, Marie Mahon, Ireland, and Eje Kim, Republic of Korea,
who were unable to contribute to this publication. Furthermore, we would like to
thank all those communities and artists referenced in this book for their invaluable
contribution to questioning and extending creative placemaking practice.
Abbreviations

a2ru Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities

AAF American Architectural Foundation
AAG American Association of Geographers
ASU Art Services Unincorporated
AUD Australian dollars
AUN Atelier Urban Nomads
BHAAAD Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement
BSC Balfron Social Club
CAE Critical Art Ensemble
CCI[s] Cultural and Creative Industries
CEO[s] Chief Executive Officer[s]
CLT[s] Community Land Trust[s]
DOT Department of Transportation
ERDF European Regional Development Fund
GDNE Gothenburg Development North East
HUD Housing and Urban Development Department
IHRU Instituto de Habitação e Reabilitação Urbana
iMOCA Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art
LGBTQI+ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and
Intersex
LQC Lighter-Quicker-Cheaper
MACLA Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana
MICD Mayors’ Institute on City Design
MSB Maritime Housing Board
NEA National Endowment for the Arts
NGO[s] Non-Governmental Organisations
NSW New South Wales
ORU Operações de Reabilitação Urbana/Urban Rehabilitation
Operations
PwC PricewaterhouseCoopers
RFP Request for Proposals
RGS Royal Geographical Society
RSPB Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
xviii Abbreviations
RTR Roman Road Trust
SEK Swedish krona
SIAP Social Impact of the Arts
SNAG Southwark Notes Archive Group
STEAM Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics
TRF The Reinvestment Fund
URBSEC Urban Safety and Societal Security Research Center
USCM United States Conference of Mayors
V&A Victoria and Albert Museum
VALI Validating Arts and Livability Indicators
Introduction
Curating research, theory and practice
Cara Courage and Anita McKeown

The curatorial approach taken to the conference sessions this book has arisen
from, and to the book itself, was a deliberative, and, as arts practitioners, intuitive
act, orientated as we are towards an expansive understanding of the role of the
curator and the curatorial praxis.
The arts sector has seen a curatorial turn that has widened its scope from art
museum or gallery exhibition to include ‘enabling, making public, educating,
analysing, criticising, theorising, editing and staging’ (Jackson, 2015, p.62) – the
knowledge base of the curator has expanded and been de-centred, and multiple
disciplines have been incorporated into its purview. We take this a stage further to
include academic presentation across research dissemination platforms and the
practitioner voice in the academy. Within our practice and academic fields (sepa-
rated here only notionally), we see an ‘entanglement of actors’ (Jackson, 2015,
p.15) rather than siloed or fixed-boundary positions and seek to engage academia in
this praxis as an active concern. For us, the curatorial is a ‘a more viral presence
consisting of signification processes and relationships between processes and
relationships between objects, people, places, ideas, and so forth, a presence that
strives to create friction and push new ideas’ (Lind, in Jackson, 2015, p.65).
Thus, our curation is co-produced, is collaborative and dialogical, as is our
placemaking practice. With the abundance of content and channels of content
communication within academia and the arts alone, the curatorial is a vital and
critical approach to take for sense-making, dissemination and whether academic,
researcher or practitioner, the expansion of our intellectual and creative endea-
vours. The curatorial imbricates the folding and unfolding of academic and
practitioner knowledge and provides a critical framework to find and assess
information. It requires traditional and information literacy, visual and critical
literacy (Dale, 2014, p.203) and the critical faculty to add value to, rather than
just share, information. This is curating of the cognitive value and the material in
this book has been chosen to support the best writing and research undertaken
in the creative placemaking sector and to make this work more available to
those within and without the academy, especially, as a practitioner-led field, to
the placemakers themselves.
Our co-organised conference sessions at the Royal Geographical Society
(RGS) and American Association of Geographers (AAG) (see Preface) and this
2 Cara Courage and Anita McKeown
book manifest a curatorial framework of critically engaged practice and a ‘mode
of becoming’ (O’Neill and Wilson, 2015, p.12) of theory, research and
practice. Responding to the conferences themes (‘Geographies of the Anthro-
pocene’ at RGS, and at AAG, ‘Thriving in a Time of Disruptive in Higher
Education’, ‘International Geography and Urban Health Symposium’ and
‘Symposium on Physical Geography and Challenges of the Anthropocene’),
we devised our thematic response of galvanising, continuing and re-invigorat-
ing the arts-led conversation, our mode of enquiry for the sessions and
learning objectives and plenary questioning. The sessions were formed from
an open call for papers as well as targeted approaches to our trusted net-
works. Submitted abstracts were put through a process of filtration, evaluation
and assemblage, checked against the theme and our session-learning objec-
tives. The disparate sources of information that is a portfolio of papers were
ordered to present a coherent narrative arc across the theme; for example,
moving from a global to a local perspective or moving from the theoretical to
the practice-based enquiry.
This process, informed by our curation as artistic practice, utilises ‘form’ as a
means to advance understanding and speakers were offered guidance in advance
on content in this regard. When in the conference room, the sessions were a
space for active engagement with experts and peers between speakers and
delegates, resulting in a mutual gaining of insight and embedding of new
thinking. The composition of the narrative arc curated the panellists’ presenta-
tions as a series of landing points from which to navigate the field. This served to
create an experience in which the space between the contributions informed
understanding as much as what was presented.
Through traversing geographic, intellectual and infrastructural constructs, the
sessions’ curation sought to encourage a diverse landscape to create an
interdisciplinary ecology that facilitated the cross-pollination of knowledge.
This in turn encouraged and supported our understanding of creative place-
making as a collaborative, participatory process and taking an ecological
approach to theoretical and practical framing and questioning. Seating plans
of plenary sessions were chosen for best fit to the learning objectives, and
ranged from conventional classroom setting to cabaret, world café, conversa-
tion circle. Interdisciplinarity has been a constant mode of enquiry – ‘not only
a matter of going beside the disciplines but of breaking them’ (Jackson, 2015,
p.6) – as has been the curatorial conversation of the closing plenary or
discussant. To this end, our curatorial approach through this publication
further endeavours to encourage the reader to select sections and chapters at
will, co-curating their own exploration of the contributions to develop further
understanding and questioning.
The curation of the conference sessions sought to engage with the vital
conversations that we as editors, through our own research on placemaking and
earlier critiques of cultural regeneration, had identified as problematic for the
creative placemaking sector, which, principally at the time of writing, revolved
around issues of gentrification, participation and exclusion. Our purpose behind
 Introduction 3
curating research, theory and practice is to offer an approach that can structure and
demonstrate a multiplicity of positions, models and voices at their intersection
(O’Neill and Wilson, 2015, p.12). Topics and themes create a constellation that can
generate reflection, debate and the extension of both research and practice processes.
This operates on two levels: the choosing and framing of the topic, and the choosing
of its components and their presentation, ‘which (together via the programming)
enable and enhance reflexive dialogues among audiences and participants’ (Nelund,
2015, p.174). Throughout this process, our own reflective practice mined the RGS
sessions to extract common themes, questions and avenues for further inquiry that
informed our second set of sessions at AAG the following year.
This curation is further manifest within the book’s Ecologies organisational
structure, which references a conversation deeply embedded in creative place-
making’s heritage: the need for an ecological approach as identified in the work
of Stern and Seifert (2006) within the Social Impact of the Arts (SIAP) at Penn
State. In a radical pairing, Joan Shigegawa, Head of the Rockerfella Foundation
(soon to be Deputy Chair to Rocco Landesman’s Chair of the National Endow-
ment for the Arts (NEA)), negotiated an innovative collaboration between SIAP
and The Reinvestment Fund. This culminated in an influential report – Culture
and Urban Revitalisation (2006–8), an important in-depth critique of The Rise of
the Creative Class (Florida, 2002), which recommended the need for an ‘ecolo-
gical’ approach to including the arts within ‘urban revitalisation’. Shigekawa’s
relationship to this partnership and report, an important influence on the early
development of creative placemaking, is evident in the curatorial organisation of
the book.
Further, the use of ecologies as metaphor and formal construct presents not
only the need for an ecological systemic approach to actualise creative place-
making’s generative potential but references the need for dynamic practices that
transcend the bi-polarities of top-down or bottom-up, a key discontent within the
field, and which are necessary to devolve power, encourage self-organisation and
agency and integrate citizens’ existing placemaking practices. Resilient and co-
produced instances of creative placemaking are moving towards a processual
open source approach (Silberberg, 2013) and have become more common since
our exploration of the field began in 2015. Early drivers of the sector, the NEA’s
and ArtPlace’s reflection on their own processes now sees support shifting from
capital projects, such as the monumental and plaza or waterfront development,
towards a broader transference of power from external local or centralised
authority and towards opportunities to develop agile resilient practices.

Section 1 – Evolving Ecologies

The book’s curation seeks to present advancement, and as such the first section,
Evolving Ecologies, opens with two reflective chapters that reflect on the field
through revisiting earlier scholarship. The four scholars’ willingness and enthu-
siasm to rethink earlier research and present the long view initiates a grounded
exploration of creative placemaking, our first aim for the book. The theoretical
4 Cara Courage and Anita McKeown
and practical concerns that the book presents move away from a traditional
placemaking foci often manifest within urban development as the waterfront,
plaza or the market place towards arts-led socially engaged processes that
encourage a deeper level of public participation and agency. The opening section
sets the scene for this objective by presenting key concerns that have been
present within the field since its inception, yet acknowledges that despite
progress, creative placemaking is a process that is still evolving. Ann Markusen
and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, the authors of the original White Paper (2010)
commissioned by Rocco Landesman, Chair of the NEA, review close to a decade
of work, designed by the Obama-appointed NEA administration. This foundation
is strengthened by Edensor and Millington’s reflections on their edited volume
Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy (2009).
Emerging as Landesman was coining the phrase ‘creative placemaking’, Edensor
and Millington presented a critical response to predominant discussions on
creative geographies. As a companion piece to Markusen and Gadwa’s text,
Edensor and Millington’s chapter serves to contribute to an understanding of the
landscape that informed our initial concerns: the potential of creative placemak-
ing and the limitations posed by a focus on economic impact and how this in turn
shapes regeneration policy.
The second objective of the book was to extend definitions and the under-
standing of creative placemaking, and the chapters that follow Section 1 offer a
rich breadth and depth of projects that traverse urban design and art heritage,
theory and practice, planning and policy and cultural and place heritage and
politics. Many of the scholars and practitioners contributing to this collection are
engaged in a critical process of creative placemaking as well as moving beyond
the confines of their discipline and its training to interrogate the issues that have
led to many of the criticisms of the practice and sector.

Section 2 – Dialogical Ecologies

The three chapters presented in Section 2, Dialogical Ecologies, illustrate the
book’s aims by initiating a conversation between theory and practice from three
perspectives: a geographer, an artist-scholar and an architect. Collectively, these
chapters simultaneously highlight the potential of creative placemaking and its
discontents from within three distinct geo-political contexts, reaffirming the need
for an overarching ethos that allows for non-formulaic context-responsive and
adaptive approaches. Within these chapters the authors present key criticisms of
creative placemaking that pertain to issues of place attachment and belonging,
present in discussions of creative placemaking from early in its inception.
Creative practice in the broadest sense offers avenues for understanding and
expressing place identity through articulation of psychosocial processes including
comprehension of self and other, inclusion and exclusion in processes and
systems that affect feelings of belonging and, as Bedoya (2013) has discussed,
disbelonging.
 Introduction 5
Walker’s reflection on a collaborative interdisciplinary citizen-led social prac-
tice project, Wrecked! On the Intertidal Zone (2014–6), shines a light on the
value of the arts to contribute beyond economic development. Through situated
practice, Wrecked! brought together multiple actors – local arts groups, citizens,
Arts Catalyst and Critical Art Ensemble – to produce social and cultural capital
as a response to water pollution and high shipping volume in the Thames
Estuary, UK. Barns raises awareness of the instrumental logic behind the support
of culture-led projects in Australia through government finance and urban
regeneration projects, and cites this as leverage for temporary programming.
This segues into an exploration of the renowned ‘Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper’
(Reynolds in MacIver, 2010) process (advocated for by the placemaking agency
Project for Public Spaces) within the final chapter in this section through projects
in Mumbai by Patak, the Director of Urban Vision, along with a team of urban
innovators, architects, artists and urban designers. Urban Vision’s consideration
of a Western concept highlights issues prevalent in all three sections: the need for
awareness and sensitivity to local contexts when transferring models and work-
ing in contested arenas.

Section 3 – Scalable Ecologies

Scalable Ecologies positions perspectives of scale in dialogue, bringing together
three contributors who address issues of location through rural, the peri-suburban
to the urban; issues of practice from the individual to municipal level; organisa-
tional issues within small and larger scale actions and approaches to creative
placemaking. Handwerker, a researcher and member off M12 arts collective,
assesses creative placemaking from a rural perspective informed by critical and
historical reflections augmented by a practice that is place-based and by the
realities and complexities of rural life in the United States. Handwerker raises
awareness of challenges to creative practices in a rural context and how creative
placemaking can dilute limited funds from the arts to social services and private
development, rather than being a means to increase resources and embed the arts
more concretely in all aspects of placemaking.
Landzelius and Rundqvist chart the evolution of a project in a peri-urban
context, the north-east of Gothenburg, which explored an assumption that
Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) could serve as an instrument for the
city’s integration and economic development policies. The chapter presents the
shift from cultural policy driven by a socially orientated state-level system
towards an entrepreneurial neoliberal approach, while illustrating the difficul-
ties and conflicting ideologies and social requirements at play within public
sector-initiated projects within ‘vulnerable, economically weak and socially
segregated areas’.
The section concludes with a conversation undertaken on a research road trip
between Big Car Collaborative founders Walker and Marsh as they visited North
American rust-belt cities. Now in its fifteenth year as a socially engaged art and
placemaking organisation, Big Car is an integral part of a community in the
6 Cara Courage and Anita McKeown
urban core of Indianapolis, Indiana. Literally travelling through ideas, experi-
ences and a physical landscape that is adopting creative placemaking solutions
as they drove, Big Car present pertinent aspects for creative placemaking
practitioners.

Section 4 – Challenging Ecologies

Challenging Ecologies presents the perspective of three scholar-practitioners
testing their fields’ conventional practices. These perspectives offer important
insights into a critical reflection of standard practices that informs both the field
of creative placemaking and the education and training of those working
professionally in disciplines that are engaged in the practice. Concerns around
ownership and authorship are dealt with in different ways by each author yet
underpinning their contributions is the recognition that creative placemaking is
not the preserve of the ‘professional placemaker’; instead they acknowledge the
necessary and long-standing role multiple individuals contribute to the practice
of placemaking that is creative and occurs every day and in many ways.
Khonsari’s introduction to the role of temporary spatial objects/architectures
considers how such territorial interventions can facilitate civic use and social
empowerment as a tactical approach to resist privatised enclosures in urban
areas. Using a comparative study, Khonsari presents the historical context of
temporary spatial objects/architectures: the Soviet Agitational Propaganda Vehicles
(Agitprop trains, 1920) and The Fun Palace by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price
(1960) in conjunction with two contemporary London case studies. Khonsari’s
counterpoint highlights the ‘problematics of control and power’ and the need for a
spatial practitioner to have critical understanding of power relationships and
dynamics within neoliberalism.
Following on from Khonsari’s polemic, Pritchard suggests that creative place-
making perpetuates the gentrification associated with Creative City and Creative
Class models, arguing that creative placemaking enacted via state and local
authority policy and corporate partnerships, integrates art, community and
economic development, and as such is a neo-liberal tool. As a rebuttal to this
argument Pritchard advocates the process of ‘place guarding’ (collective acts of
protecting existing people and places) as a way of artists resisting artwashing
(the use of art as a veneer or mask for corporate or state agendas) (O’Sullivan,
2014), which, he argues, is embedded within creative placemaking. Alpalhão’s
pertinent reflection on participation and apathy within Outros Espaços (Other
Spaces) (2014–15) highlights the complexity and pitfalls of participatory civic
engagement within multi-agency regeneration.

Section 5 – Extending Ecologies

The closing section, Extending Ecologies, offers signposting to the type of
thinking that is taking the creative placemaking sector into its next era. Kim
and Yates’ chapter builds on current understandings of the complexity of cities
 Introduction 7
and their significance for the future. Increasingly, there is recognition of the need
for an ecological model of cities that acknowledges an ecosystem with living and
non-living organisms co-existing in dynamic interactions. This poses challenges
to conventional approaches to planning and management as such environments
are complex, with their dynamism requiring conditions that allow for constant
change and evolution if they are to thrive.
The final chapter returns the reader to creative placemaking’s inception, as
Iyengar, the NEA’s Director of the Office of Research & Analysis, documents
its journey and move to a Theory of Change model. Iyengar’s reflection is an
optimistic perspective on creative placemaking’s evolution at practitioner,
funder and administrative levels. It is an appropriate milestone on which to
end the book, as creative placemaking nears completion of its first decade.
Through a longitudinal consideration and evaluation of intended and unin-
tended outcomes from practitioners, the NEA has listened, acknowledged and
integrated the knowledge from those enacting creative placemaking in the
field.
In this spirit, we now invite you to follow our own journey through this book,
following our curated path or by devising your own, and hope that it both
illuminates creative placemaking practices and processes and informs your own
research, theory and practice in the same.

References
Bedoya, R. (2013). Creative Placemaking and the politics of belonging and disbelonging.
World Policy, Arts Policy Nexus series May 13, 2013. Available at: www.worldpolicy.
org/blog/2013/05/13/creative-placemaking-and-politics-belonging-and-dis-belonging.
[Accessed: 25 March 2018].
Dale, S. (2014). ‘Content curation: The future of relevance’, Business Information Review,
31 (4): 199–205.
Davis, J. L. (2017). ‘Curation: A theoretical treatment’, Information, Communication &
Society, 20 (5): 770–783.
Edensor, T., Leslie, D., Millington, S., & Rantisi, N. (Eds.). (2009). Spaces of Vernacular
Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy. New York: Routledge.
Florida, R. L. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work,
Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Jackson, G. (2015). ‘And the question is. . .’ in Curating Research, O’Neill, P. and Wilson,
M. (eds.). London: Open Editions.
MacIver, M., (2010). Eric Reynolds, Master of Low-cost, High Return Public Space
Interventions in London and NYC. Available at www.pps.org/blog/ericreynolds-master-
of-low-cost-highreturnpublic-space-interventions-in-londonand-nyc/. [Accessed: 9
August 2010].
Nelund, S. (2015). ‘Home works’ in Curating Research, O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (eds.).
London: Open Editions.
O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (2015). ‘An opening to curatorial enquiry: Introduction to
curating and research’ in Curating Research, O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (eds.). London:
Open Editions.
8 Cara Courage and Anita McKeown
O’Sullivan, F. (2014). The Pernicious Realities of ‘Artwashing’. [Online] Available at:
www.citylab.com/housing/2014/06/the-pernicious-realities-of-artwashing/373289/
[Accessed 26 September 2016].
Potter, J. and Gilje, Ø. (2015). ‘Curation as a new literacy practice’ E-Learning and Digital
Media, 2 (2): 123–127.
Silberberg, S. (2013) Places in the Making: How Placemaking Builds Places and Commu-
nities. MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning [Online] Available at: http://dusp.
mit.edu/cdd/project/placemaking (Accessed: 13 August 2015)
Stern, M. and Seifert, S. (2006). From Creative Economy to Creative Society. Creativity and
Change. Philadelphia, PA: Social Impact of the Arts Project and The Reinvestment Fund.
Section 1

Evolving Ecologies
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1 Creative placemaking
Reflections on a 21st-century American
arts policy initiative
Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus

Abstract
The US National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town initiative and its philanthropic
counterpart, ArtPlace, emerged in 2010/2011 in response to a 1990s crisis in national
arts funding and retreat into economic impact advocacy. We recount the Obama
administration’s arts policy leadership and their ‘creative placemaking’ approach.
We analyze two ongoing challenges – diversity and displacement – addressing how
to broaden participation by people and communities of color and avoid displacing
low-income residents and small businesses. We review the indicators approach
initially embraced by National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace for
evaluation, exploring its conceptual fuzziness and challenges of spatial scale,
suitable data, and exogenous counterforces. We recap the spread of the creative
placemaking ethos, celebrating its invitation to artists and arts organizations to use
their artistic creativity for the good of their communities.

Introduction
The creative placemaking rubric frames a decade of new work by the US
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)1 and its companion philanthropic
consortium, ArtPlace.2 Both organizations fund locally initiated community and
economic development projects with arts and culture at their core. They also
fund knowledge-building exercises (the NEA) and field scans (ArtPlace.)
Designed by the President Obama-appointed team at the helm of the NEA, the
initiative’s intent has been to celebrate and embed arts and cultural capacity in
neighborhoods and communities, contributing to prosperity (jobs, small-business
income), social wellbeing, public safety, and stability. Both funders encourage
arts organizations and artists to preserve and enliven places by using their visual,
musical, speech, writing, and acting skills for and in conjunction with larger
publics. Since the publication of the NEA-commissioned White Paper Creative
Placemaking (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010), interest in this approach has spread
to many countries and their small as well as large cities. For example, the Czech
Republic’s Prague/Pilsen Year of Culture adopted creative placemaking as its
overarching theme (Markusen, 2014; Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus, 2015),
12 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
and the South Korean national arts agency translated the original Creative
Placemaking document into Korean. In this reflective essay, we employ a
political-economy point of view, charting the challenges that almost eliminated
the NEA in the 1990s, the subsequent advocacy shift towards the economic
impact of the arts, and the emergence of the NEA’s Our Town3 initiative in 2011.
We take policy initiatives, their rationales, and their implementation seriously,
placing them center stage.
Creative placemaking deliberately conflated the creative class approach of
Florida (2002) with decades of progressive community-culture-based placemak-
ing, offering US advocates of greater public engagement in arts creation and
presentation new channels for accomplishing this. The initiatives, and the
financial and organizational power behind them, prompted productive debates
about the roles of artists and arts organizations as well as the potential for
coalitions and their interventions to gentrify neighborhoods and in doing so
displace long-time lower-income residents and the commercial activities that
served them. We probe the issues of displacement and racism in detail as
unanticipated challenges for communities and funders, citing pertinent examples
and offering policy solutions.
In a following section, we address the considerable evaluative challenges for
funders and placemakers, especially given cultural diversity and placekeeping
priorities. Part of the ‘creative’ in creative placemaking is precisely this – that the
fruits may emerge very differently than initial intentions, just as we see in funded
science projects all the time. Engaging partners and stakeholders in conversations
about what success looks like and for whom can be useful in helping people move
beyond fuzzy concepts into what they actually hope to accomplish. Creative
placemaking evaluation sometimes confronts difficulties accounting for conflicting
agendas of participants: the development industry (often quite powerful locally),
artists, art organizations, neighbourhood leaders, and elected officials regarding
creative placemaking projects. However, evaluators face steep challenges surround-
ing good, grounded research that can produce comparative data across localities. We
also discourage evaluation efforts that attempt to winnow out winners from losers.
Overall, the NEA Creative Placemaking and companion ArtPlace initiatives
have significantly improved the general public’s view of the role of artists and
arts capabilities to serve their communities while making substantial contribu-
tions to community stabilization and cultural engagement in many places. The
two funders are now placing more emphasis on long-term integration of arts and
culture into comprehensive community development. They are also encouraging
greater grassroots participation as a priority in their criteria for awarding funding.
We remain hopeful that debates about diversity, displacement, and evaluation are
generating positive changes in the design of the funding streams and outcome
assessments. Certainly, following a decade of these initiatives, creative place-
making efforts are incorporating many more people of all types in the debate
over who, how, and why we should support arts and cultural activity. Will
creative placemaking disappear if the NEA is defunded and ArtPlace gracefully
shuts its doors at the end of its ten-year tenure? We argue that it will not, but that
 Creative placemaking 13
its varieties and protagonists have and will continue to morph. We are optimis-
tic about its long-term contributions and hopeful for greater gains for long
discriminated-against racial and immigrant groups, for greater public participation,
for a flourishing of participatory arts, and as Bedoya (2013, 2014) demands,
‘placekeeping’ as enduring features.

Creative placemaking as cultural policy shift

Beginning in the early 1990s, US cultural policy endured a Congressional
rebellion that nearly eliminated its National Endowment for the Arts, a modestly
funded federal agency that supported individual artists and arts organizations
directly and passed a significant share of its funding to state- and local-govern-
ment arts agencies. Several NEA-funded performance and visual artists were
responding to the AIDS crisis in their work (Killacky, 2011, 2014), prompting a
Republican Congress to savage the NEA budget. Corporate and private philan-
thropic support for the arts declined as well (Kreidler, 1996). Bill Ivey, President
Clinton’s Chair of the NEA, argues that this implosion was also due to elitist
attitudes and aesthetics that had driven NEA funding away from popular culture
(Ivey, 2008).
The response of the arts community was timid. Rather than defend the artists
in question, the national arts advocacy organization, Americans for the Arts
(AFTA),4 and its state-level counterparts turned to economic arguments. AFTA
continues to publish studies showing how arts spending generates income and
jobs for states, localities, and the nation (e.g. Americans for the Arts, 2016).
Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) generated considerable interest
among journalists and state and local public officials, despite forceful critiques of
the book’s theoretical and empirical quality (Markusen, 2006; Markusen et al.,
2008). Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts
(McCarthy et al., 2004) championed the arts’ intrinsic contributions. Comple-
mentary pioneering work offers evidence and methods for estimating the arts’
intrinsic value to participants and society generally (Brown and Novak-Leonard,
2007; Lord, 2012), and a new Animating Democracy publication (Borstal and
Korza, 2017) offers a way forward to value aesthetic contributions in an ‘arts for
change’ approach.

New leadership for the National Endowment for the Arts

In 2009, President Obama appointed Rocco Landesman, a Broadway theatre
owner and producer, as his new Chair of the NEA. Upon taking office,
Landesman faced a pitifully small budget, a prickly Congressional climate,
and a cultural world dominated by large institutions and philanthropies. Land-
esman, owner of four theatres on Broadway and producer of path-breaking
productions such as The Producers and Angels in America, the first Broadway
drama dealing with the AIDS crisis, brought deep experience with commercial
arts practices to the role. Moreover his deputy, Joan Shigekawa, the long-time
14 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
Rockefeller Foundation5 Arts Program Director, was known as a silo-buster,
reaching out to non-arts colleagues, embracing a more elastic notion of ‘the
arts,’ and persisting in innovative arts grants despite push-back from tradi-
tional arts institutions. Shigekawa introduced Chair Landesman to academic
research demonstrating that neighborhood-embedded arts produce positive
results for communities’ jobs and business income, quality of life, public
safety, and diversity (Stern and Seifert, 1998, 2007, 2008). Landesman and
Shigekawa called their approach ‘creative placemaking.’ Landesman believed
the arts in America were broadly viewed as elitist and left-wing. He coined a
new slogan, ‘Art Works,’ which had triple meanings: the making of art (plays,
books, paintings, compositions); how art works to move people; and the
contributions of the arts to economic and social life. Together, they strategized
how the arts could help America emerge from the throes of the recent Great
Recession. Why not ask arts organizations and artists to walk out of their
doors and studios and use their creative skills to work with partners to
reinvigorate and help rebuild neighborhoods and communities? Why not
tailor NEA funding to such partnerships?
Naming their initiative Our Town, they invited us to write a research-based
White Paper to introduce it to their constituencies, Congress, and the public.
Given only six to seven months to complete the study, we scanned the nation for
mature cases of what could be dubbed ‘creative placemaking,’ analyzing char-
acteristics and challenges. Senior Deputy Chairman Shigekawa asked that our
case studies reflect the many dimensions of place diversity: older industrial cities,
youthful suburban-style cities, small towns and ethnically distinctive places. And
that diverse art forms (music, visual art, performance, design) be represented
across the case studies. She also sought cases with cross-sector partnerships: at a
minimum, one public and one non-profit organization. From these, we designed
an analytical framework for understanding the creative placemaking process and
its challenges. Chair Landesman requested that we estimate the national con-
tribution of the arts to the national economy in our White Paper. This was
daunting, given that the national income and product accounts don’t have a
category dubbed ‘arts and culture.’ We used prior research we’d conducted
exploring artistic occupational concentrations in industrial sectors to roughly
estimate the arts’ shares of both GDP and net exports (Markusen and Gadwa
Nicodemus, 2013). Subsequently, the Research Director of the NEA, Sunil
Iyengar, worked with the Bureau of Economic Analysis6 to produce annual
cultural industry series: for example, in 2012, the arts generated $1.1 trillion in
GDP and 4.7 million jobs, more than construction or agriculture (National
Endowment for the Arts, 2013).
By the time the Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus’ study, Creative Placemak-
ing (2010), was unveiled, Landesman and Shigekawa had put in place the design
elements for the Our Town funding initiative. They required that every applica-
tion must be submitted by a partnership that includes at least one public-sector
agency and one non-profit, one of which must be an arts organization. They were
clear that this didn’t mean simply a mayor’s or arts leader’s sign-off on a
 Creative placemaking 15
proposal, but major buy-in and a firm commitment of money and staff time from
all partnering organizations.

Multiplying the arts’ loaves and fishes

In a complementary form of market research, Landesman, from the day of his
arrival at the NEA, began touring the country to test the waters for Our Town.
Alerting the press in advance and flanked by local arts leaders, Landesman
pitched the stellar contributions of art and culture to mayors, journalists, and
the public. In turn he listened to those he engaged with, bringing intelligence
back to his team’s strategic conversations. Throughout his chairmanship, he
travelled around the country at least two of every four weeks as he sought to
take the pulse of the nation’s diverse communities, from major cities to tiny
hamlets, gathering intelligence that would help the NEA to fashion its funding
criteria and continually redesign the initiative.
Immediately following his move to Washington, Landesman began to leverage
his tiny budget. ‘Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money
was,’ Landesman was fond of saying. ‘Money, in our case, was to be found
across other federal agencies and in the private sector.’ Harnessing his producer
talents and regarding himself informally as of Cabinet-level stature, he began
dining with the Secretaries of the large, wealthy agencies – Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and those gov-
erning health and human services, labor, environmental protection, and national
defense – pitching to them how arts and culture could help them with their
missions. ‘The talking point stopped being “what you can do for arts,” to “what
the arts can do for you,”’ explained Landesman in a 2015 interview with us.
Rather than asking HUD or DOT for more money for the arts, he’d offer ‘let us
help you build more attractive light-rail stations and more vibrant communities.’
Several large agencies began to incorporate the arts into major grant programs.
With the US armed forces, the NEA pioneered creative arts therapy for active-
duty military suffering traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic distress.
To expand the NEA’s effectiveness, Landesman and Shigekawa approached
the presidents of major American foundations to create a separate and comple-
mentary funding stream. The Ford Foundation convened its counterparts to
underwrite ArtPlace, an unprecedented ten-year philanthropic consortium to
fund similar experiments around the country without the constraints faced by a
public-sector funder. The consortium leaders recruited big banks as development
loan partners and federal agencies as strategic advisors. Since their inception,
Our Town and ArtPlace have harnessed the power of the arts, from beauty to
cultural bridging, to animate community and economic development. In Detroit,
they’ve helped local artists and entrepreneurs use pop-up spaces to re-spark the
city’s Avenue of Fashion.7 In Saint Paul, artists partnered with local businesses to
survive a disruptive light-rail construction project.8 Fargo residents transformed
an 18-acre barren storm-water collection basin into a community garden space
that celebrates immigrant and Native American cultures.9 In Prattsville, New
16 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
York, a local arts center led the reimagining and rebuilding of downtown
following Hurricane Irene.10 Eight years in, what have been the major
challenges?

Challenges for creative placemaking: Diversity and displacement

We might have foreseen more clearly the design flaws and challenges to
creative placemaking in our initial study. They were not long in emerging as
funding and implementation began to spread across the country. First, the lack
of racial and class diversity in the leadership of and constituencies for funded
initiatives became an issue in many places, as we learned on the public-
speaking and conference circuit. Second, the potential for creative placemaking
to displace lower-income residents and businesses quickly became apparent and
controversial. Third, and the subject of the following section, the absence of
clear outcome expectations and performance standards for creative placemaking
projects has prompted debate over evaluation, which is particularly significant
for the NEA.

Diversity
Although some of our fourteen brief Creative Placemaking case studies and
photos (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010, pp.31–61) underscored diversity of partici-
pation and constituencies served, none of the cases were initiated by people of
color. Yet for decades, many outstanding examples of US place-embedded
initiatives have been spearheaded by African Americans, Latinos, Native Amer-
icans, and Asian Americans. Though they may not have had placemaking as their
primary objective, these inititatives functioned as such. Lipsitz, in How Racism
Takes Place (2015), devotes a chapter to African-American Horace Tapscott’s
creation of the World Stage in Los Angeles and another to Rick Lowe’s Project
Row Houses initiative in Houston.11 In retrospect, the partnership aspirations of
the NEA leadership – their requirement that each prospective Our Town project
be led by at least one public-sector and one non-profit agency – made it difficult,
in an era where few city governments had much of an arts agenda at all, for us to
identify completed cases led by artists of color. The NEA’s focus on projects
rather than organizations made it more difficult to identify initiatives by people
of color as well. For so many decades, American people of color and immigrants
have created their own organizations and spaces with no support from their local
public sector and very little from philanthropic agencies. Worse, they sometimes
encountered disparagement and open antagonism. In retrospect, had we had more
time and been able to dig deeper, we would have learned about the persistent
racism on the part of government agencies, officials, and funders that make it so
difficult for arts organizations of color to thrive in the places they wish to be
located.
For instance, we considered the case of MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y
Cultura Latino Americana)12 in San Jose, California, founded in 1989 to provide
 Creative placemaking 17
arts programming as a vehicle for civic dialogue and social equity. MACLA has
served as multi-disciplinary arts center and anchor for its neighborhood and the
city- and county-wide Latino community for a quarter-century. Recently
MACLA undertook a community-development project in its neighborhood
where immigrant women could learn silk screening and help mobilize neighbor-
hood and economic development projects (Alvarez, 2005; Matthews, 2005). In
2009, when we surveyed possible case studies, MACLA was engaged in
principled disagreements with the city’s economic development agencies over
its location. From the start, MACLA’s founding Director, Maribel Alvarez, and
her Board had committed to a downtown location and aspired to own its own
building. The City of San Jose had other ideas: it was investing in its Mexican
Heritage Plaza elsewhere in the city and pressured MACLA leaders to move
there. Alvarez describes how the city pitted one ethnic group against another and
contended: ‘Isn’t a Mexican Center enough?’ No, responded the youthful
MACLA: ‘We are not just folkloric – we want to be part of contemporary
cultural conversations! We want to nurture all of Latin American arts and
cultures, and we want to stay downtown!’ Current Director Angie Helstrup-
Alvarez recounts MACLA’s long struggle to buy its building. In the late 1990s,
the San Jose Redevelopment Agency bought and land-banked it, a de facto
excuse for not improving the space for existing tenants. Just before the 2008
economic downturn, the Agency planned to convert it to pricey condos, a plan
deferred during the Great Recession. Contesting a new condo plan in 2009,
MACLA’s Board and Director asked the Agency if they couldn’t buy the
building themselves. They succeeded because some key external stakeholders,
through Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) and eventually the Ford
Foundation, came through with financing. After many setbacks and delays,
MACLA closed escrow in May of 2013. In 2017, Helstrup-Alvarez affirmed in
a recent phone conversation: ‘If we hadn’t bought the building, there would be
no Mexican-American cultural presence in downtown San Jose.’ MACLA’s
leaders speak of the pervasive racism that they and other arts organizations of
culture have encountered over the decades, manifest in researchers’ recent
empirical and qualitative accounts as well (Sidford, 2011; Markusen et al.,
2011). The California arts-funding foundations did not regard MACLA and
others as competent, especially because they did not have CEOs or CFOs on
their Boards, namely people who could write those checks themselves. ‘If your
Board members aren’t hanging out at the Aspen Institute, you aren’t apt to be on
the philanthropic radar,’ says Helstrup-Alvarez. Though increasing numbers of
US arts organizations are now hiring people of color, few of them are leading
organizations devoted to people of color (Schumacher et al., 2016), and instead
frame their different approaches along a ‘cultural equity’ continuum from
‘diversity’ to ‘self-determination.’ Maribel Alvarez, also in a recent phone
conversation, reflected that today, MACLA is one of the very few cultural
organizations of color in the US to own valuable downtown real estate. Both
MACLA leaders credited new initiatives at the time like Miguel Garcia’s Ford
Foundation initiative Shifting Sands, LINC, and Project for Livable Communities
18 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
with developing peer-group networks among place-embedded arts organizations
of color.
Despite challenges in finding funding and public-sector partners, many Afri-
can-American-led arts and cultural organizations have led in placekeeping, a
practice Bedoya (2013, 2014) counterposes to placemaking. African-American
churches across the US have long served as venues for the teaching and
performance of music, movement, and visual art. Despite the shackles of Jim
Crow laws, they have stabilized and deepened the cultural vitality of entire
neighborhoods and rural communities. Since the early 1990s, the work of Ashe
Cultural Center,13 founded by writer/producer Carol Bebelle and artist Douglas
Redd and closely allied with Black churches, has consistently engaged in
placekeeping in its immediate Central City neighborhood and for New Orleans
citywide. Its artistic missions center on diversity and place – ‘to exhibit a more
positive and inspiring view of African Americans for New Orleans’ – and ‘to
foster and participate in community organizing and networking efforts in Central
City to improve the opportunity to connect with and access mainstream opportu-
nities’ (Ashe Cultural Arts Center, 2017).
Young new organizations of color often concentrate on direct art and culture
services for community members. Sometimes this mission is strongly place-
focused. In 1996, three young African Americans with roots in the poverty-
stricken Northwest Minneapolis area formed Juxtaposition14 to teach youth from
the area art and encourage them to become artists, particularly focussing on
employment/career paths. Blending urban art and fine art, they use public art as a
catalyst for broader community dialogue and a vehicle for verbalizing ideas
about who people are and what community means. They work to transform their
campus and neighborhood physically too. Since 2004, Juxtaposition has actively
used its presence and programming to transform its West Broadway home, once
a seedy-looking commercial strip populated by liquor stores, fast food outlets,
and freeway exchanges, into an attractive and welcoming community center. Its
decades-long project, Remix: Creating Places for People on West Broadway, a
collaboration with the local community development group and university,
engages area youth in creating safe spaces using art (Markusen and Johnson,
2006, pp.78–83; Gadwa Nicodemus et al., 2017).
Scholarship and literature addressing the origins of and contemporary scourge
of racism in American communities illuminates the way that American political
systems (e.g. the American constitution, Congress, the Supreme Court, Recon-
struction, Jim Crow, immigration laws and practices, land distribution, and
military policies, including many twentieth-century and contemporary practices)
have operated to create and sustain racist practices (Feagin, 2013; Lipsitz, 2015).
Cultural segregation is a major culprit in this drama. Reading Alice Walker’s In
Search of our Mothers’ Garden: Womanist Prose (1983) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’
Between the World and Me, especially the chapter on his first year at Howard
University, reveals how Americans have been deprived of exposure to the
richness of African-American (and African) literature and culture more broadly.
Many writers and artists have similarly documented the exclusion of cultural
 Creative placemaking 19
expression and contributions by Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Lati-
nos. This continues in many places today. Carolina Sarmiento’s (2014) disserta-
tion on the creation of a Mexicano immigrant arts organization and center in
Santa Ana, California, documents how this cultural group faced stiff resistance
from and disparagement by the city’s all-Latino city council, whose downtown
development initiatives intentionally and continually are displacing Mexicano
working class cultural spaces and businesses. Thus immigrant status and class
also affect creative placemaking conflicts and outcomes. These reflections on
diversity suggest that creative placemaking must attend to the issues of race,
ethnicity, LGBTQI+, class, and immigrant communities in the design and
implementation of programs. Just as educational access, especially at the post-
secondary level, has improved greatly from affirmative admissions and action
programs, creative placemaking must make a priority of diversity, encouraging
stated intent to affect systemic change, especially in this decade of heightened
racial and immigration tensions.

Displacement
Almost immediately, the NEA and ArtPlace initiatives ran up against the
thorny phenomenon of displacement. Because multiple aspirations for Our
Town funding initiatives envisioned economic development as one of several
desired outcomes, the potential for displacing low-income homeowners and
renters, businesses, and jobs was almost immediately controversial. Authors
researching gentrification – the movement of higher-income and wealthier
households into lower-income urban neighborhoods – attribute a role in this
process to artists and cultural activity as attractors (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984;
Zukin, 1987). This view – and the lack of solid empirical evidence for it – has
been questioned by many, including a brilliant essay by art critic Davis
(2013), a thought piece by Gadwa Nicodemus (2013a), and an evidence-
based rebuttal in Markusen (2006). Elsewhere, Bedoya and Markusen argue
that displacement rather than gentrification is a superior way of conceptualiz-
ing the equity challenges of creative placemaking (Markusen and Bedoya,
2017). Bedoya, an artist and arts administrator, made substantial contributions
to the debate over creative placemaking in two articles and in public speeches
in many venues across the US. In the first of these, Placemaking and the
Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging (2013), Bedoya argues that the
concept of creative placemaking lacks an awareness of the politics of belong-
ing and dis-belonging that operate in civil society. ‘Before you have places of
belonging,’ Bedoya writes, ‘you must feel you belong. Before there is
the vibrant street one needs an understanding of the social dynamics on that
street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in
civil society.’ In a second contribution, Spatial Justice: Rasquachification,
Race and the City, Bedoya (2014) explores the placekeeping practice of
rasquachification, used by Latinos in claiming their neighborhoods from the
‘white imaginary aesthetic’ often enforced by planning practices.
20 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
Displacement is deeply embedded in American (and capitalist) law and logic.
These forms of profit-taking foster a permanent built-environment industry that is
powerful in achieving large government infrastructure commitments and laws
that permit continued expropriation of land. These actors increasingly focused on
urban land uses in the twentieth century, setting in motion a continual movement
of middle-class whites out of the central city (and countryside) towards stratified
suburbia, and, more recently, profiting from a reversal of these patterns through
revitalization of core cities. Markusen and Bedoya (2017) place responsibility for
gentrification on these forces and document the ways that communities can use
various political tools to stop displacement.
Some economic development can be place-reinforcing. Some neighborhoods –
especially those with empty storefronts and vacant homes – can support more
housing and jobs, occurring without displacement. In a nuanced analysis of gentrifi-
cation in dozens of neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area, Chapple and
Jacobus (2009) identified cases where modest amounts (and a moderate pace of
construction) of new retail and middle-class housing units have avoided displacement
and improved the lives of current lower income residents – offering new jobs and
better consumer opportunities without raising land values, housing prices, rents, or
property taxes. In other cases, they found displacement. In another instance, a
philanthropy-subsidized negotiation with national grocery chains brought large super-
markets back into Philadelphia neighborhoods and improved the quality of food
offered without causing gentrification and displacement (Personal communication).
How can displacing gentrification be avoided? Bedoya and Markusen argue for
vigilance in funding and program design to ensure that low-income residents and
small-business owners are not forced out by funded projects. Rent control has
worked in many cities to preserve affordability and prevent speculative hikes in
rent and housing prices (Blumgart, 2015). Community-benefit agreements are
often negotiated among citizens, developers, and local governments to shape the
conditions of redevelopment, including preservation of affordable housing and
provision of open space (Gross, 2005; Marcello, 2007). Community-development
corporations’ housing projects help curb displacement. Community land trusts
offer community members a way of demarketizing housing, retail, and cultural
property that eliminates ownership gains from sales and reins in gentrification
pressures (Greenstein and Sungu-Eryilmaz, 2007a, 2007b). Some communities
have engaged non-profit organizations, such as Artspace,15 to build affordable
artist housing and cultural creation and presentation spaces. Empirical studies by
Gadwa Nicodemus (2010) and Gadwa Nicodemus and Muessig (2011) on five
Artspace buildings built in the 1990s found little gentrification in surrounding
neighborhoods and considerable benefits for artists, the larger arts community,
local commercial businesses, and local government (see Markusen and Bedoya
(2016) for sources on these tools). Above all, designers and funders of creative
placemaking initiatives must require that proposed projects actively address the
potential for displacement and provide alternatives and guarantees that will
ensure placekeeping for current residents and businesses, especially within low-
income and diverse communities.
 Creative placemaking 21
Evaluating creative placemaking initiatives
Demonstrating successful outcomes was a goal from the start for both NEA and
ArtPlace. Lead program managers scrambled to articulate and measure results,
especially challenging if cultural diversity and placekeeping objectives matter.
Markusen’s critique (2013) helped to inform a much deeper and nuanced
approach. The art of the ‘creative’ in creative placemaking means almost
certainly that results will diverge from initial intentions. Evaluation exercises
often avoid addressing explicitly the problem of conflicting values and goals
among the massive development industry (often quite powerful locally) and
artists, art organizations, neighbourhood leaders, and elected officials.

Efforts to define success and design indicators

Early on, both the NEA and ArtPlace attempted to design ‘indicators’ that
could be used to gauge outcomes (National Endowment for the Arts, 2012;
ArtPlace, 2012a, 2012b). Using external sources, each funder designed
place-specific measures that would enable creative placemakers to compare
their projects with those of others. ‘Over the next year or two,’ wrote Jason
Schupach, the NEA’s Director of Design,

we will build out this system and publish it through a website so that anyone
who wants to track a project’s progress in these areas (improved local
community of artists and arts organizations, increased community attach-
ment, improved quality of life, invigorated local economies) will be able to
do so, whether it is NEA-funded or not. They can simply enter the time and
geography parameters relevant to their project and see for themselves.
Jason Schupbach (2012)

On the speaking circuit, I (Markusen) began to field distressed questions from

grantees and potential creative placemakers. In June of 2012, at the annual
meetings of the Alliance for Media Arts and Culture,16 my fellow plenary panel
members, all involved in one or more ArtPlace- or Our Town-funded projects,
expressed anxiety and confusion, baffled by the one-measure-fits-all nature of the
indicators, especially in the absence of formal and case-tailored evaluation. In
2012, ArtPlace produced a set of ‘vibrancy’ indicators designed to capture
creative placemaking success (ArtPlace, 2012a, 2012b). ‘Vibrancy’ cannot be
precisely defined, and thus it joins a long list of impressively fuzzy concepts, a
notion that I coined a decade ago to critique planners and geographers’ enamora-
tion with concepts like ‘world cities’ and ‘flexible specialization’ (Markusen,
2003). A fuzzy concept is one that means different things to different people, but
flourishes precisely because of its imprecision. The ‘indicator’ approach left
ArtPlace immediately open to trenchant critiques (Frank, 2013; Markusen,
2012, 2013). Ideally, creative placemaking evaluations will monitor the perfor-
mance of each awardees’ progress towards initial aspirations of its leaders and
22 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
funders. Because projects should be accountable to local stakeholders as well as
funders, grantees should be able to make course corrections in goals as projects
unfold. Evaluation should monitor process as well as outcomes, so that other
practitioners can learn from them, accelerating the learning curve.
Then there is the multi-causality challenge. Project outcomes, whether enthu-
siastic or disappointing, cannot be attributed solely to a particular creative
placemaking intervention, another reason for being cautious about relying on
area indicators. Property values may fall due to an environmentally obnoxious
plant start-up or rise (and cause displacement) due to a new light-rail station.
Even if indicators were correctly calibrated, many would fail because data are
not available at spatial scales corresponding to creative placemaking target areas
such as neighborhoods. Furthermore, many creative placemaking efforts operate
at multiple scales. Gadwa Nicodemus (2010) and Gadwa Nicodemus and Muessig
(2011) document how artists, non-profit arts organizations, and commercial enter-
prises (e.g. cafés) in artist live-work buildings variously hoped that the project would
support resident artists but also have a positive impact on the regional arts commu-
nity, neighborhood commercial activity, crime rates, and local property values.
Gadwa Nicodemus’ studies demonstrate how challenging it is to document impact
along multiple dimensions, spatial scales, and time periods.

What about arts and cultural outcomes?

Ironically, early evaluation efforts included few arts and cultural dimensions.
Missing were measures of success in bringing diverse people together to celebrate,
inspire, and be inspired, goals stated in our Creative Placemaking white paper.
Shouldn’t creative placemaking advance the intrinsic values and impact of the arts:
heighten and broaden arts participation, preserve cultural traditions, improve the
quality art offerings, and produce both beauty and critical perspectives on society?
Are artists and organizations, whose greatest skills emerge from the arts world, to
be judged only on their impact outside of this core? Prototypes were available on
this front. Under Maria Rosario Jackson’s leadership, the Urban Institute com-
pleted a landmark study of cultural vitality in American communities that includes
a set of arts- and culture-focused indicators (Jackson et al., 2006). One leading arts
consultancy, WolfBrown, offers a website, intrinsicimpact.org, to ‘change the
conversation about the benefits of arts participation, disseminate up-to-date infor-
mation on emerging practices in impact assessment, and encourage cultural
organizations to embrace impact assessment as standard operating practice.’ The
research of Novak-Leonard and Brown advances our ability to measure the impact
of interventions on arts participation and ‘intrinsic’ (pleasure, learning, emotional
experience, and so on) outcomes (Brown and Novak, 2007; Brown and Novak-
Leonard, 2011; Novak-Leonard and Brown, 2011; Brown, 2012). Animating
Democracy’s (Borstal and Korza, 2017) ambitious agenda for linking aesthetic
concerns to social justice is another step forward.
The combined debate on indicators and evaluation bore fruit. Both the NEA and
ArtPlace changed course as their programs rolled out, moving away from indicators
 Creative placemaking 23
as an evaluation tool. Both took the aspirations of their grantees as a starting point
for evaluation, learning from the experience of each as they moved forward. The
NEA has recently developed a theory of change and measurement model for Our
Town. The evaluation tool accommodates considerable variation at the individual
project level and is designed to connect practitioners to evaluation-related tools. In
addition to documenting knowledge gained and impacts of its major Community
Development Investment program, ArtPlace’s evolving research and evaluation
work features field scans that investigate how arts and cultural practices intersect
with other community-development sectors (for example, housing and public
safety.) Several resulting studies are models of complex and nuanced site-based
evaluations (Gadwa Nicodemus et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2016; Tebes et al., 2015).

Is creative placemaking a worthy and enduring policy initiative?

The NEA Our Town and companion ArtPlace initiatives have significantly improved
the understanding of the role of artists and arts capabilities to serve communities
while making substantial contributions to demographic stabilization and cultural
engagement in many places. We are struck by the range and size variation of
communities across the globe who have picked up the creative placemaking
moniker, convened conferences, brought it into the policy sphere with their own
new and appropriate twists, and produced real progress on the local level. The recently
formed Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru)17 consortium of uni-
versity faculty across the arts and sciences has researched and continues to explore
creative placemaking as a central policy initiative (Cardenas, 2016). Yet in some
cases, creative placemaking initiatives may have worsened living conditions for lower
income residents (often minorities and immigrants) and renters, negatively affecting
the integrity of existing local cultures and undercutting the viability of community
bonds. We remain hopeful that debates about diversity, displacement, and evaluation
are generating positive changes in the design of the funding streams and outcome
assessments. For certain, over a decade of these initiatives, creative placemaking
efforts are incorporating many more people of all types in the debate over who, how
and why we should support arts and cultural activity. Will creative placemaking
disappear if the NEA is defunded and ArtPlace gracefully shuts its doors at the end of
its ten-year tenure? We expect that it will not, but that its varieties and its protagonists
have and will continue to morph. We are optimistic about its long-term contributions
and hopeful for greater gains for long-discriminated against racial and immigrant
groups, for greater public participation, for a flourishing of participatory arts, and as
Roberto Bedoya (2013, 2014) demands, ‘placekeeping,’ as enduring features.

Notes
1 National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov/
2 ArtPlace, www.artplaceamerica.org/
3 Our Town, www.arts.gov/grants-organizations/our-town/introduction
4 Americans for the Arts, www.americansforthearts.org/
24 Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
5 Rockefeller Foundation, www.rockefellerfoundatioorg/
6 Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://bea.gov/
7 Avenue of Fashion, www.avenueoffashion.com
8 Irrigate, https://springboardforthearts.org/programs/irrigate/
9 The Fargo Project, www.thefargoproject.com
10 Prattsville Art Center www.artplaceamerica.org/funded-projects/prattsville-art-center-
and-residency
11 Project Row Houses, https://projectrowhouses.org
12 MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, http://macla.org/
13 Ashe Cultural Arts Center, http://ashecac.org/main/
14 Juxtaposition, http://juxtapositionarts.org
15 Artspace www.artspace.org/
16 The Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, www.thealliance.media/
17 Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, https://a2ru.org

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2 Spaces of vernacular creativity
reconsidered
Tim Edensor and Steve Millington

Abstract
Our edited volume, Space of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Econ-
omy (2009) critically responded to the preoccupations that had dominated writing on
placemaking in, particular culture-led regeneration. With the inception of creative
placemaking and its international uptake, we revisit the book’s key imperatives: to
decentre instrumental and reductive conceptions about the location of creativity that
were oriented around dominant notions of the ‘creative economy’, and interrogate
how alternatively, creativity might be far more expansively conceived, within this
contemporary frame. We identify what remains salient in our original arguments,
which areas we ignored and underplayed, and key contributions that have advanced
thinking about creative geographies within the context of creative placemaking since
the book’s publication.

Introducing the vernacular

In Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (Edensor et al., 2009), we sought to extend
understandings beyond the narrow prescriptions of culture-led regeneration and
the normative framework established in economic geography to identify cultural
clusters (Mommaas, 2004), and explore creativity in a broader sense, focusing on
the relationship between creativity and place, and how creativity could be
generative of non-economic values. We wanted to provide a more constructive
riposte to the many critiques of the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’ script
popularised by Florida (2002) and Landry (2000), to uncover practices that stood
in opposition to the alignment of creativity with the cool, sophisticated and
metropolitan. We asked: if there is a creative class, then who might be the
uncreative classes against whom they are implicitly constructed? And if there are
cool places to which this creative class gravitate, then what does this mean for all
those other places that fail to make the cut on creativity indices? Instead, we
wanted to embrace marginal, un-sexy and less-than glamorous unspectacular
creative practices and reveal their role in enhancing the lives of people in
everyday spaces, to offer a more powerful and inclusive analysis of creativity
and place.
 Spaces of vernacular creativity 29
As we entered the twenty-first century, creativity occupied an elevated position
in governmental policy responses to the economic and political challenges of the
day. In the UK, for instance, ‘Cool Britannia’ captured a sense of optimism that
somehow, through the proliferation of arts and cultural districts, festivals and
music scenes, our cities and national economy could be reinvented. Florida’s
contentions were conceived as providing the academic authority that supported
such aims, and whatever the criticism of his key ideas and methods, we cannot
ignore his influence on urban policy and civic leaders around the world in
embedding the notion that the creative class can drive economic regeneration.
In the time since we compiled the book, this seductive narrative has begun to
fade from policy discourses following the 2008 financial crash. Priorities shifted
under austerity. Arguments to maintain public subsidies for arts and culture have
become marginalised in the face of calls to protect frontline services or tackle
homelessness. Florida’s (2017) recent tacit admission that the creative class were
perhaps nothing more than this generation’s gentrifiers further signifies that
optimism about their central economic role is over. Nevertheless, the cultural
life of places persists, by any means necessary. As arts professionals scramble for
ever reduced grants, volunteers and community-led action are becoming more
significant agents within the local cultural landscape. At the same time, ideas
such as Lydon and Garcia’s tactical urbanism (2015) have come to the fore in
the absence of both public and private investment. Through a make-do attitude
and experimentation, tactical placemaking interventions led by local commu-
nities have undermined the strategic thinking which underpinned the creative
city script, and seem to underscore the importance of the vernacular that we
highlighted.

Creative multiplicity
The first key emphasis in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity, as is explicit in its
title, was to embark on a thorough decentring of geographies of creativity by
moving towards the multiplicity of creative practices that take place elsewhere,
in other sites and networks through which creative ideas and skills are produced
and circulated. The overwhelming focus on the city and the city centre, implicitly
conceived as the domain of the creative class, the realm in which they work, play
and consume or the arts districts and cultural quarters that they fashion, has
marginalised other spaces in which creative practices take place. Less glamour-
ous parts of the city – suburbs, those areas of Victorian and Edwardian terraced
housing in the UK which remain resistant to gentrification, and modernist
housing schemes – were identified as less trendy or more sedate, while smaller
industrial or post-industrial urban settings, market towns, villages and rural areas
were largely consigned to the dominion of the irredeemably uncool and uncrea-
tive. These areas were drastically neglected while the apparently global cities of
London, Berlin and New York and smaller regional cities such as Manchester
and San Francisco were regarded as founts of creativity, sites where a critical
mass of creatives inspired each other and consumed each other’s goods and
30 Tim Edensor and Steve Millington
services. While galleries, coffee shops and loft studios were celebrated as sites of
creativity, living rooms, sheds, garages, gardens and community centres were
not. In attempting to address these geographical distortions, chapters in the book
examined creative practices that take place in mundane domestic settings located
in the suburbs of Toronto, the working-class estates of Sheffield, Australian
country towns and community gardens in northern England.
Since then, other work has consolidated this move away from those sites
exclusively identified as urban hot spots of creativity. Waitt and Gibson (2013)
have detailed how unfashionable, provincial, co-operative art spaces can rein-
force place-belonging, and Lobo (2017) strikingly describes how the unpromis-
ing setting of a disused underground suburban car park in Darwin, Australia, has
become a convivial venue for the shared, varied creative practices of margin-
alised Aboriginal woman and migrants. Here, friendships have emerged through
shared creative production as unexpected connections have been forged between
participants within an immersive, inclusive atmosphere. More domestic spaces
have been the focus of work by Platt (2017) and Hackney (2013), who consider
how women’s quotidian, mundane creative practices of knitting and crocheting
act to craft identities and contribute to placemaking. Besides reappraising the
ways in which evaluations around creativity have marginalised certain highly
gendered activities, their analyses emphasise how creative production extends
across the familiar realms of home and community, an arena of creativity that we
somewhat neglected in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity. In reinforcing the
creativity that inheres such domestic spaces, Lee (2010) concentrates on the
more mundane practices of bed-making, cooking, tidying up and even scrubbing
floors, which are also sensual, memory-filled and imaginative creative practices
of homemaking. For Lee, the aesthetic effects of such daily tasks do not merely
revolve around making judgements but by the ‘the small pleasure afforded by the
simple awareness and presence of mind during our everyday lives’, and are
particularly well exemplified by the traditional practice of laundry-hanging
discussed by Rautio (2009), which thoroughly entangles creative imagination,
memory borne of habit and multi-sensory immersion in the job at hand.
In Spaces of Vernacular Creativity, in exploring emergent forms of shared
production across the photo-sharing Flickr network, Burgess showed how cyber-
space was also a neglected realm of creativity, an arena in which connections
around creative-making were vastly extended. These new media applications
have subsequently multiplied with the increasing popularity of geocaching,
game-playing, creative writing, video-making and the proliferation of memes.
Burgess has continued to mine this area, showing that though they may be
mimicked in developing commercial strategies, viral videos promote inventive
adaptive engagement from a wide variety of participants, and subsequently a
‘flurry of parodies, mash-ups and remixes’ (2014, p.90) that exemplify the
ongoing production of vernacular network creativities. Through such social
networks, the boundaries between professionals and enthusiasts can become
blurred, with some non-professional participants becoming widely renowned.
Similarly, Vásquez and Creel (2017) highlight the imaginative ‘chats’ that
 Spaces of vernacular creativity 31
produce a shared conviviality amongst the online community who use Tumblr
blogs. In addition, in drawing upon the phenomenon of crowdsourced art, Literat
and Glăveanu (2016) exemplify how the internet has enormous potential to foster
a distributed creativity grounded in collaborative communication and interaction
that is available for the participation of anybody who wishes to contribute. They
contend that the sheer diversity of the knowledge, skills and cultural resources of
these multiple participants generates a context in which creative possibilities
proliferate.

Decentring creativity
Despite the abundant evidence that creative practice is much more widely
distributed, reductive, elitist notions of what constitutes creativity can have
profound political effects upon cultural endeavours that take place away from
metropolitan taste-makers. Gilmore (2013) further explores how participatory
arts policy-makers and funding bodies routinely ignore local forms of creative
practices that do not accord with those they esteem, and as Miles and Ebrey
(2017) argue, marginalisation and lack of support from central and local govern-
ments, cultural institutions and the private sector for smaller, non-urban settings
can entrench economic decline and stagnation.
In examining the geographical focus of our 2009 volume, we too were
culpable of neglecting to identify and discuss creative practices in plethora of
settings. Though such an exhaustive task is beyond any one text, perhaps we
should have made more extensive efforts to account for non-Western forms of
creativity by more extensively considering the extraordinary creative adaptations,
improvisations and in fashioning urban lives and livelihoods in African, South
American and Asian cities that have been explored by many writers. Indeed, as
Robinson (2006, p.4) claims, an understanding of the vitality of such urban
cultures without considering ‘a strong sense of the creativity of cities’ truncates
the potential for imagining their futures. Such an exploration, amongst many
other accounts, could include references to the extraordinary creation of Chandi-
garh’s Rock Garden, now a global tourist attraction, by Nek Chand, an ‘outsider
artist’ who assembled a range of figural sculptures from the debris of demolished
buildings (Jackson, 2002); the incredibly adaptive, improvisatory extensive trad-
ing networks established by peddlers belonging to Senegal’s Murid Brotherhood
(Diouf and Rendall, 2000); or the hybrid architecture of Hong Kong (Abbas,
2002) and improvisational entrepreneurial tactics and fleetingly assembled struc-
tures of Lagosians (Hecker, 2010). It might also investigate the ongoing fashion-
ing of the anti-colonial, anti-neoliberal practice of buen vivir (good living for all)
in Latin America (Escobar, 2010); the ever-transforming streetscapes of Indian
cities that are endlessly recomposed out of recycled materials and temporarily
occupied by a multitude of actors (Mehrotra, 2008); the critical political perfor-
mances of Lima’s street comedians (Vich, 2004); and the ongoing assemblage of
informal shack dwellings in Sao Paulo’s informal settlement, Paraisópolis
(McFarlane, 2011). On the other hand, many urban theorists from China have
32 Tim Edensor and Steve Millington
eagerly grasped the creative city concept and continued the normative research
agenda established in the West in analysing networks and clusters of creative
businesses (for example, see Cho et al., 2018).
This brings us onto a second and related key aim of Spaces of Vernacular
Creativity, which was to interrogate how creativity might be more expansively
conceived: to escape from a rather instrumental and reductive understanding
that had emerged as part of discussions about the ‘creative economy’ and the
‘cultural industries’, a conception that found great favour amongst city
managers and economic strategists. Our attention, therefore, was drawn
towards vernacular forms of creative endeavour amongst alternative and
marginal groups, as well as cultural producers who create non-economic
outcomes. In moving beyond a narrow focus on taste and aesthetics, we
sought to recognise how creativity may also produce social collaboration and
communication.
To return to Florida, the premium placed on promoting creativity became
inextricably entangled with the much-vaunted championing of what he called
the ‘creative class’, a group conceived as essential to the regeneration of
cities that had suffered significant industrial decline. These artists, gallery
owners, baristas, fashion designers, advertisers and musicians were conceived
as being able to reignite an economic spark by developing cultural industries
and thereby attracting new inhabitants with high disposable incomes who
were lured by the promise of trendy urban environments and lifestyle
accoutrements. Evidently, this depiction of a particular group of people who
collectively constituted a creative class was exclusive, ruling out those who
pursued creativity in less circumscribed ways. Recently, the orbit of those
belonging to the creative class has expanded to incorporate those from the
traditional professions of barbering and bartending who, under conditions of
gentrification, are being revalued in way that recognises the creative elements
that they always practised (Ocejo, 2012). Nevertheless, the durable if fluid
construct of the creative class continues to perpetrate a limited notion about
who and what is ‘creative’. Thus, the value of creativity often remains
tethered to its capacity to make profits and conforms to the entrepreneurial
imperatives of city managers, reinforcing the strategic role of creative indus-
tries in economic development and urban renewal. According to such a
perspective, creative production and practice, especially insofar as it involves
the provision of fashion, food, culture and arts, is as integral to the promotion
of the city as tolerance for social and cultural diversity.
Reductive and reified conceptions also resonate in those assertions that
creativity can primarily be defined in terms of aesthetic experimentation or
‘innovation’; that is, in the original work of artists, poets and musicians. Our
thesis in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity was that these debates have produced
highly restricted understandings about who is creative, what can be considered as
a creative product or practice and where it is that creativity takes place. We drew
upon the important arguments of Hallam and Ingold (2007) to contend that
creative practice can be habitual and reiterative, is necessarily adaptive and
 Spaces of vernacular creativity 33
improvisational and is equally likely to be found in collective work than
individual artistic innovation. Moreover, we insisted that creativity did not need
to be identified by experts – including the growing host of cultural intermediaries
and media presenters – and in fact where this took place, was principally
illustrative of the habitus and dispositions of those who espoused such particular
tastes. These arguments have been subsequently reinforced by alternative, much
more inclusive definitions such as that articulated by Waitt and Gibson, who
maintain that creativity is ‘a field of choices and possibilities that are set up in
the tensions between being and becoming’ (2013, p.75). Such tensions proliferate
through social life.
One central argument in the book focused on foregrounding the qualities of
vernacular and everyday creativity. All too often, such endeavours are maligned
by arguments based on class-oriented values that champion certain forms of
creative production in contradistinction to those that are not judged to be ‘cool’,
sophisticated or fashionable. By contrast, we wanted to honour the non-economic
values and outcomes produced by alternative, quotidian, diverse and more
socially inclusive creative practices, and in this spirit, chapters discussed the
Elvis festival situated in a small, rural Australian town (Gibson et al., 2009), the
amusing and diverse uses of garden gnomes (Potts, 2009) and the seasonal
practice of garbing the outside of houses with Christmas lights (Edensor and
Millington, 2009). Such practices were community-oriented and emerged in
mundane settings, and were certainly not examples of top-down urban provision.
Happily, a plethora of academic accounts about other mundane, vernacular and
everyday skilled practices have emerged since the book was published. This has
coincided with an upsurge in work on geographies of making and crafting
(Hawkins and Price, 2018) that also honours both artistic endeavour and more
vernacular, collective practices. Such accounts have foregrounded the creativity
and communality that inheres in the everyday practices of hairdressing (Holmes,
2015), knitting (Price, 2015) and customising cars (Warren and Gibson, 2011), as
well as the craft expressed in dry stone-walling the making and curation of neon
signs (DeLyser and Greenstein, 2018), the production of hand-made surfboards
(Gibson and Warren, 2014) and festive lantern-making (Edensor, 2018), creative
practices that move between highly skilled work to hobbyist enthusiasms.
This inclusive shift to considering creative practices of making is also
augmented in recent times by an expanded understanding of the creative
economy that incorporates a range of labour practices that has surfaced through
what Carr and Gibson (2016, p.299) describe as ‘a renaissance in small-scale
making’ that has especially emerged in industrial cities, in which ‘re-connections
are being forged with themes such as quality, providence, craft, ethics, tacit
design knowledge, haptic skill and the value of physical labour’. Here then, and
following Hallam and Ingold’s contentions, creativity was always already
embedded in all forms of industrial labour; indeed, production was dependent
upon the capacities of workers to adapt and acquire a sensuous knowledge of the
products that they helped to forge and assemble. As these manufacturing
processes have become less familiar in many deindustrialised urban settings, the
34 Tim Edensor and Steve Millington
skill and know-how required to make things is being revalued, tinged with a
nostalgic sense of loss. Yet though the value of making has been substantively
reappraised in recent times, in certain contexts, tendencies to perpetrate hoary
distinctions between crafted products and practices of making remain. For
instance, away from the contexts of urban industry, in exploring the reconfigura-
tion of rural creativity, Bell (2015) discusses how cultural intermediaries express
aesthetic judgements that strongly prioritise the innovative and cutting edge over
‘traditional’ and customary craft items. Moreover, the primary utility of the crafts
as an economic resource rather than as valuable in achieving broader social goals
has been integral to recent neo-liberal British governmental agendas (Jakob and
Thomas, 2017).
Similar kinds of negative appraisal also continue to surround creative produc-
tion in other settings that are distant from metropolitan fashions. One example is
in Blackpool, Britain’s most popular holiday resort. Situated on the Lancashire
coast and founded in the nineteenth century to serve as a site for pleasure and
leisure for workers in the industrial urban centres of Lancashire and Greater
Manchester, the town has long been associated with cheap, popular and working-
class attractions, often caricatured as ‘vulgar’, ‘tacky’ and tasteless by suppo-
sedly more sophisticated cultural commentators. The town’s illuminations,
arranged along six miles of seafront, have attracted millions of visitors for over
a hundred years, and yet are rarely subject to media reviews. They epitomise a
local expression of vernacular creativity in a style that remains immune from
wider fashions and notions of ‘good taste’ and coolness, sitting outside the
professional and sophisticated circuits that have driven the accelerating inter-
nationalisation of metropolitan light festivals. Rather, the design of the illumina-
tions – which are stand-alone installations, themed sections arranged between
lampposts on either side of the seafront road, or large tableaux – follows a
distinctly place-based vernacular based on longstanding aesthetics and craft
know-how, and is designed to satisfy the desires of visitors to experience
nostalgia, conviviality and jollity (Edensor and Millington, 2013). Situated in
the resort’s own illuminations depot, local designers and technicians produce and
stage the annual two-month extravaganza, oblivious to the tastes of metropolitan
taste-makers who are unable to recognise a creative practice that is grounded in a
distinctively local place identity and history and is not concerned with posing as
fashionable and cool.

Creative citizenship
As we have emphasised, the notion of the creative economy is tied to a reductive
understanding that creativity is an economic resource that can be deployed to
advance urban growth. In Spaces of Vernacular Creativity we challenged this
instrumental, neo-liberal conception by foregrounding the more-than-economic
forms of creativity that persist and the important social and cultural functions
that they advance. Creativity, we argued, does not need to be connected with
economic growth at all, but can be underpinned by other values such as
 Spaces of vernacular creativity 35
generosity, care and reciprocity. As Waitt and Gibson claim, ‘capitalist means of
production are only one possible way of organising resource use and exchange,
opening up possibilities to explore non-capitalist, anti-capitalist, non-profit,
collective, informal and socialist means of production’ (2013, p.77). This
articulates how notions of productivity need to be defined beyond a narrow
economic context, wherein the production of friendship, well-being and convivi-
ality might be more extensively honoured as some of the consequences of
creative practices, along with more tangible outcomes such as the strengthening
of individual and collective capacities, community building and placemaking.
Hargreaves and Hartley (2016) declare that such non-economic outcomes might
constitute the more inclusive notion of ‘creative citizenship’, where the potential
to engage in forms of creative practice can produce convivial engagements with
others that generate enduring social connections. Indeed, Platt (2017) demon-
strates that women’s shared everyday crafting practices produce exactly these
kinds of lasting friendships as well as a sense of well-being amongst participants.
In further considering more-than-economic motivations for creative practices,
we can identify a range of practices that are entangled with particular political
objectives and with experimenting with alternative lifestyles that move away
from consumerism and towards social and environmental sustainability. As
Harriet Hawkins claims, the aforementioned renewal of craft practices – or
‘craftivism’ – is frequently oriented around an avowedly political project that
foregrounds an ethos of recycling, making-do and mending. Gregson et al.
(2010) have discussed the extraordinary adaptations of materials wrenched from
huge obsolete ships by Bangladeshi furniture makers and other craft workers for
economic gain, innovatively refashioning industrially produced materials as part
of a recycling practice that leaves little vestige of these giant vessels. At a much
smaller-scale, the mundane but highly skilled practices of the host of restorers
featured by Bond et al. (2013) who repair clocks, bicycles, ceramic items, books,
footwear, furniture and musical instrument, amongst other objects, are the
remaining exponents of a world in which repair and maintenance were once a
far more commonplace activity, both as household chores and paid work. And
yet it seems that such practices are once more becoming championed in the
context of finite resources and disposability, as the ethical implications of
revaluing these practices become more apparent. Here, practices through which
objects and materials are assembled and reassembled, customised, adapted,
altered and restored are generating new forms of creative know-how as well as
recovering lost skills.
This evolving experimental disposition towards devising alternative everyday
urban lifestyles is explored by Wendler (2016) who investigates how particular
groups try-out more sustainable, equitable and collective ways of living in
autonomous spaces temporarily carved out in the city. Such open-ended, impro-
visational spaces foster new imaginaries, propose different economies and
develop distinct social relations in envisaging alternative futures. These experi-
mental efforts to achieve more sustainable living practices are more radically
exemplified by Canadian off-gridders who improvise ways of living in isolated
36 Tim Edensor and Steve Millington
situations, working out how to build houses and manage energy supply by
practising forms of ‘modest creativity and mundane intuition’. Such adaptive
exercises emerge out of unfolding experiences of dwelling that deepen a relation-
ship with place (Vannini and Taggart, 2014, p.282).
At the same time, and has so often been the case, certain non-economically
motivated creative practices that purport to challenge over-commodified and
over-regulated urban environments, notably those that gather under the category
of tactical urbanism, have, according to Oli Mould (2014), proved susceptible to
incorporation by the very agencies that they oppose. For certain urban policy
strategies, rather than seeing such creative re-appropriations of urban space as
illicit, have construed them as signifying coolness, as vital elements that
demonstrate an area’s ‘vibrant’ street culture. These guerrilla, participatory and
pleasurable initiatives, include flash-mobbing, yarn-bombing, pop-up shops and
guerrilla gardening. By being absorbed into urban marketing strategies in this
fashion, such insurgent tactics are in danger of losing their critical potential.
According to Mould, they become expected ingredients of the creative city rather
than intrusive and disruptive to official governance and advertising, though
perhaps he pessimistically overstates the extent to which all resistant practices
can be incorporated in this way. As McLean (2017) exemplifies, creative
expressions of resistance and solidarity can re-emerge despite the absorption of
radical creative groups into local state-led, instrumental economic strategies that
aim to market their ‘edginess’.
Although this suggests that the economic is frequently able to co-opt forms
of resistant creativity into economic and managerial strategies, the relation-
ships between the economic and the non-economic, and between artistic and
vernacular forms of creativity, are often more complex and ambiguous than we
suggested in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity. To illustrate these complexities,
we draw on the example of the Moonraking Festival held bi-annually in the
small West Yorkshire mill town on Slaithwaite (Edensor, 2018). Thirty years
since its inception, the event remains popular amongst the townsfolk. It is
based on a local myth from the early eighteenth century based on the illegal
trade in alcohol, supplied covertly by barges on the local canal into which
barrels were dropped and retrieved by men from the town. Upon being
apprehended by vigilant customs officers, the men pretended to be drunk,
and in that state declared that they were trying to fish the moon out of the
canal, thereby duping the officers. This incident of local cunning forms the
basis for a lantern parade that commences at the canal basin, at which a large
paper lantern in the shape of a moon is hoisted to the front of the procession,
which subsequently makes its way around the village. Hundreds of the towns-
folk participate in carrying illuminated lanterns fashioned in accordance with
the theme that has been chosen that year. The biannual recurrence of the
festival has generated the development of considerable local skill in lantern-
making, through the organisation of workshops. Several local participants who
have been steeped in the festival since childhood have become professional
lantern-makers, selling their expertise in workshops organised in preparation
 Spaces of vernacular creativity 37
for this festival and other events, and making high-quality installations and
lanterns for festive display. Here, communal, non-economic creative practice
has eventuated in providing some contributors with a livelihood as makers,
artists and designers.
Any reductive attempts to circumscribe the geography of creativity and
delineate the kinds of activities and people that should be associated with
creativity, are, we believe, doomed to failure. Creativity proliferates and
seethes in everyday life and in quotidian spaces; it is present in the most
mundane domestic practices, in work procedures and leisure activities. It is not
merely expressive of a unique individual aptitude, but can be shared and
produced in convivial settings, it may reside in experimental or reiterative
approaches to living, making and socialising. It most certainly cannot only be
associated with entrepreneurs and artists, and is undoubtedly located in
settings that are far from urban centres. This greater inclusivity is being
borne out by the incorporation of a host of domestic, craft, industrial, artistic,
communal and traditional practices into accounts that are widening the scope
of what we might consider creative. We welcome the rejection of creativity as
intrinsically economic, urban and singularly individualistic, claims that have
been greatly expanded by scholars since the publication of Spaces of Verna-
cular Creativity. We anticipate that elitist, class-ridden definitions will be
more widely rejected, recognised as signifying banal efforts to acquire
cultural capital and status, and the protean nature of creativity will become
ever more apparent.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Cara Courage and Anita McKeown for their supportive, critical and
patient support, and to Talia Melic for reading an earlier draft of this chapter

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Section 2

Dialogical Ecologies
This page intentionally left blank
3 Turning local interests into
local action
Community-based art and the case of
Wrecked! On the Intertidal Zone
Dominic Walker

Abstract
This chapter speaks to creative placemaking’s heritage (Markusen and Gadwa,
2010) through the collaborative citizen-led social practice project Wrecked! On the
Intertidal Zone (2014–16), an interdisciplinary project involving citizens, artists,
and activists, drawn from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK, to respond to water
pollution and high shipping volume in the Thames Estuary, UK.
Wrecked! used situated knowledge and citizen science drawn from local stories,
histories, and locally-led initiatives to problematise the economically focused
policies prioritising London, using art to promote a local agenda in local govern-
ment. In doing so, it showcased how social practice placemaking (Courage, 2017a,
2017b) can be used alongside arts-led resilient practices (McKeown, 2015) to
galvanise local residents, turning local interests into local action. Using Bourdieu’s
(1986) understandings of different forms of capital this chapter highlights how
Wrecked!, as a community-based and artist-led initiative, recognises the value of
arts beyond instrumentalising them to boost economic development as posited in
creative placemaking thinking. Wrecked! instead utilises artistic practitioners’
cultural capital, outlining the need for new forms of knowledge to redress the
damage of economic capital’s repeated prioritisation. By utilising different practi-
tioners’ different forms of capital, this chapter argues creative placemaking can
benefit communities once local voices are heard.

Situating art in Southend-on-Sea

This chapter draws on the 2014–16 community-based project Wrecked! On the
Intertidal Zone (2014–16) (hereafter referred to as Wrecked!) to explore how art can
galvanise local communities into uniting around shared concerns. For Wrecked!,
these concerns related to foregrounding Southend residents’ wishes in local govern-
ment as part of a bottom-up process, rather than an imposition on them of top-down
national-scale agendas. These local wishes spanned cultural, social, and ecological
concerns about the management of Southend, which locals felt had been detrimental.
In this way, they relate to what McKeown (2015, p.24) discusses as art’s role in
44 Dominic Walker
building ‘resilient places’. For McKeown, this refers to a total system of creative
placemaking involving social, environmental, and commons-based placemaking
embedded within an arts-led praxis for creative placemaking. This chapter argues
that social practice placemaking (Courage, 2017a, 2017b) is critical to these arts-led
resilient practices (McKeown, 2015) and to improving Southend-on-Sea’s shared
spaces, which Wrecked! highlights.
The origins of Wrecked! stem from Matsuko Yokokoji and Graham Harwood,
artist-activists based near Leigh-on-Sea, a district of Southend-on-Sea with its
own town council. Yokokoji and Harwood collectively form the group YoHa,1
which form one part of a group of different people and collectives which
produced Wrecked! collaboratively. Following a call by YoHa in the local
community and local initiatives, such as the Idea 13 initiative, and to Arts
Catalyst,2 Arts Catalyst subsequently used its social and professional connections
to help commission and manage the project, sourcing funding and boosting
contacts. Internationally renowned activist and tactical media collective Critical
Art Ensemble (CAE),3 known to YoHa previously, entered into discussions
alongside locally engaged artists Andy Freeman4 and Fran Gallardo,5 local
researcher Warren Harper,6 and local curator James Ravinet.7 Together, they
were motivated to prevent two key things. First was the Thames Estuary’s
expansion beyond its already-excessive shipping load destined for London to
service large multi-national corporations, thereby bypassing the local commu-
nities their shipping is polluting; second was the plan by former London Mayor
Boris Johnson to build an island airport in the Thames Estuary, in response to the
planned but problematic Heathrow expansion proposals.
This chapter uses empirical material from fieldwork in July 2015 on Wrecked!
which draws upon residents’ knowledge to consider how Wrecked! challenges notions
of expertise, forms of capital, and context-responsive artistic practices which derive
from social and spatial context. Despite appearances in previous literature (Hawkins,
2016; Lichtenstein, 2016; Worden, 2015), Wrecked! is a relatively under-explored yet
important collaborative arts-based project, which serves to highlight several tensions
between global and local issues, which shall be expressed in key junctures throughout
this chapter. The chapter is divided into three parts. Part I explores the background of
Wrecked! and its locale, Southend-on-Sea, and outlines some of the tensions arising
from different ways of framing the town’s space. This provides the background of the
situation in Southend-on-Sea that the artistic practices in Wrecked! were responding to.
Part II covers the four constituent parts of the project. Part III analyses Wrecked!
through notions of expertise, capital, the wider contribution arts-based practices and
engagements can make to local areas, and how such artistic forms can offer new forms
of knowledge and residents’ expression. It concludes by linking the chapter back to
this book’s key themes around creative placemaking.

Part I: Conflicting demands and the Thames Estuary

For Wrecked!, the artists and creative practitioners formed a community of practice
with the local population from Southend-on-Sea, notably ‘local ecologists,
 Turning local interests into local action 45
fishermen, ex-industrialists, engineers, interest groups and the general public’
(YoHa, 2015, n.p.). Their goal was to uncover and showcase the complex local
and situated knowledges of the Thames Estuary in the face of its changing ecology,
industry, sociality, and culture. Harwood of YoHa highlights a primary motivation
for producing the project, stating:

When Boris [Johnson] goes on about his airport [island airport proposal], he
goes on like no-one lives here, and because we’re not that confident . . . as an
area, at pushing forward what we think, we need . . . artists to think about
how to bring that together.
(Harwood, interview for Idea 13 Southend, 2014, n.p.)

For YoHa, Wrecked! represented a way to bring together local and situated
knowledge in an area known for its ecological diversity and sensitivity, but
perhaps less known for its cultural, and local histories, knowledges, and fishing
methods. It drew on a diverse range of local groups with their own memories and
knowledges, to enhance broader knowledge of Southend-on-Sea and preserve
key cultural, historical, ecological, and local knowledge and practices.
While being Southend’s home, the estuary is also a major shipping route.
Copious shipping trawls through the estuary’s once-fertile waters, polluting,
lacerating, and churning up the waters on its way to central London. The estuary
was also the focus of plans by Johnson in the early 2010s as a potential site for
an island airport to alleviate the growing pressure on London Heathrow airport. It
therefore sits at the confluence of a tussle between locals on the one hand and
assisting London’s industrial prowess on the other. This tussle relates to forms of
governance and issues identified by YoHa relating to the local council while
seeking to ascertain whether art can be used to promote a local agenda in local
government. Wrecked! therefore was a project aiming to encourage local voices
to unite in vocalising their sentiments about the estuary and, in doing so, to
encourage locals to defend themselves in the face of increasingly polluting,
detrimental, and industrialised business practices. These practices, locals argued,
benefitted London to the detriment of Southend and its social, cultural, and
ecological environments. The Thames Estuary and its surrounding salt marsh is
also an ecologically active and diverse area. Its ecological importance, such as its
attraction to rare wetlands birds like grebes, waders, geese, and ducks (JNCC,
2001), is underscored by its Special Protection Area status and conservation
objectives from Natural England (UK government, 2016). The Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds (RSPB) manages the area and continues to restore an
ecologically sensitive area of wetlands for wild birds, touted as potentially being
the biggest wetlands in Europe (RSPB, 2017). It is therefore a fertile, vibrant,
and essential space of ecological importance not just for the UK, but for Europe
and the wider ecological webs these ecosystems are a part of.
These ecological concerns on the one hand, and increasing globalisation through
the waterways and airways on the other, represent just two framings of the complex
and dynamic environment surrounding the estuary. This surrounding environment
46 Dominic Walker
could also be framed as infrastructure for Southend’s increasing leisure and tourism
industry; as a container port; as historic brownfield sites; or even for its local
heritage connections, such as those surrounding Anne Boleyn’s house in nearby
Rochford. This multitude of perspectives has a complex array of interests and
influences, which Wrecked! hoped to foster a critical interest within and between. In
this way, Wrecked! brought attention to the complex and often competing influences
and demands of different groups with different stakes and interests, to influence
governing strategies over these fragile but rich environments.
Worden (2015) argues these competing interests can be explored by creative
practitioners to create open forums where local sentiment can be expressed
creatively. Wrecked! sought to utilise these, Worden argues, stating that such a
situation formed

a gateway to reflection on the environment and a means of bringing together

different groups within [the] community, as a form of open space for
creativity. Extending this [the creators of Wrecked!] aim to treat the
Thames Estuary as a commons; a complex shared resource. This means
bringing together information that is collected by authorities with that
collected informally into further events, to inform sustainable development
and breakdown the bifurcation of nature and humans, and tensions between
exploitation and conservation.
(Worden, 2015, p.132)

As a shared resource for a shared community, Wrecked! invited locals to share

emotional, meaningful, or otherwise unifying stories and ways of knowing their
local area. Wrecked! sought to bring together a range of individuals with their
own interests to create forums for sharing stories and create new ways of
understanding and knowing the area in new forms. But how to capture these
possibilities, and how might artists manage differences or tensions that can
emerge, even if there is a unifying cause?

Part II: Building a community-based arts project

To approach such complex and competing demands, Wrecked! had four main
parts, each of which was a separate artistic commission, the details of which I
discuss in this section. Each of these parts drew on different actors from the
collective of locals, practitioners, and artists. These four parts sought to stimulate
residents’ interest in the project through different forums, which would then
inspire engagement with the wider issues Wrecked! explored. These four artistic
commissions sought to focus on each of the project’s four key themes. These
themes concerned the local ecology in Talking Dirty;8 resident participation in
sustainably looking after the Thames Estuary in Citizen Science;9 historical and
local cultures in Graveyard of Lost Species;10 and historical and local knowl-
edges and practices in Line in the Sand. I now discuss these four parts and their
themes.
 Turning local interests into local action 47
The first part of Wrecked! was Talking Dirty: Tongue First! (Arts Catalyst,
2017d; hereafter referred to as Talking Dirty), a series of public events and
workshops revolving around local foodstuffs. Led by local artists Gallardo and
Freeman, and environmental chemist and food scientist Mark Scrimshaw, Talking
Dirty used foodstuffs grown in and around the Thames Estuary to prepare tasty
food dishes. Talking Dirty called on locals to share recipes based on local
produce, foraging practices, and tips, as well as stories relating to local food.
From these, dishes would be prepared for visitor sampling at each event. These
recipes were compiled into a recipe book which residents could cook from at
their leisure. The array of local species meant some could also be smoked, the
inhalation adding a form of embodied engagement with the artwork. For Worden
(2015), these practices employed as part of Wrecked! helped make the environ-
ment ‘visible’ through taste or smell, such as from the local flora or through
ingredients in vaporisers. The embodied practice of consuming the estuary’s
produce represented a visceral form of knowing, stoking interest and providing a
different way of understanding the environment of this flora. However, these
workshops also raised key ecological difficulties. Given the Thames Estuary’s
importance for the UK’s shipping industry, this contribution has come at a price.
Many of the foodstuffs garnered from the estuary are not fit for human
consumption and decades of daily mass pollution has produced toxic levels of
some heavy metals, minerals, and other constituents in these organisms. This
provided a stark reminder of the ecological damage already caused by industry
and its implications further down the food chain.
To further highlight Southend’s environmental damage and encourage action,
Freeman and Scrimshaw led citizen science workshops in conjunction with
Talking Dirty. These workshops were titled Citizen Science (Arts Catalyst,
2017e) and traced the practices of waste disposal at the nearby Two Tree Island
in Leigh. This was the second part of Wrecked!. Two Tree Island was formerly a
sewage works and then a landfill site prior to its current running by the Essex
Wildlife Trust. It was therefore an ideal location for Citizen Science, drawing
local residents together to develop their understandings of the estuary in ways
understandable to them, and that could be monitored by them. One focus of
Citizen Science was on how industry and scientists use sensors in the estuary to
chart and monitor particular indicators such as tidal flows, levels of certain
pollutants, humidity, and wind speed. These data are relayed in conjunction
with the growth of particular aquatic species, such as cockles, types of fish, and
barnacles, to form an overview of how the factors relate to the species. Crucially,
both the sensors and the species levels are used by scientists when discussing
with politicians, policymakers, or legal professionals the implications of con-
troversial practices such as dredging. Citizen Science introduced these ideas to
local individuals to highlight science’s reduction of a complex and sensitive
ecological area to metrics with limited applicability. For the collaborative practi-
tioners producing Wrecked!, a reduction of the area represents a misunderstand-
ing and mis-handling of this delicate ecosystem. These Citizen Science
workshops therefore sought to use local understandings of the estuary to question
48 Dominic Walker
these methods, offering ways for the public to form and subsequently dissemi-
nate understanding of their environment in ways they can relate to, monitor, and
engage with. Citizen Science, then, sought to inspire local interest not just in the
Wrecked! project, but in the ecological area’s future, encouraging a renewed
sense of stewardship for the local environment on locals’ terms and
understandings.
The third part of Wrecked! was the Graveyard of Lost Species (Arts Catalyst,
2017c), which centred on a restored ship rescued from the estuary mud. The ship,
named the Souvenir, was a 40-foot Thames fishing boat with on-board shrimp
boiler (otherwise known as a ‘bawley’), weighing 12 tons. Souvenir was cleaned
by YoHa and restored in a public setting to encourage questions and engagement
from locals. The Graveyard of Lost Species, like the previous two parts, also
sought situated knowledges from locals. It attempted to construct a monument to
previous wildlife species, marine creatures, landmarks, livelihoods, fishing meth-
ods, and dialects that historically thrived in the estuary but have since declined or
become extinct. The artists led enquiries with Southend residents to garner local
expertise relating to these ‘lost species’ (Arts Catalyst, 2017c). The Wrecked!
practitioners encouraged locals to contribute their stories, knowledge, and mem-
ories of the local area, which would then be emblematised on Souvenir as a
monument by Southend’s people, for Southend’s people. Key words, chosen by
locals, would be laser-cut into the wood of the ship, reminding locals of what
Southend used to be and have. In this way, Souvenir represented how Southend
had changed from a distinctive town with its own cultural phenomena to one
where its identity was becoming diluted through the impact of London’s increas-
ing globalisation. Southend residents were therefore concerned for Southend’s
welfare in several ways. As pollution from enormous tankers and barges in the
estuary grows, so species decline, become vulnerable in changing food webs, and
become extinct. Landmarks are removed to make way for tourism or business
developments and livelihoods of local fishermen and women are jeopardised by
decimated stocks or cheaper labour elsewhere. These changes have gradually
progressed through time – often unnoticed – and the Souvenir represented one
way to awaken locals’ sensibilities to these by displaying them in Southend’s
marshes. Here, they formed part of the local landscape once more. Accordingly,
the Souvenir also gestured towards Southend’s future as well as its past,
implicitly questioning how the town might, in time, further change with new
stories, memories, food webs, and dialects created.
The final part of Wrecked! was Line in the sand (Arts Catalyst, 2017b),11 an
ephemeral public artwork which used writing in the Thames Estuary sand to
communicate with London-bound planes. The shifting mud of the estuary under-
lies the flight path to London’s airports, highlighting the impact of the continuous
stream of commercial and passenger jets overhead. To produce Line in the sand,
YoHa collaborated with local Southend fishermen and individuals to choreograph
boats whose arrangement spelt out messages. These messages were indented by
trawlers, sifting sand two feet wide and two inches deep, over which water lays
and shimmered in the sunlight. The content of the messages was intended to
 Turning local interests into local action 49
draw from research undertaken as part of the Graveyard of Lost Species and was
decided upon following consultation with the public (Arts Catalyst, 2017b). A
key factor in determining Line in the sand was to be attentive to and showcase
the local histories, knowledge, and culture of Southend’s declining fishing
industry and the fishermen and women whose livelihoods depend on them.
These livelihoods, residents argued, were being increasingly usurped by air
cargo, which now transports over five per cent of the planet’s annual sea catch
(Arts Catalyst, 2017b), flying it in from cheaper sources around the world.
Writing in the sand using fishing boats, then, represented a fitting way to
honour the declining culture historically seen as a lynchpin of Southend’s
cultures and livelihoods.
When combined, these four component parts of Wrecked! therefore repre-
sented an opportunity to stimulate interest in these areas of Southend’s culture,
with a view to opening up debates on key tensions in several ways, which the
following section will address.

Part III: Local engagement for local change

Wrecked!, then, highlighted four key facets of context responsive artistic practice.
First, it responded to the top-down imposition of neoliberalism-driven national
policies prioritising business and commerce above all. To argue this point, I now
engage with Bourdieu’s (1986) recognition of the different forms of capital,
highlighting how economic capital has previously dominated over other forms of
capital in ways Wrecked! draws attention to. Wrecked! highlighted the clashing
understandings about which forms of capital should be prioritised, played out
alongside the local versus national scale. In Southend, the national-level policies
have favoured, in Bourdieu’s (ibid.) terms, economic capital at the expense of
cultural and social capital. In other words, they favoured capital exchanges which
convert into economic resources, such as money, above all else. Over decades,
this pursuit has led locals to reject this economic focus after witnessing its
detriment to their area through ecological damage, dialect loss, and the decline of
local fishing methods, local stories, and histories in the name of profit, a profit
that Southend sees little, if any, of. The daily trail of shipping containers trawling
down the Thames Estuary packed with London-bound goods, polluting and
decimating Southend’s delicate ecology, if left unchecked, further disrupts the
complex and delicate ecosystems the Southend people and wildlife rely on, such
as the wetlands birds the RSPB are attempting to safeguard. Other forms of
damage have implications for local food sources, now rendered inedible by the
toxicity levels in the estuary.
Residents in Southend showed in Wrecked! that they instead favoured a form
of arts-led resilient practices (McKeown, 2015), moving away from the previous
economic focus and towards what Bourdieu (1986) terms cultural and social
capital, i.e. forms of capital which underpin notions of value. Cultural capital
involves practices, materials, and values which help produce a shared identity
among those sharing similar positions. Cultural capital therefore expresses
50 Dominic Walker
‘value’ through materiality, corporeality, or institutions. Social capital, mean-
while, relates to human relationships among social groups. It focuses on recipro-
city within the arts/social and situated practice, such as that highlighted by
McGonagle (2010, 2011), and uses interactions in these groups as currency to
determine their relative capital. ‘These relationships’, Bourdieu (1986, p.248)
writes, ‘may exist only in the practical state, in material and/or symbolic
exchanges which help to maintain them’. Social capital, then, expresses ‘value’
through human relationships and social interaction. For these reasons, Southend
residents used Wrecked! to show a need for cultural and social capital over
economic.
My second point relates to how Wrecked! engaged with cultural and social
capital. In Wrecked! creative practitioners and artists attended to unlocking
Southend’s collective cultural capital, but not through the creative placemaking
approach (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010) often seen in urban areas. This is
possibly for two reasons. First, Southend’s residents insist it does not need
rejuvenating, or at least the kind of regeneration offered by economic-led
initiatives. Second, creative placemaking must be approached carefully. When
portrayed as creative practitioners being parachuted into unfamiliar urban centres
to stimulate economic development, creative placemaking could be seen as
prioritising economic capital. Bourdieu notes how cultural capital can be ‘con-
vertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital’ (1986, p.242), and it could
be argued that practitioners’ cultural capital is sought out for its conversion into
its economic potential rather than to culturally improve the centres and their
quality of life. Consequently, creative placemaking must be utilised for the right
purposes in the right situation to avoid undermining the non-economic value of
creative practitioners.
Wrecked! acknowledged these difficulties, utilising creative practitioners’ cul-
tural and social capital rather than economic potential. Accordingly, Wrecked!
encouraged residents to engage with artists and creative practitioners to help
express their opinions, in a town historically too accepting of detrimental
practices, according to YoHa’s Harwood. ‘Because we’re not that confident . . .
as an area, at pushing forward what we think’, Harwood asserted as reported
earlier in this chapter, ‘we need . . . artists to think about how to bring that
together’ (Harwood, interview for Idea 13 Southend [2014, n.p.]). For Harwood,
artists therefore provide an opportunity to convert interest into action, using
‘their methodology to engage people differently’ (ibid.). They can encourage
expression of locals’ opinions in appropriate ways, namely the fostering and
bringing together of different forms of expression into a shared opinion. This
shared opinion adds weight when considering decisions in local government; a
first step on a long journey to overturning decades of prioritising the economic.
Artists, therefore, can facilitate residents’ self-empowerment to cultivate a sense
of shared identity, and push an agenda into local-level politics. In Bourdieu’s
terms, artists and creative practitioners in Wrecked! used their cultural capital to
improve the standard of living, shared spaces and shared identity by treating
residents as equals and pushing the local council to reflect this by focusing on
 Turning local interests into local action 51
more than just economics. Involving creative practitioners in the placemaking
process, then, highlights two points. Firstly, the difficulty of ensuring that
creative practitioners in the placemaking process are used for their cultural
capital, rather than as vehicles to boost economic capital. Secondly, how social
practice placemaking (Courage, 2017a, 2017b) can be an effective way to ensure
the use of creative practitioners’ cultural capital. This relates to the third point I
now attend to.
Social practice placemaking (Courage, 2017a, 2017b) draws on social, partici-
patory, and interdisciplinary arts practices to integrate specific knowledge cul-
tures which offers residents and creative practitioners equal expert status. Using
social arts practice gives power to visitors or audiences of artworks, allowing
them to contribute to shaping or informing the artwork (Jordan, 2017; Walker,
2017). In social practice placemaking, visitor power extends beyond the artwork.
Visitors from the community, such as in Wrecked!, became participants in the
development of the artwork. Artists and the community were recognised as
‘equal experts’ of local and situated knowledge to help improve the community
area (Courage, 2017b). One example of this community improvement from
Wrecked! lay in plans announced, during the project, for a third runway at
Heathrow airport rather than pursuing Boris Johnson’s island airport idea
(Nizinskyj, 2015). This represented a substantial victory for Southend, who had
strongly opposed the island airport proposals. Social practice placemaking there-
fore appreciates the contribution of those possessing cultural capital, such as
creative practitioners, and those of social capital, such as residents. Accordingly,
Wrecked! used a blend of local, experienced, and externally sourced creative
practitioners to vocalise local and situated knowledges and local opinion, which
clearly lambasted top-down decisions against locals’ interests.
As Wrecked! showed, participatory projects can galvanise local communities
into action, drawing on their shared identity of their town and its public spaces to
instead argue for bottom-up approaches. Using different local cultural facets
helped to underscore the importance of giving residents equal authority in
decision-making for their local spaces. In this way, social practice placemaking
becomes an effective means of bringing together artists and residents to improve
the local area’s public spaces. In the case of Wrecked!, artists used their cultural
capital to stimulate interest among locals who bore social capital. The artists then
translated this interest from locals into action, seeing themselves and locals
treated as equals among ‘experts’ in decision-making processes. Artists can
therefore help highlight the value of different forms of capital beyond the
economic.
Using creative practitioners to engage with residents to elicit local knowledges
also highlights a fourth and final theme of Wrecked!, which is that of citizen
science. As this chapter has explored, artists can help produce, encounter, and
validate forms of cultural and social capital, garnering expressions of them
through different means. In Wrecked!, this meant recognising different forms of
knowledge emerging from the project’s four main components, locking into other
‘forms of citizen science that maybe produces other kinds of knowledge’
52 Dominic Walker
(Harwood, interview for Idea 13 Southend [2014: n.p.]). For Harwood, Wrecked!
represented an opportunity to utilise citizen and situated knowledges in new and
creative ways to produce different ways of re-imagining knowledge which could
improve Southend as a shared, public space. These forms of knowledge drew on
existing and local sources rather than established, certified ‘experts’. Hawkins
(2016) argues that projects such as Wrecked! combine ‘participatory practices
with citizen science’. Accordingly, Hawkins argues that the result of Wrecked!,
and of many other projects is to recognise creative practice as something that can
contextualise the scientific expert. In doing so, creative practice allows other
voices to be heard while recognising the value of other practices in how scientific
knowledge is made. For Hawkins, participatory art, then, can work to expand the
notion of ‘expert’ and draw on locals’ situated knowledge to consider them as
equals. This approach widens notions of expertise, acknowledging the cultural
and social capital residents possess, and making it comparable to educational
qualifications in treating them as ‘experts’.
However, with Wrecked!, residents are not just contextualising scientific experts,
but also the politicians, economists, and other professionals who repeatedly
favoured economic capital at the expense of everything else. In particular,
Wrecked! focused on local councillors who, residents felt, had consistently put
their residents’ needs behind London’s. Alongside these were the politicians and
economists who suppressed attempts at replacing economic capital with other
forms of capital and allowed economic capital to dictate policy and governmental
decisions. These decisions impacted at the local level and went against Southend’s
residents’ wishes. Citizen science formed one part of residents’ riposte to these
top-down impositions, with residents deciding what is important to them, rather
than being told what to value. These top-down approaches fundamentally mis-
understood how Southend residents related to their environment, removing mani-
festations of local culture for the sake of finance. Accordingly, as an approach,
citizen science re-conceives how local forms of knowledge are encountered. Local
knowledge becomes cherished rather than overlooked in favour of certified
‘experts’ parachuted into an unfamiliar area with little knowledge of its unique
intricacies. In Wrecked! artists helped re-imagine and re-present existing forms of
knowledge in new ways drawn out from local histories, and then helped install
these as bases of accredited and accepted forms of knowledge. Wrecked! formed an
output, which can be shown to local government as a demonstrable example of
locals’ concerns, a ‘transformative politics of the local’ (Worden, 2015, p.132).
In this way, Wrecked! highlighted how context-responsive artistic practices can
produce new forms of knowledge and social practice placemaking. This pre-
empts Zebracki and Palmer’s (2018) call for questions, answers, and engagements
(Kwon, 2004) around artworks dependent on their spatial context. I have pre-
viously attended to some of these questions, answers, and engagements in a short
commentary demonstrating how artworks based around such spatial context can
re-present previously overlooked forms of knowledge (Walker, 2015). In both
Zebracki and Palmer’s (2018) and my (2015) works, the spatial context extends
into the social, an idea which Wrecked! also drew on. Spatially, residents’
 Turning local interests into local action 53
particular rhythms, practices, and knowledges are engaged with, produced, and re-
enacted. These spaces are socially practiced (Zebracki and Palmer, 2018) through
social engagements and revolve around the spaces (Lefebvre, 1996) and asso-
ciated practices of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984). These spaces and practices of
everyday life are then played out across different scales, implicating Southend in
national and international networks. These spaces and practices necessarily entail
different aspects of the community and its situated knowledge, which the four
parts of Wrecked! highlighted. These practices related to the shared community
understanding of Southend as a whole, and of places-in-the-making (Silberberg
et al., 2013), continually re-made through their everyday practices. Southend’s
residents decide how they use their own spaces by how they act in them. By
acting in the spatial, such as by attending and contributing to Wrecked!, citizens
acted to give the project traction, solidifying community bottom-up shared under-
standings and meanings of these local areas.

Conclusion
Wrecked! is an example of artists drawing on local histories, cultures, and
knowledges as part of context-responsive projects to improve local areas ecolo-
gically, culturally, and socially. Accordingly, the project speaks to the heritage of
creative placemaking, highlighting the need for equal status of locals amid the
complexities and tensions of each individual (geographical) area, each individual
project, and each unique form of local knowledge. This shows the importance of
social practice placemaking in finding new ways to improve the quality of life in
urban centres. Using social practice placemaking allows locals to be sought out
for key ideas and knowledge rather than them having to respond to imposed
policies and forms of knowledge. In this way, Wrecked! highlights the effective-
ness of combining social practice placemaking with arts-led resilient practices
(McKeown, 2015), giving residents control of managing and improving their
living spaces. Fundamentally, Wrecked! shows the importance of valuing local
contributions and for ascertaining local opinion through different forms of
expression to re-imagine and re-present different forms of knowledge. Together,
these are elicited by artists and creative practitioners motivated for change, and
whose contribution helps residents express their sentiments and cultural heritage.
In this way, Wrecked! recognises the value of arts beyond instrumentalising them
to boost economic development, instead utilising their cultural capital and out-
lining the need for new forms of knowledge to redress the damage of decades of
elevating economic capital above all other forms.

Notes
1 YoHa, http://yoha.co.uk/about
2 Arts Catalyst, www.artscatalyst.org
3 Critical Art Ensemble, http://critical-art.net
4 Andy Freeman, www.artscatalyst.org/artist/andy-freeman
54 Dominic Walker
5 Fran Gallardo, www.artscatalyst.org/artist/fran-gallardo
6 Warren Harper, www.artscatalyst.org/artist/warren-harper
7 James Ravinet, www.rca.ac.uk/students/james-ravinet
8 Talking Dirty: Tongue First!, www.tonguefirst.com
9 Citizen Science, http://wrecked.artscatalyst.org/landing/4
10 Graveyard of Lost Species, http://wrecked.artscatalyst.org/landing/2
11 Line in the sand, http://wrecked.artscatalyst.org/landing/3

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4 Arrivals and departures
Navigating an emotional landscape of
belonging and displacement at
Barangaroo in Sydney, Australia
Sarah Barns

Abstract
This chapter offers a practitioner perspective on creative placemaking within a
contested landscape of urban renewal. Focused primarily on a public art project
developed by Esem Projects in 2015 at Barangaroo, Sydney, the chapter dis-
cusses the tensions involved in negotiating contested territories of historical,
institutional and community attachment to a prime waterfront precinct. Through
creative practice, the resources of memory and affective engagement were used
to expand the different layers of meaning ascribed to the place, many of these
now erased from the physical landscape through the process of urban renewal. In
this context, conjuring an emotional landscape of attachment became an act of
resistance to urban revitalisation, while at the same time renewing, celebrating,
and expanding the many versions of place that have existed in this significant
waterfront precinct through time.

Introduction
Over the past decade we have seen the value of place become increasingly
central to the arts of urban renewal. It is now widely recognised that when a
place has a strong identity, a strong ‘sense of place’, this brings with it not only
improved social cohesion and community benefits, but also uplifts in land value.
Placemaking now defines a thriving ecosystem of practitioners, consultants and
designers working in their respective fields of architecture, urban design, prop-
erty development, local government, community engagement and public art.
Each is united in working towards the common goal of making great places. By
employing arts-led methodologies to support community programming, events,
festivals and installations, creative placemaking plays a critical role in helping to
build and enhance urban vitality and social connectivity at the local level.
In Australia, the funding environment for creative placemaking has been less
reliant on philanthropic investments than has been the case in places such as the
United States (Wilbur, 2015). Major local government organisations such as the City
of Sydney and the City of Melbourne invest significantly in creative placemaking
practice through a mix of public art programs, local events and festivals. Support
 Arrivals and departures 57
1
from New South Wales (NSW) agencies such as Destination NSW for major events
such as Vivid Sydney,2 attracting over two million visitors each year, has created a
platform for a range of media artists and designers to exhibit and showcase works
using the built environment of Circular Quay as their canvas. Many creative
placemaking initiatives have also emerged as a result of significant urban transfor-
mation projects underway across metropolitan areas. In Sydney, this includes major
transport infrastructure investments and ambitious urban renewal projects, which are
each accompanied by new creative placemaking investments designed to help
‘activate’ new precincts. Across the built environment sector there is also growing
awareness of the importance of programmatic responses to place activation, which
incorporate community-focused temporary activations just as often as ‘one-off’
permanent public art commissions.
In this environment, the avenues of support for creative work and program-
ming in the public domain have multiplied. By turning to the public realm as a
site of creative practice, creative arts practitioners can reduce their reliance on
more traditional – and diminishing – sources of arts funding, while exploring
diverse and emerging art practices that incorporate dialogue between people,
place, community and the dynamics of urban transformation. Many diverse
creative practitioners are now engaged in the field, from traditional public artists
or community arts organisations to commercial designers, advertising agencies
and landscape, lighting and interaction designers.
There is, of course, a clearly instrumental logic behind the funding that flows
into creative placemaking practice. Creative artworks or events need to align
with a largely celebratory ethos that champions and enhances the connections
between people and place. Situated within the wider ethos and practices of
placemaking, the work of creative placemakers is designed to support and
facilitate a range of affective and emotive responses to place. In doing so,
creative placemakers affirm the expression of place as a powerful expression of
culture. As Place Leaders Asia Pacific has suggested: ‘Engendering a sense of
“place” and making of great public places takes an alchemy of elements –
activity, material, structure, purpose and inspiration. Great places are memorable
and stimulate emotional responses in people’ (Place Leaders, 2017).
However, what many of these celebratory accounts of place and its emotional
entanglements often fail to accommodate are the many ways in the relationship
between place, affect, memory and public culture can often be highly fractured
and discordant. Defining what constitutes a place, and what aspects of it should
be celebrated, and by whom, can, at certain sites, be a highly political act. In this
context, if we acknowledge that notions of place are always subjective, contested
and evolving, the work of the creative placemaking practitioner will in turn
necessitate negotiations between competing claims and narratives of place.
In this chapter I discuss this work of negotiating multiple contested place
narratives as it shapes creative placemaking practice. The discussion, which
springs from a body of work I created over several years within the Sydney
waterfront precincts of Millers Point and Barangaroo, reflects on the different
frameworks of investment, attachment and value associated with one of Sydney’s
58 Sarah Barns
major urban renewal projects. As I discuss, the conjuring of an emotional
landscape, of memory and belonging, through a site-specific response that
incorporated community archives, audio-visual recordings and poetry, became
a way to resist a contested narrative of revitalisation that obscured just as much
as it ‘activated’. While not resolving any of the tensions that have simmered
and often erupted during the course of the precinct’s development, it was by
creating an intimate, experiential sense of the depth of personal connections
that had shaped and been shaped by this place that I sought to enable multiple
forms of attachment to be acknowledged, while also allowing new connections
to be forged.

Welcome to Barangaroo
In 2015 Esem Projects,3 a Sydney-based media arts and design practice that I co-
direct, was invited to produce a major installation to mark the opening of
Barangaroo Reserve. The installation was to be established in what was once a
container terminal in the former East Darling Harbour, is Sydney’s newest public
parkland which was created as part of a controversial AUD $6bn redevelopment
of the waterfront lands of East Darling Harbour. Our installation, titled Arrivals
and Departures (2015),4 was specifically commissioned to celebrate and
acknowledge the maritime history of the area as a working port (Figures 4.1
and 4.2).
The commission reflected interest in and support for our creative arts practice
as one that combines elements of creative placemaking with heritage interpretation

Figure 4.1 Families using the vintage typewriter in Arrivals and Departures, Barangaroo
Cutaway, 2015. Credit: Esem Projects.
 Arrivals and departures 59

Figure 4.2 Former residents and maritime workers projected within Barangaroo Cutaway,
with shipping containers as ‘Storyboxes’. Arrivals and Departures, Barangaroo
Sydney, 2015. Credit: Esem Projects.

and digital design. Working with public collections and local community story-
tellers, we create localised ‘living archives’ of place comprising oral histories,
documentary films and photographic collections. We use site-specific installations
and experience design methods to curate and reinscribe these ‘trace’ recordings
within the built environment. Like other creative placemaking practices, our
commissions often come from local councils and place managers who recognise
the potential to incorporate community and historical storytelling into the built
environment through temporary installations and projection media.
Our commission for Barangaroo was one of three installations featured as part
of a three-month program of ‘Welcome Celebrations’. Typical of many creative
placemaking programs, the Welcome Celebrations featured a series of curated
performances, installations, food events and public talks that together created a
broad range of attractions for Sydney audiences to visit this new harbourside
precinct for the first time. Each of the three installations were asked to offer a
creative response to different symbolic and historic representations of the place:
‘Stone’ for indigenous representations, ‘Sea’ for the maritime history and ‘Sky’
as representatives of future hopes and expectations for the site.
We were honoured to be invited to produce an installation for the opening of
this significant new precinct, specifically focused on the theme of ‘Sea’ and post-
settlement maritime history. Yet, we knew there would be tensions to resolve. On
60 Sarah Barns
the one hand, the commission gave us the opportunity to engage large audiences
with the significant maritime history of Sydney’s East Darling Harbour. The
opportunity to interpret the complex social, industrial and environmental
history of the site as a maritime precinct was incredibly exciting. The
exhibition space itself was remarkable: a cavernous new cultural space called
‘The Cutaway’ in central Sydney, enabling us to work at a scale far larger
than we had known before.
It was, however, quite evident that the revitalisation of the precinct, and the act
of ‘welcoming’ new audiences to the transformed headland, was also, for some,
an act of banishment. The redevelopment of Barangaroo has pit developer
interests – in this case the interests of the NSW state government – directly
against the needs of the local community. The management of the site’s industrial
heritage has also provoked widespread public outcry over the very role and place
of history in the wider narrative of Sydney as a city. Accepting the commission,
we knew, would necessitate negotiating directly with these tensions.
Before describing our creative response to these tensions, I want to first
capture the dynamics of debate and conflict generated by this project of urban
revitalisation – in short, the contested terrain of place that would shape the
design and activation of our project.

Revitalisation as displacement
The largest urban renewal project in Sydney since the 2000 Olympics, Baran-
garoo covers some 22 hectares (220,000sqm) of former industrial land along the
harbour and lies adjacent to the central business district. It includes a new
financial district comprising three commercial office towers designed by Richard
Rogers; an AUD$1.5b casino; a series of high-end residential apartments, as well
as shopping, dining, hotel, and hospitality services and a public promenade
leading to the new headland reserve.
The many controversies provoked by the redevelopment are familiar to most
Sydney-siders. The winning urban design for the development, selected in 2005
through an international urban design competition, was ultimately set aside by
planning authorities following a series of modifications to the masterplan,
which included a doubling of the allowable density and significant increases
in the proposed height of buildings. Influential former Prime Minister Paul
Keating, who sat on the design review panel for the development, negotiated
the inclusion of a naturalistic headland (the Reserve), intended to remove
references to the precinct’s maritime history, thereby returning the foreshore
to its pre-colonial condition.
These modifications raised the ire of the architectural profession, aghast at a
process that had seen a competition-winning masterplan scuttled through a series
of unaccountable interventions taking place at a highly significant site alongside
Sydney’s iconic harbour. The outrage was not simply on account of the poor
adherence to transparent decision-making: many also saw a complete lack of
 Arrivals and departures 61
sensitivity to the site’s significant industrial heritage (Drew, 2015; Reinmuth,
2012; Weller, 2010).
The governance of the development likewise attracted intense criticism. The
project was listed as a ‘State Significant Site’ and subsequently exempt from
many conventional planning processes. The creation of a new state government-
owned agency, the Barangaroo Delivery Authority,5 provided a governance
mechanism to reduce the influence of the City of Sydney in the planning and
development process. The placename has also provoked criticism: Barangaroo,
the partner of Australia’s first Aboriginal ‘ambassador’, Bennelong, opposed the
theft of native land and belonged to the Gamaragal people of Manly. She was not
of the Eora people who occupied the area when colonialists first arrived, and
whose own placenames were first documented by English linguist marine
Lieutenant William Dawes. The Aboriginal land council has refused to endorse
the name.
The continuing and fractious public debates sparked at many stages of the
development of Barangaroo have returned the city to familiar battles over the fate
of its heritage and lack of trust in the city authorities, whose capacity to rule in
favour of developer-led interests continues to shock and dismay. The contributions
to the development made by noteworthy international architects, no less than Lord
Richard Rogers, have heightened cynicism towards the values of urban elites.
Indeed, Rogers’ own words seem to underscore this cynicism:

The city has been viewed as an arena for consumerism. Political and
commercial expediency has shifted the emphasis of urban development
from meeting the broad social needs of the community to meeting the
circumscribed needs of individuals. The pursuit of this narrow objective
has sapped the city of its vitality.
(Drew, 2015, para. 15)

To Reinmuth (2012, para. 24), the experience of Barangaroo made plain that city
leaders continue to persist in prioritising ‘the business of consuming the city
rather than making the city with the involvement of its citizens’, and at a site like
Barangaroo, ‘we will only continue to distrust our leaders and the places they
impose on it’. Drew (2015, para. 18) writes that ‘[l]ike a giant finger given to
Sydney, everything about it is selfish and narcissistic: its excessive height, public
exclusion, and monopolisation of harbour views for a wealthy few’.
Yet, despite the very public controversies sparked during the development of
Barangaroo, others found much to praise as the project neared completion.
Australian environmentalist and writer Tim Flannery, writing for the New York
Review of Books (2017), celebrated the opening of the Barangaroo Reserve as an
‘act of restitution’. Flannery (ibid., para. 1) has compared the opening of
Sydney’s Barangaroo Reserve in August 2015, what he calls ‘an expansive,
charming public space at the heart of a great commercial city’, with New York’s
High Line6 and London’s East End Olympic7 redevelopment, each landmark
public parks that ‘help define a major metropolis’s sense of place’.
62 Sarah Barns
For Flannery, trained as an environmental scientist, the qualities of biodiver-
sity and ecology now embraced at the site pay respect to the area’s pre-colonial
environmental history. Barangaroo has provided the opportunity to restore the
late eighteenth-century shoreline of the harbour, which was altered – what
Keating called an act of ‘vandalism’ (Legge, 2015) – during the industrialisation
of the harbour. By removing the containerised port infrastructure and replacing it
with public parkland that incorporates many of the plant species native to the
area, the making of Barangaroo has also made open to the public a perspective
on the harbour lost for a century. Referring to the parkland’s extensive use of
natural sandstone, Flannery (2017, para. 5) praises the development for ‘restoring
[Sydney] standstone to the prominence it deserves.’ Indeed, to Flannery (ibid.,
para.14), the whole development ‘marks a turning point in the relation of
Sydney’s people with its past.’
To those who have opposed the development, and specifically the public
parkland, the re-creation of a long-lost headland represents a kitsch and ‘expli-
citly phoney naturalism’ that has sent Australian landscape architecture ‘reeling
back to the eighteenth century’ (Weller, 2010, para.9). Critics of the natural
headland believe the industrial harbour has significance with regard to Australia’s
historical development as a nation and aspects of its character should have been
preserved. Indeed, it is from the docks and wharves that once dotted this area of
the harbour that Australia’s exports were first shipped; it was also the embarka-
tion point for the millions of migrants who first arrived in Australia; it was the
disembarkation point for many soldiers departing during the wars of the early
twentieth century; and it was a place where one of the world’s great maritime
unions learned to fight for its workers’ rights. Returning to a pre-settlement
landscape means effectively erasing the physical markers that link us today to the
evolution of Australia as a nation.
Just as the making of Barangaroo required the removal of the site’s industrial
heritage, so too has it displaced the long-term residential community within the
adjacent area of Millers Point. Long-term residents who have traced their family
connections in the area back to the 1800s have been caught in the process of
being forcibly relocated out of the area. Millers Point has been predominantly
made up of public housing for much of the past century. When it was a home for
dockworkers, the area was managed by a state government department called the
Maritime Housing Board (MSB), but later this function was transferred to the
Department of Housing. The children of waterside workers who grew up in
homes managed by the MSB found themselves living in state-subsidised public
housing, and many of these residents would remain in their homes for much of
their lives, even as the harbour lost its industrial character and was rapidly
gentrified. However, as the state government, through its Barangaroo Delivery
Authority, was working to redevelop the Barangaroo Precinct, it was also
progressively selling this prime waterfront housing stock.
The City of Sydney’s long-serving mayor, Clover Moore, has described the
process of their forced eviction as ‘social cleansing’ (Hasham and McKenny,
2014). Many years of campaigning by residents, resident action groups and
 Arrivals and departures 63
community supporters have failed to deter the state government from selling 293
public housing dwellings and evicting their residents, some of whom are over
seventy years of age and have lived in their properties their whole lives. For
those who actively support the residents of Millers Point, Barangaroo has helped
to reinforce the spatial divides of the city that separate rich from poor. The
removal of the industrial heritage of the precinct is seen to justify the removal of
its working-class residents as well. So if Barangaroo helps us to connect with
representations of its ecological history, it would also appear to do so at the
expense of the area’s post-colonial social history.
As this discussion has made clear, there are many competing and highly
emotive accounts of Barangaroo as a place, raising many provocations about
the nature of its contributions to the life of Sydney. For some, Barangaroo
exemplifies why Sydney-siders have so little trust in their government, with its
persistently pro-development stance that continues to dislocate the lives of so
many, and particularly the most vulnerable. For others, the place points to a new
development model capable of reducing the carbon intensity of cities, raising
new benchmarks for environmental performance while embracing the site-speci-
fic qualities of Sydney’s material landscape. For many, this is simply a beautiful
new parkland, a place to exercise, a new vista on a glistening harbour.

Arrivals and departures

Esem Projects first began to explore the potential for site-specific audio-visual
installations in 2011 while working with the residential community of Millers
Point. Once the centre of Sydney’s thriving maritime industry, the area is rich in
archival documentation, having inspired generations of photographers, film-
makers, performers and artists to capture and document changing experiences of
life and labour around the industrial harbour.
Working with the support of the National Film and Sound Archive and
commissioned through the City of Sydney’s annual Art and About Festival
(2003-ongoing),8 Esem Projects created a series of site-specific installations
called Unguarded Moments (2011).9 In this, we used the mediums of digital
projection, sound design and mobile media to reinscribe audio-visual collections
back into their environments. The process of designing interfaces that facilitated
different kinds of interaction between past and present environments was critical
to this work. So, too, were the filmic editing techniques we used, which sought to
reposition a character or a moment in time outside their original narrative
references, to instead be experienced as a ‘trace element’ within the environment.
The funding we received from the City of Sydney encouraged us to consider
working with the local community in developing this public artwork. For the
creative director of Art and About, the process of creating public artworks was as
much about producing work in the public domain as it was about co-creating
with the public. Through a series of workshops with past and present residents of
Millers Point, we digitised and recorded personal photographs, oral histories and
stories of life growing up in Millers Point. In turn, recordings from contemporary
64 Sarah Barns
residents were incorporated into the filmic responses exhibited using digital
projection within the built environment, alongside the materials we had sourced
from public collections. A poor girl eating a sandwich, captured by Australia’s
first ‘mockumentary’ producer Rupert Kathner in the 1930s, was slowed down
and played on a loop, peering out mournfully from the gentrified shop windows
of Walsh Bay; boys playing in a row boat around a damaged ship in the 1940s
could be seen, ghostly projected, beneath the docks, laughing back at us.
From this original installation in 2011 our creative work has continued to
explore the possibilities of a public art practice that facilitates intimate encoun-
ters with those who have come before us and the people who recorded them. We
have reimagined the histories of places as archaeologies of recorded action,
whereby acts of historical storytelling and interpretation are positioned as
deliberately performative and collaborative. Our interest is to facilitate alternate
modalities of encounter with different layers of the past, drawing on the mediums
of sound design, large- and small-scale projection, print media and experience
design. The art of placemaking, within our practice, means enlivening different
times of space beyond those evident as traces within the built environment today.
It is a practice built out of resistance to the notion that time is necessarily linear,
and that space is empty until we fill it.
By 2015, when we were commissioned to produce a creative work within the
contested landscape of Barangaroo, many of the residents we had collaborated
with as part of the Unguarded Moments project were in the process of being
evicted from their homes. Their stories and the personal photographs they had
shared with us during the course of the 2011 installation were central to the story
of Barangaroo’s maritime history. These residents were without a voice in the
story of Barangaroo’s future, a site that had deliberately turned its back on its
‘ugly’ industrial heritage in favour of a pre-colonial, naturalistic past. Protest
banners filled the residential streets of Millers Point, but they had no place within
the ‘welcoming’ events taking place over the road at Barangaroo.
As geographer Sibley (1995, p.ix) has reminded us, the human landscape can
be read as a landscape of exclusion. Urban revitalisation projects, creating
premium, highly palatable spaces, also enact exclusionary practices, often in
subtle ways. The residents of Millers Point, living adjacent to the revitalisation of
East Darling Harbour, belonged to another era, the era of the working port, when
poverty, not plenty, festooned the shoreline. For some the launch of Barangaroo
was welcome, but for the residents, this was an act of banishment – just as, when
Europeans first arrived here, the people of the Eora nation who had fished the
harbour for millennia were also banished.
During our period of creative development leading up to the installation
launch, we discovered another narrative of the place somewhat hidden within
the historical accounts of East Darling Harbour. The site of Barangaroo Headland
had, prior to the containerisation of the working port, been the location of a
wharf called ‘Dalgetty’s Wharf’. It was here, we discovered, that Australians
fighting in the two World Wars had embarked to fight in those conflicts, and
those who made it home returned to this point in the following years, emaciated
 Arrivals and departures 65
and war-weary. A former resident recounted that she had heard a woman singing
out on the wharf every time a ship departed, carrying men to war. It was the
Maori ‘Farewell Song’ she had sung, popularised during World War Two. We
also learned that Dalgetty’s Wharf was the first site of disembarkation for many
migrants arriving in Sydney from war-torn Europe. We made contact with people
who could share their stories and memories of their first encounter with
Australia, who held that moment of first arrival close to their hearts, marking
their commencement of a new, better life.
Arrivals and Departures, the title of our installation, acknowledged this
migration history, now erased from the landscape, but also contained a reference
to the continual forces of inclusion and exclusion, placement and displacement,
entailed in the making of a place over time. The design of our installation used
shipping containers, a cliché of many placemaking initiatives, but in this instance
a direct reference to the history of the site as Australia’s largest containerised
port. Six containers, each brightly coloured, contained within them a series of
films, soundscapes, printed graphics and storytelling opportunities that offered
experiential encounters with different narratives of Barangaroo’s maritime his-
tory. We called each container a ‘storybox’.
The use of multiple, brightly coloured storyboxes in the design of the installa-
tion contained a reference to the classic arts of memory (Yates, 1966). Originally
developed as a series of mnemonic techniques to support the art of rhetoric, this
practice involved creating the rooms of a house, in which highly memorable,
representational images would be placed as a trigger to provoke recollections. In
this installation, each storybox told the life of the precinct from the perspectives
of workers, children, recently-arrived immigrants, soldiers departing for war
and merchants. One storybox offered a simple meditation on the loneliness of
the sea. Another contained a vintage typewriter, along with example letters
written by soldiers far from their spouses. Visitors were able to share their own
stories, and we found that many people left personal accounts of arriving in
Australia as an immigrant.
We deliberately included interviews and documentation provided by the
residents of Millers Point, who spoke of their life growing up in the area,
swimming in the harbour, avoiding sharks, playing with billycarts. Recordings
donated by the Maritime Union of Australia were used to capture working
conditions on the docks and the importance of the site to the history of organised
labour. Against the intimate interior scale of the containers, we also presented
large-scale video projections to create a sense of dramatic scale appropriate to the
volume of the space. The Maori Farewell Song echoed throughout the cavernous
space of The Cutaway.
The project was installed for one month during the Welcome Celebrations and
attended by some 80,000 visitors. We ran tours of the project each weekend, and
many people asked whether the installations might be made permanent. They
told us they had no idea the history of the precinct was so rich. We knew
permanence wasn’t an option. The site was being redeveloped not to acknowl-
edge and celebrate its maritime history, but to move beyond it, to embrace a
66 Sarah Barns
vision of Sydney that necessarily departed from the industrial, working-class
element of this history.

Conclusion
Arrivals and Departures was a minor intervention within a big, evolving story
about Sydney as a city. It was a temporary, creative response to the historical
contingencies of place. The installation contributed to the urban revitalisation
efforts of the Barangaroo Delivery Authority: it attracted many visitors and
caused little controversy. There were no protest banners erected by residents.
Moreover, it did nothing to prevent the eviction of Miller’s Point’s long-term
residents. The project’s title, as well as its emotional register, was as much about
the story of migration, the working conditions of the poor and the loneliness of
the sea as it was about displacement, not only of the local residents, but of the
many layers of Sydney’s industrial history enacted by the arrival of Barangaroo.
The tensions I have described are, I am aware, common to many placemaking
contexts where the risks associated with ‘pseudo-participation’ and a naive
romanticism towards the values of place have prompted calls for deeper engage-
ment with the socially-engaged practices that resist neoliberal agendas attached
to city culturalisation (Zukin, 2013; Courage, 2017, p.53). If history is told by the
victors, the celebratory narratives of places and our enduring, emotional invest-
ments in them can, likewise, be easily refashioned to suit the marketisation and
privatisation of public space.
Such tensions are no doubt particularly common within creative placemaking
projects reliant on funding from developer interests, whether government-owned
or private. In places like Australia, and particularly the major cities, it can feel
like there are limited alternatives: public funding for community-based arts
practice remains low compared to the resources available for urban revitalisation.
As Courage (2017, p.77) has put it, such contexts can inadvertently see place-
makers complicit in the politics they may be working to subvert or act outside of.
The longer-term possibilities for interpretation, community engagement and
creativity ultimately depend on the alignment of these practices with the agendas
of the site owner, in our case the state-run enterprise known as the Barangaroo
Delivery Authority.
How, then, might we respond to these tensions? It seems clear that increased
investment in urban revitalisation by entities whose primary driver is footfall can
only foster more emphasis on opportunistic engagement. This, in turn, risks
seeing the practice of creative placemaking become ever more closely entwined
with narratives of developer-led revitalisation. But it is during such times that
creative placemaking practice must seek to demonstrate a wider diversity of
potentials, including, not least, the creation of inclusive places that speak to the
possibilities of spatial justice.
Creative placemaking practitioners are often equipped with tools and resources
that can engage a diversity of communities, through collaborative, multi-disci-
plinary practices and mediums of engagement and expression. Practitioners are
 Arrivals and departures 67
able to draw on a range of affective and emotional registers not always present in
either more linear accounts of urban history or the celebratory accounts attached
to revitalisation agendas. However, to do socially-engaged practice in a way that
goes beyond mere tactics or short-term opportunism ultimately depends on
resources not commonly available through either arts funding or developer-led
investments. A clear priority for creative placemaking policy is to address the
limited support available through urban revitalisation mechanisms for sustained,
socially-inclusive community engagement.
Some practitioners, such as myself, pull together support for more socially-
engaged and/or less commercially-driven practice by knitting together small
grants from a range of research, arts and non-profit organisations. However, this
approach can lead to a dilution of creatively-engaged practice in favour of more
utilitarian goals that ultimately may better be served in other ways. Cultural
policy more broadly has experienced this, through the embrace of instrumental
policy that has seen arts investments justified for their impacts on the domains of
social policy, health policy, economic vitality and the like. Creative placemaking
practice can likewise serve a range of diverse agendas, socially-inclusive or
otherwise, but the question remains as to whether its identity as a domain of
practice should be so instrumentally defined.
For what it is worth, my own attraction to creative placemaking practice lies
with its potential for lively encounters with strangers, in ways that affirm and
make visible the multiple ways in which people attach and create meaning in
places, both past and present. In a world where our experience of place becomes
increasingly mediated as not-dissimilar brandscapes, or experienced primarily
through the prisms of smallish, glowing rectangular screens, it is the potential to
allow space to speak to a multitude of emotive entanglements, memories and
enchantments that offers the greatest reward.

Notes
1 Destination NSW, www.destinationnsw.com.au
2 Vivid Sydney, www.vividsydney.com/
3 Esem Projects, http://esemprojects.com
4 Arrivals and Departures video documentation, https://vimeo.com/159049301 and
https://www.esemprojects.com/project/arrivals-departures/
5 Barangaroo Delivery Authority, www.barangaroo.com/the-project/barangaroo-delivery-
authority/
6 High Line, www.thehighline.org
7 Queen Elisabeth Olympic Park, www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk
8 Art and About Festival, www.artandabout.com.au/
9 Unguarded Moments Project Archive, http://cargocollective.com/unguardedmoments

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5 A case for human-scale social space
in Mumbai
Aditi Nargundkar Pathak

Abstract
This chapter introduces a placemaking initiative that The Urban Vision, a social
venture focusing on solutions-driven research, executed in three localities in
Mumbai, India. The Urban Vision experimented with the creation of social
spaces as a tactic to revive the human scale and social interaction at a neighbour-
hood level. This was a co-created action research project across three sites that
used art as a methodology to investigate the impact of an addition of social
spaces. The place activation programme was designed to allow for flexibility of
use in an attempt to create ownership amongst the citizens. The projects are
discussed as an iterative approach to introducing social spaces or ‘pause points’
in a busy crowded city. The chapter will present the three projects through an
examination of the space characteristics, the processes involved, and post-
implementation observations. The chapter will conclude with a reflection on the
the necessary adaptations to arts-led interventional placemaking required for a
South Asian mega-city, such as Mumbai.

Introduction
In an Indian city the utility of spaces often evolves organically as per citizens’ needs,
irrespective of the design purpose of those spaces. Children play wherever they find
a space, and commerce happens wherever economic opportunity exists. People like
flexibility and are averse to rigidity. Alexander (1965) demonstrated this human-
focused nature of cities, comparing cities to a ‘semi-lattice’ in contradistinction to a
‘tree’, contrasting ‘natural cities’, those that have evolved spontaneously with
‘artificial cities’, those that have been designed from the ground up. Alexander
contended that artificial cities lack some essential components as they are built with
rigidly allocated functions to spaces, advocating instead that cities work best when
they mimic the dynamism of the life that they hold.
Mumbai is a dynamic city and characteristically mimics the life of its people.
It has grown as an intrinsically organic city and is constantly adapting to rapid
population growth. In doing so, it is transforming its organic arrangement by
introducing large, planned, rigid places. Mumbai is the second most densely
70 Aditi Nargundkar Pathak
populated city in the world, with 31,700 people per sq. km (UN Habitat for a
Better Future, 2015). With the Indian population changing from being predomi-
nantly rural to urban in nature and Mumbai being a preferred choice for many
because of the economic opportunities it offers, this trend is set to continue, and
vertical growth is seen as a feasible solution to this challenge. In every locality/
neighbourhood, there are informally accepted anchor points (Golledge and
Rushton, 1976) where people meet, talk or just loiter around. In Indian cities
these anchor points have traditionally been a magazine vendor, a tea seller, a
street vendor, a popular restaurant, a popular store or sometimes even a bus stop.
However, in new townships, the rigidity of the functions within spaces does not
encourage such anchor points. ‘Old’ is rapidly giving way to ‘new’ and people
are losing their affinity to and relationship with their cityscapes. At this inflection
point, it has become essential to revive and keep the social fabric of cities like
Mumbai intact. One way to achieve this is via the provision of non-intimidating,
secular, small social urban spaces alongside large urban amenities. These neutral
spaces could hold the key to a more inclusive and well-connected future for
Indian cities.

The Urban Vision approach

The Urban Vision,1 a social venture focusing on solutions-driven research,
experimented with creating flexible social spaces or ‘pause points’ as part of a
placemaking programme in Mumbai between 2012 and 2014. The research and
implementation phases were led by the author and delivered by The Urban
Vision team of urban innovators, architects, artists and urban designers. The
Urban Vision’s aim was to add social spaces that were left open to interpretation
by users, to explore approaches that are more commonly practised in Western
contexts; the intent was to evaluate if such spaces could work in the Mumbai
setting and what, if any modifications were needed to make a social space
successful. The core questions that were intended to be explored were: can such
spaces bring legibility and identity to local areas? Can they bring down the
enormity of the mega-city to a human scale so that the citizens can relate and
interact with them? Can they become inclusive spaces where people of all strata
can mingle? Can they act as a catalyst for the revitalisation of their neighbour-
hoods? And can our group advance any site-specific interventions that enable
social cohesion? The Urban Vision team worked with stakeholders – landowners,
artists, citizens and supporters – to design and deliver social spaces in three
localities in Mumbai. Two of the three spaces were built with citizens’ participa-
tion in already-existing localities and the third space was in a new planned
residential township. The three spaces represent different scenarios of the city
even though all three sites were implemented on private land owned by private
developers. In Mumbai, permission to develop private land is easier to acquire
and funding for is easier to secure from the owners than via public sources.
Developers saw value in creating the pause points to enhance the ambience of
their projects. The spaces were located on the main road of the neighbourhood
 Human-scale social space in Mumbai 71
for easy access, and with adjacent bus links to enhance footfall they acted as an
extension of the street for pedestrians. Visual art was used as method of
intervention across all three sites. In the recent past, only architecture and
infrastructure had been used to create a sense of identity in Mumbai. Thus,
these projects were an experiment to see if art-led temporary interventions could
impact that status quo. Social spaces as pause points and accessible spaces were
created to fulfil some of the perceived needs of social life. Art was used as a way
of making the space inviting and non-intimidating by aiming to harness feelings
of happiness and relaxation, stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain which
make people feel happy and relaxed (Zeki, 1999).

Project context
The three spaces that were chosen for the interventions were located in three
neighbourhoods of Mumbai. Although at the city level all these spaces were
small, they had the potential to showcase the impact of interventions through an
analysis of their ability to mitigate the monotony of new urban environments.
These spaces could potentially provide a hint to a better future for Indian cities
having inclusive small social spaces. The owners of the private land on which the
three projects were built were also keen to support an initiative where improving
walkability and scaling the city down to human level was a primary objective.
The creation of two temporary and one permanent space employed two
different approaches to place activation: first, temporary interventions that
explore PPS’s (2011) Lighter-Quicker-Cheaper (LQC) approach to placemaking;
and second, the use of permanent art. These approaches, combined with site
observations and a comparative technique, enabled The Urban Vision to explore
whether methods developed within Western contexts could be transferred to
India. Project 1 used tactical urbanism in a popular neighbourhood. Project 2
used mural and street art to mitigate a building site. Project 3 used permanent art
and place programming to energise a newly built township.

Project 1: Temporary social space in Powai

This site was located in Powai, a popular neighbourhood in North Mumbai. The
space consisted of a planned development by a single developer and was located
adjacent to a natural lake. The area has a mixed resident demographic and a
transient professional population. The locality has commercial office spaces,
residential buildings, shops, restaurants, a hospital, schools and one of the
premier educational institutions of the country. All these amenities are located
in a small area of approximately 1.5 sq. km and the facilities have made this
neighbourhood a desired location in which to live and work. The mutual
proximity of amenities, workspaces and apartment blocks made the site for this
social space a fitting location for a pause point, and the designers sought to
engage various stakeholders in building a social space that could mitigate the
enormity of the uniform high-rise buildings dominating the neighbourhood. It
72 Aditi Nargundkar Pathak
was thought that incorporating public art in the form of murals and sculptures
would change the area’s aesthetic appeal, and observations on the extent to which
this changed aesthetic was accepted by locals would form the findings of the
research project.

Project 2: Temporary social space in Borivali

Borivali is a suburb to the north of Powai, originally developed as an industrial
neighbourhood. Here, real estate prices have experienced steady growth each
year, and premium land prices and residential demand has led to conversions of
industrial land to residential spaces (Housing.com, 2017). This development, and
the project site, was on the Western Express Highway, the main north–south
arterial road of Mumbai. It is estimated that 62,191 vehicles pass through this
road daily (Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation Limited, 2016),
making the site a prominent location. The neighbourhood had residential apart-
ments, a hospital, a mall and a national park close to the site. Prior to the
intervention the site was cordoned off with plain grey galvanised iron sheets and
was visually lacklustre. The project was supported by volunteers on a pro bono
basis and the landowner provided funding for materials, basic civil works and an
honorarium for artists.

Project 3: Permanent space in new township, Thana

The Urban Vision developed and implemented an art and place activation
programme to enable civic engagement with a new planned residential township
in Thana. Thana neighbours Mumbai and is a district in the Mumbai Metropo-
litan Region. The location of this planned development is approximately 34 km
from Mumbai, developed as a residential township with some city amenities
including offices, shops, a school, fire stations, restaurants, gyms and health
clubs. The challenge of this new township is to provide a high-quality lifestyle
for residents in order to attract new buyers. The management and developers of
such townships are constantly applying added-value approaches to projects. New
developments of this scale bring people from different backgrounds together
and there is a general absence of pre-existing social connections within such
communities. At the time of the project, therefore, the township was still a
construction site, and the installations were to take three to six months to
complete. Four art organisations were selected from an open tender to complete
seven installations.

Methods and methodology

The temporary spaces employed an experimental methodology using three key
methods: a hackathon, a social media campaign and co-creation. Hackathons are
generally a coding festival used by information technology professionals to
rapidly develop software products. City design professionals and citizens have
 Human-scale social space in Mumbai 73
been using hackathon methods to organise short (one- or two-day) brainstorming
sessions to devise user-friendly solutions for city planning and urban design.
Here, citizens, artists and urban planners brainstormed to come up with design
solutions for the space. A social media campaign via Facebook and Twitter (both
widely used mediums in India for information outreach) was used to invite
people to the hackathon and later to take part in the delivery phase. The
temporary spaces were built via co-creation with local citizens. The creation of
the permanent spaces employed a more traditional approach involving, firstly, the
identification of the site, then the development of the budget, the commissioning
of art work, the site preparation and installation, and lastly, communication and
publicity.

Temporary spaces in Borivali and Powai

The spaces at Powai and Borivali were to be built as temporary spaces using
PPS’s LQC approach and terminology (2011) as advocated for by Project for
Public Spaces (Project for Public Spaces, 2011). The temporary spaces created
with this methodology are easy to build and have a relatively lower cost, and
thus were considered to be best suited for the context as they are realisable even
with a limited budget and timeframe. The LQC approach further allowed the use
of straightforward and practical solutions where the community could be
involved from planning to execution. Co- creation with citizens meant complet-
ing works in the early morning and late evening within a short time span. These
first projects, executed in four days, were an important step in showing proof of
concept and how much of an impact could be made by a quick transformation of
part of the city.
In Powai, commercial activity was not allowed to be conducted at the space,
so a social anchor point such as a tea stall could not be provided – street art and
interactive sculptures were therefore used instead. The purpose of art in this
project was also to give a social and visual cue to passers-by that they are
welcome to use this space, and so to achieve this the commissioned artists chose
vibrant and joyful colours as an initial design feature. In the visually demanding
landscape of Mumbai, art needs to create a striking impact to draw attention to
space and to make the different functional qualities of space recognisable, such
as the implied invitation to linger or sit, for example. An existing dilapidated
structure was repurposed to create a Museum of Street Art. Street art groups
Visual Disobedience2 and ST+Art India3 were invited to paint the walls of the
museum and interactive sculptures made by artists were installed, such as
FOSSILSS, a sculpture of a family with a dog created from recycled material.
People could shake hands with the father, mother and the child, as the hands
were movable, and also sit on the dog. A three-dimensional piece of floor art was
also incorporated on the pavement adjoining the social space.
At Borivali, the intention was to carve out a temporary social space that would be
open to people for the duration the construction phasing and which showcased how
construction sites could be used for meanwhile activity. The site was located behind
74 Aditi Nargundkar Pathak
a city bus stop; this location was selected in order to integrate the social space into
the street and make it accessible and non-restrictive. Two types of art interventions
were undertaken here. Firstly, a social space was created by artists and residents.
Recycled tires were converted into colourful seats and installed in an amphitheatre
formation, enabling a dynamic interpretation as seating, a performing space or a
children’s play area. The walls of this social space were inscribed with visions for
the future of Mumbai tweeted on social media by citizens and some quotes on
urbanism best practices. Aklaq Ahemad, a ‘letter artist’, was commissioned for this
project. Secondly, a mural was created by the graffiti/street art groups Visual
Disobedience and ST+ Art India. Five murals were made from 60 x 16 ft galvanised
iron sheets found on the construction site and painted offering an artists’ interpreta-
tion of visions for a future Mumbai.
The subject of the art work emerged from a hackathon. The artists painted their
interpretation of the vision based on their individual styles, with locals from the
neighbourhood painting parts of the murals. Social media engagement with was an
important aspect in discovering and then inscribing citizens’ wishes on the walls of
the social plaza, for example, whereby messages such as #Needmoresuchplacesto-
displayourtalent, #moretimetohangoutwithfriends and #MumbaiNeedsmorepedes-
trianfriendlyStreets were included.
The Urban Vision had organised a design hackathon earlier, in 2014, when
residents, artists, planners, architects and students were invited to collaborate on
a brainstorming session to design the art-led small social space in Powai and
Borivali. This was a five-hour session that produced solutions for the two
temporary sites in Powai and Borivali. In an attempt to involve the larger city,
the chosen solutions were uploaded to social media. Social and print media were
used to engage the city and invite citizens to help with their execution. Twitter
was used to follow the progress of the build and featured film interviews with
residents. Events such as artist talks, a drum circle and storytelling were
organised to encourage citizens’ participation. The project was positively
reported by print media and was covered by national television and both English
and Marathi newspapers (Cathcart-Keays, 2014; Doshi, 2014).

Permanent art and place activation

For the Thana development, The Urban Vision utilised public art and place
activation, or place programming, as a strategy to increase the number of social
spaces, create pause points and encourage greater sociability among locals.
Permanent art installations were used to add character and identity to the
already-designed green spaces and to counter the homogenised yet unintelligible
architectural aesthetic designed for monetary purposes. The objective of using
curated permanent art commissioned from multiple artists was to add legibility to
the existing community spaces, giving people landmarks or anchor points and
creating visual associations within the township. Place activation was used to
promote citizen involvement in the common spaces and foster relationship
building among fellow citizens. Citizen engagement in this context was not
 Human-scale social space in Mumbai 75
used as a planning term but as a method of encouraging residents to actively
engage with both their built environment and their fellow neighbours. This
engagement was achieved by conducting community programming, forming
interest groups and promoting the identity of the full township within the city
as a destination for new experiences. Place activation was used as a non-physical
placemaking strategy to engage the community in order to ‘activate’ the spaces
they had moved into and in turn create community ownership.

PERMANENT ART INSTALLATIONS

Local citizens were not involved in the planning or delivery of these art works;
instead, the developer created an overarching vision through a series of exercises
undertaken with The Urban Vision. As this was not a temporary approach, the
installation locations were selected after observing how citizens used the spaces
and understanding the development design. It was felt to be important to
commission art that was inviting and accessible, that could be touched and
played with and that could be integrated into the whole development, merging
with the language of the township. A further commissioning criterion was the
overarching sustainability theme of utilising waste material within some of the
sculptures and conceptually showcasing green living. Seven locations, at regular
ten- to fifteen-minute walking intervals, were selected for these pieces.

FUNCTIONAL ART INSTALLATIONS

Floor games such as hopscotch and mazes were installed at bus stops and
‘artistic seating’ was installed in the community greens along with indigenous
nature-inspired lighting on the main connecting road of the township. In-situ
seating around the street lighting was also installed to create a social space. A 20
ft globe made from recycled iron and stainless steel was installed at the main
entrance of the township. As the largest installation it needed to be located in a
landmark location and a space was chosen between the development sales office
and one of the schools. This location conveyed the township’s commitment to
green initiatives and used bicycle dynamos to light up a map of India when
peddled, encouraging an awareness of green energy. Eco Twirls, aluminium fans
that worked as windmills, were installed on three walls on a sub-station wall in
front of children’s play area and on the way to the grocery store and health club.
These were made into a competitive game for toddlers and became a loved play
space that was consistently used by the children and adults.

PLACE ACTIVATION FOR CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT

Programmes and events were designed to encourage citizens to form social

bonds within the community and with an aim for citizens to, in due course, take
over and conduct their own programmes. The events were categorised into
Partner Events – cultural and social events hosted within various sites in
76 Aditi Nargundkar Pathak
collaboration with partner organisations – and Community Events – small-scale
events developed and conducted by citizens. The intention of the programmes
was to create an environment for new social networks to form, create a sense of
belonging and patronage of a place and establish a feeling of security and safety
in the community through processes of trust building. The programming content
was based on citizen surveys and stakeholder workshops and included the
Rangoli festival, a lantern festival, photography, a capoeira performance, dance
and aerodynamics workshops and urban farming.

Findings
On completion, observations were made to evaluate the spaces as per the
core questions that The Urban Vision had set out to explore. These observa-
tions were noted through photography and observational data collection.
Interviews of users were also conducted from 6 am to 8 am and at evenings
from 5 pm to 8 pm. The temporary sites were observed twelve times in the
first year and six times in second year for all the selected times. The
permanent art installations were observed over a period of eighteen months
after installations. Observations focussed on recording the number of people
per hour using the space at predetermined times and different days of the
week, the condition of deterioration and vandalism and changes in physical
conditions.

LQC as a strategy
It was found necessary to tailor the LQC approach according to the site
locations. At the Powai site a parking area was dilapidated and required
work from the land owners to make it accessible. Similarly at Borivali, the
developer did the base work of carving out the space and painting the primer
coat on the murals.

Social spaces as pause points

The space in Powai achieved its objective of creating a pause point. The space
was most often used in early mornings and late evenings as the micro-climate
was cooler, and citizens were observed using the space for a break during their
morning walk. Young people used the space the evenings and a greater number
of women and children were seen spending time in the space and its adjacent
street, indicating that the space was perceived as safe. The position of seating
made users face the street adjacent to the space instead of the art and while
people chose to look at the street, art functioned as a visual cue that the space
was safe and accessible. Those observed were from all the same strata of society:
users interviewed included rickshaw drivers, professional drivers, domestic helps,
nannies, a grandmother, homemakers from affluent families, shopkeepers from
nearby shops and security guards.
 Human-scale social space in Mumbai 77
Meanwhile activity and social space
At Borivali the value of opening up an under-construction site to the city
attracted attention. The social space and the art murals made the space visually
noticeable, leading to other developer organisations approaching The Urban
vision team to implement similar murals. Developers have started considering
this an innovative approach to establishing community goodwill and their brand
presence around the ongoing project sites. The vibrancy of the wall mural was
successful in mitigating the harshness of the construction, as this investment
converted a derelict-looking space to one that was well taken care of and valued.
During the two years the social space was in use there was not much deteriora-
tion (as maintenance was discharged by the developer) and the space was in use
until its removal after two years. A shade device would have been useful as it
was observed that the space was unused during the summer or when it rained, or
in the afternoons generally.

Lack of maintenance and vandalism

At Powai, it was observed that the social space began to deteriorate, with parts of
the sculptures missing and not replaced as there was no clear ownership
established during commissioning. The citizens groups involved expected the
developer to take the lead in maintenance and vice versa. The direct impact of
the lack of maintenance was seen in the reduced use of the space by women and
children in the second year. At Borivali, the developer experienced vandalism on
the site during the two-year project and subsequently employed a night-time
security guard. An activity anchor such as a vendor would have helped to
establish a sense of local ownership and thus avoided a guard being present
there.

Permanent art for pause points

This project was a pilot project to see if art could create social spaces and
enhance social interaction. The locations of each installation became social
spaces, with people interacting with their neighbours around the installations,
turning an unnoticed space into a pause point for the residents during their day-
to-day activities. It was observed that people were recognising the art pieces as
indicators and using them as anchor points. The new commissions given to the
artists exemplified an emerging trend to include art in new developments as part
of a modern approach to create social spaces and to add uniqueness to the new
townships.

Place activation for increasing sociability

The programmes selected for activating the spaces were well received. A few
citizens’ clubs were formed, which continued the programming. City management,
78 Aditi Nargundkar Pathak
along with some citizen representatives, has also continued to manage the pro-
grammes and the partners involved have secured further projects.

Conclusion
In the older parts of Indian cities it is common to see a bookstore next to a
residence, which is in turn next to a police station that is in front of a hospital.
These spaces formed organically to support local life. This organic arrangement
made sure that cities were walkable and convenient for social life. However,
newer developments are rigid, with separated service functions, which makes
social interaction challenging. Small or human-scale social spaces, or ‘pause
points’, were The Urban Vision’s modest attempt to mitigate this rigidity and
allow the creation of spaces without any function within the city. Visual art was
found to be effective in signalling that such spaces are being taken care of and
offer security and subtle cues that hint towards the inclusion of all citizens. In the
examples given here it was found that the LQC approach, while a great tactic for
pilot projects, should be used for a limited time and that public art needs to
evolve to include innovations that help in building great cities. In these projects
only visual arts were used but creative placemaking is a much wider discourse
that can be ventured into.
Co-creation did not help in creating ownership as people volunteered for a day
and then did not take part in the ongoing maintenance. The assignment of spaces
to citizen groups, a delegation of responsibilities along with activities like co-
creation, is needed to create self-sustaining social spaces throughout the city. At
the time of writing, The Urban Vision is working with politically elected
neighbourhood heads to ascertain if they can mobilise businesses and residents’
associations to maintain such spaces, and has successfully completed a small
number of art-led projects that are maintained by the private sector. Some
private-sector real-estate developers have used similar art-led interventions to
promote their projects and gain community goodwill for upcoming projects. The
Urban Vision’s project findings have been instrumental in guiding the design
principles for the future projects undertaken.
All the above projects that have been discussed were The Urban Vision’s
attempt to build social spaces or pause points in a city and study the results.
There is no single or simple recommendation that can be drawn from all the
experiences described; however, many more opportunities can be found. Coming
back to the questions asked above of the projects at their inception, it is to be
noted here that spaces in Mumbai work differently to their Western counterparts.
Indian cities need spaces that their citizens can relate to. While we agree that art
and place activation as strategies may not be the answer all the time, nevertheless
it is a secular medium, which can be appreciated by all Indian citizens, across a
mix of many classes, cultures, languages and religions. There is a fear that, by
using global interventions like creative placemaking, we may alienate and
exclude already-marginalised citizens. It is therefore essential that artists and
space planners use tactics which are seen as non-intimidating and bring pride to
 Human-scale social space in Mumbai 79
the community they are placed in. The social media campaign and live Twitter
feeds The Urban Vision used documented that people like to visit areas that offer
innovative activities and experiences.4 During the execution of the social spaces,
all sections of society came together and provided sweat equity. It is important
that the authorities enable and support initiatives that allow citizens to work
towards making their urban environment better. Creative placemaking in Indian
cities can be used as an ice breaker to make cities more inclusive by encouraging
residents to work towards a common goal.

Notes
1 the urban vision, www.theurbanvision.com/blogs/
2 visual disobedience, https://www.facebook.com/VisualDisobedience/
3 st+art india, https://st-artindia.org
4 @theurbanvision #remakebby, https://twitter.com/theurbanvision?lang=en

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Section 3

Scalable Ecologies
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6 A rural case
Beyond creative placemaking
Margo Handwerker

Abstract
This chapter assesses how creative placemaking—which relies largely on the
assumption that the quality of a place is built using ‘cultural’ expertise—is
impacting public arts in the United States. As both a researcher and a member
of the M12 arts collective, Handwerker provides reflections that are critically and
historically-driven, but also informed by practice. Aided by comments from
M12’s founder Richard Saxton, Handwerker addresses M12’s determination to
create place-based work that is informed by the realities and complexities of
rural life in the United States, but without the pressure to produce ‘solutions’—or
to be the solution—to the problems these communities sometimes face. Private
and public entities, she argues with others, have used creative placemaking to
rationalize the siphoning of already limited funds from the arts to social services
and private development.

Artists aren’t always activists

In their 2010 White Paper for the National Endowment for the Arts, Markusen
and Gadwa describe creative placemaking as follows:

In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and com-

munity sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a
neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.
Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates struc-
tures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety,
and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.
(Markusen and Gadwa, 2010, p.3)

The language of creative placemaking is widely criticized among public arts

professionals as an agent of gentrification. Those of us quick to criticize this
language do so with the following quandaries in mind: How is a community’s
interest determined and by whom? How is improvement – a relative term –
determined? How do we judge transformation as successful or unsuccessful?
84 Margo Handwerker
How do we measure whether or not character and quality are shaped? How does
framing the field in these terms impact the artists, the places, and the funders
who participate? How are the missions and methods of such disparate partici-
pants impacting our field? The language of creative placemaking, despite such
reservations, has begun to dominate the cultural atmosphere in which public arts
professionals are working, particularly within rural areas. This atmosphere is
especially salient to me as I participate in the field both as a researcher, where I
have explored the role of art as a tool and of artists as service providers, and as
an active member of the M12 group,1 a collective that makes art work attentive
to the character of rural lives and rural landscapes today.
Artist Claes Oldenburg (1961) once remarked that he was ‘for an art . . . that
does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.’ While it is true that not all
art work belongs in a museum, Oldenburg’s aphorism implies that art in museums
– and presumably outside of them too – is not already doing something. What does
such an expectation presume about what art should be doing instead, and who says
so? What might new demands on art replace and, most importantly, where are
these demands coming from? Motivated by these questions, many of us engaging
in site-responsive practices distance ourselves from the category of ‘creative
placemaking’ for this simple reason: We resist an assumption implied by the
phrase, that the quality of a place is actively ‘made’ by those of us in the creative
sector. Art may indeed animate, rejuvenate, and even improve the qualities of a
place, to use Markusen and Gadwa’s language, but it is too often the case that we
take culture to be a commodity that arts professionals are uniquely equipped to
harness or bring about, to produce and then to trade.
In a 2016 interview, art critic Lucy Lippard asked artist Richard Saxton, M12’s
founder: ‘How do you feel the notion of Social Sculpture has been expanded in
the last couple of decades?’ Saxton’s response reinforces the difficulty that many
of us have with the way that art has been instrumentalized in this way:

I like that you use the term Social Sculpture, too many people don’t use that
term. Instead it’s ‘socially-engaged art’ or ‘social practice,’ ‘community art,’
or my absolute most disliked phrase ‘creative placemaking.’ My creative
interests led me to work with the Center for Social Sculpture in Minneapolis
(now defunct) early on. They were dedicated to continuing Joseph Beuys’s
7000 Oaks project and promoting the important ideas behind social sculp-
ture. I think those ideas are actually very different than forms of social art
from recent years. I always dug the spiritual part of social sculpture and the
embracing of creativity, its boundlessness, and the connections to indigen-
ous, generational thinking. It’s hard to answer this question because in some
ways our practice is firmly planted in the ideas of social sculpture, but when
I look around at other work that gets labeled ‘social’ today, I don’t identify
with a lot of it. The thing that’s happening now is basically corporate
takeover and real estate investors changing communities in the name of art
and ‘creativity’ – the ‘creative class’ is a disguise for power. I return to
Beuys often: ‘Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be
 A rural case 85
possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is
now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power.’ That’s the opening line
from I am searching for field character [1973]. I think we’re still far away
from that idea, and I guess I don’t really want to speak for social sculpture
or social art today because it seems pretty convoluted. I see a lot of things
that look like real estate investment and corporate gimmickry. I see a lot of
social narcissism. I’m hopeful that the work we do counter balances some
of that.
(Saxton, quoted in Lippard, 2016)

It seems true that the collaborative, resourceful ethos characteristic of the public
arts today has produced lines of inquiry that seem overly presumptuous in their
use of the term ‘social.’ Even in the rural case, idyllic portrayals of the barn
raising and utopic visions for how artists might brighten blighted towns raise
criticism from those who suspect that generalizations about whole ‘communities’
do not account for difference and, therefore, undermine attempts to address the
specific qualities or needs of a given region or population. The latter criticism
stems from a 2004 essay by Bishop, in which it is argued that we mollify the
politics of relational practices by interpreting a ‘community’ generally, by
aestheticizing it. Indeed, policy makers and private corporations have since
adopted a ‘social practice,’ implementing the instrumental quality of this
aesthetic. As Saxton remarks above, the result is a kind of gimmickry, one
that disguises power.
Couching social art work as social entrepreneurship risks reinforcing the
notion that social welfare is sufficiently provided by individuals, private and
third sector initiatives instead of by the government. This is not a position that
M12 seeks to reinforce, and so we resist the idea that we as artists ‘strategically
shape’ the communities in and with which we work. Such an emphasis on
deliverables reinforces the notion that art should quantify its worth. On the role
that activism might play in M12’s work, Saxton states the following in the same
interview with Lippard when she asks in the same interview: ‘How much change
can art facilitate?’ Again, I quote Saxton at length:

I’m not sure I know how to quantify change. I think in some ways change
and how art can facilitate change, is tied to the people and place you
work with. For us, we’ve worked in a number of different communities
and I think all of them have experienced change in some way through the
projects we’ve initiated. But that said, change is something we think of as
being constant – rural communities are in so much flux these days – so
good change, or bad change, or lasting change, or systematic change, that
might be something to explore further. I guess we hope that we’re making
some kind of positive change. We simply define that as moving towards a
deeper and more present experience with the places we live and work in.
Too often it seems that as a larger social being we’re moving away from a
collective awareness, and away from the small and intimate, poetic, and
86 Margo Handwerker
away from being a supportive and sustainable species. I think in our
projects we are trying to get closer to an idea of elemental awareness that
exists outside of the city, both for ourselves and for those who engage
with our work. We see our practice as a series of connections, much like
an aesthetic network or terminal with many ideas, people, and experiences
interfacing. Perhaps it’s difficult to see the change on the micro level, but
once zoomed out, the energy that enters the main terminal becomes
something to learn from. If our work can help steer us towards collective
awareness and connection, then in the long run we’re probably getting
closer to change.
(Saxton, quoted in Lippard, 2016)

The connectivity to which Saxton refers is in keeping with his reference to Beuys
about widening the definitions of art. Beuys (1973/1990, p.21) described his
idea for Social Sculpture/Social Architecture this way: ‘This most modern art
discipline – Social Sculpture/Social Architecture – will only reach fruition
when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the
social organism.’ Producing such a social organism – Saxton’s own reference to
systematic change – demands a systems aesthetic, an aesthetic based on
interdependence, an aesthetic long undervalued in the history of contemporary
art making.
Systems art, a phrase popularized by art historian Jack Burnham (1968) in the late
1960s, is a way of characterizing art’s production relative to governing systems,
whether those systems are ecological, economic, political, social, and so forth.
Burnham and many of his contemporaries make the analogy between systems art
and ritual, ritual being the carrying out of an otherwise everyday action in a
prescribed way. Lippard (1980, p.364) provides a helpful audit of ritual’s
significance within art discourse, writing in 1980 about the role of inclusivity in
Feminist art:

The popularity of the notion of ritual indicates a nostalgia for times when
art had daily significance. However, good ritual art is not a matter of
wishful fantasy, of skimming a few alien cultures for an exotic set of
images. Useful as they may be as talismans for self-development, these
images are only containers. They become ritual in the true sense only
when they are filled by a communal impulse that connects the past (the
last time we performed this act) and the present (the ritual we are
performing now) and the future (will we ever perform it again?). When
a ritual doesn’t work, it becomes a self-conscious act, an exclusive object
involving only the performer. When it does work, it leaves the viewer
with a need to do or to participate in this act, or in something similar,
again. (Here ritual art becomes propaganda in the good sense – that of
spreading the word.) Only in repetition does an isolated act become
ritualised, and this is where community comes in.
(Lippard, 1980, p.364)
 A rural case 87
Rituals can be personal, intimate actions. However, as Lippard suggests, rituals
have greater significance when they involve others – when they are carried out in
the multiple. Her remarks were written well before the ‘social practice’ arts
emerged, and yet they characterize that movement’s underlying principles as
well: Social sculpture is sacra in the anthropological sense insofar as it can
reinforce such normative social beliefs as interdependence and sustainability –
that collective, elemental awareness to which Saxton refers. M12 has long
created sites and circumstances for gathering and connectivity – a description of
‘creative placemaking’ if there was one. What follows are some examples of
M12’s own alternatives to creative placemaking as the phrase is now more
commonly understood. They are spaces we have made, places we have created,
but without the burden of articulating our strategies, accomplishments, or long-
term impacts. Why not just ‘sit,’ to return to Oldenburg’s adage, without the
pressure of outcomes?

M12: rendering, not shaping

Last Chance Press (2015–present) is an ongoing initiative that invites experts
from a variety of backgrounds and fields to produce small books and audio
recordings on a range of themes pertinent to art and rural studies. Each pocket-
sized volume explores the changing realities of rural landscapes and communities
around the world – presenting an array of curated notes and research ephemera
with images, poetry, and more traditional visual and written works. The Star
Route 1 (2018) volume, our most recent, includes photographs, interviews, and
historical accounts of regional post offices throughout the Plains of Colorado.
The book’s editor, Mary (Welcome) Rothlisberger, describes these post offices as
‘a place where intimacy and institution collide,’ serving as ‘the social fulcrum
(both publicly and privately) in remote communities.’ Last year we produced
This Road Leads to Nowhere: Pierre Punk (2016),2 a collection of images and
testimonials from an underground music scene that flourished in small-town
South Dakota from the early 1990s through to 2010. The volume, which draws
on the do-it-yourself punk aesthetic, gathers up personal accounts and ephemera
from Pierre community members, musicians who traveled through and played in
the town, and kindred spirits from similar scenes further afield. An Equine
Anthology (2015),3 the first book produced, is a collection of responses to
equine culture from the American Southwest and elsewhere. Recipes for using
horsemeat are juxtaposed with histories of rodeo culture, remarks from animal
welfare activists, and photographs and paintings by contemporary artists in the
West. Each book – these are only three of five published to date – is accom-
panied by a seven-inch vinyl record that acts as a sonic counterpart to its book.
Typically, side A consists of a new or previously unreleased song inspired by the
contents of the book, while the B sides offer more experimental soundscapes and
spoken word performances. Together, the five pairs produced since the project’s
inception make up the Press’s Center Pivot Series. Like a center pivot irrigates a
88 Margo Handwerker
field, the series provides for an alternative space for productive rural inquiry and
creative collaboration between M12 and invited contributors.
In 2015, the pages of An Equine Anthology were installed at the Santa Fe Art
Institute, alongside M12’s The Breaking Ring (Figure 6.1),4 a sculpture and
installation commissioned by the Institute as part of its Food Justice initiative
and residency. The 24 ft breaking ring (also referred to as a gentling ring or
round pen) is made from regional hand-peeled Aspen logs. Its form is a reference
to wild horse culture in the American West and to the built environment there.
Intended to host a diverse selection of public programs throughout the duration
of each installation, the enclosure is also a metaphor for the physical and
intellectual spaces required for grappling with those ideas and relationships that
are the most challenging. Despite the violence of the name, ‘breaking’ occurs
less through force than through the building of trust. And, yet, this reference to
violence is useful in the case of The Breaking Ring, where conversations about
the economic and social realities of rural lives and landscapes, can at first be
heated; resolved only through patience and mutual respect, by finding connec-
tion, on common ground.
Both the books and The Breaking Ring are ‘placemaking’ to be sure, but they
are not bound to any one place – they are re-contextualized with each new site,
whether found in another museum installation, an open field, or a pair of hands.
They are site-responsive and yet site-less – these qualities are not mutually

Figure 6.1 M12 Studio (2016). The Breaking Ring. On view at the Center for Contemporary
Arts Santa Fe, New Mexico. Installation, size variable. Image courtesy of M12
Studio.
 A rural case 89
exclusive in the rural case where attention to both the local and to the non-local
is crucial. Individual rural communities span large distances and those who
practice in and with these communities rarely network in one place the way that
other artists converge in major art centers. Online platforms and convenings are
increasingly more common, so that groups like M12 can maintain their place-
based character without losing access to a more extensive dialogue. Itinerancy is
one among many rural conditions. Rural neighbors are separated by as many as
75 miles, and so driving, a lot of driving, is common. This reality is reinforced
by the irony that some of our group’s more successful ‘creative placemaking’
grants were awarded for projects we might also characterize as mobile (Gran’s
University, Kultivator and M12, (2012)5) or temporary (Turecek Murals, Jetsonor-
ama and M12 (2011)) – qualities that seem to move further away from the objective
of creative placemaking’s funders,’ to improve the livability of a place through
infrastructure that is both contextual and long-standing.
M12’s practice is a connective one, weaving a range of expertise to realize a
range of creative outcomes, whether a workshop, a book, a record, radio
programming, or a physical space. Motivated by care and concern, individuals
with varying kinds of knowledge, whether artistic, regional, scientific, etc., come
together to create something of mutual interest and shared effort. Conceptualiz-
ing and executing projects through collaboration with various stakeholders is key
to our connective aesthetic, and forging these relationships takes time. It also
takes space. In 1980, artist Robert Morris (p.98) wrote about the problem, even
then, of finding such resources for artists: ‘The key that fits the lock to the bank
is “land reclamation.” Art functioning as land reclamation has a potential
sponsorship in millions of dollars and a possible location over hundreds of
thousands of acres throughout the country.’ By disavowing the idea of art
making as a rarefied activity, Morris opened the door to a wealth of possible
resources beyond the rigid confines of the art market. Partnerships between
artists and industry were, and continue to be, one approach.
M12’s collaboration with the Washington County Commissioners on a site in
Last Chance, Colorado, exemplifies another strategy: partnering with other non-
profit, sometimes municipal, entities. The Commissioners have leased to M12 a
40 acre parcel of grassland for a token sum. On that site, M12 has constructed its
Last Chance Module Array (2015–16) (Figure 6.2).6 This structure includes the
fourth and fifth renditions of our Prairie Module series – the first, second, and
third are located in Indianapolis, Indiana (2008–2009), and Reedsburg, Wiscon-
sin (2012), respectively. Like The Breaking Ring, the Last Chance Module Array
has a dual nature: at once formally significant, but also designed to move the
viewer’s attention beyond the structure – toward an event inside or to the
landscape outside, toward extra-art conditions and spaces to which the work
itself responds. In the enclosure created by these modules, we have hosted
potlucks and star parties. At each solstice, the sun sets and rises in the center of
the main module structure.
The Last Chance Module Array acknowledges our complex and often unex-
amined relationship with the land, and the site on which the work exists is no
90 Margo Handwerker

Figure 6.2 M12 Studio, with Onix Architects (2015–2016). Last Chance Module Array
(Modules No. 4 and 5). Last Chance, Colorado. Photograph by Anthony Cross.
Image courtesy of M12 Studio.

exception. Located one mile south of the intersection of State Highway 36 and
71, at the crossroads of Last Chance, the town received its name because it
was the ‘last chance’ to get supplies before continuing west toward Denver or
east toward Kansas. Fewer than twenty people live there. The arrangement
of Prairie Module forms creates a quiet complex for experiencing the subtlety
of this site. But the forms themselves are also meaningful – reminiscent of
regional timber frame structures and pole barns. The timbers are blackened,
having been finished with a wood-burning technique known as Shou Sugi
Ban, which increases their durability. The resulting forms, like smoldering
blackened frames, recall artist Robert Smithson’s (1996, p.72) remarks refer-
ring to new construction along the east coast: ‘This is the opposite of the
“romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built
but rather rise into ruin before they are built.’
The Last Chance Module Array represents this dialectic too. It is a meditation
on the complexities of the built landscape along the American High Plains,
where the work is located, and characteristic of remote towns more generally:
though populations in many rural places are surely in decline, six of the ten
fastest-growing metro areas in 2013 were in the greater Plains region. The Last
Chance Module Array is a humble intervention on the site – modest in scale
compared to the vast Prairie beyond it, but also reminiscent of the structures
 A rural case 91
within the vernacular landscape that surround it. Like early homestead structures,
interventions like M12’s Last Chance Module Array represent a desire for
rootedness, but also reflect the present-day realities of rural lives and landscapes,
which are swiftly changing, and in many cases very quickly declining. Driving
along this quiet highway, one cannot miss the structures. They could be a new
construction, infrastructure to support a fracking boom, or they could be the
abandoned remains of a fire, which on more than one occasion has devastated
the town of Last Chance.
Partnerships, like ours with the Washington County Commissioners, are
characteristic of creative placemaking initiatives. Indeed, some grants require
that partnerships be formalized – that project applicants or their partners have a
government-issued non-profit status – a requirement that is more often restrictive
for responsive practices like ours. The Black Hornet (2009),7 a four-cylinder,
front-wheel-drive Honda that raced at the I-76 Speedway in Fort Morgan,
Colorado, in 2009–10, was a collaboration between M12 and the Hall family,
who would have been ineligible for most creative placemaking grants, even
though that family’s efforts quite literally mobilized the value of exchanging
intergenerational knowledge in order to challenge the assumption that the
revitalization of a rural place depends upon the introduction of cultural expertise
from somewhere else. Though M12 has benefited a great deal from collaborating
with our neighbors, it would also be accurate to say that we have relied on their
generosity – not least for space and borrowed machinery.

What’s wrong with creative placemaking, for creatives and for places?
Artists are rural citizens too and, like rural citizens, we lack the resources
required to fulfill our work: space to provide for sustained encounters between
our collective and community partners for the purpose of advancing our
common goals. For now, and for reasons beyond the scope of this chapter,
this goal is elusive and ongoing for M12. How might we as a community of
public arts professionals make it easier for artists working in this way to
make these sorts of places. How might the field of creative placemaking as it
has evolved unknowingly undermine artists’ attempts to improve on their own
infrastructural needs?
Collaboration in the rural case is frequently framed as ‘sharing’ (already
limited) resources. Requirements that artists formalize their collaborations with
local partners reinforces the presumption that it is acceptable to put stress on
those partners. Partnering, sharing, collaborating, these approaches seem ideal in
principle – it takes a village to be sure – but framing social art this way has
underlying consequences. It presumes that it is up to communities, in our case
frequently poor ones, to be financially solvent enough to have resources to spare
and, therefore, to share. Work hard enough, work together, and good things will
come. If only this were true: Only 1 per cent of arts philanthropy finds its way to
rural areas in the United States, and those resources come with restrictions. It is
true that demonstrated support – whether committed partners, matching grants,
92 Margo Handwerker
and so on – can validate the quality of an artistic enterprise. But it is also true
that these restrictions on the carrot of creative placemaking risk shaping the work
too. Working artists need less ‘to-dos.’ Less restrictions on their already finite
resource: time. They need the time it takes to sit, to listen, to exchange ideas, and
to make. They need space. Having a place for contemplative walking and image
gathering, for meeting to share knowledge and stories and to workshop ideas, for
eating together and for resting comfortably – these are essential for artists too,
who are members of the communities in which they reside and work. The field of
creative placemaking, at least in the United States, is increasingly shaping the
work that is being produced because only the work for which artists are paid gets
made. By paying for those works that demonstrate ‘growth,’ granting organiza-
tions that champion ‘creative placemaking’ are effectively asking artists to sing
first for their dinner – a counterproductive stress on artists and their work, which
are a public good.
In his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Idea in America, Marx (1964, p.4) wrote: ‘the pastoral ideal has been incorpo-
rated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction – a way of ordering meaning
and value that clarifies our situation today.’ To make his point, he outlined
two kinds of pastoralism: a ‘pastoralism of sentiment’ and a ‘pastoralism of
mind.’ Examples of the first include leisure activities like camping and
gardening, flights to the suburbs. Marx is critical: sentimental approaches to
a so-called rural experience orient our attention away from the urban issues
that drive one to the country. They are distractions and not solutions. The
second kind of pastoralism – what he describes as a pastoralism of mind – is
more complex. We find this kind of pastoralism in the arts, namely in
literature as a metaphor that may ‘enrich and clarify our experience’ by
contrasting two modes of consciousness: rural peace and simplicity with
urban power and sophistication. Marx gives an example: Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s account of the train whistle that interrupts his quiet moment in
the country. This ‘little event,’ also called a ‘counterforce,’ produces a
dissonance that, once presented, demands resolution – it provides ‘a check
against our susceptibility to idyllic fantasies,’ a reminder that sentimental
pastoralism is an urban phenomenon. Today, we need not even leave the city
to exercise our nostalgia for rural places – we can read Modern Farmer8
while having lunch at a farm-to-table restaurant. What then are we to make of
the pastoralism found among creative placemaking initiatives in a rural case?
Are they sentimental or a train – no longer a metaphor for industrialization,
but rather for a global cultural economy built on urban sentimentality?
Each little event, each ‘creative placemaking’ initiative that assumes that the
quality of a rural place is built using cultural expertise from urban centers is an
opportunity. But what kind of an opportunity? An opportunity to do more,
without a sense for what we’re doing and for whom? Without a sense for
answers to these questions, creative placemaking isn’t really an opportunity at
all; but, rather, a pastoralism of mind that quietly siphons and redirects more
resources from artists and rural communities than it returns.
 A rural case 93
Notes
1 M12 Studio, http://m12studio.org
2 This Road Leads to Nowhere: Pierre Punk (2016), http://m12studio.org/this-road-leads-
to-nowhere.html
3 An Equine Anthology (2015), http://m12studio.org/an-equine-anthology.html
4 The Breaking Ring, http://m12studio.org/the-breaking-ring.html
5 Gran’s University, Kultivator and M12 Studio (2012), http://m12studio.org/grans-uni
versity.html
6 Last Chance Module Array (2015-16), http://m12studio.org/last-chance-module-array.
html
7 Black Hornet (2009), http://m12studio.org/the-black-hornet.html
8 Modern Farmer, https://modernfarmer.com

References
Beuys, J. (1990). ‘I am searching for field character (1973)’ in Kuoni, C. (ed.) Energy Plan
for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, Writings by and Interviews with the
Artist. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 21.
Burnham, J. (1968). ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum 7(1), September.
Lippard, L. (1980). ‘Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the
1970s’ in Art Journal, Fall/Winter, 362–365.
Lippard, L. (2016). ‘Where We Are’, unpublished interview with Richard Saxton in
conjunction with Where We Are, a semester-long symposium organized by Lucy R.
Lippard at The University of Wyoming.
M12 and Rothlisberger, M. (2018). Star Route 1. Last Chance, CO, and Rotterdam, NL: Last
Chance Press and Jap Sam Books.
Markusen, A. and Gadwa, A. (2010). Creative Placemaking, Washington, DC: National
Endowment for the Arts. Available from: www.arts.gov/ [Accessed on: December 31,
2017].
Marx, L. (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Morris, R. (1980). ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’, October, Spring 1980.
Oldenburg, C. (1961). ‘I am for. . .’, Environments, Situations, Spaces, exhibition catalogue,
25 May–23 June, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York.
Robert, S. and Flam, J. (1996). ‘A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ in Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
7 Creative placemaking in peri-urban
Gothenburg
Mission impossible?
Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist

Abstract
In Gothenburg, Sweden, the urban development project Gothenburg Develop-
ment North East (GDNE), started in 2011. The project assumed that Cultural and
Creative Industries (CCIs) could serve as an instrument for the city’s integration
and economic development policies. The project was founded upon a mix of
ideas that ranged from contradictory ambitions of the Swedish national cultural
policies of 1974 and 2009, to national as well as international strategies for
growth through CCIs. Although in many parts successful, the project encoun-
tered structural obstacles that hindered CCIs to play such a role in peri-urban
Gothenburg, affected by steadily increasing economic, social, and ethnic segre-
gation. After briefly situating the project in the context of a shift in Swedish
cultural policy from a generalized welfare state system towards an entrepreneur-
ial neo-liberal approach, the chapter discusses, first, the GDNE project in terms
of objectives, measures, and results, and, second, relates this to ongoing discus-
sions of creative placemaking. The conclusion draws attention to how the GDNE
project illustrates the difficulty of using CCI-based alliances initiated by the
public sector to solve problems in vulnerable, economically weak and socially
segregated areas.

Introduction
In 2011, funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
facilitated the start of Gothenburg Development North East (GDNE, 2010). The
GDNE project was a public initiative, and for the running of the project the City
of Gothenburg created a new and separate publicly owned stock company. The
overarching ambition was to make a difference in a quite deprived and segre-
gated area where no private investment interests or exploitation pressures existed.
With a focus on the support of entrepreneurship in general, and Culture and
Creative Industries (CCIs) as well as green businesses in particular, the project
objective was to promote peri-urban sustainable development in the city’s north-
eastern neighborhoods.
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 95
The project faced a number of challenges. The total population of this north-
eastern area of the city was circa 100,000. More than 50 percent of the
inhabitants have a non-Swedish background and with a strong intercultural
character, this majority is a complex mix that includes more than 160 different
nationalities and languages. Unemployment rates are high across age groups;
social security costs are high; the educational level in general is lower than
average; democratic participation is low; and many people speak little or no
Swedish. With regard to young people, school results are far below average and
the number of students proceeding to higher education is far below the average
for the city as a whole. In the peri-urban north-east, four neighborhoods in
particular were addressed in the project, all of which were mainly characterized
by large apartment blocks of various design from the 1960s and 1970s.
In the following we will focus on two issues with a bearing on this case. After
briefly situating the GDNE project in the context of a shift in Swedish cultural policy
from a generalized welfare state system towards an entrepreneurial neo-liberal
approach, the chapter discusses, first, the project in terms of objectives, measures,
and results, and, second, relates this to ongoing discussions of creative placemaking.

Cultural policy meets socio-economic restructuring

The GDNE was born in a cultural climate that in 2009 finally led to a legislative
shift in terms of Swedish cultural policy. Up to this point, cultural policy was
informed by eight objectives passed unanimously by parliament in 1974 (Swedish
Cabinet, 1974, p.292–98). The policy objectives concerned reaching all citizens,
geographically and socially, as evenly as possible; artistic freedom and indepen-
dence; opportunities for personal creative activity; protection of culture heritage
with a requested expansion of heritage to also represent the lives of ordinary
people; and the promotion of ‘exchange of experiences and ideas in the field of
culture across linguistic and national boundaries.’ However, in hindsight and
looking back through the lens of neo-liberal marketization, one objective clearly
distinguished the 1974 cultural policy from others – the goal to ‘counter the
negative effects of commercialization in the field of culture.’ That this objective
was unanimously supported by parliament indicates the extent to which commer-
cial culture at the time was seen as insufficient with regard to the creation of
cultural expressions with authenticity or value.
However, while political majorities continued to shift over a period of more
than thirty years in which Sweden saw many market-oriented reforms and an
extensive rolling back of the welfare state, much remained the same in the area
of culture until 2006. This year a review of Swedish cultural policy was initiated
by the governing center-right coalition that resulted in a neoliberal shift, includ-
ing in cultural policy. To ‘counter negative effects of commercialization’ was
now replaced with the wording that ‘[t]here is no inherent contradiction between
economic viability and artistic quality or freedom’ (Swedish Cabinet, 2009,
p.28). In this spirit, a separate section on Cultural and Creative Industries and
Regional Growth (ibid., p.72) appeared together with a recurring stress on
96 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
entrepreneurship throughout. This break in Swedish cultural politics was expli-
citly noted in a parliamentary motion made by the Social Democrats:

The present cultural policy objectives were passed unanimously thirteen

years ago, in 1996. The commission and official report that preceded the
vote included all parties in parliament, just as was the case with the passing
of the cultural policy of 1974. It is indeed regrettable . . . that the bourgeois
coalition cabinet this time chose not to have a parliamentary commission and
instead chose to break with this tradition. Accordingly we move for a
rejection of the proposed new cultural policy objectives
(Pagrotsky et al., 2009, p.4).

This cultural policy context and clear historical shift is where the question of the role
of culture in disadvantaged suburbs is situated. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the
large suburban areas were built, cultural policy was based on the model of the state
as architect and social engineer (Frenander, 2001; Hillman-Chartrand and
McCaughey, 1989). This policy sought to provide all citizens with equal access to
culture and cultural activities and projects were publicly funded. The building of
suburbs such as the ones addressed in the GDNE project – with spaces for suburban
leisure-time ranging from sports facilities to public libraries and cultural centers –
exemplifies a form of creative welfare state placemaking that was enabled through a
combined ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 1982, pp.429–38) and ‘institutional fix’ (Uitermark,
2005, p.159) resulting from a long-term agreement between labor and capital
(Larsson et al., 2012a, 2012b; Peterson, 2012). The period between 1974 and 2009
saw Sweden entering into neo-liberal deregulation (Blyth, 2001; Larsson et al.,
2012a) and a shift towards ‘governing without Government’ (Rhodes, 1996, pp.660–
67), or ‘governance-beyond-the-state’ (Swyngedouw, 2005, pp.1993–95), involving
a ‘quango-ization’ of the state (Miller and Rose, 2008, p.213). With the 2009 cultural
policy, deregulation finally came to reframe culture, affected by international turns
towards the ‘creative economy’ and notions to replace industrial production with
knowledge-based industries and services (Doel and Hubbard, 2002; Duxbury et al.,
2016; Florida, 2002; Hutton, 2008; UNESCO, 2013). The basis for this turn towards
the ‘creative’ was essentially that ‘[i]n the production of all kinds of goods and
services, the symbolic dimension has gained central importance, which has led to an
almost universal aestheticization of goods and everyday practices thanks in particu-
lar to publicity and design’ (d’Ovidio and Rodríguez Morato, 2017, p.4; Lash and
Urry, 1994). While policy prescriptions, made by proponents of this ‘creative turn,’
have focused on the potential of cultural practices as socio-economically and
politically integrative and equality-building in cities, regions, and countries, much
critique has addressed the fact that practical implementations show questionable
results (Grodach, 2017; Lindeborg and Lindkvist, 2013; O’Connor, 2016).
Importantly, it has been pointed out by Grodach et al. (2017) that these trends
need to be seen, not as neutral, but as interest-based forms of harnessing and
channeling urban potentialities that leave out progressive socio-spatial options of
linking artistic and knowledge production with manufacturing. Such criticism is
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 97
perhaps particularly relevant in a city such as Gothenburg, with its long industrial
history. They also note that presently dominating strategies lead to zoning regula-
tions that enforce the removal of any industrial activities in favor of clean, so-
called creative industries. Essential to note here is that whichever kind of place-
making we choose or confront, it carries within itself an unavoidable mirror image:
the creative destruction of earlier social and built forms, as well as the exclusion of
other options: ‘Creative destruction is embedded within the circulation of capital
itself,’ and ‘masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to
another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer
wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle’
(Harvey, 1989, p.106). This shows the instability, insecurity, and constant search
and creation of new markets, including real estate markets, for newly invented
products and uses that characterize creative destruction. The rolling-out of the
1960s and 1970s areas we see in north-eastern Gothenburg and the simultaneous
expansion of the social and cultural programs of the welfare state came when
Sweden reached its zenith as an industrial-based economy. Just like the present
rolling back and revamping of those solutions, the process was double-sided and
included a mirror image of socio-spatial destruction. While the notion comes from
Marx, the Austrian-American political economist Joseph Schumpeter was equally
at home with the idea that creative destruction is an inherent part of capitalism
(Harvey, 2011, p.46; Greenspan, 2005). The point we wish to make is that there is
nothing innocent nor anything necessarily ‘creative’ or ‘progressive’ about the
‘creative economy’ seen in a wider context of urban policy and urban justice.

Gothenburg Development North East

Across the political spectrum, the Gothenburg City Council recognized that
economic and ethnic segregation, increasing social inequalities, and high unem-
ployment, were serious problems in Gothenburg, and they continue to be so. In
this political context, the Gothenburg Development North East project was
initiated. The GDNE project was thus a public initiative. For the running of the
project the City of Gothenburg registered a new and separate publicly owned
stock company – Utveckling Nordost AB (Development North East Co). The
board of this company was politically appointed and consisted of members from
the City Council. The project partners consisted of seven different departments
within the city administration plus the city’s business development office,
Business Region Göteborg (another non-profit stock company owned by the
city). The international auditing and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers
was selected as official project evaluator (PwC, 2013). It is obvious that this
set-up fitted well with the expectations and priorities of the new cultural policy
of 2009. Nonetheless, there are political tensions in Gothenburg, where a City
Council majority coalition formed by the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the
Left Party has been in place since the fall of 2010. In terms of cultural policy,
this majority does not represent a neo-liberal turn but rather holds on to many of
the values of the 1974 policy.
98 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
Objective and the role of culture
In the design stage, the GDNE project faced the facts outlined above, such as
high levels of unemployment, rising social security costs, falling school results,
and low levels of democratic participation. The overall objective of the GDNE
project was to contribute to sustainable urban development in Gothenburg with a
focus on the peri-urban north-eastern neighborhoods (GDNE, 2010). The project
was planned to run from 2011 to 2013, and upon acceptance from the ERDF
received a budget of 123 million Swedish krona (SEK) (12.8 million euros) of
which the ERDF contributed 40 percent and the City of Gothenburg the remain-
ing 60 percent. Identified goals were to develop the business sector, create jobs,
develop cultural life and the urban environment, and to increase the attractive-
ness of the north-eastern parts of the city. The primary target group consisted of
three partly overlapping categories: the inhabitants, those working in the area as
well as people conducting business there. The project’s activities were divided
into four themes: Business, Culture, Urban Environment, and Vision and Com-
munication. The themes were mutually interlinked and the efforts were planned
to reinforce one another: Business aimed to promote business development in
general; Culture focused on gender equality and on the promotion of entrepre-
neurial approaches within the arts. The Urban Environment theme focused on
accessibility and mobility issues, including increased movement between places
of shared utility and residential areas, and on personal safety and security. The
Vision and Communication theme aimed to increase the attractiveness of north-
eastern Gothenburg. Of the 123 million SEK budget, Business was allocated 10
percent, Culture 26 percent, Urban Environment 37 percent, and Vision and
Communication 11 percent (actual turn-out stayed close to predicted). The
remaining funds went to project management. It should be noted that while the
project supported entrepreneurship in general, the particular focus was on CCIs
and green businesses. The role of culture was thus central to the overarching
ambition.
When the application was drafted, there was an assumption that ‘culture’
would contribute to cohesion, integration, business development, and jobs.
There was a double ambition, both to break new ground in terms of attitudes
and relationships between suburban residents and to translate ‘culture’ into
business and jobs. The project design thus reflected general developments in
the European Union (European Commission, 2012) and elsewhere (UNESCO,
2013). While CCIs make up only a small part of the economy, there were also
great expectations within the GDNE project that CCIs would become engines
for post-industrial economic development. A pronounced CCI-policy is yet to
be developed in Gothenburg, and CCI investments and development projects
have been concentrated to close-to-the-center areas, e.g. activities related to the
publishing and film industry have been provided with facilities in the revamped
port and shipyard areas that now form part of the center and are exposed to
high exploitation pressures. The ambition of the GDNE project-design to
establish peri-urban CCIs in a context of socio-economic and ethnic segregation
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 99
was thus an innovation. The project also noted that CCIs in peripheral locations
could contribute to local suburban gentrification by having a negative impact
on the life and positive dynamics of existing communities and their diversity
(Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Apartment building in the Hammarkullen neighborhood with a windowless

concrete gable remade into a public work of art: Every time I look up I feel
happy, when I look down I’m sad, by the British artist Ben Eine. This particular
piece was made in 2016 during the Gothenburg Street Art Festival Artscape, after
the initial ERDF-supported period of the GDNE project was over. The building is
owned by the city’s housing company Bostadsbolaget. Photo: Michael Landzelius.
100 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
Obstacles, incubators, startups
Four neighborhoods in north-eastern Gothenburg were involved in the GDNE
project: Hammarkullen, Angered, Gårdsten, and Rannebergen. They are located
12–16 km from the city center, and travelling times by tram and bus from the
city center to central stops in these areas vary between 17–35 minutes. While
these are quite fast connections compared to the situation in many cities, the
distance is not only physical but also social as well as mental – experienced as a
rupture in the urban fabric between the deprived peri-urban neighborhoods and
the creative zones of the city center, and representing a hinderance to the flow of
people and the exchange of ideas, as well as to the will to invest capital. In the
performance of the GDNE project, other obstacles were also identified that
challenged the engagement of local inhabitants as well as potential entrepreneurs
and the role of culture as a cohesive and business-creating factor. For example,
the bureaucratic and slow administration of individual unemployment cases and
of project applications created frustration and made potential cultural entrepre-
neurs hesitant to try to realize their ideas. In an attempt to alleviate or even
remove some of these structural constraints, the GDNE project launched a series
of culture-incubators in order to initiate, develop, and support cultural entrepre-
neurship. One immediate result of these efforts was the startup of about twenty
new small CCI companies, the majority of them run by immigrants (PwC, 2013).
However, on a more general level, while unemployment did go down during the
performance of the project, in the years directly after the GDNE project Sweden
and Gothenburg underwent an economic boom that may be considered a more
important factor for reduced unemployment rates, increased investments, and
increased social stability in the north-eastern neighborhoods. In the Angered
district unemployment rates fell from 10.9 percent in 2009 to 9.7 in 2016, and in
Hammarkullen from 16.4 percent in 2009 to 14.0 in 2016.

Urban art network

One of the activities supported by GDNE was the Urban Art Network, a sub-project
aimed at creating a multidisciplinary network for both arts education and existing
cultural activities in north-eastern Gothenburg. The purpose of the network was to
enable the arts to contribute to the segregated city’s needs and opportunities through
specific targeted development projects, pilot projects, and the creation of new
learning environments. Based on the educational and research environment of the
district, the network was to support and contribute to artistic practices, for example
community art and cultural heritage work. The Urban Art Network focused on three
main targets: firstly, broader recruitment to higher arts education through better
collaboration between arts education programs; secondly, arts development; and
thirdly, sustainable community development on local, urban, and regional levels. To
reach the first core target, cooperation had to be established between the city
administration, the regional administration, art schools, and the University of
Gothenburg so that preparatory courses and admission criteria were harmonized,
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 101
and also in order that some educational institutions and programs at higher and
research levels could be located outside the university’s city center facilities and
anchored in the north-eastern areas of the city. Activities resulting from the GDNE
project were still alive and expanding in 2017, such as education for music teachers
(The Music College), an MFA program in Literary Composition, and a one-year
preparatory course in Performing Arts, all of them organized in collaboration with
the Faculty of Fine Arts at the university. An average of six students each year have
graduated from the course for music teachers, and they have either found work as
music teachers or proceeded to higher music studies.

Investments in places for culture

An important undertaking made as part of the GDNE project was the renovation
of a local cultural center with libraries, a theater, a movie theater, an art gallery,
meeting rooms, and a restaurant. The center was built in 1979 and was the first
of its kind in a Swedish suburb. The renovation was funded by public money and
aimed to make the center more attractive to more groups of citizens. The project
had no significant effects on the CCI sector, and no effects on the labor market
for artists have been discussed or registered, but the main objective to make the
center more attractive was reached, with a remarkable rise in the number of
visitors.
The GDNE project also supported several smaller initiatives for creating new
meeting places and activity centers, the intention of which was to support local
community life and enable more citizen initiatives. Such local placemaking
initiatives have especially occurred in the district of Hammarkullen, where
unemployment rates remain constantly high, but where the civil society sector
is lively and mobilizes inhabitants in different cultural development activities,
from local arts projects and a yearly carnival to political engagement. The many
examples also of minor sub-projects among the GDNE initiatives have strongly
contributed to an increase in the level of trust among citizens with regard to local
cultural institutions and in the value of activities supported by the public sector.
This may to some extent have contributed to a rising level of interest, particularly
among young people in the area, in engaging in civil society and social and
cultural activities, many of them related to the fighting of segregation.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ review in brief

The overall objective of the project was, as we have described above, to develop
north-eastern Gothenburg with a focus on four themes – Business, Culture,
Urban Environment, and Vision and Communication. In their review of the
project, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC, 2013) noted that within these four
themes a total of eighteen different overarching activities were carried out,
ranging from investments in physical interventions in the environment to devel-
opment work for and by the local business community. Measurable objectives set
by PwC at the outset of the GDNE project included the following goals that were
102 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
to be achieved by the end of the project: 220 new jobs (with equal gender
distribution) located in north-eastern Gothenburg; sixteen new companies (again
with equal gender distribution) in the area; five investments for increased
attractiveness of the area; and eighty-five companies participating in the various
efforts within the project. To measure these four objectives, 343 activities with
specified goals were defined– of these, 338 were reached. One of the five goals
that was not reached was the number of created jobs, but the analysis noted
difficulties with directly linking some jobs that were created to the performance
of the project as such. The actual results of the four main objectives were: 123
jobs; fifty-six start-ups; five attractiveness-investments; and 258 participating
businesses. From the point of view of PwC as project evaluator, the GDNE
project was indeed a success. The City Council decided in 2014 that the project
in revamped form should continue to work on urban development strategies as
well as attempt to seek further EU funding, now under the management of
Business Region Göteborg.

The GDNE project – creative placemaking?

The GDNE project had a larger budget than any other comparable project in
Sweden has ever had. The project resulted in a mix of activities that all had the
ambition to contribute to dynamic creative placemaking, strengthening civil
society, and reducing segregation locally. One characteristic common to all
these initiatives was that they originated ‘from outside and above.’ The initiatives
came from public sector bodies with good ambitions. In accordance with the
‘multiple-helix’ development models already forecasted in most European policy
tools and long-term strategies for lifelong learning, for economic and social
cohesion, and for sustainable development, the project mobilized existing colla-
boration – between different public administrative bodies, between educational
institutions including the university level, and between different jurisdictions
(from the City of Gothenburg and adjacent municipalities to the region). The
GDNE project stressed capacity building with regard to the shaping of new
strategies to counter segregation, to create jobs and to build cross-cultural ties.
The peri-urban north-east is a vivid example of the global as both eminently
glocal and complex: it is an area characterized by people of more than 150
nationalities and with multiple kinds of challenges: demographic and genera-
tional shifts; economic inequalities; segregation; extensive in-migration; complex
conflicts structured by ethnic, religious, and class differences, and with some
groups and individuals that represent beliefs highly negative to boundary-cross-
ing and hybridity (World Values Survey, 2016; Welzel, 2013).
Given this, an ambitious creative placemaking project of the kind undertaken
by GDNE will have to work with an innumerable set of unknowns in terms of
reception among target groups, in this case first and foremost the inhabitants of
150 nationalities, and those working as well as conducting business in the area,
many of which were also inhabitants. As we have noted, the project emerged out
of public sector bodies that intended the project to be democratic and
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 103
emancipatory. Yet, partly because of the kinds of interventions such an agenda
may lead to – particularly when culture is mobilized as a tool at the same time as
culture is a contested issue in the complex local community – well-intended
projects might backfire and lead to local failures and increased distrust between
ethnic and religious groups and individuals as well as between local citizens and
project initiators. Indeed, the project was often met with skepticism by citizens
who felt they did not have much influence over the plans and activities, which
they believed did not build upon their real needs and wishes. The extent to which
favoritism and intercultural conflict and other such issues were experienced is yet
to be researched.
In a much-quoted text, Markusen and Gadwa (2010, p.3) have defined creative
placemaking as a situation when ‘partners from public, private, non-profit, and
community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a
neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.’ This
definition fits with the GDNE project, with its stress on the Culture theme and
the fact that CCIs were planned to play a major importance also in the
performance of activities in the other three themes. However, we wish to make
a point here based on a slightly longer quote from Markusen and Gadwa (ibid.,
pp.5–6) on the core ‘six components of a successful strategy.’ Such a strategy,
they write:

starts with an entrepreneurial initiator; demonstrates a commitment to place

and its distinctive character; mobilizes public will, both in local government
and the citizenry; attracts private sector support, either from cultural industries
or place developers or both; wins the active participation of arts and cultural
leaders; and succeeds in building partnerships across sectors (for-profit, non-
profit, government, and community), missions (e.g., cultural affairs, economic
and workforce development, transportation, housing, planning, environment,
and health), and levels of government (local, state, and federal).
(Markusen and Gadwa, ibid., pp.5–6)

The point we wish to make is that the GDNE project failed from the outset with
the first component in that it did not start with an entrepreneurial initiator but
with local government (i.e. half of the third component); it succeeded with the
second and the fifth; partly also with the last; but failed with the fourth and the
last since support from major private sector interests did not materialize. In this,
the project partly resembles an ‘older’ form of cultural policy practices based on
local state initiatives and control. However, we would argue, this resemblance
was not desired by the City Council majority, nor by project management or the
local state neighborhood bodies, but resulted because the suburbs in north-eastern
Gothenburg, with their particular needs, problems, and geographical locations,
have poor competitive characteristics in relation to other parts of the cityscape
(Landzelius, 2012). We can thus note that the first component of a successful
placemaking strategy in the view of Markusen and Gadwa was not possible to
fulfil in Gothenburg’s peri-urban north-east. One might argue that this is a too
104 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
literal reading of Markusen and Gadwa, and we will return to that shortly.
Nonetheless, the case shows how a City Council majority can take a council-
decision to start a project such as the GDNE, but then what? With the rolling
back of the welfare state and the lack of entrepreneurial interest, what remains to
be done?
Before we conclude, another piece in the puzzle is worth mentioning, which
could open up a discussion of ripple effects that might be related to a project
such as the GDNE. This piece follows upon the cabinet’s initiative in the fall of
2016 to create a special governmental body, effective from January 1, 2018, for a
coordinated and efficient implementation of the national policies on gender
equality (Swedish Cabinet, 2016). After parliament’s passing of the bill in
December 2016, the cabinet decided that this new Swedish Gender Equality
Agency was to be located in Gothenburg, and half a year later that the agency
was to be placed in Angered. The Minister for Gender Equality, Åsa Regnér,
noted: ‘That the agency is placed in Angered and not centrally in Gothenburg, or
in Stockholm, is in accordance with the cabinet’s objective that state jobs and
work places should be found in different parts of cities and across the country’;
while the Minister for Social Affairs, Ardalan Shekarabi, commented on the
same topic: ‘Neither people, places, suburbs, or entire areas of the country, are to
feel abandoned’ (Swedish Cabinet, 2017). The Swedish Gender Equality Agency
will from the start have seventy-five employees. The long-term effects with
regard to ambitions such as the ones governing the GDNE project cannot be
predicted, and comments from politicians, academics, and the press vary with
regard to its impact on jobs as well as the local image.

Conclusion
The final report from PwC noted that the achievements of the project needed to
be taken care of, nurtured, and continued to be built upon. Some such results and
areas of activity clearly belonged to one of the seven participating administrative
bodies of the city and could be fused with their normal responsibilities, while
other results ended up – as in many project-based temporary activities and
interventions – falling between the cracks. There are a number of remaining
questions facing the GDNE project: What kinds of jobs and education were
created in terms of local relevance and long-term sustainability? What kind of
long-term sustainable impact was envisioned and planned at the outset, and what
was achieved and could at the end be secured through the project format? What
kinds of local expectations did the project explicitly as well as implicitly raise,
and how should discontent and failed expectations be met when the project has
been dismantled? How did the project’s belief in CCIs fit in relation to an area
such as north-eastern Gothenburg, in terms of both the needs of its extremely
diverse population and the competitive characteristics of the area in relation to
other parts of the cityscape?
We would argue that the GDNE project illustrates the difficulty of using CCI-
based alliances initiated by the public sector to solve problems in vulnerable,
 Creative placemaking in Gothenburg 105
economically weak, and socially segregated areas. While this was a huge under-
taking with a budget of 123 million SEK, public funding – be it from the local
state, the central state, or the EU – can only reach so far. The project could be
seen as a mix of both the cultural policy of 1974, in which commercial culture
was seen as insufficient and which thus aimed to ‘counter the negative effects of
commercialization in the field of culture,’ and the policy of 2009, the latter
supported by the fact that on-the-ground conditions today are significantly more
market-oriented. This mix in the GDNE project could be seen as a way of
integrating important values not present within neo-liberal agendas. With regard
to the quite literal reading of Markusen and Gadwa above, we might perhaps
indeed argue that the local authority – with additional economic support from the
ERDF – effectively and with good results acted as entrepreneurial initiator.
While this is true in a sense, the results of the GDNE project show that in a
society where everything is expected to run on market conditions after the end of
a project phase, that phase needs to secure strong private entrepreneurial interests
if the accomplishments of public investments are to survive. The remaining
bottom-line question thus concerns what can be done when the public sector
has to gradually pull back.
The conclusion we have reached based on this study is that neoliberal-
influenced confidence in CCIs may be relevant in areas that at some stage finally
are recognized as having economic potential in the eyes of entrepreneurs – for
some, the city is, after all, not much more than a growth machine (Molotch,
1976). In this period of ‘quango-ized’ governance, creative placemaking seems
to work in spaces and situations where cultural practices can be made to overlap
with CCIs and investment interests tied to local and regional agendas of
economic growth and entrepreneurship. This is the case in Gothenburg’s more
central parts, as in so many other cities around the world. In such situations,
creative placemaking may well, in very real terms lead to both creative (de)
construction, with all its accompanying spatial and social consequences in terms
of its often-observed contribution to gentrification and segregation. In poor and
weak areas such as north-eastern Gothenburg, the idea of creative placemaking is
at risk of remaining exactly that, an idea or a form of ‘therapeutic’ activity that
promotes false consciousness and ideological méconnaissance in a perhaps both
Marxian and Lacanian sense of concealing both social contradictions and the
subject’s self-recognition (Harvey, 1989; Lacan, 1977). Creative placemaking,
when seen as a processual whole, is in this sense something that is always
struggled over, open to various forms of articulation in which moments and parts
of the whole are controlled in unequal ways by different social actors.
This brief analysis of the GDNE project has clearly shown that publicly
initiated creative placemaking of this kind is not enough to create sustainable
structural changes in vulnerable areas. We believe that more in-depth research is
needed in order to understand the possible role of culture and the arts as well as
CCIs as contributors to sustainable urban development in the context of suburban
and peri-urban neighborhoods such as the ones in north-eastern Gothenburg.
Research on these issues needs to engage both with a critical scrutiny of
106 Michael Landzelius and Peter Rundqvist
governmental policies and practices ranging from cultural policies to securitiza-
tion, and with asking questions about if and how present forms of quango-ized
governance could be harnessed for channeling entrepreneurial interests and
investment decisions to areas that seemingly lack competitive advantages. This
in a situation where inter-urban competition seems to have turned more destruc-
tively intra-urban than ever before. In this regard, the GDNE project was an
ambitious attempt to seek a path away from such intra-urban competition, yet
simultaneously sought to make Gothenburg more competitive on the inter-urban
stage. On the one hand, research needs to focus on the realism and ideological
conundrums of such strategies, and on the other it should not forget to address
how groups and individuals from different cultural zones understand, embody,
and relate to identity, social change, and democracy in relation to the interven-
tions of CCIs and cultural artistic practices, in order to make innovation in peri-
urban neighborhoods feed long-term social sustainability and peace rather than
run the risk of feeding tensions and conflict.

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October 3 2017].
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8 A conversation between a
collaborating artist and curator
Placemaking, socially engaged art, and
deep investment in people
Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh

Abstract
After fifteen years of learning and building on its experiences, Big Car Collabora-
tive—a socially engaged art and placemaking organization and studio led by artist
Jim Walker and curator Shauta Marsh—is delving deeply into what it means to be
an integral part of a community in the urban core of Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
This conversation between Walker and Marsh—which took place during a
driving trip to multiple North American industrial ‘rust belt’ cities—explores
the ideas of placemaking and social practice art and how these work together.
The conversation also examines the path of Big Car’s learning by experience
with a variety of projects and programs to reach a better—but constantly
evolving—understanding of how deep investment of time and care for a com-
munity and its people can support a stronger society. Further, they look at the
roles of socially engaged art and active, program-based, and site-specific place-
making in these efforts.

Introduction
After more than a decade of learning and building on its experiences, Big Car
Collaborative1 – a socially engaged art and placemaking organization and studio
led by artist Jim Walker and curator Shauta Marsh – is delving deeply into what
it means to be an integral part of a community development in the urban core of
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. These collaborators, along with other artists in the
organization and a variety of civic and cultural partners, are working to accom-
plish the goal of supporting a more vibrant community without creating a
situation that prices out existing residents or the artists now moving in to fill
vacant homes in the neighborhood. This work comes after learning by experience
that gentrification is best handled by maintaining control of real estate and being
at the table – even serving as a partner – during redevelopment efforts.
Big Car Collaborative began as a small, cross-genre collective of artists
interested in surrealism and experimentation in the then-struggling Fountain
Square neighborhood2 near the city’s center. Four years into operating an all-
volunteer grassroots arts organization, Walker and Marsh found that they weren’t
110 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
satisfied with focusing mainly on supporting artists and serving an arts audience.
They weren’t satisfied with art as an end in itself. Big Car began, instead, to see
art as a means for benefiting individuals by bringing the spark of creativity to
their lives and supporting stronger communities by boosting positive perception
and vibrancy through an eclectic array of programs that engage audiences in arts-
focused social experiences. A turning point came in 2008 when Big Car began
handing its studio and gallery over to visitors, showing collages and drawings
they made in equal status with work made by self-identified artists. Big Car’s
lead artists saw, from this, that the audience of collaborators became better
connected with Big Car and with art.
Big Car artists also began taking further steps toward working with diverse
community members as collaborators – choosing to take these approaches to co-
creation from institutional settings (galleries and museums where art is expected)
to places where art is a surprise and where opportunities to participate in creative
projects are rare. The organization progressed to libraries, schools, and commu-
nity centers and then to parks, fairs, apartment complexes, and the streets –
building out a mobile art unit and devising partnerships (for example, a library
bookmobile) to make this click.
This work led to stronger relationships with the community and better
acceptance of Big Car’s ideas. This approach of collaborating with and working
for partner communities is a critical element to all of Big Car’s placemaking
projects – from putting on arts programming in parking lots in Fountain Square
on the artists’ own dime to taking over Monument Circle, the most visible place
in the city, for a $400,000 National Endowment for the Arts-funded3 partnership
with the City of Indianapolis.
This conversation between Walker and Marsh – who are also married and
parent two teenagers – explores the path of learning through a variety of projects
and programs to an understanding that a deep investment of time and care in the
people of a community is the best way to truly support thriving neighborhoods
through socially engaged art and engaging, programming-based creative place-
making. Marsh and Walker discussed these things during an extended family
driving trip to explore art spaces and public places in Pittsburgh, Buffalo,
Niagara Falls, Toronto, small-town Canada, Detroit, and Fort Wayne, Indiana –
before returning to Indianapolis.

The conversation
MARSH: Let’s start out by talking about what we think placemaking is.
WALKER: We were just staying at a hotel near the northern shore of Lake Eerie in
Canada. A newer place, it was furnished with ping pong tables, a badminton
court, and other games in an indoor atrium adjacent to the swimming pool.
This is sort of an indoor court outside the interior-facing rooms. The floor out
there is covered in artificial turf. There are tables and chairs scattered about.
People working in placemaking like we do would probably not consider that a
placemaking project. It is really just a game room or activity space, the kind of
 A conversation between an artist and curator 111
thing that has been around a long time. But, when those things – ping pong,
turf, chairs – are placed outside in a public space, these are the regular
trappings of placemaking zones.
MARSH: Similarly, we were just talking about how we’ve noticed artists calling
what they’re doing placemaking because they’ve moved activities they’d
normally do inside, outdoors to public or semi-public space. So instead of
painting a portrait with a model they hired in their studio they do that same
thing out on a sidewalk. Then they might share a picture of this on Instagram
and hashtag it #CreativePlacemaking. But creative placemaking is much more
than the presence of an artist making or displaying art in public. Doing art in
public view is what has happened forever with plein air painting and at art
fairs. And simply putting art out in public places for the people to experience
and passively enjoy has happened in all kinds of traditional public art, also for
a long, long time. Those things are great and important roles for artists, but
they aren’t what I see as creative placemaking.
WALKER: So, following this logic, is it accurate to simply put games outside and
call that placemaking? Again, most of us wouldn’t call the setup inside the
hotel where we stayed placemaking. It’s just the game area. But there’s a
difference. And this comes when the games and turf and chairs and tables
serve purposes for people in public places. Placemaking really happens when
people utilize recreational, social play and lingering spaces – and artists doing
art – in ways that actually help solve a design problem. That’s kind of what the
hotel atrium games are for too. You have families stuck there for the night.
They want some things to do where they are staying – without getting back in
the car after a long day of driving. So they hang out in the atrium, swim in the
pool, and play some ping pong. If the hotel were located, instead, in the little
town by the park or closer to the lakeshore like hotels used to be before we
drove everywhere, then people wouldn’t need to hang out inside the hotel.
They’d walk out and do stuff at other places nearby. This hotel is located in a
place easy to drive to but terrible for walking anywhere. So it’s a design
problem. If the developers had been able to put the hotel in the right place by
the lake, the game area and even the pool might be unnecessary. But this
hotel – like so many things built today – is isolated. So they had to make it a
self-contained, inwardly oriented place, an island. This is much like what we
see with indoor shopping malls in suburbanized North America. If everything
is offered in a one-stop shop, you don’t need to wander by foot or bike from
place to place and you don’t experience spontaneous social encounters, you
don’t run in to your neighbors or meet new people, you don’t make new
discoveries. Your life becomes routine.
MARSH: I see placemaking as an effort to undo these terrible physical and social
design choices. Creative placemaking is an effort by artists to be part of this
work of place fixing, and also part of undoing the social damage that these
choices have caused for communities.
WALKER: Right. For this reason, all actual, effective placemaking is closely
aligned with the ideas of Tactical Urbanism – described by Mike Lyon and
112 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
Tony Garcia (2015) as ‘short-term actions for long-term change’. The tactical
aspects of placemaking are vital. Artists simply making art outside are not
doing creative placemaking unless they are utilizing this art experience as an
avenue for social reconnection or to address other challenges in direct
response to and collaboration with the community where they are working.
Moving games outside to help bring people together does a lot more than just
moving an artist outside to paint in full view of us all like a sort of artist zoo.
At least we’re all invited to play ping pong when the tables are out there. If
you’re going to have art outside as part of a creative placemaking effort, the art
needs to be made with the community and needs to connect with them in real,
hands-on ways. Doing art about the community or doing art in front of the
community doesn’t help undo the social damage we’ve caused in the way
we’ve designed and created divided, auto-centric cities; in the ways we’ve
segregated people; in the ways we’ve ignored the importance of equity,
opportunity, and social connectivity. Like Rick Lowe figured out as he started
working on Project Row Houses4 in Houston or as Frances Whitehead5
considered as she moved to ‘post normal’ art in Chicago, why make art about
the challenges of our times when we can make art that at least begins to take on
things directly? Why not make art that actively intervenes?
MARSH: Placemaking, really, is about re-evaluating the world and how it is
changing. Everything we create is ephemeral. It’s an illusion to believe that a
project or place people use is ever going to be finished or used in the way you
plan. With urban design, public art, architecture, and landscaping, people who
use these will show you if your intended idea for a space is right or not.
America is a relatively young country. When you look at buildings and public
places here, many have only been in existence a hundred years; in rare cases, a
couple hundred years. Then you compare that to other parts of the world where
you have buildings and communities in existence for several centuries. There’s
a lot to learn in how places are used over time. And places constantly need to
be re-evaluated to ensure they’re meeting the desires and needs of the
changing culture of the people living there or visiting.
WALKER: Yes. Placemaking is a response to this re-evaluation. It’s an action step
addressing changes. Placemaking works best, at least right now, as place
repair. So what the thing people are doing, at least most of the time, with
placemaking today is trying to undo the problems created by suburbanization
and breakdowns of social networks. We have re-evaluated those choices and
believe we need to do something about the damage. We’re taking a tactical
approach to place or city repair – also the excellent name of a group doing this
work for decades in Portland, Oregon.6 With the way sprawl spread out cities,
especially in America, places don’t have the population density to give the
right level of life and activity to places that once were inherently vibrant and
sticky – that were places where people stuck around and spent time together.
In the past, many cities and neighborhoods and blocks – especially with a
high density of residents and streets that remained safe and comfortable for
people – didn’t really need public programming or placemaking. When it
 A conversation between an artist and curator 113
came to street life or pedestrian activity, this all just worked – even while other
problems, especially on the social level, still existed. And many places around
the world still work will without placemaking interventions.
Earlier in this trip, we saw a big difference when comparing the market area
in Pittsburgh – called Strip District7 – and the Kensington Market and China-
town market area in Toronto. The Strip District is a really wonderful place, but
it goes really quiet in the evening and at night because all the people go other
places, many back to the suburbs. In Toronto, the density of people living and
working in Kensington Market make it so much more alive twenty-four hours
a day (Figure 8.1).
MARSH: So the purpose of placemaking, many times, is to attract more people,
via unique experiences, to either visit or move people back into these areas that
previously did have that higher density of people. Those places like Kensing-
ton Market don’t even have to think about programming. It’s already that way.
And it’s not always like these denser cities have great architecture or design.
They just have a lot of people. The people take over and you see a lot of graffiti
and people doing what they want to do outdoors. A place with high density of
people may not require placemaking for the purpose of attracting people to
public places. But active placemaking programs, like socially engaged art
projects, can be used to connect people, connect strangers. This is really
important given the current social climate where we are dealing issues of
equity and political polarization. Artists and placemakers creating social
opportunities for people of different backgrounds, with different beliefs, can
help support empathy and understanding. This can be beneficial to creating a
happier, more harmonious city. People start seeing each other as individuals
and not as somebody from a different tribe when they play chess or ping pong
with a stranger who may think differently. Placemaking is providing that
opportunity.
WALKER: Absolutely. The advantages of connecting people with each other
should be a primary goal of this work. And I think the work should also have
long-term goals focused on reducing the role of the automobile in our lives.
People should be able to enjoy public places very near where they live. And
we should live and shop and work and find entertainment and recreation in
close proximity as much as possible. A life with less driving and more walking
and public transportation is better for physical and mental health, keeps
businesses like corner shops and pubs going, and helps with empathy. When
you are out on the sidewalk or in a packed train, you have to deal with other
humans in real space and time and you get out of your bubble. This is more
important than ever, especially here in America.
The Strip District in Pittsburgh could use a lot more people, especially at
night. It seems like a great place to live and residential development appears to
be coming there. Placemaking and public programming could help make that
place even more appealing and push this forward. When you see the Strip
District, you see a place that’s perfect for people. So the problem isn’t the place,
it’s the overall design of the city that prioritized getting in and out of the city, not
Figure 8.1 What is our work: Big Car Collaborative takes a holistic approach to its work,
seeing placemaking as a strategy for reaching important, broader goals with
communities.
 A conversation between an artist and curator 115
staying in it. Like most larger American cities, Pittsburgh is disrupted in major
ways by downtown freeways. That’s hard to fix. And public programming can’t
do much about that situation. But the way downtown and public areas are
programmed can change. And placemaking can be part of that.
When we were in Buffalo, you could see that they have been working on
their downtown – especially their riverfront area – in a way to primarily make it
appealing to people who live in the suburbs and drive in for big, self-contained
festivals and events. They’ve dedicated lots of space to parking and they’ve
made it easy to drive in and drive out. These kinds of ticketed festival grounds
are more self-contained, inwardly focused islands where everybody spends their
money inside the fence. And, because of this setup, the events don’t support
small businesses nearby. So you’ll see very little life in a downtown bar three
blocks away while people stand in line to buy a beer at the festival grounds. It
doesn’t help the businesses and other places around it. Everybody buys their
beers and food in the festival. And it doesn’t have any sort of economic
development support for those depressed blocks right there by it, where there’s
a dead shopping mall and other vacant spaces. There were hardly any people
down at a really great bar at the Lafayette Hotel – just blocks from the festival
full of thousands of people. That’s the problem. And we have the same issue in
Indianapolis. You park in the parking garage, go to the White River State Park,8
go to a concert. Then you never go to anything else. You don’t really touch the
experience of being in the city or what it is about. It wouldn’t matter where the
festival was located, the festival gives a person no experience of the city core, it
just happens to be in the city. You might as well have it in an amphitheater in the
middle of a cornfield. It’s the same experience.
MARSH: A lot of the people working for the city, creating programs for the
downtown core, live in the suburbs. I think that has something to do with it.
What do you think can be done by cities to keep people around the core?
WALKER: Cities should be designing their downtowns and planning their cities for
residents to live right there. And public programming and placemaking work
should be designed to include the people who live there – the homeless, condo
owners, service industry and office workers, CEOs, everybody. There are
already communities in these downtowns. Focusing on public programming
like festivals and concerts that often exclude people because of cost
ignores a good portion of these community members. You often see
them there outside the fences. Instead of putting all of your eggs in that
blowout event basket that many can’t afford, why not offer lower-cost,
human-scale public programming more often? We’ve seen this work
really well in a lot of places from Bryant Park9 in New York to Campus
Martius10 in Detroit to Monument Circle in Indianapolis.
Of course, Indianapolis has messed up a lot with that over the years as well.
We’ve built our city and prioritized our streets and roads to serve people who
live in the suburbs. And we’ve done the same thing, far too often, with events
116 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
designed to attract suburbanites. If you want people living in the core of the
city, you have to design the downtown and your public programming for
people who live there, who would live there, and not for people who live
somewhere else. If you keep cities and places designed in a way that makes it
too easy to live somewhere else, people will keep on living there.
But if you design public places in outwardly oriented ways, they’ll help
support what’s around them. Look at Chicago’s Millennium Park.11 It has
attractions, a parking garage people from the suburbs drive into, big festivals.
But it’s also designed for people to hang out in there for free, experience art,
and socialize. And it doesn’t gobble up all the business from around it. So
people can go to Millennium Park but they also walk right into the city. It’s
about integrating the design of the public place into the city. It’s not separate,
not fenced off. Bryant Park in New York is like that too. They made it part of
the city. You might buy something – like a drink at the sidewalk café – at one
of those places. But you’re going to move on to the next thing. That’s where
placemaking can help. It encourages people to go on to the next thing, to
wander and to have spontaneous experiences they wouldn’t have if they were
trapped in a programmed festival.
MARSH: Like when we were doing Spark12 at Monument Circle in the center of
Downtown Indianapolis. The owner of the jewelry store and owners of some
of the other businesses said when big festivals pack thousands of people onto
the Circle, they actually get less business than when nothing is happening
down there. No one goes into their businesses because they are only there
for the big, loud festival parked in front of their business. But they said
that Spark – which created opportunities for people outside and experi-
ence quieter, human-scale activities – encouraged people to stay around
and actually support the businesses. People were moving from place to
place and experiencing the city. They didn’t just do the one big thing,
blow it all out, then drive back home to the suburbs again. That’s how
cities and how neighborhoods work. Cities weren’t supposed to be a
place where you went to just one thing then turned around and drove
twenty miles back home. You’d go from the corner market to get fruit,
then you’d go to the other corner and get meat, and then you’d go
down the way and get some bread and cheese. Then maybe stop in the
bookstore. And you’d run into people along the way and have conversa-
tions with strangers and maybe make new friends. Now, shopping
happens much of the time in one, big place. And life is all split up and
the in-between experience is isolated inside cars. If the supermarket has
everything you need, then you don’t go into the different shops. And you
lose out on a lot of opportunities for human interaction, for meeting your
neighbor, meeting the different shop owners.
Some of this still happens when you see your neighbors at the Walmart in a
small town. But it’s less likely that you’ll have spontaneous interactions at
these big box stores. Also the problem is how you get to Walmart and get
home, is in your car. You don’t see anyone on the street. If you’re in Toronto
 A conversation between an artist and curator 117
and in Kensington Market and getting three or four things you need you’re
going to run into more people and talk to them.
13
WALKER: In Indianapolis, when we go down Virginia Avenue by Bluebeard and
14
Calvin Fletcher coffeehouse, it’s like Mayberry, from The Andy Griffith
Show on TV back in the ’60s. You walk down the street and see friends and
catch up. It takes time but it is important. That’s a lot more like an authentic
experience. Just like we saw at La Prima15 – this Italian espresso shop next to
an Italian bakery in Pittsburgh. There are plastic chairs out front under a large
awning shared by the two shops. Customers, some speaking Italian, just show
up there and meet up and form friendships. It’s kind of like how I used to play
pickup basketball. We’d show up individually and do this group sports thing.
There, it’s a group cup of coffee. We heard them telling everybody that they’d
be having a celebration the next morning for somebody moving away. They
were acquaintances hanging out at these plastic tables and chairs they pull
together, having coffee and pastries together and talking and celebrating.
Sometimes the customers are also sitting there playing cards. La Prima is a
made place. It doesn’t need city repair, it doesn’t need anybody’s interventions
because it is still working. It has great design: a big, metal awning to protect
you from the elements and movable furniture where you can sit and watch
people go by in the Strip District for as long as you’d like. It’s not designed,
like many fast-food restaurants, to encourage you to move on. La Prima offers
excellent food and drink right there by the sidewalk. And the customers have
created their own avenues for social interaction.
People don’t get that kind of experience at Walmart in big cities. They miss
out on these routines, on seeing people on the sidewalk and the street. We have
designed our cities for efficiency but that took away a lot of the social
spontaneous stuff that made life really good. And, as we’ve seen, sprawl is
very inefficient in reality. It’s turned out that people spend all the time sitting
in traffic and waiting in lines that they once had for conversations with
neighbors. Working on repairing these bad choices is where placemaking and
an art practice to encourage social interaction can have a positive effect.
Maybe we can be part of helping fix problems that were created by capitalism
and greed and always thinking things need to be changed and improved when
really it was just destroying things that are already good. Changing things for
the worse, for the illusion of progress. These changes – like the incessant and
unnecessary road building that continues today – are all linked back to
somebody making a lot of money. But these are short-term profits that
contribute to long-term problems.
MARSH: What do you think people want? Do you think it’s different from city to
city, is it unique from city to city or is there a formula?
WALKER: People want to be around other people. They want to have opportunities
to spend time together or to be comfortable, feel safe. A lot of those are basic
things. And many public places don’t allow for that kind of stuff. Some of this
is because people in charge of public places don’t want you to get too
comfortable or you might move in. We’re seeing that in the park in our
118 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
neighborhood as homeless folks have set up camp. But when you make
benches purposefully uncomfortable so drunk or homeless people won’t
sleep on them, then you are also making them uncomfortable for the rest of
us. And it tells us all the same message that was meant for the homeless: ‘We
don’t really want you here, so move along.’ (Figure 8.2)
MARSH: In America, we’ve built a society where people stay inside much of the
time – often in front of screens. Add driving into the mix and we are very
physically isolated. I don’t think that’s what people really want. We like to
move around and do things. But going to a public place and connecting with
others is now such an ordeal because of the way things are separated. It goes
back to what we were talking about with Buffalo. People shouldn’t have to buy
a ticket, drive fifteen miles downtown, park, and then go to the festival
grounds to find an opportunity to connect with others in a public place. This
kind of experience needs to be something that is an easy, natural part of life.
That’s where designing something to add a little pause in a public place is
important – like we saw with a Southwest Airlines and Project for Public
Spaces16 Heart of the Community project outside the public library in down-
town Buffalo.17 The idea of small interventions in public places, in the case of
the library turning a modernist plaza into a gathering place, is good and will
make a difference for all kinds of people. We’ve seen this same thing with our
work with Indianapolis City Market18 – people are there for a variety of
reasons because it is by the City County Building and the courts. So we’ve
added features that are comfortable and respectful to everyone. Maybe you are
the mayor or maybe you are there for a court hearing.
WALKER: As we look at this, I see the small things as important and as things we
can do now. But, in the meantime, we can’t just wait for the big things to
happen. Policies need to be influenced to encourage changes in how cities and
regions work. We know this is failing. But we still haven’t been able to make
sure that we stop further suburbanizing and lowering the density of our cities.
Without density returning to urban neighborhoods in cities like Indianapolis,
we’ll continue to struggle to enjoy the kind of thriving public places and
neighborhood commercial and cultural corridors we see in very dense cities
like Toronto.
How much do you see placemaking and socially engaged art making
a difference?
MARSH: It varies from city to city. Placemaking has always been around.
And now it has a label. This is because isolation and tribalism and nationalism
have become such major issues. What’s happened was the world became so
small via the internet but also became so isolated also due to the internet and
technology. It’s complicated because, with the internet, our species has created
a tool for creating world-scale tribes. In the past, we created groups based on
geography. The internet has changed geography. Humans are social. We seek
connection. Placemaking creates opportunities for social interactions with
Figure 8.2 Why is this work so important: It’s all about the ‘why’ or the motives behind
placemaking in the view of Big Car Collaborative’s team. Putting it in words
helps clarify and guide the work.
120 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
people different than you and helps you understand people who are different
from you. It provides that opportunity for unplanned interaction. With your
social media account, you create like-minded groups. We need that. But, to
improve our future and our lives, we need interactions with people much
different than us. Placemaking should be funded more and more by cities and
by foundations. We are already seeing this in cities with smart leadership.
Indianapolis is a place where some of our leaders and funders already get it.
However, funders should be making sure artists and organizations pitching
placemaking have the correct philosophies and aren’t just following money.
We’ve seen it in Indianapolis. All of a sudden, a lot of non-profits are
placemaking. Some are doing a fine job of it, others not. The foundations
shouldn’t rely on grant reports or videos. They need to visit their funded
projects. They need to get out and experience the work directly. And they need
to emphasize true community engagement to avoid ‘plop placemaking’.
People don’t always realize how much work goes into this work. We are
really in the people business, dealing with dozens of relationships on all levels.
This means going to neighborhood meetings and being an active part of these.
Meeting with neighbors who don’t go to neighborhood meetings, meeting with
businesses owners and teaming up with them and neighbors alike to lay the
groundwork and do the research to make sure you do a good job on these
projects. Anyone can do a version of placemaking. But doing it in a
thoughtful, effective way requires research, practice, and staffing the
engagement process and programming in public places with people who
care. These have to be people who aren’t just doing this for a paycheck.
We’re fortunate to have found many artists, designers, and planners who
share this passion with us. Good placemaking requires that you believe in
what you’re doing and its importance. It takes a lot of emotional energy
to be a bridge for people, to connect people and create spaces and
programming where comfort, play, fun, and social interaction can
happen – all at no cost for the visitors. You have to smile at people and
say hello, ask how they are, who they are, and figure out the situation.
You can put some games out or set up your art studio on a sidewalk and call
it placemaking. But a key component of what makes our style different is your
journalism background, Jim. You are genuinely interested in the people in the
places where we work, in their stories.
WALKER: Yes, the work has to be about the people and not the placemaker. For the
most part in good journalism and good design alike, the person who is
making the story or the space doesn’t need to be apparent in what’s going
on. When they are invisible, that means they are doing things right. It’s like a
referee for a basketball game. You know they did a good job if nobody is
paying any attention to them. If the game starts to be about the ref, something
went wrong. In placemaking and socially engaged art alike, the designers of
the space, the project, and the programming should be responding to what
people want. And they should be doing what they can to make that happen –
usually in behind-the-scenes, invisible ways. With this work, I still think
 A conversation between an artist and curator 121
about what I want as a basic test. Anything we offer has to be something I’d
want to do or a place where I’d want to hang out myself – and I always spend
hours and hours of time in these spaces, doing the activities with people and
making adjustments and improvements. But these projects are about the
people who participate in them, not about me or us.
MARSH: The really difficult, delicate work is with people – facilitating interac-
tions between people. It helps to have a multi-pronged approach. Public
placemaking is more on the front lines connecting people, removing as many
barriers as possible to get people to connect and permission to be creative.
Because of social structures our society has created, people don’t feel like they
should make things, either because they didn’t go to art school or because they
can’t make a profit at it. But there’s a benefit to people to create and interact with
each other through art.
Often people happen upon our public placemaking work, then want more
opportunities. That’s why we have our home base, Tube Factory,19 operate
equally as a community center and contemporary art museum. That’s why we
chose to give 2,000 square feet to a place where neighbors can have meetings
and gather and 2,000 square feet for the gallery where we commission shows
curated on the themes of mythology, community, and memory. When selecting
artists and exhibits, I look for ways to bring different audiences together. With
the artist Carlos Rolón,20 we presented 50 GRAND (2017),21 a standard 2D art
exhibit and an installation. He also created a boxing robe that members of a
local boxing group could wear. And we brought in a full-size boxing ring and
hosted free live boxing matches in partnership with a boxing gym that serves
at-risk youth. Rolón is a well-known artist who would also attract an arts
audience. So we were able to bring together two different audiences with that
show that would not have many options to interact typically.
That’s why I selected those themes. People of different backgrounds have
things in common, certain childhood foods, smells, tastes, décor from grand-
parents’ and parents’ homes. I learned about theme-based curation initially at
Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New (MONA).22 They curate based upon the
themes of sex and death. Chicago artist Theaster Gates23 and MONA are two
of my biggest influences.
WALKER: I also really enjoyed another combination of audiences that happened
with our Hairy Man exhibit you organized with Jeremy Efroymson24 and
Christopher Murphy. The public programming included talks by experts
on Bigfoot. The Hairy Man25 is the Native American folklore version of
Bigfoot and the show explored this and the obsession with this idea. So
here we were, just a few months after Donald Trump was elected, hosting
rural Bigfoot hunters from across the Midwest and artists from the city
together in this space, sharing paranormal theories. The highlight came
when the guy who hosts the Ohio Bigfoot Conference told the audience
they should support art spaces like ours and artists in their own commu-
nities whenever they visit a new place. This kind of moment really felt
like it was bringing people together.
122 Jim Walker and Shauta Marsh
The biggest thing I want to do with placemaking, socially engaged art, and
tactical urbanism is create these kinds of small opportunities and interventions
that are part of bigger, long-term societal and policy change. We have to do
something right now to bring people together in our world. The goal needs to
be an emphasis on how this work can contribute to empathy, equity, better
health, safer communities, places where people are physically and socially
connected with each other and the rest of their city. And we need to keep in
mind the potential negatives of gentrification, especially displacement of
people from the best parts of cities – neighborhoods close to jobs and parks
and art and good food and all the things that make places attractive. The work
of creative placemaking needs to be for everyone. And we shouldn’t be
making places better just for developers to make more money. So it’s
important that people don’t feel satisfied with placemaking as window dres-
sing or as a tool for the kind of economic development that benefits only a few.
We need to be sure we are positively influencing the ways cities are changing
for the benefit of many.
MARSH: Do you think there’s incentive for people to be less passive about these
challenges?
WALKER: We need to lean on the influencers – the developers, the funders, the city
leaders. On a small scale, we can do things that help people become more
active within their own communities. But, on a larger scale, we need to
continue to get city leaders and elected officials involved in these ideas – in
supporting a better-connected society and safe, comfortable, equitable, artful,
and welcoming neighborhoods and public places. There are two things we
have to do: One is take on these smaller interventions, team up with neighbor-
hoods, with all kinds of people, and just make things happen out there. Then
we also have to do bigger things that influence politicians and funders to get
behind this on a policy level by helping them see, experience, and believe in
the power of this work.

Notes
1 Big Car Collaborative, www.bigcar.org
2 Fountain Square, www.discoverfountainsquare.com
3 National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov
4 Project Row Houses, www.projectrowhouses.org
5 Frances Whitehead, www.franceswhitehead.com
6 City Repair, www.cityrepair.org
7 Strip District, www.stripdistrictneighbors.com
8 White River State Park, www.whiteriverstatepark.org
9 Bryant Park, www.bryantpark.org
10 Campus Martius, www.downtowndetroitparks.com/parks/Campus-Martius
11 Millennium Park, Chicago, https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/
millennium_park.html
12 Spark Monument Circle, www.bigcar.org/project/spark
13 Bluebeard, www.bluebeardindy.com
14 Calvin Fletcher Coffee, www.cfcoffeecompany.com
 A conversation between an artist and curator 123
15 La Prima, www.laprima.com
16 Project for Public Spaces, www.pps.org
17 Heart of the Community, www.pps.org/blog/2017-heart-of-the-community-placemak
ing-grants/
18 Spark City Market, www.bigcar.org/project/citymarket
19 Tube Factory, www.tubefactory.org
20 Carlos Rolón, www.carlosrolondzine.com
21 50 GRAND, www.bigcar.org/project/50grand
22 Museum of Old and New, www.mona.net.au
23 Theaster Gates, www.theastergates.com
24 Jeremy Efroymson, www.jeremyefroymson.net
25 The Hairy Man, www.bigcar.org/project/hairyman

Reference
Lydon, M., Garcia, A. (2015). Tactical Urbanism. Washington: Island Press.
Section 4

Challenging Ecologies
This page intentionally left blank
9 Temporary spatial object/architecture
as a typology for placemaking
Torange Khonsari

Abstract
This chapter will introduce the role temporary spatial objects/architectures can
play in claiming space in parts of neighbourhoods for both civic use and social
empowerment harnessed towards placemaking. Research within creative place-
making that considers contributions to citizen-led creative placemaking is emer-
ging and this chapter argues for a tactical approach to creative placemaking.
Temporary spatial objects/architectures are presented as a tactic to encourage
citizen-led approaches to resist privatised enclosures in urban areas. This chapter
will use two historical contexts of temporary spatial objects/architectures
embedded in fields of architecture, site specific performance and art; the Soviet
Agitational Propaganda Vehicles (Agitprop trains) of the 1920s and the Fun
Palace by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price of 1960s. Two selected London case
studies of temporary spatial objects/architectures by public works [sic] collective
will offer the contemporary position of such structures within the neoliberal
neighbourhood of London. This chapter argues for temporary spatial objects/
architectures to act as what Flood and Grindon (2017) call ‘disobedient objects’
in placemaking projects that battle against waves of city-development, supported
by capital interests moving at a high speed. To this end this chapter explores how
temporary object/architecture in its disobedience creates agency within a locality
encouraging chance encounters and organic formation of communities.

Introduction
This chapter will primarily draw from two case study projects by public works
collective:1 firstly, a mobile structure, DIY Regeneration (2009); and secondly, a
situated temporary project, The Bow Common and Common Room (2014–ongoing)
as possible objects of disobedience. The case studies’ context is London, an ever-
growing city with increasing gentrification, where the high value of land prohibits
placemaking tactics described in this chapter. It will draw comparisons with two
historical case studies, which share commonalities and differences. For mobility, it
will look to use the Bolsheviks Agitprop trains of 1920s, in Russia, and for
temporary architecture it will draw on the adaptable Fun Palace of theatre director
128 Torange Khonsari
Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price of the 1960s in London. Both the
historical and the contemporary case studies share the commonality of being situated
in a place to affect a social impact and are offered as current examples on the
historical trajectories of the past. The contemporary structures are contingent within
a complex and unpredictable city where residents have moved away and new ones
have moved in: ‘Complete participation would suggest a closed domain of knowl-
edge or collective practice for which there might be measurable degree of “aquisi-
tion” by newcomers’ (Lave and Wenger, n.d., p.36). Every move brings with it new
cultures, desires and values which the ephemeral nature of these structures can
accommodate. The term ‘spatial objects’ refers to mobile structures created by
artists, architects and designers, whereas ‘temporary architectures’ are structures
created by the same group of practitioners but are fixed to a site and are considered
temporary by planning authorities.
public works collective was set up in 2004 as an interdisciplinary platform
between artists and architects situating themselves in neighbourhoods using tempor-
ary spatial objects/architectures as a method for social engagement. The methodol-
ogy used in this research is situated practice in both case studies, being in residence
as a spatial practitioner through the collective, public works or as an academic
through London Metropolitan University. The act of being situated in a place where
relationships are made, collective tactics agreed on, and being involved in events,
allowed the researcher to become part of the community of learners attached to a
locality and place (Lave and Wenger, n.d.). Here local knowledge was produced,
disseminated and acted upon. Most of the findings in this chapter are based on
experienced knowledge within the communities of learners. These findings were
then analysed against desktop research of the two historical projects, which have
commonalities and conflicts with the contemporary case studies.
This chapter will not elaborate on specific tactical methods, but positions the
temporary spatial objects/architectures as a domain for tactical knowledge to be
shared and tactical moves agreed upon. It is from within these structures that
tactical moves are devised and acted on. Temporary spatial objects/architectures,
although highly programmed with events and activities, are not about being
purely functional. They are concerned with the nurturing, gathering and dissemi-
nation of knowledge, collective decision-making and the offering of platforms
for individual desires, for both individual and collective voices to be heard. By
their placement on to sites in the city they have the potential to become agonistic
in nature (Mouffe et al., 2001), a space where conflicts are negotiated and
agreements are made. They require non-corporate public spaces, where pluralism
(Mouffe, 1992) can be hosted within the theatre of everyday life away from
corporate control. When temporary spatial objects/architectures become the arena
where civil society claims its right over the use and possibly the ownership of
places, they become what Flood and Grindon (2017) call ‘disobedient objects’.
The more these structures can create their own financial independence, the more
they can respond to its role as places where democracy is practised. This chapter
takes its understanding of democracy from Mouffe’s conceptualisation, where
democracy becomes negotiations among interests, rather than those scholars who
 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking 129
think in lines of consensus and pure ‘communitarian’ spirit (Mouffe, 1992, p.29).
In the current social context in the UK, where the social value system is so wide
and varied, we need places that can embody and understand such variety. It is
important not to simplify and order it with imposed values, which in turn
requires what Chomsky and Herman (1988) term ‘manufactured consensus’.

Situating spatial objects/architectures in place

Based on knowledge gained through being situated both in Bow and Kings Cross
in London, temporary spatial objects/architectures aiming to make places are
programmed with themes derived from local involvement of citizens. The
structures are offered as open platforms for local initiatives generated at the
grassroots and arenas where tactical or specialised local knowledge is exchanged,
aiming to engender agency in those involved. It is these spatial objects/architec-
ture’s embedded nature away from financial systems of consumption that aligns
this typology with ‘situated’ environments for learning for communities of
practice (Lave and Wenger, n.d.). These spaces are not about being commercially
productive but are set up to nurture collective action. They are places where
knowledge for one’s right over the city can be learnt and exercised as citizens;
here, citizenship is practised. As Mouffe et al. tell us:

Arendt, when she speaks of the right to have rights, insists that the right to
have rights is citizenship. If you are not a citizen, you don’t have the right to
have rights. Thus, in fact, she insists very much on the importance of being a
citizen.
Mouffe et al. (2001, p.105)

If we see citizenship based on pluralism with an understanding that at a higher

level we all belong ‘to a political community whose rules we have to accept’
(ibid., p.30), it is pertinent to question the structure of the localised political
community. Who makes up the political community, the rules and its govern-
ance? Temporary spatial objects/architectures ‘situated’ in a place have the
possibility to test and question relations of power, be it top-down or at grassroots.
The testing can be through models of platforms offered for discussion, thematic
of workshops and events and involvement of expertise offered by local residents.
This can influence localised governance of neighbourhoods and their resources,
decision-making on ways in which sites get developed, methods in which
commonalities and differences are celebrated and negotiated and visual represen-
tation of values displayed in festivals and public events.
Temporary spatial objects/architectures in their disobedient form are structures
whose aesthetic, flexibility and affordability enables their multiple use and
misuse, and through this process allows them to remain contingent. The motive
force and the affordable way in which the disobedient object/architecture can
establish itself gives it power – the power of being possible, present, constant
and ‘extending material spaces into spaces for action’ (Arlt et al., 2006, p.14).
130 Torange Khonsari
Haydn discussed material as being generated through human relations and
programmes in flux, away from current obsession with efficiency and order,
prohibiting chance encounters and organic formation of communities. These
spatial objects/architectures growing out of interdisciplinary praxis often have
diverse materiality ranging from:

as found, originating from the French object trouvé to being products of

manufacturing (architects tend to lean towards this due to disciplinary
education). Some structures will be made to enable ease of collective
construction demonstrating social solidarity, whilst having the ability to
change and shift with time. Disobedient structures can exert ‘counter
power’.
(ibid., p.9)

Two key constitutive components of such structures are firstly, delivery of social
agency, and secondly, re-imagined models of public spaces towards active
citizenship. To implement these constitutive components, projects need to be
self-initiated with new models of financing which are dependent on countries’
economic cultures, values and policies. These can range from grants to crowd-
funding, as well as becoming income-generating. Mobility presents a different
relationship to being ‘situated’: it is situated in shorter periods and its role has
less impact than temporary architecture in creating long-term agency. However, it
contributes in producing new models of public space in places it visits, as
described in the next section.

Temporary spatial objects

Historical context 1: Agitational Propaganda trains (Agitprop)

In order to frame the discussion on spatial objects, this chapter introduces the
historical context of Agitational Propaganda trains, referred to as Agitprop. Here
I am not claiming this is the primary historical context to subsequent develop-
ment in the art, architecture and design of mobile structures; rather, I am
exemplifying it as a precedent, which had political intent and whose intensions
were fulfilled using mobility of a found object (a train), married with contem-
porary constructivist art of the time.
The Department of Agitation and Propaganda was founded in 1920 by the
Soviet Communist party. Russia’s population was 70 per cent illiterate, thus
visual language of art and theatre was the most effective means of spreading
revolutionary ideas (Brown, 2013, p.5). The Agitprop trains were not passenger
trains but carriages utilised on the national railway tracks to reach as much of the
country as possible, becoming a messenger of utopian dreams, where constructi-
vist film makers such as Alexandr Medvedkin, and artists such as Malevich and
Lissitzky, produced artistic visual content, creating the theatrical spectacle to lure
audiences. Imagine the scene as trains approach the platform, hordes of farmers
 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking 131
with hoes, shovels and sickles run towards the station. The train throws poems,
manuscripts and flyers out of the windows. Among the revolutionary flyers and
the intense red posters lie helpful tips about farming, repairing your house and
bicycles. The train stops, doors open and a film begins, the library opens and a
member of the Blue Blouse, an influential Agitprop theatre collective in the early
Soviet Union in 1920s, stands on the roof performing revolutionary messages.
Utilising Agitprop, art, theatre and poetry was being developed hand in hand
with top-down political ideology. One can question if this set the historical
precedence for what UK Prime minister Tony Blair in 1990s advocated in
policies towards public art in regeneration, which subsequently enabled art
practices to develop in the public realm funded by the state, questioning, as
above, self-initiation and the role of multiple funding sources to achieve artistic
freedom within the public realm.
The instrumentalisation of art of Agitprop with top-down political ideology
becomes a cautionary tale. One can take the view that the emerging Russian
government invested in new forms of theatre, methods of art production and
aesthetic, promoting a synthesis between many visual and political re-enactments
into the realm of art and culture, which was important for artistic development
of the time. Agitprop in bed with art and culture of the time in Bolshevik Russia
is both fascinating and disturbing. Brown quotes Pipes on Agitprop, describing it
as a rise in ‘cultural bureaucracy for whom culture was only a form of
propaganda, and propaganda the highest form of culture’ (Brown, 2013, p.6).
Working classes had no time or money to venture to cities to attend theatres so
the trains went to them. There was a lot of improvisation, varied engagement
with audiences and active participation to really engage people, to keep them
interested and keen to attend other performances. The creativity in social
engagement, championed in the 21st century through abolishing the audience/
performer/artist dialectic, and the notion of useful art, were all emerging. In this
sense constructivist art around the Agitprop phenomenon becomes an important
reference point in current socially engaged art practice, participatory theatre and
art in the public realm, be it mobile or static. The cautionary tale of this type of
instrumentalisation of art by political power is the implementation of didactic
propaganda messages it spread using spectacle and simplified, easily accessible
content. For the artists the ideology of empowerment of the working classes
against oligarchy was more important than power relations and manipulation
being set up by communism and their political strategies. The constructivists and
their Agitprop projects set the scene for interdisciplinary endeavours post the
onset of industrial revolution.

Case study 1: DIY Regeneration

In 2009, Camden Art Centre commissioned public works to do a project in the
Kings Cross redevelopment area, one of the biggest regeneration schemes in
Europe. The project, DIY Regeneration (2009),2 used the Folk Float (initially
commissioned by Grizedale Art centre),3 a customised milk float, as a mobile
132 Torange Khonsari
workshop space, billboard, archive and an on-site office. The milk float and
public works roamed the area looking for activist residents, workers and
commuters engaged in making a difference to the area. DIY Regeneration was
interested in small-scale, self-driven initiatives, motivated by local actors as well
as local needs and desires. Over the three months, public works talked to
individuals who had a direct, active involvement with their community and on a
daily basis contributed to and changed the area in which they lived. Each of these
chance encounters at the Folk Float which resulted in handmade posters captured
the tips and advice offered for others to get involved and start taking ownership
of public spaces in one’s neighbourhood.
The content was not produced from the top as a means of dictating values, like
the Agitprop, but was derived from knowledge of everyday life in a place. The
posters, which documented the tips, advice and slogans collected on site, were
displayed on the roaming Folk Float as well as on an online specially designed
digital platform. A final selection of posters was printed and fly-posted across the
Kings Cross area, spreading the advice back into the community which produced
it. Returning to the cautionary tale of the Agitprop, the spatial object developed
by public works was not a means to make government consultation events or a
method to make government agendas come to life. For this their value came from
the local neighbourhood and not local government or the developers. The
structures were meant to reveal hidden informal sociabilities to allow collective
interests to reveal themselves. Here is where the unexpected is revealed, and
knowledge required for civic action disseminated towards the heterogeneous city:
‘I’m trying to think of a model of the public sphere which will not be one where
people leave aside all their differences in order to try to reach a consensus, but
precisely a sphere where an agonistic confrontation takes place’ (Mouffe et al.,
2001, p.123).
In DIY Regeneration, residents’ frustrations, views and disempowerment were
revealed, shared and discussed, yet the ephemerality of the structure in a place did
not enable lasting relations that led to trust and potential agency. Mobility is both a
vice and a virtue, it is very short-term presence in a place does not achieve
commitment for setting up a true agonistic platform, from which to empower,
mobilise civic action and support self-governance. It is more a tool for spreading
words/knowledge and campaigning like the Agitprop. Mobile structures are effec-
tive for reaching otherwise difficult communities with low participation. Used to
benefit civil society, their agency lies in bringing knowledge and a different value
system to a place, and these differing values have the potential to create agitation and
what Mouffe calls agonistic (Mouffe et al., 2001) places of difference. With
Agitprop the agitation was part of a political strategy to change public opinion; this
is different to DIY Regeneration, which offered knowledge on a local scale for
citizens to use tactically, sometimes in opposition to strategies imposed. In this sense
they may become disobedient, with the potential to counter power exerted by capital
and legislation. If the practitioner entering areas anticipated for development starts
with deploying mobile structures, both their strategic and tactical intent needs to be
thought through and collectively discussed and agreed on by local residents. In this
 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking 133
context the mobile structure becomes a space for productive social engagement and
where knowledge is transferred.

Temporary architectures

Historical context 2: The Fun Palace

Less than half a century after the Agitprop vehicles of the Soviets and half a century
before DIY Regeneration, Joan Littlewood engaged in revolutionary Agitprop street
performances in the UK. Littlewood’s work was to occupy the spaces of the city,
the streets and the neighbourhoods, her passion shared by architect Cedric Price
who saw architecture as in constant flux, and temporary. Price and Littlewood’s
unrealised project, The Fun Palace, was reflective of its political context: The Fun
Palace was to be an educational and recreational centre in which users would
‘actively participate, instead of passively receiving entertainment’ (Shubert, 2005,
p.5). It was to have a multitude of activities, from music, performance and theatre to
hangouts. Littlewood and Price saw the spaces as varied in size, lighting and shape.
Price saw the space as something that never reached completion and was to host
informality: ‘The programmatic fluidity and formal indeterminacy of The Fun
Palace might be thought of as an architectural analogue to the transformations
experienced throughout post-war British society’ (Mathews, 2005, p.91).
The political context within which Littlewood and Price were operating was
filled with social ambition. The Labour leader at the time, Aneurin Bevan, had
initiated welfare state reforms around leisure and making higher education
available to all classes. With a decline in industry, the need for unskilled labour
decreased and the working class had more time to call their own. Leisure was a
key political and economic agenda, which the government was promoting with
the perception of moving the working classes away from drinking and crime and
revolutionary ideas towards more consumerist leisure (Mathews, 2005). All
classes were admitted to university to learn more intellectually challenging
subjects, many in the leisure industry and tourism. Price believed people should
be free to find their potential, interest and skills in an environment such as The
Fun Palace. Mathews (2005, p.79) tells us that ‘Price thought of The Fun Palace
in terms of process, as events in time rather than objects in space, and embraced
indeterminacy as a core design principle.’ The strength of The Fun Palace for
temporary architecture as agents for change was emerging in Price’s ideas with
improvised architecture and Littlewood with undetermined and interdisciplinary
programming. Their collaboration with Gordon Pask and his interest in games
theory within The Fun Palace leaned towards negative social engineering of the
Agitprop. Cybernetics, interactivity and social control took the place of Bretchian
theatre and Price and Littlewood, in the hope that human control could be
diminished, allowed this to happen (Mathews, 2005). The complex and rich
ideas in The Fun Palace has enabled its lasting influence, which may not have
been as powerful if it had ever been built and its social engineering elements
realised.
134 Torange Khonsari
The Fun Palace’s idealisation of human behaviour is avoided by the situated
condition of this type of temporary object/architecture. Being situated enables
understanding of human behaviour to be concrete rather than imagined. The Fun
Palace happened at a time where values for open space and leisure still existed
post-Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London Plan (1943). However, Price had a
more revolutionary idea of public spaces. Rather than locating a fixed building at
the city’s core, as Abercrombie proscribed, Price tended towards a temporary
solution, for London’s evolving neighbourhoods (Shubert, 2005). Building on
Price’s and Littlewood’s concepts of temporality and undetermined program-
ming, the following section discusses the second case study, which focuses on
the longer-term temporary architecture of The Common Room.

Case study 2: The Common Room

The project The Common Room (2014–ongoing), situated in Bow East, London,
was initiated as support for a citizen-led high street development. Planned as a
long-term project in an area of high land value, public works negotiated a
disused, leftover site belonging to Circle Housing Association to be used for a
period of three years. It was to provide an open platform for the community to
use and set up a public living room as a temporary project. The spatial
arrangement of the site was to have a porch, display window/threshold, and a
public living room: the public front as a porch became a place for informal
engagement, to encounter strangers who may or may not wish to get further
involved; the threshold/display window, important as a space where the engage-
ment between the semi-private place of the living room and the public street is
negotiated; and the public living room, the most private location of the site at the
back and the space for deeper engagement. It was a place where the communities
of practice met and where such communities were generated. These took the
shape of more formal meetings, organised workshops, debates and platforms for
knowledge exchange specific to local needs.
Taking residence and becoming situated in a place within a temporary
architecture was the first step in the realisation of The Common Room. The
project went through a series of naming processes based on the participants
involved. In its initial stage, as an extension of a collaborative space between fine
art and architecture students at The Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design
(London Metropolitan University), the students called it InterAct Hub. Once the
collaborative project ended after a year it was referred to as the Roman Road
Public Living Room and then by its current name, given by the local residents, of
The Common Room. The porch became very much the place where engagement
was at its optimum, while the public living room at the back required more
committed participants. The public living room was more intimate and those who
were happy to be hosted were also happy to engage in the future. The place set
for hosting took on two characteristics: firstly, hosting with making, be it food,
crafts or poster making, and secondly, as a classroom for learning, be it about
oral histories, sanctioned heritage, environment, and debates about placemaking.
 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking 135
The roof and walls that defined and finally created the room made the space
drier, yet still unserviced. This meant that staying for any length of time to
engage with local residents was hard. No heating, electricity and toilets made the
space hard to use for longer engagements.
Before the roof was constructed the space was opened up in the summer as a
public space to local citizens. There was Karam (an Asian board game) playing
as part of the Roman Road festival, organised by the Roman Road Trust (RRT)4
residents’ group, and the space hosted a series of tea and biscuit mornings and
was open for birthday parties. The Common Room ran craft workshops, attracting
children who brought their parents with them. This became an effective way to
engage the parents, especially those from more diverse ethnic backgrounds, to
talk about the identity of the town centre. Many of the seemingly middle-class
parents commented on the lack of offerings for mothers and children and they
showed a strong wish for the workshops to become educational. At one of the
sessions there was a desire for crafts to be related to specific local history,
environmental knowledge and local needs. When it came to their children,
parents had strong opinions and with the rise in young families in the area this
became an important consideration for multiple common desires.
A total of four cooking sessions in summer 2016 were open to everyone living
and working in and around Roman Road. An invitation was posted on The
Common Room’s Facebook page (105 followers) and events were tweeted by the
RRT to take part in cooking events using waste food from grocery shops on
Roman Road. All the products used for the workshops were locally sourced,
either donated or salvaged. The workshops attracted a great number of residents
and passers-by who wanted to get involved with the weekend food-making
programmes. The aim was to expand this to ask residents from a wider area to
share family recipes or traditional dishes, which could tell more about their
country of origin and their background. The Common Room as a classroom
hosted children from the adventure playground, it programmed a treasure hunt to
explore the area and designed a temporary playground. In collaboration with
local residents, public works did a tour of the green spaces behind the high street
before coming back to The Common Room and undertaking educational work-
shop on ecology, talking about green spaces as places of environmental learning
while making bird feeders. This led to the discussion on the importance of an
active use of green spaces for health purposes and biodiversity, leading to a
subsequent project with Circle Housing, The Wilderness project (2016), with its
own independent funding generated by public works through RRT.
A cultural project, Bow: Her Story (2016), an initiative by RRT and developed
within The Common Room, looked at the heritage of women who have made an
impact in Bow. Historically, there were many notable women in and around the
Roman Road, such as suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and others in the East London
Federation of Suffragettes in 1914, and not forgetting many women engaged in
civic activity today (for example, those in the RRT). Bow: Her Story has resulted
in a project, which at the time of writing is seeking funding to work with
multicultural women in Bow. This project aims to use history, hospitality, food,
136 Torange Khonsari
storytelling and performance to engage Somalian, Bengali and Afro-Caribbean
women and East End old-age pensioners to discuss their domestic and public life
in the UK, hoping to reveal commonalities, conflicts, insecurities, misunderstand-
ings and vulnerabilities. These stories would then be transformed into everyday
objects such as wallpaper, tablecloths and a local woman’s magazine, whose
content and dissemination will be decided and negotiated between the female
participants.
A critical awareness of the design and themes of events becomes necessary in
order not to alienate different ethnic groups and to allow a critical look at the
role of an event in a multicultural neighbourhood. Events are part of the
spectacle and narrative of a place and that narrative needs to be designed in a
participatory manner. Locations of temporality possess identity, relation and
history; as Temel (in Arlt et al., 2006, p.59) says, ‘they are not empty; they are
screens onto which something is projected’. The question remains: What actions
can leave the most traces recognised by its citizens and how do they feel they
belong to those traces? For its first year The Common Room also accommodated
a mobile booth designed by architect Carlotta Novella. It was designed to create
a mobile presence on the street, on the one hand, and be a billboard, on the other,
to promote the activities of the temporary site. This booth had two functions:
firstly, to host residencies for participatory practitioners and researchers, and
secondly to disseminate/disclose information/knowledge on its billboard. One
aspect that is not discussed with mobile structures is the resources and effort they
take to operate and run. Its duration is much more limited and unless considered
carefully, it takes more effort to operate than the outputs it generates. Its iconic
image (like a circus coming to town) is part of its allure and needs to be carefully
considered. In this situation the mobile booth mainly worked as a billboard than
a space where residencies can happen. All the events and engagements held at
The Common Room delivered Fukuyama’s (1995, p.10) notion of social capital,
‘the ability of people to work together for common purposes in groups and
organizations’. The recording of such social capital over time becomes a key
tactical factor in transformation of land towards its use as a community asset.
Public works also used The Common Room as a planning room where local
residents mapped the local civic infrastructures, the functions of the shops and
the area’s insufficient public realm. The project also supported the development
of a neighbourhood plan (neighbourhood planning gives communities direct
power to develop a shared vision for their neighbourhood and shape the devel-
opment and growth of their local area), part of its strategic local work.

Conclusion
As mentioned in the introduction, the temporary spatial objects/architectures
described in this chapter have tactical ambitions in placemaking. They offer a
place where social capital (Fukuyama, 1995) is generated in a single space. The
tactics are generated through learning platforms, workshops and events, and once
its social capital is quantified and documented communities have the power to
 Temporary spatial object/architecture as a typology for placemaking 137
negotiate land use as community asset. This agency can enable new forms of
public space for social interaction to emerge based on evidence generated by the
temporary architectures/objects. Tactical modes of operation alone do not yield
the scale of change and influence one may need in a neighbourhood. Alternative
ways of strategic thinking that is citizen-led can negotiate with institutional
powers that govern. Participatory and collaborative planning practices challenge
large-scale or masterplanning approaches. Such approaches, as mentioned by Arlt
et al. (2006), focus on ‘everyday urbanism’ reacting to existing local situations.
Such community assets also have the power to fight threats to future erasure
from development. In this sense, spatial objects/architectures become disobedient
as they start to exert counter power. The historical examples offered in this
chapter have foregrounded the problems of control and power and the need for
the spatial practitioner to critically understand the power relations that the spatial
project creates. Although the Agitprop trains gave rise to developments in art,
theatre and consumerist spectacles, they were not making platforms for demo-
cratic social, political engagement that ultimately create places. They used
mobility and art towards control of public opinion – indeed,The Fun Palace’s
automated games theory may have had similar quandary if it had been realised.
As a conceptual project, The Fun Palace intended to provide a democratic and
flexible space, whose form and performance was dictated by the public. This is
much closer to the ambitions of ‘situated’ temporary architecture and spatial
objects discussed in the contemporary case studies of this chapter, striving to be
politically tactical. One hopes to position such projects between the performative
spectacle of the Agitprop but with narrative derived from its citizens, not its
governments, and designed with the democratic spatial ideologies of The Fun
Palace. The Fun Palace’s ultimate desire was consensual use of space – it was
utopian by not considering the complexities of human psychology. It assumed a
common mode of behaviour by all.
To summarise, there are six key factors to consider when proposing spatial
objects/architectures described in this chapter: the critical understanding of power
relations in a place and the role of spatial objects/architectures within it; designing
a programme and events with intentionality equipped with situated knowledge;
and considering the potential of projects to be constructed in an incremental way.
This slow process enables communities to engage and form opinions; the potential
of affordable construction to allow continuous change and adaptation; the devel-
opment and use of tactical knowledge and its application within strategic agendas
to negotiate with formal institutions of power; understanding interests and conflicts
and learning how to negotiate them both with institutions of power and citizens;
and ensuring to have an independent position in terms of financing of the project
and the practitioners affiliation with organisations.
Ultimately these structures allow non-corporate public spaces that can
empower and open up possibilities for democratic city spaces (Mouffe et al.,
2001). They can be places where conflict and difference are negotiated: for
example, Mouffe’s (ibid., p.123) agonistic public spaces are disappearing as the
neoliberal project takes stronger hold over our city spaces: ‘you need to have a
138 Torange Khonsari
choice. What I’m arguing is that this form of agonistic public sphere is not
something that should be seen as negative or threatening for democracy.’ Every
temporary project should consider its own role in the specific place they are
situated and its role over time through collective discussion with local residents.
The spatial object/architecture can evolve, allowing the social interests and
concerns to manifest themselves physically. Such processes can be slow and
appear conventionally unproductive. The temporary architecture needs to be
tactical; a part of the informal city that negotiates the formal economic and
political structures at play. It needs to give the image of productivity to survive.
In this sense temporary architecture becomes a way towards a tactical placemak-
ing in neighbourhoods. The practitioner of the temporary spatial object/architec-
tures is permanent; they negotiate the site and build the initial infrastructures,
physical and operational, as cheaply and flexibly as possible. This creates the
civic platform where its sociability can flourish and grow and protects the site
from the encroachment of the formal city negotiating its position with the formal.
The role of permanent practitioner and their temporary structures are in constant
evolution situated in a place and context.

Notes
1 public works, www.publicworksgroup.net
2 DIY Regeneration, www.diyregeneration.net/
3 Grizedale Arts, www.grizedale.org
4 Roman Road Trust, http://romanroadtrust.co.uk/

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Bourriaud, N. (2010). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel.
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Mouffe, C., Deutsche, R., Joseph, B., and Keenan, T. (2001). ‘Every Form of Art Has a
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10 Place guarding
Activist art against gentrification
Stephen Pritchard

Abstract
The US policy platform of creative placemaking (Gadwa Nicodemus, 2013,
p.214) is becoming a dominant global vehicle for the implementation of neolib-
eral ideologies (Wilbur, 2015, pp.96-7) like the Creative City (Landry and
Bianchini, 1995) and Creative Class (Florida, 2002). This chapter explores how
activist art within the context of housing protests can offer potentially generative
approaches to place guarding capable of resisting appropriation by policy plat-
forms like creative placemaking.
This chapter argues that creative placemaking is a state- and local-authority
inspired policy that is wedded, via corporate partnerships, to neoliberalism: an
approach that merges art with community and economic development at every
level of society, from the global to the hyper-local. It suggests that creative
placemaking thereby utilises Creative City and Creative Class models alongside
New Urbanist principles and social capital theory to become an effective means
of gentrification. Yet the chapter also argues that art and artists can use their
creativity as part of broader social movements to resist and oppose gentrification.
This process can be described as a form of ‘place guarding’, collective acts of
protecting existing people and places from the ravages of neoliberalism and
policies and practices such as creative placemaking and ‘artwashing’, the use of
art as a veneer or mask for corporate or state agendas (O’Sullivan, 2014).

Introduction
Art has been used as a symbol of property, wealth and power since the
beginnings of civilisation (Groys, 2008). However, it became wedded to capital-
ism and thereby to ‘regeneration’ agendas during the late twentieth century
(Vickery, 2007), culminating in the dominant ideologies of the Creative City
(Landry and Bianchini, 1995) and Creative Class (Florida, 2002). Creative
placemaking is founded on these notions (Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus,
2010b, pp.5, 31). Yet the Creative City and Creative Class models are widely
accused of driving gentrification globally (Malanga, 2004, p.36; Peck, 2005,
pp.740–1). These models have been widely adopted by national and local
 Place guarding 141
governments who have corralled the arts into a wildly divergent economic
classification commonly known as the creative industries. Indeed, even the
originator of the Creative Class recently acknowledged that it led to gentrifica-
tion (Florida, 2017, pp.xvi–xvii). The co-option of art as one element of the
creative industries leaves it vulnerable to economic exploitation, including its use
as a placemaking tool for state-led gentrification.
This chapter asserts that gentrification remakes places for the middle-classes
and that that art is its stalking horse. Art, when fused with the overlapping
agendas of urban renewal, localism and neoliberalism and the normative ideals of
the civic, community development, social capital and, ultimately, financial
capital, becomes a powerful weapon for displacement. Housing is the key
battleground. But some artists, working indistinguishably with other community
members, employ acts of resistance to deny compliance, to refuse complicity.
Invoking and embodying a spirit of disobedience, indignation and insurrection,
they stand in support of those threatened by neoliberalism’s insatiable desire for
accumulation by dispossession. Such acts can be considered as attempts to
defend and guard people and places threatened by gentrification; actions aimed
at exposing the complex interrelationships that occur when art and urban
regeneration meet in contested spaces.

The roots of creative placemaking

It is possible to argue that creative placemaking is a product of Creative City
participation and investment, New Urbanism’s ‘community building’ of diverse
neighbourhoods and ‘human-scaled urban design’ (Congress for New Urbanism,
2017), and Creative Class economics. Moss (2012), for example, argued that Florida
and his associates had, in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), not only sold the
idea of Creative Class as a means of improving economic prosperity but also ‘made
the current creative placemaking movement possible.’ The creative placemaking
‘movement’ is particularly strong in the US and expanding globally. The US
independent federal arts funding agency, the National Endowment for the Arts,
describes creative placemaking as a strategic partnership that uses art and culture to
animate and rejuvenate people and places, as well as improve ‘local business
viability and public safety’ (Gadwa Nicodemus, 2012). This is a definite and
important shift in tone: ‘regeneration’ renamed as ‘placemaking’; ‘cultural regenera-
tion’ becomes ‘creative placemaking’; and art is reimagined as ‘one of the leading
place-making devices’ in this new urban economy (Mathews, 2010, p.667).
For Courage (2017), placemaking as a form of social practice – as a form of
socially engaged art practice – is distinct from creative placemaking because it
reflects a recognition of the value of how some artists have worked with people
and place for many years (Schumerth, 2015). But, just as there is nothing new
about artists exploring place, there is also little new about other sectors using
artistic practices for their own benefits – community organisers and property
developers alike. Yet whilst Courage acknowledges the value of rigorous, long-
standing, socially embedded artistic practice in which artists and community
142 Stephen Pritchard
members become (relatively) equal contributors in social practice placemaking
processes, the practice has been reduced and rebranded; conflated within creative
placemaking. It is possible to argue that the rebranding and appropriation of
socially engaged art practice began when Landesman (2009) coined the term
‘creative placemaking’ to describe a strategic policy platform that McKeown
(2016) stated could be considered as part of the ongoing evolving efforts to
embed arts-led processes within cultural regeneration initiatives. In this way,
creative placemaking becomes a component of neoliberal post-welfare govern-
ance; particularly part of localism agendas. It is therefore possible to argue that
creative placemaking, like localism more broadly, seeks to consolidate ‘the
social’ within localised free market economics (Hess, 2009; Davoudi and
Madanipour, 2013; Williams et al., 2014).

Creative placemaking, social capital and gentrification

Creative placemaking, like the arts in general, promotes itself in dual economic
terms: as capable of generating financial capital and social capital. For example,
Stern (2014, p.86) claims that within the practice ‘there is room for both
investment- and social capital-driven policy making’, although warns that crea-
tive placemakers must fully understand the practice better to avoid unanticipated
or unwanted outcomes. Bennett (2014, pp.77–8) adopts a more positivist posi-
tion, arguing that creative placemaking can ‘strengthen economic development,
encourage civic engagement, build resiliency, and/or contribute to quality of life’.
Social capital theory is an economic and cultural approach that seeks to build
networks and civic norms by developing ‘the links, shared values and under-
standings in society that enable individuals and groups to trust each other and so
work together’ (Keeley, 2007, p.102). And it is social capital that is increasingly
emphasised as a way of deflecting attention from creative placemaking’s primar-
ily economic function, whilst simultaneously building its claim to be a tool for
community development and civic improvement.
Social capital is considered by the World Bank to be a crucial element of
community-driven development, alongside participation and the decentralisation
of many state functions to regional and local authorities, including civic society
and private sector organisations:

Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape
the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions. Increasing evi-
dence shows that social cohesion is critical for societies to prosper econom-
ically and for development to be sustainable. Social capital is not just the
sum of the institutions, which underpin a society – it is the glue that holds
them together.
(The World Bank, 2004, n.p.)

Artists engaged in community contexts are perfectly suited to harnessing social

capital because, unlike corporate consultants, they are frequently able to earn the
 Place guarding 143
trust of local people and community groups, and trust is perhaps the single most
important element of social capital (Pritchard, 2017). Because social capital
theory underpins neoliberal state policies around urban regeneration, community
development, civic engagement and localism (Mayer, 2003, pp.119–22) and is
also a global economic theory that ultimately seeks to monetise intangible assets
and exploit them, the marriage of art and social capital can be considered
ideological.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand that social capital is used by the
state as a way of measuring public ‘good’ and public ‘bad’ (Pantoja, 2002,
p.138). It thereby functions positively and negatively. Social housing has suffered
from intensive under- and dis-investment for many years and many of these
places, now deemed to possess low levels of social capital, are earmarked for
improvements, which include arts engagement and wellbeing programmes (Vella-
Burrows et al., 2014; Robinson, 2016; Ecorys, 2017). If programmes such as
these are, as is almost always the case, unsuccessful, communities may be
classified as ‘failing’ or ‘deprived’ or ‘sink estates’ or ‘slums’ and therefore in
need of further social and physical regeneration. Many of so-called ‘sink estates’
have witnessed a raft of arts projects. In London, for example, the Aylesbury
Estate has witnessed numerous participatory art projects supported by the Crea-
tion Trust.1 Furthermore, the Lansbury Estate has similarly been the site of arts
interventions, including a long-term Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) ‘micro-
museum’, whilst the V&A residency at Robin Hood Gardens culminated with the
removal of a section of ex-council housing to be preserved and rehoused in its
new museum in Stratford, East London.
Within a neoliberal agenda, the standard approach to improve a neighbour-
hood’s social capital is to renew it by bringing in new, middle-class people with
high social capital (Josten, 2013, p.21). This is fertile ground for artists and
creative placemakers. But the presence of artists and placemaking initiatives
often drives gentrification and the area’s original residents are often ultimately
displaced (Bedoya, 2013). In these cases, artists and creative placemakers can
perform a dual role in what can be considered as artwashing: first, they ‘embed’
within local communities and carefully and creatively harvest their social capital;
second, their presence acts as an indicator of the area’s creativity and a flag to
other property developers and small enterprises (often established by those
classed as ‘hipsters’) that the area is ‘up-and-coming’ (Pritchard, 2017). It is
this twin-pronged manipulation of artistic practices that are increasingly opposed
and called out by activists.
Cultural activists and activist artists understand that artistic practices like
socially engaged art and creative placemaking encourage artists and arts organisa-
tions to work in partnership with private-, public- and third-sector institutions
(Balfron Social Club, 2015). This leads commissioned artists to become complicit
in capitalist exploitation, reproducing the state and corporate agendas and promot-
ing forms of neoliberal governance that are at once more central and more local.
The now ubiquitous Creative City has become an emancipatory ideal for the new
Creative Class and a revanchist reality for the city’s ‘others’ (Lees, 2014, p.52),
144 Stephen Pritchard
with artists often touted as exemplars of a new class of creative entrepreneurs. This
class polarisation, driven by a global free market economy, restricts community
organisations (including arts organisations) tasked with tackling exclusion and
poverty to the limited objectives set by the state and corporations (Mayer, 2007,
p.100). Peck (2009 [2007], pp.5–7) describes this as ‘the creativity script’ –
individualistic and market-driven – in which creativity becomes a cheap and
cheerful means of reinforcing fierce competition, valorising a ‘superior’ Creative
Class, and validating it via the market and ‘post-progressive urban policy’. This
incorporation of art within the discourse of neoliberal urban development (and
therefore gentrification) makes it increasingly complicit with state and corporate
interests. The narrative is one of ‘heroic elites’ saving inner cities from the
‘dangerous classes’ (Madden, 2013): the binary opposite of Lefebvre’s (1968)
assertion of the right to the city.
There are deeply problematic links between creative placemaking and third-wave
gentrification. For Smith, the third wave – or ‘generalised gentrification’ – expands
global capital’s reach into local neighbourhoods using complex amalgamations of
‘corporate and state powers and practices’ to create ‘landscape complexes’ that
integrate ‘housing with shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities . . . open space,
employment opportunities’ and more. Generalised gentrification enables ‘global
interurban competition’ couched in the language of ‘urban regeneration’ (Smith,
2002, pp.441–3). Gentrification foreshadows the ‘class conquest of the city’
with ‘new urban pioneers’ intent on the ‘systematic eviction’ of the working class
from cities. Social histories are rewritten ‘as a pre-emptive [sic] justification for a
new urban future’; slums transform into ‘historic brownstones’ with façades ‘sand-
blasted to reveal a future past’ as the middle classes ‘recolonize the city’
(ibid., 1996, p.25–7).

Creative placemaking as neoliberal function

The neoliberal language of urban regeneration

Creative placemaking merges the discourse of urban regeneration with the lan-
guage of urban architects, business and economics as well as that of not-for-profit
community development, softening neoliberalism with culture and community on
the one hand, and neoliberalising culture and community on the other. Typically,
creative placemaking advocates a ‘more decentralized portfolio of spaces acting as
creative crucibles’ (rather than the traditional big arts centre or cultural quarter
models) in which arts and culture exists ‘cheek-by jowl with private sector export
and retail businesses and mixed-income housing, often occupying buildings and
lots that had been vacant and under-used’ (Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus,
2010b, p.3). But these sorts of ‘pop-up’ art activities and forms of mixed-use
housing and community development are often associated with gentrification
(Hancox, 2014; Schulkind, 2017). Creative placemaking in this vein thereby
reproduces a falsely utopian vision in which artists live next door to corporations,
rich next to poor.
 Place guarding 145
Referring to fourteen specific case studies, in their creative placemaking White
Paper, Markusen and Gadwa Nicodemus stated: ‘Private sector developers, len-
ders, sponsors, philanthropists, and local arts businesses have in most cases been
important facilitators of arts and culture-led revitalization’ (2010a, p.20). The
voices of community members, individual artist practitioners and cultural activists
are obviously missing from this description, revealing the top-down nature of
placemaking (and cultural regeneration in general). The link to property devel-
opers is telling. Property developers and local authorities often utilise the ‘artistic
mode of production’ as symbolic capital with which to construct ‘new place-
identities’ that increase their economic value by rebranding them as ‘creative’
(Zukin and Braslow, 2011, p.131). Typically, gentrification and displacement
follow as can be seen, for example, in the rebranding of Manhattan’s SoHo district,
London’s Kings Cross as the city’s ‘Knowledge Quarter’,2 Chicago’s Wicker Park,
and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.3

Community engagement and social capital

Creative placemaking often markets itself as employing a ‘community arts’
approach that can, for example, ‘impact participants individually by fostering
transferable life skills’ and ‘cultivate social capital’ (Artscape, 2017). This is
somewhat of a departure from traditional notions of community arts practice,
perhaps reflecting what Kelly considered to be the demise of community arts as
activism, replaced by a professionalised and respectable simulacrum (1984,
p.38). However, Artscape’s normative outlook, which is mirrored by some other
creative placemaking agencies, not only appropriates the contested term ‘com-
munity arts’, it does so to mask its (frequently downplayed) economic objectives.
Some placemakers are, however, rightly sceptical about privileging artists by
placing them at the centre of placemaking (Nikitin, 2013; Project for Public
Spaces, 2012). Nonetheless, both movements tend to emphasise the importance
of social capital, repeating arguments about how social capital is a ‘social good’
capable of combating social exclusion by increasing participation and citizenship.
Project for Public Spaces (PPS) (2012), for example, argues that ‘one of the most
important factors in any effort to change the way that we shape the places where
we live and work . . . [is] social capital.’ Placemaking becomes a way to develop
‘loose social networks’ and thereby ‘urban resilience’ and to reinforce existing
social ties whilst simultaneously stimulating new ones (ibid.). The importance of
social capital developed through community participation to placemaking cannot
be underestimated.
Mayer describes the rush by policymakers to broadly apply the rhetoric of
grassroots participation and community activism as part of a ‘new mode of
governance’ dominated by economics:

By prioritizing specific forms of civic engagement (while neglecting others),

[social capital] filters the contemporary reconfigurations in the relationship
of civil society, state and market in a peculiar way, which is conducive to
146 Stephen Pritchard
supporting the spread of market forces in areas so far beyond the reach of
capital.
(Mayer, 2003, pp.110-1)

Insisting that marginalised people and communities suffer from a lack of social
capital rather than disempowerment, domination and exploitation enables neolib-
eral governments to employ the burgeoning third sector to encourage wealthier
people to volunteer. This undermines direct state welfare systems, expanding the
reach of the market way beyond its traditional confines. Social capital policy
achieves this by labelling voluntary and civic activities as a form of capital,
which reconfigures them as economic assets, thereby facilitating ‘good govern-
ance’ based upon public-private-civic partnerships (Mayer, 2003). Social capital
therefore offers low-cost solutions for social issues, placing social capitalists at
the head of efforts to both reduce the size of the state and to refine traditional
neoliberalism. Social capital interventionism, spearheaded by state-led arts insti-
tutions and creative placemakers, forms a vanguard of (relatively) cheap, often
cheerful options that not only ‘engage’ (some) marginalised people but also
produce aesthetically pleasing outcomes which in turn are used as ‘evidence’ of
‘inclusion’.
This increasing valorisation of civic engagement embeds the principle of social
capital within arts and community organisations as a universally positive output.
Social capital serves to distract from the economic and political processes that
drive the civic engagement agenda. Refocusing attention onto marginalised and
excluded individuals rather than the causes of their marginalisation and exclusion,
it recruits disadvantaged people as the ‘agents’ of their own salvation – social
capitalists ‘whose “belonging” is conditional on their mobilizing the only
resources they have as a form of capital’. This is because accumulating social
capital is not intended to benefit the poor or working-classes. The goal of social
capital is about ‘“empowerment” and “inclusion”’ rather than ‘economic security
for the poor or the reduction of inequality’ (Mayer, 2003, p.123). The democratic
façade of social capital policy offers the perfect means of implementing other
neoliberal agendas such as austerity, devolution and localism. It is therefore
important to understand that any attempt to incorporate social capital policy
within creative placemaking can only function to reinforce the neoliberal project
and enforce neoliberalism upon the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
In this way, austerity offers many ‘opportunities’ for arts organisations and
artists to exploit communities using a façade of ‘community benefit’ and ‘social
impact’. In this sense, creative placemaking can be thought of as exploiting the
intangible assets in a neighbourhood faced with or in the early stages of gentrifica-
tion; creative placemakers become its agents, bringing about a form of social
change that is antithetical to the principles of social justice. Using processes
dressed as ‘community-led development’, creative placemaking encourages
public/private initiatives to integrate art, creative consultation, urban design,
participatory democracy, civic governance and economic revitalisation. Creativity
becomes part of the neoliberal ‘market-building project’ that rolls-back some
 Place guarding 147
social and institutional functions and rolls-out creative- and community-led alter-
natives as part of its ‘destructively creative social order’ (Peck and Tickell, 2007,
pp.33–4). There is, however, a vast chasm between, for example, social capital,
community governance and creative consultation and the radical demands for
social justice, to take back the city and for the right to the city.

Artists against gentrification

Creative placemaking is ultimately a state- and local authority-led policy, filtered
down to arts institutions and then on to artists and down to participants and
audiences via agencies, funders and a raft of philanthropic foundations and charities.
Agencies such as Artscape develop projects that typically seek to ‘empower’
marginalised people and places through a mixture of socially engaged art, education
and outreach (Artscape, 2017). They are often implemented in areas classified as in
need of, or already undergoing, regeneration initiatives, and art has long been
perceived as a primary tool for urban regeneration. From another perspective, this
could equally be seen as targeting low- or under-engaged people and communities
deemed to be lacking in culture (and therefore social capital). Thus, artists and arts
organisations are funnelled by funders and agencies into working in places identified
by government, with people categorised as in need by government, addressing
problems defined by government, using approaches and outcomes prescribed by
government. Art and artists become instrumentalised by these processes.
To combat this, community activists – often artists who deny their status as
artists who work collectively using pseudonyms – employ creative techniques of
resistance such as tactical media and anti-art strategies to resist the traditional
agents of gentrification. Their creative resistance extends beyond the traditional
drivers of gentrification (the state, local authorities and corporations). They oppose
those who often operate as socially engaged artists or creative placemakers in the
service of gentrifiers – whether local ‘micro-enterprises’ or large-scale state and
corporate ‘regeneration’ initiatives. This is because cultural activists recognise that
art is increasingly used to smooth and gloss over social cleansing and gentrifica-
tion, functioning as ‘social licence’ (Evans, 2015, pp.70–84), a public relations
tool and a means of pacifying local communities: a practice known by activists as
‘artwashing’ (Pritchard, 2017).
Rather than becoming complicit in neoliberalism, artists and communities
must, as Harvey (2008, p.23) proposed, ‘exercise . . . collective power over the
processes of urbanization’ and assert our right ‘to make and remake ourselves
and our cities’. This is because our freedom to be able to determine how we live
in our cities, our places, our spaces is ‘one of the most precious yet most
neglected of our human rights’. Reclaiming ‘the right to the city’ is a radical
political act (Lefebvre, 1968, p.158). It requires self-organisation, self-realisation,
self-determination. It requires social practice as activism – ‘the practice of
everyday life’ (De Certeau, 1984). This practice must, as Holmes (2012, p.79)
proposes, produce a common desire to change the way we live ‘without any
guarantees’. We must reclaim our freedom to make and remake our spaces from
148 Stephen Pritchard
those who wish to define and limit our everyday lives through a totalising system
of ‘controlled consumption’ and ‘terror-enforced passivity’ (Lefebvre, 2000,
pp.196–7). For many, contemporary social spaces enforce what Lefebvre
describes as the ‘latent irrationality beneath an apparent rationality, incoherence
beneath an ideology of coherence, and sub-systems or disconnected territories
linked together only by speech’ (ibid., p.197). We must therefore understand the
complex dialectics of neoliberal space.
Creative placemaking does not and cannot offer people the freedom to take back
the city because it is often rolled out as an integral part of neoliberalism’s totalising
system. It is about ‘economic development, livability, and cultural industry competi-
tiveness’ (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010b, p.6). Creative placemaking uses art to
window-dress neoliberal regeneration and renewal agendas. Activist art, on the other
hand, is about direct action: ‘full spectrum resistance’ (Verson, 2007, p.171). For
Verson, cultural activism is a ‘living practice’ that ‘addresses complicated questions
about how we build the world that we want to live in’ (ibid., p.174). It requires what
Jordan and Frémeaux (in Hopkins, 2015) describe as an ‘insurrectionary imagina-
tion’ that recontextualises our understanding of past political movements through a
constant striving for the reconnection of art and protest, rather than their artificial
separation. This form of activist art pursues social justice and radical political
change. It leads activist artists to ask: Why should we (re)make your places for
you? People, communities and cultures already exist in places. They produce and
reproduce their own social spaces. So why do we need creative placemakers? And if
creative placemaking is irrevocably linked to gentrification and social cleansing – to
artwashing – shouldn’t it be opposed as another Trojan Horse for dispossession?
It is, however, difficult for artists to create anti-gentrification interventions that
can avoid recuperation by both an insatiably voracious art world and an exploita-
tive capitalist machine. Nevertheless, there are many examples of practices that
have avoided recuperation and, on some occasions, successfully resisted gentrifi-
cation. For example, activist art collective BAVO’s project Plea for an unCreative
City (2016) attacked Rotterdam’s decision to follow, like Hamburg, a Creative City
model which valorised Florida’s concept of a Creative Class. US-based activist art
collective Illuminator 994 often targets gentrification and other issues of social
justice using a high-powered, van-mounted digital projector. Its actions are often
performed with local people. Temporal employment of symbols, statements and
political slogans makes it difficult for these interventions to be recuperated and,
indeed, classed as art. Meanwhile, calls for social justice are more accessible to
people outside the art world; to local people threatened by displacement and
inequity. The next section outlines three examples of collective interventions
involving artists, which could be considered as place guarding.

Balfron Social Club

Balfron Social Club (BSC)5 is a collective of artists and local people who
campaign against the social cleansing of Poplar in Tower Hamlets, London. Its
demand for 50 per cent social housing in Ernő Goldfinger’s Brutalist ex-council
 Place guarding 149
housing icon, the now gentrified Balfron Tower, challenged developers and
raised awareness but ultimately failed to prevent the building from becoming
luxury housing. Nevertheless, its sharp critique of the role of socially engaged
artists as ‘placemakers’ led to what is a crucial article on the role of socially
engaged artists and placemakers and their involvement in artwashing: Brutalism
[redacted] – Social Art Practice and You (Balfron Social Club, 2015). For BSC,
artists today are faced with a choice: ‘join the club to make ends meet’ or
become ‘completely marginalized and unable to work’. The collective is here
referring to the immense pressure many artists feel to conform to policies such as
creative placemaking and arts-led regeneration agendas to make a living.
The ‘perfect storm’ of austerity, increased corporate interest and the professio-
nalisation of the arts as the ‘creative industries’ led, according to BSC, to ‘the birth
of the community based Social Art Practitioner’ (2015). Funded by the state and
employed by local authorities and property developers, these artists are placed into
communities facing gentrification to operate as the foot soldiers of social cleansing
(ibid.). The collective’s position offers a completely alternative view of a practice
– socially engaged art – that is lauded internationally as an almost universally
positive act of change or placemaking. For BSC, the process of creatively
engaging citizens, stimulating employability and building ‘positive social change’
parrots those of housing developers, housing associations, councils and arts
funders. Interestingly, BSC links social capital to enterprise and placemaking
policy: a top-down strategy presented, through the filter of creative engagement,
as ‘grassroots’ (ibid.). BSC has raised and continues to raise the issue of the sell-
off of social housing to private luxury housing developers and the politics that
underwrite this situation. Their work at Balfron Tower, across Tower Hamlets and
beyond reveals how artists with other community members attempt to guard their
homes and communities against the onslaught of state-led gentrification.

Southwark Notes Archive Group

Southwark Notes Archive Group (SNAG)6 is a politically independent group of
‘local people who aren’t particularly happy about what is going on in the name of
“regeneration”’ (Southwark Notes, 2017). It demands that regeneration schemes
enhance the quality of existing communities and opposes gentrification. Like BSC,
the collective uses a moniker to maintain anonymity. SNAG is careful to avoid
‘political and intellectual language’ in its campaigning, thereby ensuring it is as
accessible to as many people as possible. The group works to oppose gentrification
across Southwark and further afield, both individually and with other groups. It also
has links to anti-gentrification movements in other countries, including international
activist art collective Ultra-red.7 SNAG’s opposition to the ‘redevelopment’ of the
Heygate Estate – a large ex-council housing estate in Walworth, South London – was
extensive. It occupied the estate’s gardens, organised regular walks around the area,
helped community groups fighting the demolition of the nearby Aylesbury Estate
and played an important role in the successful scrapping of artist Mike Nelson’s
planned pyramid sculpture which was to have been constructed from the detritus of a
150 Stephen Pritchard
demolished building on the estate. Whilst not all the collective are artists, SNAG
collaborates with residents in campaigns, sharing cultural awareness and labour,
facilities and ways of resisting. This mode of working means artists become virtually
indistinct from other activists (Graham and Vass, 2014, p.16). This is a form of
resistance that seeks to collapse art into everyday life.

Boyle heights alliance against artwashing and displacement

The most prominent example of anti-gentrification and anti-artwashing cam-
paigning is Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement
(BHAAAD).8 BHAAAD vigorously campaigns for all art galleries in Boyle
Heights, Los Angeles, to leave, accusing them of artwashing social cleansing
(Aron, 2016; Barragan, 2016; Stromberg, 2016). The alliance comprises several
organisations: Union de Vecinos; Defend Boyle Heights; The Eastside Local of
the Los Angeles Tenants Union; School of Echoes Los Angeles; and what
BHAAAD describes as ‘Multiple Affinity Groups of Artists’. These artists
acknowledge the role art plays in gentrification and refuse to be used to artwash
‘the realities of racial and economic violence’ (Boyle Heights Alliance Against
Artwashing and Displacement, 2017). BHAAAD has raised the issue of the
struggle of residents to guard their neighbourhoods against an initial influx of
arts organisations and artists that brings further gentrification in its wake. Some
long-standing arts organisations are employing creative placemaking in attempts
to preserve the local, predominantly Latino culture in Boyle Heights (Jackson,
2015), but they too are finding themselves targets for BHAAAD. The constantly
shifting spaces and relationships in which anti-gentrification activism and place
guarding take place are complex and deeply contested. The function of artwash-
ing and the instrumentalisation of art in the service of regeneration in all its
forms serve to fragment artists and communities.

Demanding the impossible

There are many other examples of radical art/cultural activism that utilise similar
modes of direct action against gentrifiers and placemakers in attempts to guard
complex community structures and rights and protect existing ways of living.
They share a common belief that it is time for ‘the dispossessed to take back
control of the city from which they have for so long been excluded’ (Harvey,
2010, p.32). To some, this may seem utopian; to others, ‘Demanding the
impossible may be . . . as realistic as it is necessary’ (Pinder, 2015 [2013],
p.43). The ‘urban renaissance’ narrative is not only insidious but, as Madden
(2013) argues, ‘a condescending and often racist fantasy’.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that creative placemaking is a neoliberal vehicle for
accumulation by dispossession and gentrification. It has traced a path from art as
 Place guarding 151
status symbol – an object of property and power – to art as a process that
transfers tangible assets such as property and places and intangible assets such as
the social capital of communities into the hands of the powerful and wealthy. It
has argued that creative placemaking does not demand the right to the city but
rather encourages us to gift our cities to the Creative Class so that they can (re)
make places for middle-class gentrifiers. Creative placemaking thereby becomes
a policy and practice increasingly adopted and co-opted by state, local authorities
and even property developers that use art, design, marketing and community
engagement as a way of disempowering people by imposing subtle forms of
compliance and implicating communities by securing their participation in the
creative destruction of their own neighbourhoods and the dispossession of their
own homes.
In this sense, creative placemaking is urban policy in the guise of a gilded
neoliberal Trojan Horse. It ushers in the strategic reshaping of the social, spatial
and economic characters of neighbourhoods with the sweet cupcakes and pretty
bunting of art, the mixed economy and mixed-use, walkable, bikeable spaces.
Socially engaged artists are its foot soldiers and amateur artists and participants its
conscripts. This chapter has argued that creative placemaking is creative compliance.
And compliance kills creativity because, as Winnicott (1991 [1971], p.65) explained,
compliance is the opposite of living creatively – ‘a sick basis for life’. It is the very
real threat of dispossession and displacement, which drives activist artists and
cultural activists, like those briefly discussed here, to use anti-art tactics to combat
the co-option of creativity by neoliberalism. The radical yet everyday approaches of
groups such as BSC and SNAG to working collectively with community members
represent attempts to build relationships and guard places from the forces of capital.
It is possible to conceive of such actions as ‘place guarding’.
Conversely, this chapter makes the case for artistic acts of resistance that deny
compliance, invoking and embodying a spirit of disobedience, indignation and
insurrection. Such creative acts of refusal can create what might be understood as
‘potential spaces’ in which radically alternative ways of being and living can
develop democratically. Yet activist artists/cultural activists are aware that they
cannot effectively challenge an authoritarian neoliberal state or global corporate
interest unless they can become part of a much broader social movement.
Nevertheless, their tactics of constantly harrying and undermining the power of
the state and gentrifiers can win small victories, garnering significant press and
political attention and helping to secure concessions for local people embroiled
in gentrification and threatened by displacement. These artists are, however, also
becoming increasingly aware that their activism can be appropriated or recuper-
ated by the state and corporate interests; disavowing the art in their work to
subvert this process.
We must therefore acknowledge that the right to the city is ‘an empty signifier’
that can be claimed by ‘financers and developers’ but, equally, by ‘the homeless
and the sans papiers’ (Harvey, 2012, p.xv). And, true to their roots, some artists
stand in support of those threatened with rehousing; demanding that the dispos-
sessed take back the city. They stand against vested interests, taking direct action
152 Stephen Pritchard
with people against placemakers, guarding complex community cultures and
their existing ways of living. It is time to demand and to action ‘place guarding’
rather than ‘placemaking’ or ‘place keeping’ (creative or otherwise); to directly
resist the neoliberal machinations of gentrification instead of following a hope-
fully misguided urban (re)map – a simulacrum in which, I have argued, all roads
lead to capitalist complicity.

Notes
1 Creation Trust, www.creationtrust.org
2 Kings Cross, London, www.kingscross.co.uk
3 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk
4 Illuminator99, http://theilluminator.org/about/
5 Balfron Social Club, http://balfronsocialclub.org
6 Southwark Notes Archive Group, https://southwarknotes.wordpress.com
7 Ultra-red, www.ultrared.org/mission.html
8 is Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, http://alianzacon
traartwashing.org/en/bhaaad/

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sive localism’, Environment and Planning, 46.
Winnicott, D. W., 1991 [1971]. Playing and Reality. London and New York: Tavistock/
Routledge.
Zukin, S. and Braslow, L., 2011. ‘The lifecycle of New York’s creative districts’, City,
Culture and Society, 2(3).
11 Outros Espaços
Apathy and lack of engagement in
participatory processes
Luísa Alpalhão

Abstract
Participation has become an often meaningless buzzword associated with notions
of empowerment and democratic values (Blundell-Jones, Petrescu, and Till,
2005, p.xiii). It is recurrently taken for granted that people want to participate
in the making of their cities and to be actively involved in shaping their
environments (Beebeejaun, 2016, p.7). In this chapter, the position that participa-
tion is effectively welcomed and desired by all is explored and reflected upon
through the problematics of apathy and lack of engagement found in the
participatory project Outros Espaços (Other Spaces) (2014-15), in Beja, Portu-
gal. Outros Espaços was an initiative of Atelier Urban Nomads in collaboration
with local authorities, local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local resi-
dents’ association, and a local school. It is an illustrative case study where
despite purportedly being a collective, collaborative participatory process, the
participants were often reluctant to get involved in the transformation of their
neighbourhood’s public spaces. Outros Espaços found that passivity, lack of
engagement and even a certain level of apathy can be present in projects that
intend to empower the citizens. Collaboration, in this case, did not exist, nor
were the neighbourhood’s public spaces socially or spatially transformed in a
long-lasting way. The meaning of success in this instance is questionable and this
chapter presents a critique of the project’s process to reveal some of the pitfalls
of architectural practices that seek to develop social agendas and asks why this
lack of interest, and in some cases apathy, prevailed.

Introduction: Participation, engagement and placemaking

‘Participation’ has become an often meaningless buzzword (Blundell Jones et al.,
2005, p.xiii) and is open to interpretation. The extent and implications of interaction
and interchangeability between user/viewer and artist/architect is equally broad and
ambiguous, having been criticised for an emphasis solely on process to the detriment
of product and for a bias towards a collective good that omits authorship (Bishop,
2012; Miessen, 2011). Artistic or architectural participatory projects share the will to
promote democratic ideals (Beebeejaun, 2016; pp.7–9; Helguera, 2011) and many
 Outros Espaços 157
participatory projects aim to empower their participants and inspire them to have a
more active role in the making of their environments, becoming spatial agents and
active placemakers rather than passive users, consumers or spectators (Schneider,
2013, p.250). These projects become political acts where, through direct action and
activism, spatial agency is activated through collectivism (ibid.). Conversely, any
romanticised nature of participation is contested as an ‘un-questioned mode of
inclusion that does not produce significant results, as criticality is challenged by
the concept of the majority’ (Miessen, 2011, pp.13–25). Participation thus often
focuses on reaching a consensus, rather than on managing conflict, a processual
weakness as reaching consensus does not represent a form of empowerment, but
rather complacency when ‘everything seems fine just as it is’. However, the state
of ‘being fine, often purely results from a lack of inquisitive thinking and the
simple ‘withdrawal from civic participation’ (Sennett, 2013, pp.187–8). When
supposed engagement does not occur, one questions this lack of interest, or
apathy (Dürrschmidt, 2005). Apathy and lack of engagement are some of the
difficulties encountered along the development of participatory processes that
intend to incentivise collective, creative placemaking, challenging the assump-
tion that participation is desired by all.
Outros Espaços intended to be a process where different and complementary
views could be exchanged following Bakhtin’s concept of dialogics (Holquist,
1981, p.291), where a discussion does not resolve itself in finding a common
ground, but allows for complex situations to be analysed from different angles
(Sennett, 2013, p.14–19) where conflict and consensus could coexist. Prior to a
dialogue that would lead to the making of the project, the desire to make Outros
Espaços materialise needed to be present amongst all participants:

a schizoanalytical approach to ‘participation’ should start with desire, by

considering the participative process as a way of assembling a collective
economy of desire, articulating persons, gestures, economic and relational
networks, etc. The participation process depends on participant’s desire.
(Petrescu, 2005, pp.43–63)

It was considered therefore that Outros Espaços, an initiative from Atelier Urban
Nomads (AUN), was a desirable gift to all those who would participate in the
project. Mauss (2002, p.3–9) argues that the exchange of objects between groups
builds relationships between individuals. Such reciprocal gifting relates not only
to a material gift, but also to political, economic, religious and social exchanges.
However, Outros Espaços was not understood to be a gift under the same
parameters as those described by Mauss. For AUN’s gift to be of any value, it
implied some form of reciprocity that should have materialised in clear commu-
nication, collaborative work and engagement and, importantly as Petrescu iden-
tifies, the desire of the community’s participants.
Collaboration and cooperation are not interchangeable terms. The former
implies action, whilst the latter relates to the act of enabling something to be
done jointly. Cooperative encounters translate into an experience of mutual
158 Luísa Alpalhão
pleasure, a complex situation where people come together for a shared purpose,
despite ‘separate or conflicting interests’, inequalities or lack of understanding of
one another (Sennett, 2013, p.5–6). To cooperate requires skill, the ability to
manage conflict and to shift from a passive to an active participatory presence
(ibid., p.14). Collaboration or cooperation are not about establishing consensus
but about making space for different views and opinions, for different perspec-
tives to cohabit:

We painfully discovered that collaboration is not about different disciplines

and personalities climbing into a blender and producing a consensus. Rather,
it has to be the deliberate creation of a sufficiently generous atmosphere to
make room for the different disciplines and personalities, both ours and
those of consultants, friends and lovers [. . .] being in one room, dialogues
and eavesdropping inform projects.
muf (2001, p.10)

These views of the role and value of participation for the making of urban
environments leads to an unsettling position regarding whether or not participa-
tory processes are worth pursuing as potential catalysts for spatial and social
transformation and, consequently, as part of the process for the collective claim
of one’s right to the city (Lefebvre, 2003; Harvey, 2012). The ‘freedom to make
and remake ourselves and our cities’ is ‘one of the most precious yet most
neglected of our human rights’ (Harvey, 2012, p.4). The act of actively partici-
pating in the transformational process of our environments can reflect the
engagement of citizens in claiming their right to the city as a collective entity,
in relation to a political, economic, social and urban context. To dissociate the
people from the governmental agencies that make decisions regarding the use
and shape of the city would mean to create cities that are not designed for their
inhabitants, but for speculative inhabitants fantasised by those in and with power,
hence the importance of the citizens’ active participation in the making of their
urban contexts.
Even if not always idealised placebos for doing good and enacting democracy,
writings on participation tend to emphasise the positive aspects of the practice,
often omitting any difficulties encountered along the process. The acknowledge-
ment that active participation leads to the making of more democratic environ-
ments assumes that a desire to participate is a given (Beebeejaun, 2016, p.8;
Cooke and Kothari, 2011). Creative placemaking is considered to be a critical
catalyst for the physical and social revitalisation of neighbourhoods, towns, cities
and regions, animating public and private spaces (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010,
pp.3–7). It promotes a decentralisation of the arts as a means to ignite a network
of creative hubs and to democratise culture and both become associated with the
development and regeneration of neglected or run-down urban areas. The danger
lies in how these methods can easily become governmental tools that, through
their social agenda, mask the roots for gentrification, ‘urban cleansing’, privatisa-
tion and the homogenisation of the public realm. They are no more than mere
 Outros Espaços 159
forms of entertainment and spectatorship rather than means to strengthen, create
or empower communities for the making of their own built environments (Brenner
et al., 2012, pp.24–41).

Project context and methodology

Outros Espaços took place in Beja II, a housing estate built in the late 1970s
(after the 1974 revolution, Revolução do 25 de Abril) and is a ten-minute walk
westwards from Beja’s city centre. It was designated an ARU (Áreas de
Reabilitação Urbana), categorised by having ‘insufficient, run down or obsolete
buildings and infrastructures; insufficient facilities for collective use; and lack of
green spaces’ (Governo de Portugal, 2013). Beja, the capital of Baixo Alentejo, a
region in the south-east of Portugal, has 35,854 inhabitants and an ageing
population (Governo de Portugal, 2013). It is a ‘shrinking city’ (Oswald, 2005),
an area that faces depopulation as a result of economic decline and social
problems reflecting symptoms of a structural crisis (Martinez-Fernandez et al.,
2012). From 1981 to 2011, Beja’s district suffered a demographic loss of 35,663
people, reflected in the number of derelict and abandoned spaces and building
stock encountered across the district (Governo de Portugal, 2013). When built in
the late 1970s the priority of Beja II was to provide housing facilities as there
was a nation-wide urgency to re-house those who were living in very precarious
conditions (Williams, 1981). The importance and value of public space was
secondary and not acknowledged as a crucial element for the formation of a local
community. Lack of engagement with the public realm was present since the
neighbourhood’s construction.
Outros Espaços was proposed by the author on behalf of AUN, a platform for
the making of urban projects founded by the author in 2011. The proposal to
Beja’s Municipality (CMB) was in response to the ARU designation and intended
to develop a collaboration with the local authorities, local non-governmental
organisations, the local residents’ association and a local school. The proposal
aimed to overcome the problem of negligence and abandonment of shared public
spaces in the neighbourhood. AUN’s projects brought together transdisciplinary
creative practices to create new collective spaces, grounded in a holistic design
process built around site-specific, spatial and social narratives through visual
storytelling. Each step of the design methodology was valued as much as the
created spaces and each project presented a self-contained set of tools with a
strong pedagogical agenda that aided the inhabitation and understanding of the
intervention sites (Figure 11.1).
Contrary to common practice in Portuguese public realm projects, Outros
Espaços did not aim to promote urban and environmental interventions to
enhance life quality through a top-down approach. Rather, it intended to be
inclusive and to work as a pedagogical tool to raise interest and awareness of
Beja II’s residents’ regarding the importance of getting involved in the
making and transformation of the non-existent public realm of their neigh-
bourhood. Outros Espaços aimed to intervene in Beja II’s Operações de
160 Luísa Alpalhão

Figure 11.1 Outros Espaços project online archive.

Reabilitação Urbana (Urban Rehabilitation Operations) (ORUs) process with a

more ethical and participatory approach in order to inform and complement
the municipality’s project procedures. This pedagogical approach was, how-
ever, a novel mode of working in Portugal and, consequently, unfamiliar
amongst the project partners and, as the project evolved, it proved to be a
challenge that needed overcoming for the engagement process to become
more fluid.
ORUs resulted from the initial identification of certain urban areas as ARUs
with the view of responding to identified problems. ORUs that involved not
only the building stock but also the rehabilitation of infrastructures or green
spaces were designated as Operações de Reabilitação Urbana Sistemáticas
(Systematic ORUs) and benefited from a programme of public investment.
These were covered by a Strategic Rehabilitation Programme which involved
the submission of a design project to the IHRU (Instituto de Habitação e
Reabilitação Urbana) for approval of the proposal by the municipal assembly
and via public discussion with the local residents regarding the design and
decision-making process. When approached by AUN, the municipality appeared
to value and acknowledge the benefit of a more socially engaged and inclusive
practice and Outros Espaços was perceived by the municipality as an opportu-
nity to simultaneously respond to both spatial and social issues. However, for
that to happen, collaboration was necessary, and for that to happen there was a
need for an architecture practice that understood collaborative practice to be
brought into the project: it was thought that without such understanding, the
 Outros Espaços 161
impact of this participatory and collaborative project may be compromised from
its conception. It is important to note that the implementation of an ORU was
not an initiative of Beja II’s residents, nor was the project Outros Espaços,
despite aiming to be inclusive of all parties. There was no ‘collective economy
of desire’ (Petrescu, 2005, pp.43–63) to fuel the project and the transformation
of Beja II’s public spaces. Instead, Outros Espaços’ role was to advise any
decision that would affect the design of the ORU based on an informed
involvement of the local residents and local organisations in order to prevent a
bleak, non-site-specific design.
Similar to other participatory projects developed by AUN, Outros Espaços
began with the setting up of the project team. This involved getting the local
boroughs on board, along with a local school, local residents’ association and
local NGOs. Together these would become both the participants and the co-
authors of the project. AUN’s team would engage with the site and its inhabitants
on a monthly or bi-monthly basis for periods of five to six days at a time with a
site-based active mediator to maintain momentum between the visits. It was
thought that clear and frequent communication would be crucial for the project to
succeed as all management would be done from afar. There was no allocated
budget for the development of Outros Espaços, the intention being to collectively
and iteratively fundraise for the project’s implementation. Outros Espaços did
not have a defined outcome in place at the start of the project as the spatial,
social and programmatic design would emerge from the discoveries found along
the project’s development process.
AUN worked with the students from a local school, on the principle that
working with children and young people brings fresh, non-preconceived ideas to
the design process and is a means of engaging younger people in thinking about
their urban environments through creative and unconventional ways. It also
forms part of a systemic approach; a way of reaching a wider group of people –
relatives and friends – as the students would most likely share their makings with
those they were close to. For Outros Espaços, AUN worked with a class of 14–
16-year-old students of Escola Santiago Maior who were pursuing a professional
path. The class was chosen based on their flexible timetable and on the number
of students living in Beja II. AUN usually works with organisations based on-site
that already have close contact with local residents facilitating the initial interac-
tion in the period of time, during which the team remains in the background.
This less prominent role of AUN at the initial stage leads to the identification of
key residents who are more vocal within the neighbourhood and therefore, it is
presumed, will help AUN approach those more reluctant to engage in something
unknown and initiated by strangers, and time to develop these connections is key
for the overall understanding of the value of AUN’s projects. In Outros Espaços,
the local authority and residents’ association were the pivot for most other
contacts within the neighbourhood.
At the core of Outros Espaços was the intention to reinvigorate Beja II’s
public realm by adding a social agenda that would give voice to the local
residents before any proposal for the design of the public space adjacent to the
162 Luísa Alpalhão
residents’ homes was to be developed further. By doing so, Outros Espaços
specifically intended to prevent the construction of a homogenous non-site, nor
user-specific, park. Passive users, consumers and spectators would be empowered
in the project’s process to take control over their environment by gaining some
independence from the government, actively creating and building some of the
public space around their homes. Unlike in projects where authorship is fully
transferred from the artist or architect to the users, and the value of aesthetics
supposedly becomes secondary, Outros Espaços promoted the transformation of
the users’ drawings and ideas into professionally resolved products and spaces.
These would be part of a collaborative process that allowed different expertises
to conjoin.
Based on AUN’s methodological procedure, Outros Espaços involved six
stages: preparing, observing, experiencing, experimenting, building and present-
ing. All actions would happen outdoors, on-site, so that the project could start
having a direct impact on the use of the space. The programme of action was
outlined at the very beginning and shared with all involved. Preparing consisted
of creating a logo for the project and an accessible website where the project’s
development would be documented as it evolved. Observing involved the inter-
action with local residents and ethnographic research techniques, such as draw-
ing, photography, film and mapping. Experiencing involved developing the
observation process with the local residents, including interviewing. Experiment-
ing involved the transformation of the collected imagery and ideas into new
proposals and new design suggestions using methods such as stop-frame anima-
tion and storytelling. Form as much as function was to be valued and neither
form nor process should cause detriment to the outcome. Instead, all stages
would have an equal weight, that being part of the holistic design approach of
AUN. Outros Espaços would differ from relational art projects where process
tended to surpass the value of form, and where a lack of ability to generate
transformation in the long run was revealed to be problematic, as sharply
criticised by Bishop (2012, p.51–79), leaving no legacy beyond the relational
event(s). Building involved the construction of temporary (at an initial phase)
small test infrastructures intended to respond to some of the identified problems
experienced in the neighbourhood, such as lack of sport facilities and sheltered
seating areas. Presenting was key for the success of the projects. To recurrently
share the results of the process would be a means of demonstrating the
importance of ones’ involvement in the making of ones’ own environment. It
could take the form of a film projection, an exhibition or a meal, for example
(Figures 11.2 and 11.3).
Quality and durability were also valued by AUN. These qualities were
perceived as synonyms of pride and sense of ownership. Therefore, all designed
elements of Outros Espaços intended to reflect quality and durability throughout
the development of the participatory process. To produce something spatial and
material was important as a first step for the eventual long-term transformation of
the public spaces. As suggested by Potrč (SKOR Foundation, 2011), the value of
making something together with people instead of merely talking would by
Figure 11.2 Escritório de Rua interviews with local residents.

Figure 11.3 Conversas no Sofá, interviews with and by Beja II’s residents about the history
and future of the neighbourhood.
164 Luísa Alpalhão
itself start generating some form of spatial and political change. However, for a
sense of pride to be felt, the quality of the objects or spaces being made was
fundamental.
To better understand the participatory process of Outros Espaços and the
obstacles encountered, two topics, collaboration and success, will be reflected
upon.

Collaboration
In Outros Espaços, the desire to make room for an exchange of different
thoughts, ideas and views to enter a dialogue and generate a participatory
collaborative process never materialised. To participate implies some form of
both collaboration and cooperation. However, the partnering organisations
appeared to dismiss the possibility of a shared ownership of the project and,
instead, relied on the complete control of the project by AUN. This was not part
of AUN’s role, which was proposed as that of initiators, not of off-site project
managers. The agreement with the municipality was loose rather than written in
the form of a contract, which led to differing interpretations of roles and
responsibilities from the different parties involved. At the same time, neither
was AUN’s intention to adopt the mere role of facilitators, as criticised by
Bishop (2006, pp.179–85) as being ‘an attempt at the “elimination of author-
ship”, grounded in the anticapitalist premises and in a sort of Catholic altruism, a
way to redeem the guilt of social privilege’. In an attempt to maintain author-
ship, albeit collective, the project tried to involve multiple entities with
different perspectives and backgrounds. The municipality and the residents
would inevitably have very different views and intentions for the shared
spaces of Beja II, as would the children and the local NGOs AUN worked
with. However, for such a process to integrate these perspectives, some form of
collaboration and interest would have to exist from all in the first place.
Instead, there was a lack of commitment from the municipality towards the
Outros Espaços that translated into apathy. This was interpreted as a lack of
belief in the project by the residents, residents who had been previously
deluded by CMB and who would not see AUN regularly enough to develop
an understanding of the project’s intent.
Triggering the desire to participate in the project was problematic. However,
when Outros Espaços was initiated, the desire to collaborate seemed to be
present, if not amongst all partnering organisations, then certainly by the
municipality, which clearly manifested the will to embrace a joint venture for a
shared good. However, it is possible that CMB did not fully acknowledge what
collaboration implies and how crucial clear communication is for any form of
collaboration to succeed. As for the residents, their previous awareness of how
their opinions were usually dismissed or not even acknowledged by the munici-
pality restrained the intention of Outros Espaços to become a platform for the
residents to claim its ownership. Desire did not initially exist amongst the
residents either. Lack of a collaborative attitude and poor communication were
 Outros Espaços 165
unable to confront lack of engagement and any existing apathy from all entities
involved, including from AUN, who gradually started foreseeing the redundancy
of its efforts to transform the neighbourhood’s public realm. As the project
evolved, AUN began to question the meaning of success in a participatory
project. The initial expectations for Outros Espaços were replaced by the
acknowledgement of the municipality’s development of a non-inclusive design
process for Beja II’s public spaces.

Success
Success was important to AUN, firstly, to reassure the residents and the local
associations that the project could have an impact, and secondly, for the
municipality to justify the time and resources invested in Outros Espaços. An
assumption that the project was unsuccessful derived from the limited involve-
ment from the partnering organisations and lack of adherence from the resi-
dents in the different actions organised. These hindered the project’s
progression as it raised scepticism of its value. Collaboration, in this case, did
not exist, nor were the neighbourhoods’ public spaces socially or spatially
transformed in a long-lasting way. It could thus be concluded that Outros
Espaços should be considered unsuccessful. Yet, the meaning of success, in
this context, is debatable.
Failure, according to Halberstam (2011, pp.1–25), can also become a means to
question certain social standards that dictate the way certain people lead their
lives. Outros Espaços opened a series of doors to question how public space is
being designed in Portugal without the involvement of the users: how participa-
tory projects, on their own, do not suffice, as the ground has not been prepared
for them to actually happen or for them to have a long-term impact, leading to an
overall lack of interest by all parties involved. Time is crucial for any participa-
tory process to flourish. Without it, the necessary relationships and connections
that will make the projects self-sustainable are less likely to have the opportunity
to occur. Outros Espaços also allowed us to understand that the right to the city
(Lefebvre, 2003) is not acknowledged either by the local authorities or by the
residents. Despite supposedly being promoted by agents from the local autho-
rities, the right to the city, as drafted in the World Charter on the Right to the
City (Osorio, 2006, p.107), is not yet divested or practised even by those in the
government. This reinforces the gap between the municipality and residents who
were not being listened to and who, subsequently, do not expect their rights to be
acknowledged, leading in turn to an overall attitude of apathy and indifference.
Lastly, the involvement of children and young people in the process undermined the
role of the architect to that of ‘entertainer’, as architectural pedagogy lacks strategies
of participation and engagement in Portugal. The focus is instead on construction
methods, urban planning, rehabilitation and maintenance and an architect’s
professional practice (Universidade de Coimbra, 2018; Universidade Lusófona
do Porto, 2018; Escola de Arquitectura da Universidade do Minho, 2018).1,2,3 The
time, dedication, costs and social skills involved in this reform and in the
166 Luísa Alpalhão
participatory form of practice are perceived as unappealing and costly, yet it is
increasingly promoted within urban agendas.
For all these supposed ‘failures’, Outros Espaços has shown that this work is
needed so that a shift in attitude can potentially occur. For such to happen, the
conventional understanding of success will have to be abandoned, or one would
succumb to frustration. Outros Espaços can be considered successful, if the
critique of its process is shared and used to pursue work that tackles a lack of
involvement of residents and partnering organisations in the making of their
living environment, fighting a lack of engagement experienced to date.

Conclusion: The unwanted gift – apathy and lack of engagement

The agreement with the municipality was loose rather than written in the form
of a contract, which led to differing interpretations of the roles and responsi-
bilities of the different parties involved. Neither the municipality, the other
partnering organisations nor the residents appeared to have felt an urgent need
for change to happen, or the lack of engagement would not have been
experienced throughout the development of Outros Espaços. Outros Espaços
was a ‘gift’ from AUN to Beja II’s residents and to the municipality and other
partnering organisations based on its altruistic motive to enhance the life and
to empower those who lived the city. This gift was intended to trigger the
residents’ desire to be in control of their own environment so that their
neighbourhood, and subsequently their city, could mirror who they are as
individuals that share a physical space – Beja II’s public space. It was a
supposedly desired gift by the municipality, which, when presented with the
projects’ proposal, perceived it as an ideal complementary input to their
intended strategy. However, it became no more than a placebo to address the
previously identified social issues present in the neighbourhood.
Neither the project partners nor the residents had objectively asked for AUN’s
gift: Outros Espaços both revealed not to know how to make use of what was
being offered and AUN made the assumption that the value of participatory
projects for the making of public spaces was understood as a means to exercise
the right to the city. Yet, its assumptions were wrong and AUN found itself
assuming an altruistic role of gift giving. This phenomenon, however, is not new.
The residents of Beja II, and other social housing estates, had been perceived as
always being second in the municipality’s list of priorities. There was a stigma
attached to the neighbourhood for its history of drugs, vandalism and poverty,
leading to its seclusion and containment within residential and familiar comfort
zones, as established by the sociologist Neckel (in Dürrschmidt, 2005, p.275)
‘emerg[ing] from the inner feeling that one has been personally degraded and
exposed’. The gift AUN wanted to give was likely to have been received with a
lack of interest and engagement and the ‘altruistic’ process of giving obscured
such prediction. Before giving a gift, desire and an acknowledgement of its
benefits ought to be triggered amongst the receivers.
 Outros Espaços 167
Outros Espaços intended to promote a more democratic involvement of the
residents in the making of their neighbourhood. In retrospect, it was trapped in
its own romanticised idea of democratic placemaking, as criticised by Miessen
(2011), despite its supposedly transformative agenda. Outros Espaços was never
conceived as a placebo for democracy, but as a project with genuine intentions to
‘co-create urban life for the better’, so that the residents could demand ‘their rights to
be heard’ and ‘be involved more fully in the decision making’ process (Beebeejaun,
2016, p.7). It was envisioned as an initiative that, although triggered by AUN, would
eventually be taken over, appropriated and transformed by the residents and the
projects’ local partners, including the municipality. In turn, this transformation
would benefit from an increase in proactivity by the residents contributing to a
share of responsibilities between them, local NGOs and the municipality, which
would be appealing to the latter. However, in practice, this would translate into the
dismissal of the government’s responsibility, as often occurs in government-funded
art and architecture participatory projects which unwillingly become caught up in
neoliberal agendas (Blundell Jones, Petrescu, Till, 2005).
Transformation was intrinsic in the design process, as was the idea of creating
and designing through making, which intended to empower the residents and to
contribute to generating autonomy from governmental agencies. If all had
manifested as planned, Outros Espaços would have become an example of a
participatory project that would contribute to raising awareness of ones’ sur-
roundings, both socially and spatially. Outros Espaços would not only reflect
what already existed in the neighbourhood, but it would invite the materialisation
of new ideas that would value and enrich the existing neglected spaces of Beja II.
Outros Espaços is merely an example of a participatory project, which, despite
its potential, had few, or possibly no, long-term results. With limited resources
AUN tried to make the process creative and engaging, but that on its own proved
not to be enough to generate the aims for social and spatial transformation that
had been initially intended. To participate in the making of ones’ urban environ-
ment and to be actively involved in the construction of the public realm is not
solely the responsibility, or interest, of the individual or community that inhabits
or uses public spaces. Instead, it ought to be a joint effort of the collective of
individuals, organisations and the municipality as the representative governmen-
tal body. All of these need to be the participants, the makers of their cities.

Afterword
The phone rang. It was Renata’s mother. Renata wanted to speak to me. She wanted
to ask when we would be back, as she hadn’t had so much fun in the neighbourhood
as when we were around. Even if our aim was different, in the eyes of the residents
our role was as ‘animators’, those who came to keep the children busy, entertained.
Drained by the process, apathy, lack of engagement and lack of collaboration
we decided to temporarily withdraw from fieldwork. A moment of reflection was
necessary to assess what had not succeeded as expected, to reflect on the
incongruence of the initial journey. Some months later, when I got back in
168 Luísa Alpalhão
touch with the municipality, their ‘yet to be drawn’ project went to tender. I
requested to see the package with the drawings. Unsurprisingly, I received no
answer to the email I sent to the urban management department chief. After
insisting, I was finally sent a series of Sketchup renders showing the future park.
Amongst architects, as the name indicates, the software Sketchup was known for
lacking precision and for being used to quickly represent 3D images that
illustrate diagrammatic ideas. In this context, the Sketchup renders were being
used as tender drawings and to promote the project. Had I not been told it was
Beja II park, it could have been designed for any site, aimed at any user,
negating all the work AUN did on-site and the municipality’s supposedly socially
minded agenda. Instead, the Sketchup proposal drawn by the municipality’s
architect was magically transformed into a built soulless park equal to any other
place-less space. It involved no participation from anyone except for the
municipality’s urban management department team. Renata will not call the
architect as she has never met him, and will never do so. Outros Espaços might
not have succeeded in the way we had initially imagined. However, the lessons
learned along the process are invaluable. Participation alone does not suffice to
generate change, but now, more than ever, we believe that participatory processes
developed in a creative way are necessary to trigger transformation at a local
level. They can create places and connect people, though never by themselves,
but as part of a bigger vision, a collective one (Figure 11.4).

Figure 11.4 Renata conducting interviews with the local residents.

 Outros Espaços 169
Notes
1 Integrated Master’s Degree in Architecture, 2018, Universidade de Coimbra, https://
apps.uc.pt/courses/en/course/501.
2 Master Studies Architecture, 2018, Universidade Lusófona do Porto, www.masterstu
dies.com/universities/Portugal/ULP/.
3 School of Architecture, Universidade do Minho, www.uminho.pt/EN/uminho/Units/
schools-and-institutes/Pages/School-of-Architecture.aspx.

References
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Bishop, C. (2006). The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents. Artforum, February
2006 www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Art%20His
tory/Claire%20Bishop/Social-Turn.pdf [Accessed 23 April 2015].
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.
London: Verso.
Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D. (2005). ‘Losing control, keeping desire’ in Blundell Jones, P.,
Petrescu, D., and Till, J. (eds.) Architecture and Participation. London: Spon Press.
Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D. and Till, J. (eds.) (2005). Architecture and Participation.
London: Spon Press.
Brenner, N., Marcuse, P., and Mayer, M. (eds.) (2012). Cities for People Not for Profit.
London: Routledge.
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds.) (2011). Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed
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Governo de Portugal. (2013). Manual de Apoio : Processos de delimitação e de aprovação
de Áreas de Reabilitação Urbana e de Operações de Reabilitação Urbana. Ministério da
Agricultura, do Mar, do Ambiente e do Ordenamento do Território. www.portaldahabita
cao.pt/opencms/export/sites/portal/pt/portal/reabilitacao/ARUs/documentos/ManualdeA
poioARU.pdf [Accessed 19 June 2014].
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Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. London: Duke University Press.
Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New
York: Verso.
Helguera, P. (2011). Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques
Handbook. New York: Jorge Pinto Books.
Holquist, M. (ed.) (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lefebvre, H. (2003). The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Markusen, A. and Gadwa, A. (2010). Creative Placemaking: Executive Summary. Washing-
ton: National Endowment for the Arts. www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/CreativePlacemak
ing-Paper.pdf [Accessed 3 June 2015].
Martinez-Fernandez, C., Audirac, I., Fol, S., Cunningham-Sabot, E. (2012). ‘Shrinking
cities: Urban challenges of globalization’, International Journal of Urban and Regional
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Mauss, M. (2002). The Gift. London: Routledge.
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Miessen, M. (2011). The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg.
muf. (2001). This is what we do, a muf manual. London: ellipsis.
Osório, L. (2006). ‘World charter on the right to the city’ in Sané, P. and Tibaijuka, A. (ed).
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(2005). Architecture and Participation. London: Spon Press.
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An Alternative History of Architecture. New York: Routledge.
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Section 5

Extending Ecologies
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12 Towards beauty and a civics of place
Notes from the Thriving Cities Project
Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates

Abstract
This chapter proposes a new paradigm to address some of the central challenges
of the creative placemaking movement: a framework of urban thriving based
upon a model of human ecology. We introduce the paradigm as it emerged over
five-years of research and practice at the Thriving Cities Project; then highlight
the role of ‘beauty’ within this framework, in its potential to engender attitudes
of care and commitment foundational to civic agency. In conclusion, we suggest
that the intersection of aesthetics and civic agency – conceptualized in terms of
placemaking as a ‘civics of place’ – as a promising area for future research.

Introduction
Now that the creative placemaking movement has received broad-based support for
nearly a decade, it can begin to reflect upon one of its more ambitious aims: to enact
resilient and effective processes of citizen-led placemaking (Markusen, 2014). We
have ample evidence of the remarkable, but at times temporal, power of arts-based
interventions in communities. The challenge is whether we might effect structural
processes and conditions to create, and also sustain, more enlivened, equitable
places of inhabitation. Given the current state of social disparity and political life in
the US and the UK, where creative placemaking has had the longest history, critical
attention to this agenda seems not only pressing, but also opportune. Among the
questions we might pose is how to cultivate civic engagement in urban commu-
nities when its inhabitants – whether mobile, displaced, or subject to social
exclusion – may feel little or no connection to place (Bedoya, 2013). In addition,
what arguments can we bring against the displacement that at times follows from
gentrification, when success in urban regeneration is still judged primarily in
economic terms? This chapter proposes a new paradigm to address some of the
central challenges of the creative placemaking movement: a framework of urban
thriving based upon a model of human ecology. In the first part, we introduce the
paradigm as it has emerged over five years of combined research and practice at
the Thriving Cities Project.1 In the second, we highlight the role of ‘Beauty’ within
this framework, in its potential to engender attitudes of care and commitment
174 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
foundational to civic agency. In conclusion, we suggest that the intersection of
aesthetics and civic agency – conceptualized in terms of placemaking as a ‘civics of
place’ – as a promising area for future research.

Why ‘thriving’?
We begin with the acknowledgement that neither of us arrive to these questions
from the usual backgrounds or training that characterize the field, but rather from a
shared interest in larger questions of meaning pursued within the interdisciplinary
community of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture2 at the University of
Virginia, where the Thriving Cities Project was initially launched. As such, the
project has been shaped from its outset by an aim central to this particular
intellectual community: to articulate richer conceptions of human thriving, as it is
challenged under the conditions of globalized or advanced capitalism.
At the heart of the Thriving Cities Project is the question of what constitutes
human thriving, considered within the specific context of cities and civic activity. In
taking ‘thriving’ as its conceptual starting point, our project reflects the re-orienta-
tion of ethics, from utilitarian or quantitative measures of the ‘good’, towards a more
capacious, Aristotelian idea of flourishing (eudaimonia), which was also envisioned
within the context of the polis. While not adopting an Aristotelian position, we take
‘thriving’ roughly to mean the realization of human capabilities, as philosophers
such as Nussbaum (1988, 2000, 2011) have theorized, and also acknowledge the
historic and present circumstances particular to each community in which those
capabilities are constrained or realized. In building upon a philosophical tradition
that has importantly shaped not only ethics but economic theory and policies of
world development (Sen, 1999), we hope to contribute more than a ‘fuzzy concept’
to the placemaking debate (Markusen, 2012; Gadwa Nicodemus, 2013). For the
Thriving Cities Project, the concept of thriving also works on a practical level, to
shift thinking from conventional deficit perspectives to one of asset orientation,
encouraging leaders and citizens to see beyond common problems to collective
possibilities. This double intention – to combine theory and practice, testing one
against another – serves as a guiding principle throughout. Briefly, over the course of
its initial development, the aim of the Thriving Cities Project has been threefold: to
formulate a more complex, holistic picture of what thriving is, both conceptually and
for a particular city or urban environment; to apply research towards the question of
how this thriving might be fostered, and test this research against the practical
experience and knowledge of a diverse and unconventional range of stakeholders, in
collaboration with eight pilot cities in the US; finally, to develop effective, user-
friendly tools for the practitioner, from grassroots to government, to advance the
thriving of their individual community.

An ecological model of cities

Our focus on the urban dimension of thriving is motivated by the exponential
rise of cities and their significance for the future of the planet. It is estimated that
 Towards beauty and a civics of place 175
by 2050, the urban population of the world will nearly double (UN-Habitat,
2017, p.3). In this shift, cities will become the grounds for many of the
consequential challenges humanity faces – demographic, ecological, technologi-
cal, economic, political, and social. Cities will likewise become the principal
forging grounds for solutions to these challenges in the years ahead. What it
means and takes to thrive in urban environments in the twenty-first century –
what will count as societal and material progress – is arguably one of the great
challenges of the present era, a challenge that will be as much cultural and
ethical as it is economic or technological. We live in a time of opportunity for
advocating for the role of the arts in this development, but more importantly to
define and press for the conditions, structures, and kinds of commitments that
will bring about greater equity and thriving for greater parts of the population.
Towards that end, the first aim of the Thriving Cities Project has been to develop
a new paradigm for understanding and assessing what constitutes success in
these terms.
At the foundation of the paradigm is the recognition that cities are complex,
asymmetric and dynamic social environments that are constantly changing and
evolving. Here we build upon Jacob’s idea of cities as forms of ‘organized
complexity,’ as developed in her increasingly acknowledged study, The Death
and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961). Much like biologists think of
an ecosystem as a community of living and non-living things working together in
the natural world, Thriving Cities adopts a human ecology framework to help
envision the interrelated structure and workings of a city. An ecological model
brings into view the idea that cities are neither collections of autonomous
individuals or discrete problem areas, like poverty or affordable housing, each
hermetically sealed from one another; nor do cities behave like mechanical
systems that can be managed and controlled by rational experts in a top-down
manner. In this regard, it also shares the principles of models of new urban
governance, which stress democratic, participatory networks of stakeholders
across all levels (UN-Habitat, 2016; Brain, 2005). The ecological approach
helps reveal the unique features of a city as a social organism that both
empowers and constrains the ways of life and life chances of its residents.
Finally, it insists that the human ecology of a city is specific to the social,
historical, and moral context of a particular place that gives each city its own
unique and ever-evolving identity.

The Endowment Framework: An ecological paradigm for civic

thriving
In order to make sense of the human ecology of a given city, and provide tools to
empower communities to use their distinctive history, resources, and culture to
foster greater thriving, Thriving Cities has developed an Endowment Framework3
organized around six realms of civic life. The language of Endowments is highly
intentional. It stands in dynamic tension with the language of capital used by most
standard and many cutting-edge approaches. Where ‘capital’ denotes abstract, a-
176 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
temporal, and amoral value that is at once fungible and fluid (which is to say
unfixed – precisely the source of its conceptual strength), the language of Endow-
ments brings the dimensions of particularity and temporality back into view.
Endowments are the products of investments made over time; they must be
maintained in the present if they are to remain available in the future. Also implicit
in the language of Endowments is a sense of fiduciary responsibility and obliga-
tion. Where capital functions as a medium of value and exchange irrespective of
context, Endowments function as a reservoir of wealth held in common, as a trust
within very definite contexts. Despite its obvious strengths, the language of capital
is not able to capture these essential qualities of community life. Not surprisingly,
it remains empirically elusive in approaches that rely on it.
We define ‘Endowment’ as a realm of human activity that generates socially
determined value and ends. The generative value produced within an Endowment
is realized by and through existing resources comprised of cultural practices and
vocations, perceptions and ideas, and institutions. This is a distinctively cultural
approach, one that emphasizes the normative dimensions of common life in cities
and invites us to see them in terms of six interactive (and ever-evolving) formative
contexts in which we routinely see the exercise of moral agency and practical
reasoning across human communities. To gain analytic purchase on the intercon-
nections that comprise the human ecology of a city, and to measure them for
assessment, we articulate that interconnecting web in terms of six dimensions. We
call these ‘community Endowments.’ As with ecologies in the natural world,
human ecologies contain and depend upon an array of fundamental Endowments
(i.e., capacities and qualities as much as quantities). In the case of human
ecologies, such Endowments: give expression to long-standing and universally
recognizable ends that are essential to human thriving (e.g., intellectual life,
aesthetics, sociality, play, health, security, and transcendence); become actualized
within specific social practices and institutions (e.g., universities, theaters, social
media, clubs and associations, hospitals and clinics, and places of worship); have
distinctive histories that shape their present and future possibilities; and interact
dynamically with one another, creating both virtuous cycles when robust and
healthy, and vicious cycles when depleted and weak, but also generating synergies
with unintended consequences and tensions between competing goods.
Taking again a philosophical view as our conceptual starting point, the first
three of the six Endowments build on the classical ideals of ‘The True,’ ‘The
Good,’ and ‘The Beautiful,’ which serve as placeholders for our initial attempt to
capture the larger dimensions of human thriving. The last three are what we
might call the modern ideals of ‘The Prosperous,’ ‘The Just,’ and ‘The Sustain-
able.’ Together they describe some of the most recognizable horizons of human
experience, and the building blocks of thriving in any given community.

‘The True’
The Endowment of ‘The True’ contains realms of activities that are expressed
through educational institutions and in informal settings. These realms generate
 Towards beauty and a civics of place 177
the value of knowledge for a given city, many of which are investing in
knowledge and innovation districts. Resources and indicators for this area might
include the quality of education available there; access to remedial training; the
number of media outlets; vocational training centers; and numbers of educated
citizens, teachers, and tutors. The contextual realities that constrain and enable
this Endowment within a city can include the politics of education funding and
burgeoning social media platforms.

‘The Good’
The Endowment of ‘The Good’ is comprised by activities that are expressed
through philanthropy, religion, and non-profits. Resources that constitute this
Endowment might include civic-minded organizations, volunteer hours, and
geographical proximity and overlap of different populations. Equally important
for this Endowment are areas in a city that allow for the creation of different
relationships, such as city sports leagues and public spaces. The contextual
realities that constrain and enable this Endowment within a city can include
demographic trends, decline of traditional institutions, forms of individualism,
legacies of racial distrust, and increasing diversity.

‘The Prosperous’
The Endowment of ‘The Prosperous’ encompasses the activities that are
expressed through businesses and personal and social thrift. These realms gen-
erate the value of economic wealth for a city. Increasingly, cities are being
viewed as central places for economic growth due to certain structural dynamics
associated with urban places, such as industry clustering, agglomeration or
density of networks, and attraction of skilled labor. With the growth of the
knowledge economy, these particular urban features will become more salient as
economic growth will largely consist of technological innovation. Other aspects
of this Endowment assess the fiscal health of the city, the tax burden on residents
and businesses, and the affordability and availability of housing stock. Equally
important are the structures of economic opportunity within cities that highlight
the distribution and quality of jobs, access to job training, and ease of credit.

‘The Just’
The Endowment of ‘The Just’ is characterized by activities expressed through
government, advocacy groups, and justice institutions. These realms generate the
value of public justice and political/civic order. The primary realm of this
Endowment is government institutions that ensure the smooth and just manage-
ment of the city. The resources in the US might include the Board of Alderman,
the city treasury, and various municipal courts. In addition to public administra-
tions, private actors such as advocacy groups, lawyers, and political activists play
important roles in this Endowment. Resources that constitute this aspect of the
178 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
Endowment are perceptions of community safety, levels of corruption, and
voting levels. By focusing on issues of justice, this Endowment also highlights
the larger inequitable power relations and unjust spatial distribution of resources
based on race, culture, or class. The contextual realities that constrain and enable
this Endowment within a city can include sectarian politics, legacies of racial
injustice, and limits imposed from federal and state agencies.

‘The Sustainable’
The Endowment of ‘The Sustainable’ contains realms of activities expressed
through resource management, biotic care, and public health. These realms gen-
erate the value of environmental and biological health of a city and its inhabitants.
A key issue for a city is how well it stewards important natural resources. This
includes both its efficiency and resiliency. Resources associated with this realm of
activity include public works (excluding water management and recycling centers)
and private organizations, such as environmental advocacy groups. For biotic
engagement, resources that facilitate opportunities for residents to interact with
and care for the natural world, such as riverfronts or outdoor ventures, are
included. Finally, public health captures proximity to healthcare, access to fitness
centers, and prevalence of diseases within a community. The contextual realities
that constrain and enable this Endowment within a city can include legacies of
urban pollution, physical geography, and environmental regulations.

The case for ‘The Beautiful’ as an Endowment of thriving cities

Beauty would seem to be a key indicator of a city’s thriving. Yet not only is it
difficult to define and measure, it also stands in need of some defense. Beyond the
aesthetic delight we take in a well-designed city and its amenities, beauty’s larger
significance may be indicated by pointing to what results in its absence. As evident
in slums and other forms of urban blight, human flourishing seems intimately
bound up with the built environment and the possibilities it affords. Yet when
‘beauty’ is ranged against other Endowments, especially those that seem to more
directly address fundamental aspects of thriving – education, justice, and economic
wellbeing – its significance recedes from view. Much like the arts, which are
among the first programs to be cut when budgets are tight, beauty can seem a mere
luxury at the top of a structure whose foundations desperately need attention, or
worse: a value that obscures or distorts our very attention to those needs.
Moreover, historically, beauty, like the values of truth and goodness with which
it is traditionally allied, has been subject to competing interpretations and claims
that at times seem incapable of resolution. This would seem problematic if we, or
various constituencies of a given city, are to invoke it as a measure of what it
means to thrive, and moreover to claim it as a source of unified vision, rather than
division. Any attempt to recover a productive concept of beauty must proceed from
the awareness that it is philosophically and culturally complex in these and other
ways. In our initial research Brief (Kim et al., 2014)4 to make a case for ‘beauty’ in
 Towards beauty and a civics of place 179
an expanded frame, as architectural theorists such as Meyer have proposed (2015),
we directly acknowledge the challenges posed by our Endowment, but also its
potential. For the purposes of our Brief, we define the realm of ‘The Beautiful’ to
encompass the built environment and urban design crucial to the infrastructure of
the city and our experience of it. We also highlight the role of the arts, at the level
of community, in the health and vitality of the urban commons, particularly in their
potential to foster imaginative responses to urban challenges and dialogue across
societal boundaries. More broadly, we consider ‘beauty’ in terms of the aesthetic
orientation fundamental to human life, and its capacity to foster attitudes of care
for the urban commons. Within the discussion of these domains, we draw out the
contribution of ‘The Beautiful’ to thriving in its dynamic relation to other Endow-
ments, in particular ‘The Good,’ ‘The Just,’ ‘The Prosperous,’ and ‘The True’.
Casting the realm of ‘The Beautiful’ in this larger ecology of forces not only
highlights its catalyzing role, but, more importantly, offers critical leverage against
any one-sided, positive valuation of processes with which it is at times allied, such
as beautification and gentrification.
The arts have often been valued as sites for cultivating our orientation towards
beauty and shared experiences that foster communal imagination and vision. But
it is an indication of the resourcefulness of the arts that they also function as a
source of autonomous vision and critique. In their re-presentation of reality, the
arts, in their manifold expression, are also pockets of reflective resistance against
society’s mainstream values of consumer culture, profitability, and even beautifi-
cation. Here we embrace the paradox that the realm of ‘The Beautiful’ encom-
passes that which seems to subvert traditional notions of beauty, affirming that
‘The Beautiful’ has the potential to provide alternative, transforming images to
those of oppression. From this perspective, we might think of beauty as it
cultivates a fundamental orientation, attunement, or awareness that enables us to
experience reality in new, dynamic, and potentially disruptive or even disturbing
ways (Meyer, 2015, pp.32–4). Beauty encourages us to bracket, if even for a
moment, our everyday mode of being in the world, transforming our experience
of it – and potentially ourselves. Beauty arguably has an important social
dimension as well. Not only is it an experience we share or generally want to
share with others, as the history of art, literature, and other forms of human
expression attest, but experiences of beauty might also be described as particu-
larly intense forms of communication, connecting people in communities of
appreciation. As the philosopher Nehamas (2007, p.82) writes: ‘What is involved
is less a matter of understanding and more a matter of hope, of establishing a
community that centers around it – a community, to be sure, whose boundaries
are constantly shifting and whose edges are never stable.’ At the societal level,
whether these communities are uniform or diverse will depend upon the context
in and conditions under which beauty is enacted and mobilized. While there is
ample evidence of beauty’s power to create exclusive communities of ‘taste,’
beauty also has the potential to create unusual coalitions among otherwise
polarized, segregated, or inequitable populations, in the pursuit of higher or
intrinsic values.
180 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
Beauty’s social architecture: Art as a public good
From this point of departure, we begin to grasp how ‘beauty’ is a phenomenon
that, even at the level of its aesthetic genesis, holds important possibilities for
individual experience and the social order. But what about the place of these
possibilities within the practical forces of urban life – what we might call the
architecture of the body politic? What has beauty to do with the tangled yet vital
nexus of social macrostructures, civil society, and cultural policy? How do the
arts’ sectors of our cities stand within the push and pull of proprietary markets,
government agencies, and nonprofit organizations? This is a large question that
concerns scholars and practitioners alike, and cannot here be addressed in full.
However, some compelling indicators for advancing our thought can be found in
studies such as Zuidervaart’s (2010) Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a
Democratic Culture. Following Zuidervaart, we stress two points of orientation
that help contextualize the Endowment of ‘The Beautiful’ along these lines: first,
the nature of art as a public good in civil society; and second, art as an
autonomous yet interconnected form of healthy participation in the social
economy. These emphases also reveal how ‘The Beautiful’ intersects more
tangibly with the Endowments of ‘The Just’ and ‘The Prosperous.’
Zuidervaart’s systemic study contributes a useful framework for conceptualiz-
ing art as a public good. Zuidervaart begins by articulating the limitations that
contemporary market-based economic analyses and instrumentalist, political
models of liberalism bring to bear on this issue. Here our understanding of a
social ‘good’ must first overcome a ‘cultural deficit’ prone to evaluating art on
the basis of benefit principles alone, and a ‘democratic deficit’ prone to under-
standing administrative state involvement in the arts on the basis of an insuffi-
cient conception of public justice. These concerns in many ways echo and
specify a tension between a rational-scientific point of view and the more broadly
aesthetic orientation described above. Both deficits highlight the need to reposi-
tion the question of aesthetic value within a larger reflection on institutional and
cultural pluralism and the goals of a deliberative democracy. One way forward is
captured in Zuidervaart’s attention to the macrostructure of ‘civil society.’ The
term denotes a site of vital interface between the proprietary economy and the
administrative state, as well as that constitutive element of democratic commu-
nication crucial to mediating the meaning of public goods. It is here that we find
one normative dimension for understanding how the arts are societally important
(ibid., p.91), and thus a specific resource for situating beauty more conspicuously
in a trajectory of public thriving.

Civic participation and the arts

Thinking in terms of the public character of art has to do with identifying how
the body politic needs the arts and the arts need the political and economic
systems that, all things considered, too often undermine creative communication
and exert systemic pressures on arts-related initiatives. Prioritizing the arts in
 Towards beauty and a civics of place 181
society requires the lead players (institutions, initiatives, and decision-making
bodies) to recognize one another’s contributions and to exercise together a
committed participation in the life of the public realm and goods. The point
combines the better sides of democratic idealism and pragmatic public policy.
The case is not just for the good of art, but for a healthy transformation of
culture. Towards such ends, we need to consider how the arts indeed strengthen
civil society and merit more genuine participation in the social economy. Doing
so in turn requires us to consider ‘participation’ with respect for the work of
‘nonprofit, mutual benefit, and nongovernmental organizations’ (Zuidervaart,
2010, p.132), and how their work on behalf of the arts happens in relation to
the proprietary market and government organizations. Zuidervaart acknowledges
how the mission-driven character of civic sector organizations might not always
comport with the capitalist criteria of the proprietary market, but says that this
need not weaken the call to think of art and its public in terms of societal and
structural transformation (ibid., p.151). Mutual respect and recognition can go a
long way. The proprietary economy needs to mitigate its more reductive models
of participation, and arts organizations need to promote ‘artistic practices and
relations that are sociocultural goods’ (ibid., p.168).
Alongside these points, it is important to remain sensitive to the balance
between artistic autonomy and social inter-subjectivity. The balance parallels an
important dynamic in our practical philosophical points about how artistic beauty
works. In terms of aesthetic production, what the artist puts into a work is realized
most fully in the event of aesthetic experience, in which viewers engage with the
work. In terms of a social architecture, the arts indeed enjoy an internal autonomy,
but their underlying dimensions are always already interpersonal: as processes,
products, and events, they involve multiple publics. The authenticity of any
resulting participation, for Zuidervaart, depends upon a delicate balance between
intrinsic artistic worth and extrinsic practices of imaginative disclosure. In other
words, what individual artists and arts sectors both do inherently involves an
outward movement. Here, drawing on the work of Taylor, Zuidervaart speaks
about the compatibility of artistic authenticity and social responsibility within a
democracy. The point parallels the ethico-political trajectory of aesthetic experi-
ence highlighted by philosophers such as Gadamer (1986). If art is a social
institution, then the goal of ‘imaginative disclosure’ (in, for example, public art in
new genres) necessarily involves the responsible contribution of collaborators,
critics, and publics. The ‘co-responsibility in the creative process’ (Zuidervaart,
2010, p.263) in this sense concerns the place of the arts’ sector within an urban
society, as well as the more particular place of a given work of art within an
individual’s experience of beauty in that society. All told, Zuidervaart equips us to
discern how beauty, as manifested in artistic practices and priorities, ‘can foster the
growth of democratic culture’ (ibid., p.269). Understanding the public character of
art is not about proving the bottom-line profitability of museums and galleries,
performances and festivals, nor is it about extending special entitlements to
appease constituencies. It is about appreciating how the arts are poised in a
unique way to serve the common good.
182 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
Contextualizing ‘The Beautiful’ as an asset to urban thriving in many ways
centers on the idea that the artistic and creative vitality of cities can yield a
pronounced impact on the social – and not just economic – strength of urban life.
It also concerns us – as individuals, precisely in the context of our lived sense of
who we are, how we live, and with whom we are intrinsically connected. In our
Brief, we explore, by way of indicators drawn from practical philosophical
considerations, a macro-societal conception of art as a public good and research
paradigms that advance attention to the cultural and community value of urban
arts sectors. Each of these touchstones speaks uniquely to the aesthetic architec-
ture of a city, and to the manner in which beauty is a practice through which we
find and make our place amid the physical and social landscapes of urban life.
We focus in this Brief on the role of the arts in this itinerary towards Creative
Placemaking, in necessarily technical terms. But aesthetic beauty, we also
suggest, does not always accommodate itself to formulaic calculations or bench-
marks, and sometimes shows recalcitrance before reductive definition. Yet such
is the wonder, the appeal, and the urgency of the arts. Though the aesthetic
architecture of a city is not an easy matter to encircle and appraise, seeking out
the places and practices of ‘The Beautiful’ across our neighborhoods and broader
networks allows us to engage and affirm our urban imagination all the more in
the service of the higher aims of the Creative Placemaking movement.

Future research: From Creative Placemaking to a civics of place

While the arts are championed as a neutral resource with the potential to bring
together and transform diverse constituencies, arts-based initiatives are not
immune to perceptions of bias, privilege, and insensitivity towards pressing
issues of social injustice and exclusion. As one line of response, we propose
that a central, ethical challenge of creative placemaking might be addressed
through the paradigm outlined above: an ecologically-based framework that
articulates and emphasizes the necessary interrelation and contribution of a
city’s cultural Endowments, particularly the realm of ‘The Beautiful,’ ‘as it
plays’ a central and catalyzing role, but is in turn responsive to and constrained
by other domains and values.
While the question of what constitutes beauty in a particular culture or society is
open to debate, we believe that it is both possible and necessary to become more
articulate in regard to beauty. In its potential to mobilize resources of an imagina-
tive, and at times critical and transformative, vision of what a city and its citizens
might be, we believe beauty also has the potential to bridge disparate social,
economic, racial, and political divides in a time when initiatives of this kind are
critically needed. With regard to beauty and the city, we find it significant that
major, recent public surveys invoke beauty as precisely that value which might
serve as a common ground of consensus building among diverse populations: the
UK Government’s People and Places: Public Attitudes to Beauty (2010) and in the
US, studies such as Beautiful Places: The Role of Perceived Aesthetic Beauty in
Community Satisfaction (Florida et al., 2009). Beyond the renewed emphasis in
 Towards beauty and a civics of place 183
many studies on good urban design and greater access to aesthetic spaces, there are
signs that beauty is returning to areas of discourse on urbanism from which it had
been largely displaced, for example, by an overriding concern with issues such as
sustainability. As the landscape architect Meyer (2008, p.6) argues in her ‘mani-
festo,’ sustainability itself might be seen to depend upon the re-orientation of
consciousness that beauty and aesthetic experience fosters: the cultivation of
commitment and care that depends upon a shift from ‘an egocentric to a more bio-
centric perspective.’ In terms of beauty’s ‘re-orienting’ capacity, one might also
pursue parallels to what is described by theories of biophilic response, which, on
one level, may be interpreted as a displacement of the aesthetic into the realm of
ecological affiliation.
Along similar lines, across many urban communities today, the aesthetic
dimension of beauty intersects with initiatives that deliberately involve artistic
practices in order to cultivate a richer consciousness of the public good. This
intersection of aesthetics and civic agency, conceptualized in terms of placemak-
ing as ‘civics of place,’ offers a promising area for future research. Placemaking,
in its varied dimensions and possibilities, captures a significant array of functions
along the continuum of human ecology. It speaks to the most fundamental need
of individuals to have a place in the world, as part of a community that supports
their full placemaking potential, and speaks as well as to the creative activity by
which this is made possible. The art of placemaking reveals the dynamic way in
which beauty can operate as a coefficient that multiplies the creative and caring
endeavors of citizens and institutions committed to promoting the public good.
To envision this possibility, we will need to better express and capture how a
city’s aesthetic orientation can support a fuller consciousness of an individual’s
place in a given community, and also a richer mode of engaging the common
good. While daunting, to this end we might draw upon a recent gathering on
Beauty and Justice to which Thriving Cities was invited, as part of the Ford
Foundation’s yearlong initiative, The Art of Change:

Beauty is not essential because it is in service to some economic or social

outcome that is more basic than it; it is in and of itself a basic need.
Together we will investigate how we might more effectively articulate,
value, and nurture beauty as a basic need and right in our society . . . We
will consider the interdependence between beauty and justice, exploring how
beauty itself is a kind of justice, and also how beauty can be an agent of
justice because of what it provokes in us. We will ask: How might we
leverage this inherent yet often unexamined connection between beauty and
justice in order to build, in the words of Ford Foundation president Darren
Walker, ‘an economy of empathy’?
(Frasz, 2015, n.p.)

Beyond articulating the significance of beauty, how might we move from creative
placemaking to the construction of actionable, sustainable civic processes and
infrastructure? This practical question has been a driving concern of the Thriving
184 Anna Marazuela Kim and Joshua J. Yates
Cities Project over the course of its initial development. It began by creating a new
paradigm to identify and better describe the issues at stake; then to proof of the
validity and usefulness of this framework through conversations with stakeholders
and practical application in the field, according to which it was also rethought. The
first idea of what was crucial to thriving we called ‘civic substructure,’ a notion that
has origins in the idea of place as root and foundation. This concept was next
expanded to think in terms of two interrelated ideas: civic capacity and civic
infrastructure. Capacity building in particular figures centrally in calls for a new
urban agenda, in HABITAT III’s 2016 Policy Paper, and in Americans for the Arts’
report on arts and cultural districts (Ashley, 2014).
After the completion of its final year as an experiment between research and
practice, the Thriving Cities Project moves into its next phase as a collaborative
partnership between two new entities. The Thriving Cities Lab,5 a research outpost
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, aims to understand the nature of our
epochal transformation into urban inhabitants; critically engage its consequences for
human thriving; and equip scholars and communities with the intellectual resources
necessary for constructively meeting the demands of this grand challenge. The
Thriving Cities Group,6 a not-for-profit Civic Ventures Firm, will work to translate
the Lab’s research into tools and services to practically equip residents, practi-
tioners, investors, and experts over the next decade to rebuild the civic infrastructure
of their cities and regions so all can thrive. Together, these two entities will continue
to engage with questions about the nature of our moment and the possibilities of
urban thriving, working at the intersection of research and practice.

Notes
1 Thriving Cities Project, http://iasculture.org/research/culture-capitalism-global-change/
thriving-cities
2 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, http://iasculture.org/
3 Thriving Cities Endowment Framework, http://thrivingcities.com/endowments
4 Endowment Brief on the Beautiful, http://thrivingcities.com/endowments/beautiful
5 Thriving Cities Lab, http://iasculture.org/research/thriving-cities-lab
6 Thriving Cities Group, www.thrivingcitiesgroup.com/

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13 From indicators to face validity to
theory – and back again
Measuring outcomes of U.S. creative
placemaking projects
Sunil Iyengar

Abstract
Since 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has advanced
creative placemaking throughout the United States not only by funding
individual projects, but also by providing resources in support of research
and evaluation. This chapter reflects on the NEA’s journey in promoting
metrics and publicly-accessible data sources for assessing practitioners’
progress toward achieving livability outcomes—a journey that has led to a
theory of change, a logic model, and a measurement model for Our Town, the
NEA’s premier creative placemaking program. These experiences have
reinforced the NEA’s commitment to understanding and articulating the
relationship between Our Town program components and the intended and
unintended outcomes reported by grantees and their organizational partners.
The next phase of this institutional learning process will occur through a
mixed-methods evaluation study that will attempt to validate the conceptual
framework and metrics that the NEA has developed. Along the way, NEA
researchers have grown to appreciate the complexity of concepts and variables
at work in empirical studies of creative placemaking. Similarly, NEA
researchers have benefited from parallel efforts in the field to identify
outcomes and indicators that resonate with policy-makers and practitioners.

Premise
The following is not exactly a personal reminiscence, nor is it a species of case
study or policy analysis. What I hope to do, rather, is share an evolving
perspective on the research investments that the National Endowment for the
Arts (NEA) has made since 2010 to build evidence about creative placemaking –
a term that first gained currency from a NEA-commissioned White Paper
(Markusen and Gadwa, 2010). The present chapter describes two large research
projects that have resulted in metrics for creative placemaking, and it discusses
the respective strengths and limitations of both approaches. It is a historical
survey, tinged with one arts administrator’s discoveries, reappraisals, and, finally,
convictions.
188 Sunil Iyengar
Challenges in measuring the impacts of Our Town
In the field of program evaluation, it’s a commonplace that the best time to start an
evaluation is at the start of a program. Certainly, senior managers at the NEA1 were
not slow to recognize that metrics, data analysis, and reporting would be indispen-
sable to any narrative in support of the fledgling Our Town2 program. Our Town is
the NEA’s creative placemaking grant category; its birth coincided roughly with the
NEA White Paper, and it preceded (but not by much) the founding of ArtPlace
America,3 a coalition of several national funders, including the NEA. Yet, at the time
of Our Town’s inception, the NEA’s research priorities did not entail a formative or
summative evaluation of the program. Instead, the thought was to identify innova-
tive measurement strategies and data sources that could be used to record benefits
associated with Our Town investments. At no point during this phase did we
remotely consider the prospect of drawing causal inferences from NEA funding,
where societal or economic benefits might be concerned. Even if we could have
performed such daunting methodological tasks as choosing control sites to compare
with Our Town communities, there would remain problems of scale. How could
we assume that the NEA’s investment, which often is a relatively low share of a
project’s overall costs, had had a decisive effect on outcomes typically assessed at
the county level, zip code level, or, at best, within a U.S. Census tract?

Enshrining greater livability as a program goal

Before discussing measurement, it is necessary to review the kinds of outcomes
that we intended to produce. The Our Town program aligned with a key
‘objective’ in the NEA’s previous strategic plan. That objective was ‘Livability:
American communities are strengthened through the arts’ (National Endowment
for the Arts, 2014b). The grant application guidelines state:

The Our Town grant program supports creative placemaking projects that help
to transform communities into lively, beautiful, and resilient places – achiev-
ing these community goals through strategies that incorporate arts, culture,
and/or design . . . This funding supports local efforts to enhance quality of life
and opportunity for existing residents, increase creative activity, and create or
preserve a distinct sense of place . . . Our Town requires partnerships between
arts organizations and government, other nonprofit organizations, and private
entities to achieve livability goals for communities.
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2017b, n.p.)

Having tied Our Town to the concept of general ‘livability,’ the NEA was
obligated to define it. The White Paper authored by Markusen and Gadwa
(2010) flashed some cues:

Livability outcomes include heightened public safety, community identity,

environmental quality, increased affordable housing and workplace options
 From indicators to face validity to theory 189
for creative workers, more beautiful and reliable transportation choices, and
increased collaboration between civic, non-profit, and for-profit partners.
(Markusen and Gadwa, 2010, p.5)

This ambitious rhetoric, implying a need to improve community-level outcomes

not historically served by an arts agency of the U.S. government, came at a time
when the NEA was pursuing new cross-sectoral and trans-disciplinary initiatives
to extend and demonstrate the relevance of its work. Then-chairman of the NEA,
Rocco Landesman, had rewritten our motto to ‘Art Works,’ explicitly recogniz-
ing art’s functional properties in helping to transform lives and communities. In
service of this motto, Landesman and his senior deputy chairman, Joan Shige-
kawa, encouraged or engineered collaborations with other funders – starting with
our much-larger peer agencies within government. Regarding livability and the
arts, a prime example was the NEA’s work with the U.S. Department of Housing
(HUD), the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection
Agency to support arts-based projects under the Partnership for Sustainable
Communities initiative. This venture gave the NEA unprecedented access to
technical knowledge about review criteria and funding decisions affecting com-
munity development. But it also allowed the NEA’s research team to learn from
HUD colleagues about community-level outcomes that they sought to influence
through grant-making.
Indeed, there was much learning to be done. Prior to designing a measurement
system for tracking the potential impact of Our Town grants, the NEA convened a
research workshop investigating how to monitor the arts’ relationship to the
quality of life of communities. Titled The Arts and Livability: The Road to Better
Metrics, the November 2010 workshop took up some of the trailblazing research
by Maria Rosario Jackson, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, and Stephen Sheppard,
and it tapped the expertise of other scholars and consultants, arts leaders, and
policy-makers. A report from the convening attests to a plurality of available
metrics, but it also signals a raft of decisions – about data sources, analytical
methods, and geographic units – that the intrepid researcher must navigate (Pierson
et al., 2010). Above all, as should have been apparent to me at the time, one cannot
assemble metrics for a creative placemaking program without first investing
substantial time and energy in designing a theoretical framework for it.

Birth of NEA Arts and Livability Indicators

Lacking such a framework, we nonetheless saw value in moving swiftly to
provide creative placemaking practitioners with research tools of their own.
Among NEA management, there was no appetite for a program evaluation per
se, but rather an understanding that Our Town grantees and their partner
organizations would welcome guidance on publicly accessible data and introduc-
tions to other research resources, so that outcomes associated with creative
placemaking could begin to be quantified. Even if we could not test a causal
relationship between Our Town and greater livability, it seemed worth asking
190 Sunil Iyengar
what categories of community-level change were envisioned by our grantees.
Beyond this inquiry, we wanted to know if it were possible to construct a series
of national indicators, using mainly government data, to chart directions in which
Our Town communities should be headed, depending on the type of Our Town
project.
In the end, we led a retrospective review of Our Town grant applications – and
of applications submitted to a precursor program at the NEA – so that we could
sort the desired outcomes of these projects into affinity groups. Fresh from this
work, and from an environmental scan, we arrived at four broad dimensions of
livability that we connected with Our Town programming: residents’ attachment
to communities; quality of life; local economic conditions; and arts and cultural
activity (i.e., the infrastructure supporting artists and arts organizations). We then
worked with a consultant to help select indicators from these general outcome
areas. The choice of indicators was constrained not only by the outcomes
themselves, but also by our requirement that free, publicly accessible data
enabling comparisons across U.S. communities be used to populate the indica-
tors. The latter stipulation, in turn, necessitated that the geographic units of
measurement were restricted to the zip code area, county, or Census tract – they
could go no deeper. Below is the ultimate list of NEA Arts and Livability
indicators (Figure 13.1).

Validation exercises get under way

This list resulted from a much more elaborate process of consultation than we
had intended. After developing an initial series of candidate indicators, we knew
it would be important to gather opinions from grantees and other stakeholders,
and to revise the indicators accordingly. Long before the indicators themselves
were announced, the NEA had started to field genial criticism about the very
approach we were taking. In 2012, Markusen, author of the original NEA White
Paper on creative placemaking, posted an online article titled ‘Fuzzy Concepts,
Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative Placemaking Success.’ Her
article had been preceded that same year by ‘Creative Placemaking Has an
Outcomes Problem,’ (May 9, 2012) by arts researcher Moss, posted to the same
publication. Admittedly, there was then a zeal for indicators – not only on the
NEA Research team, but also at ArtPlace America, which had proposed a set of
‘vibrancy indicators’ to track long-term results of creative placemaking. It’s also
worth noting that, at the time, HUD and its federal partners had been construct-
ing indicators of their own, as part of an evaluation plan for the Partnership for
Sustainable Communities initiative.4 NEA program managers had been newly
inspired to coordinate their efforts with other federal agencies and departments.
If we managed to find meaningful metrics for outcomes related to creative
placemaking projects, we reasoned, then some of those metrics could inform
other toolkits such as HUD’s.
The indicators craze fed partly on the glamor of Big Data, a concept then at its
peak within government and the popular consciousness alike. From our
Figure 13.1 National Endowment for the Arts (2015), The Arts and Livability Indicators.
192 Sunil Iyengar
perspective, the idea was to curate datasets reflecting dimensions of livability that
creative placemaking practitioners aspired to affect over time. Critically, the
outcome measurements were not meant to communicate the direct impact of
creative placemaking projects. Instead, they were intended to permit arts and
design organizations and their partners to monitor trends associated with selected
outcome areas. Relying on secondary data sources, the indicators also could
supplement evaluations of creative placemaking projects. In a November 2012
response to critics of the indicators program, my former colleague Jason
Schupbach, then director of Design & Creative Placemaking at the NEA, and I
attempted to clarify this key distinction. Beyond recognizing the need to
communicate our intent more clearly, the NEA research staff understood that a
project of this scope could not afford to rest on the assumption that the indicators
we had handpicked in Washington, D.C., would resonate with the breadth of
organizations doing creative placemaking work nationwide. In hindsight, the
cautionary feedback we had received about the indicators drove us even harder
to test their validity.
With the help of the Urban Institute, therefore, we met with Our Town grantees
and their partner organizations (both on-site and in Washington, D.C.) and showed
them maps and tables reporting arts and livability trends in their communities. We
also consulted a working group of arts and cultural researchers and evaluators.
Among the most impressive features of these ‘ground-truthing’ sessions were the
spontaneous warmth and recognition the citizens exhibited for places on a map
and their instant grasp of the values we were attempting to measure. This study,
Validating Arts and Livability Indicators (VALI), produced a table of indicators
and data sources – already shown above – and a detailed report with recommen-
dations. Urban Institute found that ‘overall, [respondents] felt the data for the
respective indicators for their communities were about right. The data generally
reflected respondents’ perceptions of local conditions’ (National Endowment for
the Arts, 2014b). At the same time, respondents would have liked to see data that
more closely reflected conditions in the immediate vicinity of the creative
placemaking projects. Respondents also expressed mixed views about the rele-
vance of specific indicators to creative placemaking outcomes. Indicators such as
‘capacity for homeownership,’ ‘election turnout,’ and ‘median commute time’ –
though justified within the NEA’s construct of ‘the arts and livability’ – did not
appeal to some participants. Ultimately, we decided to serve up the entire list of
indicators as a menu on the NEA website (National Endowment for the Arts,
2015). In this respect, and on a modest scale, our thinking resembled that of HUD
researchers, who finally had opted not to prescribe indicators for their Sustainable
Communities grantees, but rather to catalogue hundreds of indicators that could be
used to measure progress on ‘livability principles’ (Partnership for Sustainable
Communities, 2014). For our part, we added an online directory of indicators
systems and data sources that are not universally available across the U.S., but
which can be used by certain communities to track arts and livability-related
outcomes. We also posted user case-scenarios illustrating how the national-level
indicators can help creative placemaking practitioners. These tools, along with an
 From indicators to face validity to theory 193
interactive graphic, achieved about as much public utility for the indicators project
as could have expected.

Parallel and complementary research efforts

Even while it pursued national indicators and datasets relevant to creative placemak-
ing, the NEA Research team monitored other studies and measurement techniques
that were being used in specific communities nationwide. Much of this work had
been directly supported by the NEA – either through its Design division or the Office
of Research & Analysis. In Philadelphia, the NEA had awarded funding to help
establish Culture Blocks,5 a free, publicly accessible web tool linked to a spatial
database of Philadelphia’s creative and cultural resources. Similarly, the NEA
supported GEOLOOM,6 a cultural mapping collaboration between the Baltimore
Neighborhood Indicators Alliance and the Jacob France Institute that proposed to
add ‘a cultural data dimension that is a vital but oftentimes missing element in the
conversations about neighborhoods’ (Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, 2017). Beyond
providing support for geospatial mapping tools and datasets, the NEA backed Plan it
Hennepin in Minnesota, a creative placemaking effort that resulted in an evidence-
based series of indicators, authored by Metris Arts Consulting. Carl Grodach,
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, Joanna Ganning, Doug Noonan, Mark Treskon, and other
researchers worked on NEA-sponsored projects, performing secondary data analyses
about the arts and livability. The NEA’s research grants program has since expanded
to cover primary data collection and experimental or quasi-experimental studies of
the arts’ benefits for individuals and communities.
Empirical research into variables affecting the livability of communities is a
logical function for a national funder of creative placemaking activities. Still, the
resulting studies do not necessarily help local policy-makers and artists and
designers in their daily efforts to integrate cultural assets with broader commu-
nity-development projects. Rather than wait until completion of the NEA
indicators initiative, the agency’s Design team wisely developed other informa-
tional resources about creative placemaking and Our Town in particular. For
example, the NEA’s Design team produced a digital storybook titled Exploring
Our Town, which, to date, features detailed vignettes and key statistics about 78
selected Our Town projects (National Endowment for the Arts, 2014b). The team
published How to Do Creative Placemaking, ‘an action guide for making places
better’ (National Endowment for the Arts, 2016).
Most substantial of all were changes that the NEA made to grant application
guidelines for Our Town. Specifically, the Design team introduced a knowledge-
building grants category to

expand the capacity of artists and arts organizations to be more effective at

executing creative placemaking projects, and to work more effectively with
economic and community development practitioners, and vice versa, to
improve the livability of the communities and create opportunities for all.
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2017b, n.p.).
194 Sunil Iyengar
For the first time, the NEA solicited grant applications proposing mentorships,
training opportunities, technical assistance, and research and policy analysis –
and related types of project activity – so that the network of creative placemak-
ing practitioners could be strengthened. As Our Town continued to mature, the
NEA Design team saw other opportunities to enhance learning that could benefit
the creative placemaking field. One such opportunity led the team to another
round of collaboration, described below, with the NEA’s Office of Research and
Analysis.

Building a theory of change and measurement model

In 2016, the NEA Research and Design teams issued a Request for Proposals
(RFP) from contractors who could help the NEA to design and conduct a mixed-
methods evaluation of Our Town. The creative placemaking program then was
five years old, and it seemed an opportune time to learn what it had accom-
plished for individual grantees and for the field at large. The RFP outlined
expectations for a ‘national survey of all past and current Our Town grantees,’ a
follow-up survey, and seven to ten case studies of Our Town communities, all to
capture outcomes and processes associated with projects in the NEA’s creative
placemaking portfolio. There was just one step that needed to be taken before the
mixed-methods study could occur. The RFP specified, as the first phase of the
evaluation, that the contractor would work with the Design and Research teams
to develop a ‘theory of change and measurement model’ for Our Town. This
product in turn would stem from a review of NEA administrative data, geogra-
phical data covering Our Town project activity locations, and insights from
stakeholder interviews, a literature review, and ‘a rapid scan of logic models,
theories of change, outcome measures, and data collection tools for other place-
making initiatives, especially those sponsored by other federal agencies or
departments.’
More than a year later, I can admit to having underestimated the amount of
time and effort that needed to be devoted to this research project. I had not
credited how highly iterative a process would be needed to design a grounded
theory for Our Town, and to create a measurement model that could account for
the variables of interest. After we had hired a contractor to assist us with this
crucial first phase, and had been working with this firm for several months, it
became clear that bringing in the NEA’s Design team would prove vital to
interpreting any findings, and that the interim reports from our contractor
required extensive vetting. I soon learned that the very same kind of ‘ground-
truthing’ we had identified earlier was necessary now for checking the contrac-
tor’s assumptions about the data it presented to us. The difference is that this
time the validation was being provided not by a cross-section of NEA grantees,
but by the program managers for Our Town. This approach seemed only fitting,
as the primary goal was to design a conceptual framework for the NEA’s
rationale, processes, and intended outcomes for Our Town, so that the agency
more effectively could monitor and improve the program’s performance.
 From indicators to face validity to theory 195
Before the contract period was over, the NEA’s Research and Design teams
had refined methods for communicating with each other, and with the contractor,
about the agency’s changing views of the project, even while keeping within the
scope of the contract. Early on, the NEA Research team had encouraged the
contractor to think about developing a series of ‘nested’ logic models that could
fit within the overarching theory of change for Our Town. We believed that a
typology of Our Town projects could map onto a typology of Our Town
outcomes, thus suggesting that each project activity type could generate its own
discrete logic model. Instead, we learned from a grants data review that no direct
correlation existed between project activity type (e.g., a fair or festival, or an art
or design installation) and outcome type (e.g., civic engagement, or beautification
of the environment). Accordingly, the contractor’s final product consisted not
only of a conceptual framework document, with a theory of change and a
measurement model, but also a capacious logic model that identified a ‘problem
statement’ for Our Town, a program goal, inputs, activities, outputs, and two
broad categories of outcome. One outcome is titled ‘Innovation/Systems Change
and the other is ‘Local Community Change.’ Each element of the logic model is
described meticulously in the framework document itself, which the NEA will
make publicly available in 2017/2018. Now that the first phase is completed, the
NEA is overseeing a study to validate the conceptual framework (theory of
change), logic model, and measurement model (not shown here) for the Our
Town program. The study will include a national web-based survey of current
and former Our Town grantees and case studies documenting implementation
practices and outcomes achieved through NEA funding (Figures 13.2 and 13.3).

Conclusion
Looking back at the sequence of NEA research investments to understand
creative placemaking, one may be forgiven for thinking that we’ve come full
circle. To recap: we began with an indicators system, moved to validation
exercises, and then established a theory of change, which itself has bequeathed
a new validation study and the quantification of outcomes. From this experience I
conclude that future evaluations of interventions operating in complex systems
should begin with a sturdy conceptual framework, one co-created by practi-
tioners, researchers, and program managers. I further conclude that national
public funders of social-impact work are at their best when they point to real-
world examples of how programs look and behave under optimal conditions, and
that sometimes the greatest service we can provide is to connect organizations
with resources that can be customized for use at the local level. For this dual
reason – to honor the need for an organic theory behind each program or
intervention, but also to promote public access to data and tools that can be
adapted ingeniously to suit the context – I have no difficulty justifying the two
distinct learning pathways (one an indicators system, and the other a conceptual
framework) that have informed the NEA’s understanding of the Our Town
program and its associated outcomes.
 Systems Wide Change
Sustained support and recognition of arts, design, and cultural strategies as integral to every phase of community planning and development across the United States.

Local Systems Change

More and more local cross-sector partners integrate arts, culture, and design
activities into community development.

Local Economic, Physical, and

Social change
Local Leaders National Leaders

Imagine/
Illuminate
Envision
Local Inputs
-Leadership Arts, Culture,
-Cross-sector Partnerships
-Financial Resources and Design
-Community buy-in Tactics
Energize Connect

NEA NEA NEA

Technical Assistance, Research, Our Town Grants Knowledge Building Grants
Communications, Convenings
NEA Creative Placemaking Program

Problem Statement: American communities everywhere face a distinctive set of local economic, physical, and/or social challenges. And yet, community
leaders are often unaware of solutions that can arise from the successful adoption and integration of arts, design, and cultural strategies.

Figure 13.2 National Endowment for the Arts (2017b), Our Town’s Theory of Change.
 Our Town Program Logic Model
Problem Statement: American communities face local economic, physical, and social challenges (including in agriculture & food, economic development, education & youth,
environment & energy, health, housing, immigration, public safety, transportation, and workforce development). Arts, culture, and design activities are underutilized in addressing
these challenges.

Program Goal: The Our Town program

addresses these challenges by advancing and Innovation/Systems Change Outcomes
sustaining the increased utilization of arts, Place-based community development stake holders see, hear, and learn
culture, and design activities in community from the activities and local community change that result from Our Town
development through diverse, cross-sector projects.
partners. This encourages:
• Sustained cross-sectoral
partnerships/collaboration
Project Inputs Project Activities Project Outputs • Sustained replication or
To prove successful, Our Town partners adopt creative placemaking The project activities result in scaling of innovative
Our Town projects strategies that: concrete, tangible products: projects
require specific • Illuminate assests, issues, voices, history, cultural Participation • Strengthening the field of
resources or inputs: infrastructure • Counts of participants creative placemaking
• Energize places, issues, economies • Diversity of participants
• Leadership
• Imagine new possibilites, futures, solutions, approaches Offerings/Deliverables
• Cross-sector
partnerships • Connect communities, people, places, and economic
• Number of arts engagement
opportunity
• Financial resources offerings (residencies, festivals,
• Community buy-in artworks, etc.)
Local Community
• Number of cultural planning
deliverables (cultural asset maps, Change Outcomes
Change in the community that
cultural plans, etc.)
results from the Our Town
To advance the strategies, Our Town partners engage in • Number of design deliverables project activities and outputs:
one or more art tactics: (artist space or cultural facility
Economic
Arts engagement plans, renderings, etc.) • Local business growth
• Artist residency • Number of artist/creative industry • Job creation/labor force
• Arts festivals offerings (programs/service hours participation
• Community co-creation of art to support creative business/artists’ • Professional development/
training
• Performances professional development, sum • Preventing displacement∗
• Public art of dedicated funds, shared • In-migration∗
• Temporary public art marketing platforms, incubators, • Tourism
Cultural planning etc.) Physical
• Cultural planning Quality • Beautification and/or
• Cultural district planning • Quality of participation (active, enhancement of physical
• Creative asset mapping passive, one-off or repeatedly environment
• Public art planning participating, etc.) • New construction and
Design redevelopment (incl. arts,
• Quality of offerings/deliverables cultural & public space)
• Artist/designer-facilitated community planning
(participant perception, partners/
• Design of artist space Social
leadership perception, etc.)
• Design of cultural facilities • Civic engagement
• Public space design • Collective efficacy, social
Artist/creative industry support cohesion, social capital
• Creative business development • Community attachment
• Professional artist development *Very context specific

Project Community Contexts: Local Our Town projects unfold in varied community contexts. Projects are responsive to and shaped by community type, existing social and
human capital, existing policies, local assets, and other community development activities.

Figure 13.3 National Endowment for the Arts (2017b), Our Town’s Logic Model.
198 Sunil Iyengar
Notes
1 National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov/
2 Our Town, www.arts.gov/grants-organizations/our-town/introduction
3 ArtPlace America, www.artplaceamerica.org/
4 Partnership for Sustainable Communities, www.sustainablecommunities.gov/
5 Culture Blocks, www.cultureblocks.com/wordpress/
6 GEOLOOM, https://geoloom.org

References
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National Endowment for the Arts. Available at: www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Creative
Placemaking-Paper.pdf [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
Markusen, A. (2012). ‘Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative
Placemaking Success’, Createquity. Available at: http://createquity.com/2012/11/fuzzy-
concepts-proxy-data-why-indicators-wont-track-creative-placemaking-success/
[Accessed: 13 November 2017].
Moss, I. D. (2012). ‘Creative Placemaking Has an Outcomes Problem’, Createquity.
Available at: http://createquity.com/2012/05/creative-placemaking-has-an-outcomes-pro
blem/ [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2014a). Art Works for America: Strategic Plan, FY
2014-2018. [online] Washington, D.C. Available at: www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/
NEAStrategicPlan2014-2018.pdf. [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2014b). Exploring Our Town. Available at: www.arts.
gov/exploring-our-town/ [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2015). NEA Arts & Livability Indicators: Assessing
Outcomes of Interest to Creative Placemaking Projects. Available at: www.arts.gov/
artistic-fields/research-analysis/arts-data-profiles/arts-data-profile-8/arts-data-profile-8
[Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2016). How to Do Creative Placemaking. [online]
Washington, DC Available at: www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/How-to-do-Creative-Place
making_Jan2017.pdf [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2017a). Our Town: Projects that Build Knowledge about
Creative Placemaking – Grant Program Description. Available at: www.arts.gov/grants-
organizations/our-town/projects-that-build-knowledge-about-creative-placemaking-
grant-program-description [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
National Endowment for the Arts. (2017b). Our Town: Introduction. Available at: www.arts.
gov/grants-organizations/our-town/introduction. [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
Partnership for Sustainable Communities. (2014). Sustainable Community Indicators Cata-
log. Available at: www.sustainablecommunities.gov/indicators [Accessed: 13 November
2017].
Pierson, J. and Lacey-Moreira, J. (2010). Arts and Livability: The Road to Better Metrics.
[online]. Washington, D.C. Available at: www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Arts-and-Liva
bility-Whitepaper.pdf [Accessed: 13 November 2017].
The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. (9 March 2017). GEOLOOM Launch Planned for
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press.com/2017/03/09/geoloom-launch-planned-for-summer-2017/ [Accessed: 1 June
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 From indicators to face validity to theory 199
Schupbach, J. and Iyengar, S. (2012). ‘Our View of Creative Placemaking, Two Years In’,
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Urban Institute. (2014). The Validating Arts & Livability (VALI) Study: Results and
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2017].
Conclusion
Moving into the beyond – What’s next for
creative placemaking?
Anita McKeown and Cara Courage

As a nascent field, nearing completion of its first decade, creative placemaking is

still evolving. As the concept is embraced and enacted through practice globally,
this book has sought to present approaches and practices that have moved away
from the popularly attributed elements of creative placemaking – of monumental
artworks and artists’ live-work spaces and the like – to more diverse practices
and voices that both offer sector critique and development. This concluding
chapter draws attention to the underlying concerns that motivated the book and
the questions and issues raised within it, signalling the ‘move beyond’ the current
into creative placemaking’s next era.

Part 1 – Coming full circle

The aim for the book was never to be a definitive text on creative placemaking;
instead, the motivation was to present and integrate a practitioner-led critique in
conversation with an academic and research-based discourse. Many of the
authors, and ourselves as editors, traverse research and practice and value the
different forms of mutually-informing knowledges this traversal produces. In this
sense, our professional experience within ephemeral, situated and citizen-led
creative practices guided the initial Call for Papers and the curation of the
conference sessions (see Preface and Introduction). Our initial conversation
presented discussions and practices that we recognised from non-object-orien-
tated art practices that were becoming increasingly relevant within creative
placemaking’s emergent practice and are now offered as a springboard for the
next phase of the sector.
Many of this volume’s contributors are anchored in creative practices that are
often process-driven and that move towards a complex and more nuanced
practice and understanding of creative placemaking. They present tangible
explorations and responses to many of the concerns that have been prevalent
within creative placemaking discourse, such as the role of the artist and the
social, economic and political contexts of this work. We are not alone: these
concerns have also fuelled common discussions within non-object-orientated art
practices for at least half a century. From this perspective the book does not seek
to provide answers but rather charts a dynamic conversation through the
 Conclusion 201
collection of professional creatives’ responses to key commentaries prevalent
since creative placemaking’s inception. The practitioners presented here have a
long-standing engagement with ‘arts in place’ practices and as such their
contributions offer a comprehensive survey and an insightful critique for the
creative placemaking scholar. Thus, this volume is presented as a reflection on
what creative placemaking’s evolution could mean for future practitioners and
scholars within the context of emergent global challenges and radical changes to
where and how places are made and sustained.
Despite many of the criticisms levelled at creative placemaking, the book is an
optimistic and positive consideration of creative placemaking’s evolution and its
potential. Emerging from a policy leadership initiative in the USA, local and
global uptake of creative placemaking has been informed by increasing involve-
ment from diverse arts practitioners and organisations. This collection, therefore
charts a departure from economic impact towards broader intrinsic values of the
arts and citizen engagement and ephemeral practices of creative placemaking. By
drawing attention to the ongoing concerns around diversity, displacement and
concepts of belonging such engagement has informed a positive move towards
participation in the arts contributing towards Bedoya’s (2013) demand for ‘place-
keeping’ and Pritchard’s (this volume) call for ‘place-guarding’. Issues of place
attachment and belonging, present in discussions of creative placemaking from
early in its inception, highlight concerns around ‘who, how and why we should
support arts and cultural activity’ (Markusen and Gadwa, this volume) contribute
to the book’s overarching question: how will creative placemaking evolve over
the next decade and beyond?
Many of the projects that were included within Markusen and Gadwa’s (2010)
White Paper illustrate aspects of what could be considered as leading through
practice, an aspect often overlooked when engaging with the field of creative
placemaking: the projects presented drawn from the field were motivated not by
economic agendas but an encouragement of inclusive, participatory and colla-
borative processes beyond the limits of elitist art practices and the sanctified
walls of the gallery (and indeed, a similar move to generative planning from a
professionalised silo (Courage, 2017)). However, this was not necessarily
reflected in many of the early projects funded by the National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA)1 and ArtPlace,2 which tended to conform to capital spend
projects, design enhancements, festivals or monumental artworks. This can be
seen to have perhaps overshadowed the wider, and perhaps more grassroots,
culturally creative foundation and potential of creative placemaking and con-
tributed to many of the concerns around elitism and exclusion and critiques of its
practice.
The book argues for how creative placemaking – defined in its broadest sense
as creative practices within the process of placemaking – can offer avenues for
understanding, galvanising and expressing place identity and place attachment
through individual, cultural, social and material articulations of psychosocial
processes (Courage, 2017). The material process of creative placemaking
involves social and cultural processes that can uncover senses of self with the
202 Anita McKeown and Cara Courage
community and in place, considerations of disbelonging (Bedoya, 2013), and
inclusion and exclusion in place habitation and politics. Opportunities for citizens
to engage and co-create within creative placemaking are necessary if the sector is
not to be complicit in nor perpetuate social displacement but instead contribute to
an authentic and meaningful sense of place, and a sense of ownership of and
belonging. The ethical imperatives of social and environmental justice that
should be necessarily embodied in a concept such as creative placemaking are
manifest in concepts of identity and implemented through an articulation of not
only an understanding of place, but also having a place within it. The concerns
around the addition of the exclusivity of the ‘creative’ modifier for placemaking
(Bedoya, 2013; Kent, 2013; Mehta, 2012), including the very real psychological
barriers to involvement in the arts (Keaney, 2008; McCarthy and Jinnett, 2001;
Sinnott, 1983) was a key motivation behind the curation of the conference
sessions, in turn informing this volume. Our professional experience sought to
introduce the fifty-year heritage of non-object-orientated practices (Lippard,
1968) and place-based creative practices that provide a heritage that is often
overlooked within creative placemaking (Courage, 2017). Such practices, for
example, from land art to New Genre Public Art (Lacy, 2008), have consciously
explored complexity and creative self-expression, and interrogated the language
and meanings of community, partnership, identity and dynamics of power and
spatial equity. This book presents practitioner-led expansion of the potential of
creative placemaking, drawing on this established legacy and integrating the arts,
creativity and the role and value of creative knowledge and skills that is found
within suburbs, villages, rural areas and cyberspace (Edensor and Millington, this
volume). Through their engagement with the social ecosystems and infrastruc-
tures that are engaged in creative placemaking, our contributors offer a critical
engagement with and inclusion of the arts and creativity within civic life beyond
the expressive pursuits of a culturally dominant elite. Their contributions chal-
lenge many of the creative practices, historically utilised within previous itera-
tions of cultural regeneration, and as such the book offers an understanding of
creative placemaking that forefronts creative practices that are situated, partici-
patory and collaborative in nature. Importantly for creative placemaking, the
ecologies of practices the book presents form a collective challenge to the
limitations and dangers of harnessing creativity’s intrinsic values in the pursuit
of geopolitical economic agendas. Co-opting these values into the creative
industries for economic gain or imposing reductive elitist understanding of
creativity can have profound effects. Yet creative practices, when unconstrained
by disciplinary silos or economic motivations, can offer expanded opportunities
to engage in new conversations and creative social exchange. The following
section explores these issues in more depth.

Part 2 – The art of creative placemaking

Artists and arts have a history of being employed as ‘agents of change’ (Stern and
Seifert, 2006; Matarasso, 1997; Miles, 2000). Yet this should not be confused with
 Conclusion 203
a vision of arts as a way of ‘remaking communities, creating jobs, reducing crime,
in short saving the world, in light of long-standing systemic inequities’
(McKeown, 2015a). Lippard’s (1968) seminal text, Six years: The De-materialisa-
tion of the art object, and Kraus’ (1979) Sculpture in an expanded Field are early
documents that began to highlight the concerns around equity, power dynamics,
participation and authorship that arose with non-studio art practices. More con-
temporary texts, such as Kwon’s The Wrong Place (2000) or McGonagale’s work
on reciprocity, negotiation and active citizenship (2011, 2010, 2007) engage in a
critical stance as practitioners working in collaborative, participatory or activist
practices. Kwon’s (2004, p.60) term ‘art in the public interest’ identifies the
engagement with ‘social issues, political activism and community collaborations’.
Such practices do not take place within the gallery but instead often work across a
range of non-art contexts with numerous constituents. By rejecting the classical
notion of the creative genius (McGonagle, 2010) post-studio practices offer an
opportunity to explore and encourage everyday creativity within creative place-
making. These practices enable new relationships to form and facilitate ‘the
constant imagination, search for, and construction of alternatives’ (Hays, in
Osman et al., 2002, p.58). Thompson understands such practices as tactical forms
of resistance to the current global context of an ‘increasingly privatised and
visualised cultural sphere’ (Sholette and Thompson, 2004, p.52).
Within the context of creative placemaking, these practices can be considered
as transgressions into or subversions of the functions and power mechanisms that
construct dominant place narratives, a key concern when considering belonging
and displacement. Creative placemaking projects can have an interstitial function
as ‘third spaces’ (Soja, 1996) where, as grounded in an inclusive systemic
approach, there is opportunity to explore and reconsider narrowly understood or
ill-defined place-based situations and harness its potential to facilitate under-
standing and scalable localised solutions to systemic problems. Many of the
projects presented here develop micro ‘network[s] of resistance’ (Sholette and
Thompson, 2004, p.52) as a bi-product of their creation, connecting citizens and
organisations through their expanded field of operation and shared aims. As an
inclusive approach, this offers a way into generative spatial planning, critical
decision-making and policy development for those often excluded. By recognis-
ing and valuing multiple actors and their creativity within creative placemaking,
the projects can begin to transcend polarising debates of expert/non-expert and
offer alternative paths to the officially sanctioned channels that normatively
create the places we live.
As diverse practitioners are increasingly recognised in and engage with
creative placemaking, the sector begins to reflect contemporary approaches to
creativity that challenge or do not conform to an understanding of the arts and
creative processes often held by those outside the realms of contemporary
creative practices. Increasingly, those charged with the commissioning and
engagement of creative practitioners within placemaking contexts are acknowl-
edging more nuanced understandings and manifestations of professional creative
practice. Currently, developments within the NEA and ArtPlace’s approach to
204 Anita McKeown and Cara Courage
funding projects are reflective of the move away from cultural corridors, live/
work schemes and monumental practices, for instance. Furthermore, the knowl-
edge from creative practitioners’ and ephemeral processual practices of creative
placemaking are being formally recognised and integrated into creative place-
making, as evidenced by the NEA’s two-day symposium Beyond the Building
(NEA, 2014) and MIT’s Places in the Making (Silberberg, 2013) report. Beyond
the Building discussed the importance and potential of ephemeral art practices,
while MIT’s report identified the potential of processual and continual placemak-
ing, stressing the need for an open source approach.
However, it should not be forgotten that ephemeral and processual forms of
creative placemaking can also have negative aspects, which need to be considered.
Contested place narratives are at the core of creative placemaking practices and
can be exacerbated by ill-considered interventions and the policy and funding
behind them. Temporary place activation programmes are often inadequate at
nurturing inclusive practices that sensitively address the relationship between
‘place, affect and memory’ (Barns, this volume). Questions of what should and
could be celebrated and by whom, when explored within public culture, ‘can often
be highly fractured and discordant’ (ibid.). The authors presented in this book all
engage with multi-form presentations and ephemeral practices which can offer an
intimate means of experiencing the multiplicity of narratives that shape a project’s
location. Yet they are also realistic in recognising the limitations of such projects.
Temporary projects cannot and should not be expected to resolve contested
narratives that have been embedded over generations. If undertaken sensitively
they can ‘enable multiple forms of attachment to be acknowledged, while also
allowing new connections to be forged’ (ibid.). The growing awareness of
temporary projects as a critical first step in community engagement as part of
place activation is a global trend, enshrined in Reynold’s (in Project for Public
Spaces, 2013) 2009 maxim, ‘Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper’ (LQC) and championed
by numerous other placemaking agencies since. Any benefits will only be apparent
if undertaken sensitively and with an awareness of the potential impacts of any
resulting consequences (McKeown, 2015b) and not deployed due to an appeal to
any perceived low-cost or quick-fix political and material end-solution finding.
Like any intervention, a temporary action can have negative and positive
outcomes. This important aspect is illustrated through Urban Vision’s considera-
tion of LQC (Pathak, this volume) within three localities in Mumbai, India, and
Alpalhão’s (this volume) reflexive critique of participatory practice, offering an
insight into the considerations and consequences of using interventional practices
developed within different contexts. Urban Vision’s exploration of the creation of
human-scaled social space within a rapidly-changing urban context with a history
of social space as integral reaffirmed the need to understand local contexts and
adapt practices accordingly. Meanwhile, Alpalhão’s chapter offers a considera-
tion of the role of the artist and public apathy and disinterest in place, stemming
from feelings of being excluded from its decision-making and planning. These
issues are discussed throughout this book, of course, with the chapters by
Edensor and Millington, Pritchard, and Walker and Marsh particularly pertinent.
 Conclusion 205
The changing context in Mumbai has raised issues that many western contexts
have already experienced: an auto- and infrastructure-centric environment is being
created or maintained that is to the detriment of social spaces. Such practices are
useful for their opportunities to explore possibilities initially – as Lydon and
Garcia (2015) rightly attest to Tactical Urbanism – but they require careful
consideration and sophisticated understanding of context and complex skills if
they are to be beneficial and facilitate inclusive practices. This has import also for
the global uptake of creative placemaking, with many countries still struggling to
address equitable placemaking practices. As such, creative placemaking interven-
tions become deeply political acts that contribute to defining and constituting
place. To this end creative placemaking practitioners should engage with a full life-
cycle analysis of their proposed interventions and awareness of the complexities of
the social construction of place. Further, practitioners must beware of the potential
for creative placemaking to be appropriated into the use of celebrating place
identity and unique culture as a way to ‘re-image and sell places’ (Ward, 1998.
p.193). Counterintuitively perhaps, creative placemaking can offer alternatives to
the attributes of placemaking and branding that are increasingly attributed to it by
not being ‘tethered to a meaning of place manifest in the built environment’
(Bedoya, 2013) through the creation of spaces that encourage multiple, new or
different understandings of place. However, this takes skill and a critical under-
standing of the power and historical dynamics at play.
This book introduces an array of contemporary creative professional practices
and approaches, illustrating the diverse skillset necessary for interdisciplinary
practices and complex contexts that engage with issues of social and environ-
mental justice. It is in these new territories of practice, that the book’s authors re-
imagine traditional roles with additional skills such as an understanding of
positioning and power dynamics, an ability to negotiate and the acknowledge-
ment that it can no longer be ‘business as usual’ when it comes to authority.
Their projects reflect the ecology of knowledge and expertise embedded in
processes that emerge from the inclusion of a broad range of constituents,
requiring trust, communication skills, sharing information, a willingness to learn
and adapt, all qualities of a more complex systemic approach. This requires
dynamic leadership models that demand specific expertise at different times
while offering foundations for multiple opportunities to participate which have
expanded the concept of stakeholding. Leadership, coming from a creative
catalyst, has been a key element in creative placemaking from its inception and
the book’s contributors begin to expand the understanding of this aspect of
creative placemaking, in new ways. Increasingly, research on leading-through-
artistic-practice (Frye-Burnham, 2007) is now being incorporated into emerging
ideas on leadership and consequently into creative placemaking practices.
Each chapter in this book illustrates this changing landscape by sharing the
multiple methods that can encourage new ways of seeing the world beyond the
concept of the professional creative as sole creator. In this instance, the practi-
tioners, through multiple partnerships, form ecologies of practice to engage with
specific knowledge that subsidised their own skillset, while integrating the
206 Anita McKeown and Cara Courage
benefits of their field-specific knowledge. Reconsideration of the role of the
professional creative, in conversation with active citizens and other disciplines,
illustrates how such skillsets can be used to create sites for intersectional issues
and multiple identities to be enacted. McKeown (2015a) has identified thirteen
distinct roles attributed to artists, highlighting a range of skills of value for
creative placemaking, Collaborator, as Negotiator, as Mediator and Catalyst.
These diverse roles reflect the multiple modes of operation that many of the
book’s practitioners currently employ and are increasingly expected to employ
within their professional practice. Overtime, this approach develops a transfer-
able interdisciplinary skillset with a range of constituents within various contexts.
This understanding of contemporary creative practices will do much to address
the concerns of the ‘creative’ modifier of creative placemaking and the critique
of creative placemaking’s potential to be exclusive. Indeed, within the new socio-
economic and environmental conditions predicted, the continued evolution of
reciprocal models of practice to re-connect ‘art’s ethical responsibilities with its
aesthetic responsibilities’ (McGonagle, 2011, p.44) becomes a vital task for
creative placemaking. The book’s authors collectively contribute to an expanded
understanding of professional and intersectional creative working practices that
that can be traced back to earlier practitioners such as Beuys (see Social
Sculpture, 1972),3 Artist Placement Group (1969)4 and Mierle Laderman Ukeles
(see Maintenance Art, 1969).5 Although the heritage of a ‘participatory, socially
interactive framework for art’ (Gablik, 1991, p.7) is now common practice for
many artists, this approach has not yet been fully integrated into creative
placemaking. Acting as ‘mediators, creative thinkers or agitators’ (Bourriaud, in
Doherty, 2004, p.10), this is increasingly recognised within contemporary crea-
tive placemakers such as Candy Chang,6 Theaster Gates7 and the Rebuild
Foundation,8 as well as Rick Lowe and Project Row Houses.9

Part 3 – Into the beyond

This volume’s closing chapter highlights the need for trial and error, exploratory
approaches, listening to multiple voices and experiences and being open to
change, a common thread that runs through the book. As the USA sector
heavyweights, the NEA, reaches a pivotal stage in its engagement with the
concept of creative placemaking and ArtPlace completes its deep dive evaluative
Field Scans10 before its operational closing in 2020, there is an evident, at this
macro level, a move away from the historic valuations of creative placemaking.
The shift from a ‘hyperfocus on economic advocacy’ (Markusen and Gadwa, this
volume) towards more holistic and expansive notions of value and success is a
timely milestone. Will recent changes to the USA’s administration dash this hope
or will creative placemaking continue to morph and evolve without philanthropic
support given the global spread and take-up of the concept? Indeed, creative
placemaking’s journey to date draws attention to the intrinsic qualities that the
editors perceive in its potential as a practice: a dynamic evolving approach and
set of tools that will continue to be enacted globally by many. Whether it is
 Conclusion 207
called creative placemaking in the future (though this term has evident sticking
power and understandably pragmatically so) and operates as a strategic agenda is
a different matter.
Rather than a neat conclusion, the book leaves us with a number of critical
questions. To list but some: will the value of creativity in making and re-making
our world have become more centralised or will the arts have been abandoned,
side-lined or ever more tokenised as geopolitical agendas focus more on
technology and environmental challenges? Or will the current interest in social
design thinking and the benefits arts and humanities training brings be deemed
critical to our continued existence? What should and could be the role of the
developer, as increasingly, the only constituent around the planning table
with any funds for creative place-based endeavour, be? And how will theory
and practices interplay and be evaluated, curated, disseminated, collected and
exhibited?
As creative catalysts, many practitioners are challenging their fields’ conven-
tional practices of gallery presentation of objects and the design and construction
of buildings. By moving beyond normative roles of practice the perspectives
from these practitioners offer insights into a critical reflection of standard
practices, thus informing both the field of creative placemaking and the education
and training of those working professionally in disciplines that are engaged in the
sector, from housing and education through to transit and health. All the authors
in the book are expanding beyond their fields and the skills that they require are
not yet integrated into the education and training of emerging practitioners. As a
nascent field, creative placemaking-specific courses are few in number and
mentoring opportunities for younger practitioners are limited, not least as
established practitioners are in the process of ‘learning as they go’. Granted
there are many examples of best practice from other socially engaged disciplines
and earlier theorists but the planning schools, art colleges and architectural
programmes are only beginning to embrace the need for skills beyond formal
language, building and planning regulations, such as advocacy skills, cultural
awareness and community liaison, and not least, the disposition of the creative
practitioner to work in relative expertism, not as sole author (Courage, 2017).
Creative placemaking is manifest in communities as a ‘system of interrelated
elements’ (Davidoff, 1965, p.337) and organisms. This perspective inevitably
necessitates an even greater understanding and implementation of an ecological
approach than may have been initially recognised, when included in Markusen and
Gadwa’s White Paper and SIAP’s Ecology of Cultural Revitalisation (Stern and
Seifert, 2006). Other fields are also embracing a systemic approach as the realisation
of the impact of isolated practices and knowledge comes to the fore and existential
threats from a range of source make themselves known. Many practitioners in a
broad range of fields are looking to create partnerships that could be said to manifest
what Gablik (1992, p.22) called a ‘radical relatedness’. The diverse skills of the
artist and other’s expertise within a creative experimental approach can form
Gablik’s (ibid., p.2) ‘connective aesthetic’, a means to hold the ecological diversity
inherent in place in ethical and equitable ways. From this perspective perhaps the
208 Anita McKeown and Cara Courage
global push and engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals (2015) could
offer a common ethos to underpin creative placemaking?
In this way, the editors understand creative placemaking to be centrally
positioned to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century with creative
place-based approaches offering tangible locally scaled explorations of global
concerns. The original creative placemaking White Paper was initially presented
to the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), a leadership initiative of the
NEA in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) and
American Architectural Foundation (AAF). MICD seeks to ‘prepare’ mayors to
‘be the chief urban designers of their cities’ (MICD, 2015). As professional
creatives working within the public realm no longer see themselves as sole
creative genius, the threat of human-driven climate change and the resulting
problems becoming increasingly acknowledged, it is clear that all citizens will
need to contribute to placemaking practices. No longer can mayors and other
professionals engaged in spatial planning be considered the ‘chief urban
designers of their cities’.
It is noteworthy that an analysis of creative placemaking definitions by
twelve key actors in the field identified no overt statement of environmental
criteria (McKeown, 2015a). Furthermore, all the chapters within this book
consider human-centric approaches, highlighting one of creative placemak-
ing’s pressing vulnerabilities – its human-centric default. The editors offer that
a beyond-human lens is severely lacking from the creative placemaking field,
yet this addition offers an important direction for future research if creative
placemaking as a sector is to contribute to the development of sustainable and
resilient places. Other scholarly work has addressed the need for the integra-
tion of nature and culture (Weintraub, 2012; Wright, 2005). Moving towards a
bio-psychosocial approach (McKeown, 2015a), which would expand concepts
of belonging, self and other to include other organisms and processes that
recognise their contribution to the practice of placemaking. As an ethical
imperative, this integrates the social and environmental justice that the editors
understand is the core of creative placemaking, beyond economic motivations.
Although creative placemaking was informed by a cultural ecology approach
to revitalisation (Stern and Seifert, 2006), the next stage in its evolution will
need to expand the understanding of what an ecological approach truly means.
The duty to ensure the ‘identification, protection conservation, presentation
and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage’ is
embedded in UNESCO’s World Heritage constitution, article 4 (1973). The
recognition of the importance of both cultural and natural heritage for future
generations offers a useful underpinning in this vein as well as an ethical
imperative to expand creative placemaking’s understanding of an ecological
approach.
Returning to non-studio and expanded creative practices, many arts practi-
tioners are no longer working only with self-expression, instead applying their
skills to ‘wicked’ problems ‘in pursuit of a sustainable planet’ (Weintraub, 2012).
The inclusion of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths)
 Conclusion 209
(Maeda, 2010) educational practices into creative placemaking has much to offer
the field. As an integration of arts and science, the STEAM project-based
pedagogical approach could encourage younger generations to engage with
situated learning and global systemic concerns through local contexts. Place-
based learning provides opportunities to embed a student’s local context and
personal experience as a foundation for their own learning and creative explora-
tion. As a tangible process, STEAM education offers an opportunity for students
to embed and apply their knowledge in new ways. Moving between tacit, explicit
and abstract knowledge could enable a sophisticated response to place concerns,
with a deeper understanding of place-systems leading to an integration of social
design thinking. This approach incorporates the creative processes and strategies
common to artists and designers into a resolution of issues within social contexts.
Creative placemaking as a policy platform will have to address existential
concerns if it is to remain relevant, requiring systemic knowledge and a social
and environmental ethos deeply embedded into its practices. However, as the
book has identified, through this initial tracking of creative placemaking’s
journey, the inclusion of creative practitioners must be integrated from the
beginning to ensure that the value and benefits from the field and nuanced
understanding of practices and processes are present. Just like creative placemak-
ing’s first decade, without a nuanced understanding of STEAM, we could see the
benefits and potential of STEAM, albeit compromised by economic agendas and
lack of awareness of its heritage, practices and evolution.
At the present time, there are many culture-led organisations and practitioners
that have established best practices and are continuing to contribute to multiple
forms of conversations with others involved in making places creatively – what
will creative placemaking, and its place, look like in another ten years’ time?
This volume identifies rich seams for future exploration that would be necessary
to sustain the vitality and potential inherent in the combination of words ‘creative
placemaking’ into its next decade and beyond. Together, all contributors have, in
their practices and in these chapters, worked to break down the assumptions of
creative placemaking and build it anew from a global and multi-layered purview
and sitting across urban design and art heritage, theory and practice, planning
and policy and cultural and place heritage and politics. At the beginning of this
book we asserted that creative placemaking is reductively considered a subset of
placemaking and valued for its economic instrumentalisation of the arts. As we
have since seen, creative placemaking is much more interesting, complex, vital
and exciting than that.

Notes
1 National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov
2 ArtPlace America, www.artplaceamerica.org
3 Beuys (1972), Social Sculpture, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/social-sculpture
4 Artist Placement Group, www2.tate.org.uk/artistplacementgroup/
5 Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1969), Maintenance Art, www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/
mierle-laderman-ukeles-maintenance-art-works-196920131980
210 Anita McKeown and Cara Courage
6 Candy Chang, http://candychang.com
7 Theaster Gates, www.theastergates.com
8 Rebuild Foundation, https://rebuild-foundation.org
9 Project Row Houses, https://projectrowhouses.org
10 ArtPlace America Field Scans, www.artplaceamerica.org/our-work/research/translat
ing-outcomes

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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures.

50 GRAND (Rolón and Big Car American arts policy initiative: arts and
Collaborative) 121 cultural outcomes 22–3; case studies
15–16; cultural policy shift 13–16;
a2ru (Alliance for the Arts in Research displacement 19–20; diversity 16–19;
Universities) 23 exclusion of cultural expression/
AAF (American Architectural Foundation) contributions 18–19; gentrification 19;
208 overview 11–13; success and design
AAG (Association of American indicators 21–3
Geographers) 1–2, 3 American High Plains 90
Abercrombie, P. 134 American political systems 18
Aboriginal Land Council 61 Americans for the Arts (AFTA) 13, 184
activist art 148 Andy Griffith Show, The 117
African-American arts and cultural Animating Democracy 13, 22
organizations 18 architectural pedagogy 165
African-American churches 18 Arendt, H. 129
African-American cultures 18–19 Aristotle 174
AFTA (Americans for the Arts) Arlt, P., et al. 137
13, 184 Arrivals and Departures (Esem Projects)
agents of change 202–3 58–9, 58, 59, 63–6
Agitprop theatre collective 130 art: and civic participation 180–2;
Agitprop trains (Soviet Agitation contribution to U.S. economy 14;
Propaganda Vehicles) 127–8, 130–1, psychological barriers 201; as public
132, 137 good 180–2; in public view 111;
agnostic public sphere 138 re-presentation of reality 179; as social
Ahemad, A. 74 institution 181; symbol of property,
AIDS crisis 13 wealth, and power 140, 150–1
Alexander, C. 69 Art and About Festival (City of Sydney) 63
Alliance for Media Arts and Culture 21 art fairs 111
Alliance for the Arts in Research Art in Public (Zuidervaart) 180
Universities (a2ru) 23 Art of Change, The (Ford Foundation) 183
Alpalhão, L. 204 Art Works 14, 189
Alvarez, M. 17 artist-activists 44
America: Department of Housing 189, 190, ArtPlace: Community Development
192; Department of Transport 15 Investment program 23; displacement 19;
American Architectural Foundation Ford Foundation 15; founding 11;
(AAF) 208 vibrancy indicators 21, 190
214 Index
Arts Catalyst 44 Beuys, J. 84–5, 86, 206
arts-led methodologies 56 Bevan, Aneurin 133
arts-led resilient practices 44 BHAAAD (Boyle Heights Alliance Against
arts philanthropy, rural America 91–2 Artwashing and Displacement) 150
Artscape 145, 147 Big Car Collaborative 5–6, 109–10,
Artspace buildings 20 114, 121
artwashing 143, 149, 150 Bigfoot 121
Ashe Cultural Center 18 Bishop, C. 85, 162, 164
Association of American Geographers Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME)
(AAG) 1–2, 3 16, 17, 18, 150
Atelier Urban Nomads (AUN) 156–7, 159, Black churches 18
160–2, 164, 166, 167 Black Hornet, The (M12) 91
austerity, opportunities for arts Blackpool Illuminations 34
organisations 146, 149 Blair, Tony 130
Australia: Dalgetty Wharf 64–5; Darwin 30; Blue Blouse 130
Department of Housing 62; funding Bolshevik Russia 129–31
environment 56; local government Bond, P., et al. 35
organisations 56–7, see also Barangaroo Borivali 72, 73–4, 77
(Sydney, Australia) Bourdieu, P. 43, 49–50
Aylesbury Estate 143, 149 Bow Common and Common Room, The
(public works collective) 127, 134–6
Bakhtin, M.M. 157 Bow: Her Story (public works collective)
Balfron Social Club (BSC) 148–9, 151 135–6
Balfron Tower 149 Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing
Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators and Displacement (BHAAAD) 150
Alliance 193 Breaking Ring, The (M12) 88, 88
BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) Brown, A., Novak-Leonard, J. 22
16, 17, 18, 150 Brown, K. 131
Barangaroo Delivery Authority 61, 62–3, 66 BSC (Balfron Social Club) 148–9, 151
Barangaroo Reserve 58 buen vivir (good living for all) 31
Barangaroo (Sydney, Australia): Arrivals Buffalo 115, 118
and Departures 58–9, 58, 59, 63–6; built-environment: American High Plains
Cutaway, The 60, 65; design review panel 90; citizen engagement 74–5; human
60–1; East Darling Harbour 58–60; flourishing 178; land values 56, 72;
financial district 60; industrial heritage property values 22
60, 62; Millers Point 62–3, 64, 65; Burgess, J. 30
overview 56–8; phoney naturalism 62; Burnham, J. 86
placename 61; recordings of residents Business Region Göteborg 97
63–4, 65; revitalisation as displacement
60–3; storybox 65; Welcome Camden Art Centre 131
Celebrations 59, 65 Canadian off-gridders 35–6
BAVO 148 capital: conversion from cultural to
Beautiful Places (Florida) 182 economic 50–1; different forms 49
Bebelle, C. 18 Carr, C., and Gibson, C. 33
Bedoya, R. 4, 13, 23, 201; and Markusen, A. Cass School of Art, Architecture and
19, 20 Design, The 134
Beja 156, 159 Catholic altruism 164
Beja II 159–60, 160, 161–2, 164, 166, CCI (Cultural and Creative Industries),
167–8 Gothenburg (peri-urban) 5, 94, 98–9,
Bell, D. 34 103, 104–5
Bennelong 61 Center for Social Sculpture (Minneapolis)
Bennett, J. 142 84
Between the World and Me (Coates) 18 Chapple, K., and Jacobus, R. 20
 Index 215
Circle Housing Association 134, 135 Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs),
cities: ecological model 174–5; human Gothenburg (peri-urban) 5, 94, 98–9, 103,
focused nature 69; human level scale 71; 104–5
right to the city 151, 165 cultural capital 49–51
citizen-led social practice project 43 cultural segregation 18
citizen science 51–2 Culture and Urban Revitalisation (SIAP
civic engagement: urban communities 173; and Reinvestment Fund) 3
valorisation 146 Culture Blocks (web tool) 193
civic-minded organizations 177 culture-incubators 100
civic participation, and the arts 180–2 curating research, theory and practice:
class polarisation 144 challenging ecologies 6; dialogical
Coates, T. 18 ecologies 4–5; evolving ecologies 3–4;
collaborating artist and curator extending ecologies 6–7; overview 1–3;
conversation: advantages of connecting scalable ecologies 5–6
people 113; gentrification 109, 121; curatorial framework 2
genuine interest in people Czech Republic, Prague/Pilsen Year of
120; hotel atrium games 110–11; Culture 11
overview 109–10; Pittsburgh Strip
District 113–14, 117; public space design Dalgetty Wharf 64–5
117–18, 119; what is placemaking Darwin, Australia 30
110–12, see also Indianapolis Davis, B. 19
Common Room’s Facebook page 135 Dawes, W. Lt. 61
community activists 147 Department of Agitation and Propaganda
community art 145 (Bolshevik Russia) 130
community-based arts project 46–9 Department of Housing (America) 189,
community-benefit agreements 20 190, 192
community-development corporations 20 Department of Housing (Australia) 62
community Endowments 176 Department of Transport (America) 15
community land trusts 20 Detroit, Avenue of Fashion 15
community-led development 146 digital projection 64
community participation 51 disobedient objects 127, 130
community programming 56 DIY Regeneration (public works collective)
community safety 178 127, 131–3
conference sessions 1–2, 3 downtown planning 115
contemporary social spaces 148 Drew, P. 61
Cool Britannia 29 dynamic leadership models 205
County of London Plan (Abercrombie)
134 East Darling Harbour 58–60, 62
Courage, C. 66, 141–2 East London Federation of Suffragettes 135
creative arts therapy 15 Ebrey, J., and Miles, A. 31
Creative City 140, 141 ecological damage, Thames Estuary 45, 47
creative city 28 Ecology of Cultural Revitalisation (SIAP)
Creative Class 28, 32, 140–1, 148, 151 207
creative destruction 97 economic advocacy hyperfocus 206
creative entrepreneurs 144 Edensor, T., and Millington, S. 4
creative practices: non-economically education opportunities 101, 129, 177
motivated 36; process of placemaking 201 educational practices, STEAM 208–9
creative script 144 Efroymson, J. 121
creative self-expression 201 Elvis festival 33
creative turn 96 employment opportunities, Gothenburg
Cultural and Creative Industries and (peri-urban) 102
Regional Growth (Swedish Cabinet) entrepreneurial initiator 103
95–6 Eora people 61, 64
216 Index
Equine Anthology, An (M12) 87, 88 ideologies 143; Philadelphia
ERDF (European Regional Development neighborhoods 20; third-wave 144
Fund) 94, 98 GEOLOOM 193
Escola Santiago Maior 161 Gibson, C., and Carr, C. 33; and Waitt, G.
Esem Projects 56, 58–9, 58, 59, 63–6 30, 33, 35
European Regional Development Fund Gifts of the Muse (McCarthy) 13
(ERDF) 94, 98 Gilmore, A. 31
exclusionary practices, urban revitalisation Glăveanu, V.P., and Literat, I. 31
projects 64 Goldfinger, E. 148–9
Exploring our Town (NEA) 193 Gothenburg City Council 97, 103, 104, 105
Gothenburg Development North East
Fargo 15 (GDNE) 94, 96, 97–104
Feminist art 86 Gothenburg (peri-urban): Cultural and
Flannery, T. 61–2 Creative Industries (CCIs) 5, 94,
Flickr 30 98–9, 103, 104–5; cultural policy and
Flood, C., and Grindon, G. 127, 128 socio-economic restructuring 95–7;
Florida, R. 12–13, 28, 29, 141, 148, 182 employment opportunities 102;
flourishing (eudaimonia, Aristotelian idea) gentrification 99; Gothenburg
174 Development North East (GDNE)
Folk Float 131–2 97–104; Hammarkullen district 99, 101;
Food Justice initiative 88 higher education 95, 98, 100–1; industrial
Ford Foundation 15, 183 history 97; objective and role of culture
FOSSILSS 73, 77 98–9; obstacles, incubators, startups 100;
Frasz, A. 183 overview 94–5; PricewaterhouseCoopers
Freeman, A. 44, 47 97, 101–2; public funding budget 105;
Frémeaux, I., and Jordan, J. 148 unemployment 95, 97, 98, 100, 101;
Fukuyama, F. 136 Urban Art Network 100–1; Urban
Fun Palace, The (Littlewood and Price) Environment theme 98; Vision and
127–8, 133–4, 137 Communication theme 98
funding awards: federal agencies and grassroots participation, funding
private sector 15; grassroots participation awards 12
12 Gregson, N., et al. 35
fuzzy concepts 21, 190 Grindon, G., and Flood, C. 127, 128
Grodach, C., et al. 96
Gablik, S. 207
Gadamer, H.G. 181 HABITAT III’s Policy Paper 184
Gadwa, A., and Muessig, A. 20 hackathons 72–3, 74
Gadwa Nicodemus, A. 19, 20; and Hackney, F. 30
Markusen, A. 4, 11–12, 14 Hairy Man (Big Car Collaborative) 121
Gallardo, F. 44, 47 Halberstam, J. 165
games theory 133 Hallam, E., and Ingold, T. 32, 33
Garcia, A., and Lydon, M. 29, 111–12, 205 Handwerker, M. 5
Gates, T. 121 Hargreaves, I., and Hartley, J. 35
GDNE (Gothenburg Development North Harper, W. 44
East) 94, 96, 97–104 Harvey, D. 147
gentrification: American arts policy Harwood, G. 44, 45, 50
initiative 19; anti-gentrification Hawkins, H. 35, 52
interventions/movements 148, 149; artists Hawthorne, N. 92
against 147–50; Big Car Collaborative Haydn, F. 130
109; Creative Class model 140; Heart of the Community Project (Buffalo)
displacement 121; financial capital 141; 118
Gothenburg (peri-urban) 99; language of Helstrup-Alvarez, A. 17
creative placemaking 83; neoliberal Heygate Estate 149
 Index 217
Holmes, B. 147 Jacobus, R., and Chapple, K. 20
homeless people 118 Johnson, Boris 44, 45, 51
hotel atrium games 110–11, 112 Jordan, J., and Frémeaux, I. 148
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 15 Juxtaposition 18
housing projects, community-development
corporations 20 Karam 135
housing protests 140 Kathner, R. 64
Houston, Project Row Houses (Lowe) 16 Keating, P. Prime Minister 60, 62
How Racism Takes Place (Lipsitz) 16 Kelly, O. 145
HUD (Housing and Urban Development) 15 Kensington Market (Toronto) 117
human capabilities 174 Khonsari, T. 6
human ecology framework 175 Kim, A.M., and Yates, J.J. 6–7
human flourishing 178 Krauss, R. 203
human interaction opportunities 116, Kwon, M. 203
117–20, 119, 137
human-scale social space: citizen Lacan, J. 105
engagement 74–5; FOSSILSS 73, 77; Laderman-Ukeles, M. 206
marginalised citizens - including 78–9; Lafayette Hotel 115
methods and methodology 72–6; murals Lake Eerie 110–11
71, 72, 74, 76, 77; overview 69–70; land, as community asset 137
Partner Events 75–6; permanent art and land reclamation 89
place activation 74–5; permanent space in land values 56
Thana 72, 74–5; place activation 75–8; Landesman, R. 4, 13–15, 142, 189
project context 71–2; recycled materials Landry, C. 28
74, 75; sculptures 73, 77; study findings Landzelius, M., and Rundqvist, P. 5
76–8; temporary spaces Borivali and Lansbury Estate 143
Powai 71–2, 73–6; Urban Vision 70–1, lantern-makers 36–7
75, 78 Last Chance, Colorado 89–91
Last Chance Module Array (M12) 89–90,
Ideal 13 initiative 44 90
Illuminator (99) 148 Last Chance Press 87
India, utility of space 69, 78 Latino community 17, 150
Indianapolis: Big Car Collaborative 110; Lee, J. 30
community development 109; National Lefebvre, H. 144, 148
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 110; leisure time 133
planning mistakes 115–16; smart Leveraging Investments in Creativity
leadership 120; Spark at Monument (LINC) 17
Circle 116; Virginia Avenue 117 life skills 145
Indianapolis City Market 118 Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC) 5, 73, 76,
industrial heritage, East Darling Harbour 78, 204
60, 62 LINC (Leveraging Investments in
Ingold, T., and Hallam, E. 32, 33 Creativity) 17
Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture Lippard, L. 84–7, 203
174, 184 Lipsitz, G. 16
InterAct Hub 134 Lissitzky, L. 130
Internet: Culture Blocks (web tool) 193; Literat, I., and Glăveanu, V.P. 31
online archive 160; world-scale tribes 118 Littlewood, J. 127, 128, 133
Ivey, B. 13 Lobo, M. 30
Iyengar, S. 7 local and situated knowledge 45, 52
local councillors 52
Jackson, M.R. 22 local government organisations, Australia
Jacob France Institute 193 56–7
Jacob, J. 175 local knowledge 45, 52, 128
218 Index
local residents’ engagement 135–6 MICD (Mayors’ Institute on City Design)
London: Aylesbury Estate 143, 149; Bow 208
and Kings Cross 129; Heygate Estate Miessen, M. 167
149; Kings Cross 132; Lansbury Estate Miles, A., and Ebrey, J. 31
143; Poplar 148–9 Millennium Park (Chicago) 116
London Metropolitan University 128, 134 Millers Point 62–3, 64, 65, 66
Los Angeles, Boyle Heights 150 Millington, S., and Edensor, T. 4
Lowe, R. 16, 112 MONA (Museum of Old and New) 121
LQC (Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper) 5, 73, 76, Moonraking Festival 36–7
78, 204 Moore, C. 62–3
Lydon, M., and Garcia, A. 29, 111–12, 205 Morris, R. 89
Moss, I.D. 141, 190
M12 5, 84, 85, 87–91 Mouffe, C. 128, 129, 132, 137–8
Machine in the Garden, The (Marx) 92 Mould, O. 36
MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino
Latino Americana) 16–17 Americana (MACLA) 16–17
Madden, D. 150 MSB (Maritime Housing Board) 62
Malevich, K. 130 Muessig, A., and Gadwa, A. 20
Maori Farewell Song 65 muf 158
marginalised citizens 78–9 Mumbai: issues raised by projects 205;
Maritime Housing Board (MSB) 62 population growth 69–70, see also
Maritime Union of Australia 65 human-scale social space
market areas: Indianapolis 117, 118; Mumbai Metropolitan Region 72
Pittsburgh 113–14; Toronto 117 murals 71, 72, 74, 76, 77
Markusen, A. 190; and Bedoya, R. 19, Murid Brotherhood (Senegal) 31
20; and Gadwa Nicodemus, A. 4, Museum of Old and New (MONA) 121
11–12, 14 Museum of Street Art 73
Marsh, S.: and Walker, J. 5–6, 109–10, see music teachers 101
also collaborating artist and curator
conversation National Endowment for the Arts (NEA):
Marx, K. 97 Arts and Livability indicators 189–90,
Marx, L. 92, 105 191; Beyond the Building 204;
Mauss, M. 157 Congressional rebellion 13; displacement
Mayer, M. 145–6 19; early projects 201; Exploring our
Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) Town 193; grant applications 194;
208 Livability 188–90, 191; nested logic
McCarthy, K., et al. 13 models 195; Obama-appointed
McGonagle, D. 50, 203 administration 4, 11, 13–15; Our Town
McKeown, A 43–4, 142, 206 12, 15, 187; partnership with City of
McLean, H. 36 Indianapolis 110; regeneration projects
measuring outcomes U.S. projects: Big Data 141; Request for Proposals (RfP) 194;
glamor 190; groundtruthing 194; website 192
livability as a project goal 188–9; Our National Film and Sound Archive 63
Town 187, 188; overview 187; parallel Native American cultures 15
and complementary research efforts Native American folklore 121
193–5; secondary data sources 192; NEA see National Endowment for the Arts
theory of change model 194–5; validation (NEA)
exercises 190–3 Neckel, S. 166
Medvedkin, A. 130 Nehamas, A. 179
Metris Arts Consulting 193 neighborhood-embedded arts 14
Mexican Heritage Plaza 17 neighborhood meetings 120
Mexicano working class cultural spaces 19 Nelson, M. 149–50
Meyer, E.K. 179, 183 neoliberal ideologies 140, 143, 146
 Index 219
neoliberal language of urban regeneration pervasive racism 17
144–5 Petrescu, D. 157–8
neoliberal marketization 95 Philadelphia neighborhoods, gentrification
new era - what’s next: art of creative 20
placemaking 202–6; into the beyond philanthropic investments 56
206–9; coming full circle 200–2; phoney naturalism 62
economic advocacy hyperfocus 206; pickup basketball 117
established practitioners 207 Pierre community members 87
new urban governance models 175 Pipes, R. 131
New Urbanist principles 140, 141 Pittsburgh, Strip District 113–14, 117
New York, Prattsville 15–16 place activation, increased sociability 77–8
New York Review of Books 61, 62 place-embedded initiatives 16
newspaper reports 74 place guarding: artists against gentrification
Novak-Leonard, J., Brown, A. 22 147–50; Balfron Social Club (BSC)
Novella, C. 136 148–19, 151; Boyle Heights Alliance
Nussbaum, M. 174 Against Artwashing and Displacement
(BHAAAD) 150; community
Ohio Bigfoot Conference 121 engagement and social capital 145–7;
Oldenburg, C. 84 neoliberal ideologies 146, 148, 151;
organizations of color 18 neoliberal language of urban regeneration
Osório, L. 165 144–5; overview 140–4; Southwark
Other Spaces see Outros Espaços (Other Notes Archive Group (SNAG) 149–50,
Spaces) 151
Our Town: emergence of project 12, 15; Place Leaders 57
evaluation tool 23, 187, 189–90; funding places, inwardly oriented 110–11
initiatives 19; grant application Places in the Making (Silberberg) 204
guidelines 193; Logic Model 197; Plains of Colorado, post offices 87
outcome categories 195; residents’ Plan it Hennepin (Minnesota) 193
attachment to communities 190; Theory Platt, L. 30, 35
of Change 196 Plea for an unCreative City (BAVO) 148
Outros Espaços (Other Spaces): apathy and Portland, Oregon 112
lack of engagement 157, 165, 166–7; Portugal: Beja 156, 159; Beja II 159–60,
Beja II 159–60, 160, 161–2, 164, 166, 160, 161–2, 164, 166, 167–8; public
167–8; collaboration 164–5; context and space design 165, 166, see also Outros
methodology 159–64; demographic loss Espaços (Other Spaces)
159; development budget 161; interviews post offices, Plains of Colorado 87
with local residents 163, 168; online Potrč, M. 162–4
archive 160; overview 156–9; Powai 71–2, 73
pedagogical approach 160; project legacy PPS (Project for Public Spaces) 71, 73, 145
162; public space design 161–2, 165; Prague/Pilsen Year of Culture 11
residents involvement 167; Sketchup Prattsville, New York 15–16
renders 168; Strategic Rehabilitation Press’s Centre Pivot Series (M12) 87–8
Programme 160; success and design Price, C. 127, 128, 133
indicators 165–6 PricewaterhouseCoopers 97, 101–2
print media 74
Pagrotsky, et al. 96 Pritchard, S. 6, 201
Palmer, J., and Zebracki, M. 52–3 Project for Public Spaces (PPS) 71,
participation, romanticised 157, 167 73, 145
Pask, G. 133 Project Row Houses (Lowe) 16, 112
pastoralism 92 property developers 145
People and Places: Public Attitudes to property values 22
Beauty (UK Government) 182 public good 183
people of color 16, 17, 18 public realm 57
220 Index
public space, marketisation and projects 89; overview 83; regional
privatisation 66 post offices 87; restrictive to-do’s 91–2;
public space design 161–2, 165, 166 what’s wrong with creative placemaking
public works collective 127, 132, 135–6 91–2
pyramid sculpture (Nelson) 149–50 rural places, nostalgia for 92
Russia, Bolshevik Russia 129–31
quango-ized governance 105
salt marsh 45
racism 17 San Francisco Bay area 20
radical relatedness 207 San Jose, California: MACLA (Movimiento
Rautio, P. 30 de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana)
Ravinet, J. 44 16–17; Mexican Heritage Plaza 17
recycled materials 74, 75 San Jose Redevelopment Agency 17
Redd, D. 18 Sarmiento, C. 19
referee role 120 Saxton, R. 84–6, 87
Regnér, Å. 104 Schupach, J. 21, 192
Reinmuth, G. 61 Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and
Reinvestment Fund, The 3 Maths (STEAM) 208–9
Remix: Creating Places for People on Scrimshaw, M. 47
West Broadway (Juxtaposition) 18 sculptures: Center for Social Sculpture
Reynolds, E. 204 (Minneapolis) 84; FOSSILSS 73, 77;
RGS (Royal Geographical Society) 1–2 human-scale social space 73, 77; pyramid
ripple effects 104 sculpture (Nelson) 149–50
Rise of the Creative Class, The (Florida) Seifert, S., and Stern, M. 3
13, 141 Senegal, Murid Brotherhood 31
ritual art 86 sense of place 56
rituals 87 Shekarabi, A. 104
Road Leads to Nowhere, This (M12) 87 Shigekawa, J. 13–14
Robin Hood Gardens 143 shopping, isolated experience 116, 117
Robinson, J. 31 Shou Sugi Ban 90
Rock Garden (Chandigarh) 31 SIAP (Social Impact of the Arts) 3, 207
rodeo culture 87 Sibley, D. 64
Rogers, Richard 60, 61 Silberberg, S. 204
Rolón, C. 121 sink estates 143
Roman Road festival 135 situated knowledge 45, 52
Roman Road Public Living Room 134 Sketchup renders 168
Roman Road Trust (RRT) 135 skilled labor 177
rootedness, desire for 91 Slaithwaite 36–7
Rothlisberger, M. 87 Smith, N. 144
Royal Geographical Society (RGS) 1–2 Smithson, R. 90
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds SNAG (Southwark Notes Archive Group)
(RSPB) 45, 49 149–50, 151
RRT (Roman Road Trust) 135 social agency, delivery of 130
RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of social agenda, governmental tools 158
Birds) 45, 49 Social Architecture 86
Rundqvist, P., and Landzelius, M. 5 Social Art Practitioner 149
rural America, arts philanthropy 91–2 social capital: Bow Common and Common
rural case: artists aren’t always activists Room, The (public works collective) 136;
83–7; collaboration (framing) 91; and community engagement 145–7;
elemental awareness 86; installations/ marginalised people and communities
books 88–9; Last Chance, Colorado 146; place guarding 142–3; Wrecked! On
89–91; Last Chance Module Array (M12) The Intertidal Zone 49, 50
89–90, 90; M12 87–91; mobile temporary social cleansing 62–3, 66, 148–9
 Index 221
social cohesion, site-specific interventions 70 Temel, R. 136
social engineering, negative 133 temporary spatial object/architecture:
social housing 143 Agitprop trains 127–8, 130–1, 137;
Social Impact of the Arts (SIAP) 3, 207 Common and Common Room, The
social interaction opportunities 116, 117–20, (public works collective) 134–6; DIY
119, 137 Regeneration (public works collective)
social media engagement 74, 79, 135 131–3; Fun Place, The (Littlewood and
Social Sculpture 84–5, 86, 87 Price) 127–8, 133–4, 137; inclusive
social spaces, as pause points 71, 76 practices 204; key factors 137; land as
socially engaged art practice 141–2 community asset 137; local residents’
South Dakota 87 engagement 135–6; mobility - vice and
South Korea, National Arts Agency 12 virtue 132; overview 127–9; situating
Southend-on-Sea, situating art 43–4 spatial objects/architectures in place
Southwark Notes Archive Group (SNAG) 129–30
149–50, 151 Thames Estuary 44–6, 47, 49, 51
Souvenir (Thames fishing boat) 48 Thames Estuary island airport 44, 45, 51
Soviet Agitation Propaganda Vehicles Thana 72, 74–5
(Agitprop trains) 127–8, 130–1, 132, 137 Thompson, A. 203
Soviet Communist Party 130 Thriving Cities Group 184
Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (Edensor Thriving Cities Lab 184
and Millington) 4, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36 Thriving Cities Project: ecological model
spatial objects term 128 of cities 174–5; education opportunities
Special Protected Area status 45 177; Endowment Framework 175–8, 184;
stakeholders: accountability to 22; future research 182–4; human ecology
concept 205 framework 175; overview 173–4;
Star Route 1 (M12 and Rothlisberger) 87 participation - authenticity 181; role
ST+Art India 73, 74 of Beauty 173–4, 178–9, 180–2;
State Significant Sit 61 sustainability 183; values of truth and
STEAM (Science, Technology, goodness 178; why thriving 174
Engineering, Arts and Maths) 208–9 ticketed festival grounds 115
Stern, M. 142; and Seifert, S. 3 Tube Factory (Big Car Collaborative) 121
storybox 65 Tumblr 31
Strategic Rehabilitation Programme 160 Twitter 79
street art groups 73 Two Tree Island 47
suffragettes 135
supermarkets 116, 117 Ultra-red 149
Sustainable Development Goals 208 unemployment, Gothenburg (peri-urban)
Sweden: Cultural and Creative Industries 95, 97, 98, 100, 101
and Regional Growth 95–6; UNESCO World Heritage constitution,
governmental polices and practices 106; (article 4, 1973) 208
market-oriented reforms 95; Minister for Unguarded Moments 63, 64
Gender Equality 104; Minister for Social United Kingdom (UK): London 129, 132,
Affairs 104; neo-liberal deregulation 96; 143, 148–9; welfare reforms 133
welfare state 97, see also Gothenburg United States Conference of Mayors
(peri-urban) (USCM) 208
Swedish Gender Equality Agency 104 United States of America (USA):
Sydney, urban transformation projects Department of Housing 189, 190, 192;
57, 58 Department of Transport 15
Systems art 86 University of Virginia 174
Urban Art Network 100–1
Tactical Urbanism (Lyon and Garcia) 29, urban blight, human flourishing 178
111–12 urban communities, civic engagement 173
Tapscott, H. 16 Urban Institute 22, 192
222 Index
urban population (world) 175 Wendler, J. 35
urban regeneration tools 147 Western Express Highway 72
urban revitalisation projects: exclusionary what can the arts do for you 15
practices 64; socially-inclusive White Paper (Markusen and Gadwa
community engagement 67; tensions Nicodemus): case studies 145, 201;
66–7 creative placemaking definition 83, 84,
urban thriving, contextualizing ‘The 103–4; cultural outcomes 22; ecological
Beautiful’ 182 approach 207; international interest
urban transformation projects, Sydney 11–12; Mayors’ Institute on City Design
57, 58 (MICD) 208; NEA research investment
Urban Vision 5, 69, 70–1, 75, 78, 204 187; and Our Town 14, 188
US armed forces, creative arts therapy 15 White River State Park 115
US cultural policy 13 Whitehead, F. 112
USCM (United States Conference of Wilderness project (public works collective)
Mayors) 208 135
Utveckling Nordost AB 97 Winnicott, D.W. 151
WolfBrown 22
V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) 143 wood-burning technique 90
Validating Arts and Livability Indicators Worden, S 46, 47
(VALI) 192 working class, systemic eviction 144
Vásquez, C., and Creel, S. 30–1 World Bank, social capital 142
vernacular creativity: creative citizenship World Charter on the Right to the City
34–7; creative multiplicity 29–31; (Osório) 165
decentring creativity 31–4; overview world-scale tribes 118
28–9; renaissance in small-scale World Stage (Tapscott) 16
making 33 Wrecked! On The Intertidal Zone: artistic
Verson, J. 148 commissions 46–9; building a
vibrancy indicators 21, 190 community-based arts project 46–9;
Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 143 Citizen Science 47–8; citizen science
Visual Disobedience 73, 74 51–2; community participation 51;
visual language 130 ecological damage 45, 47; Graveyard
Vivid Sydney 57 of Lost Species 48; local and situated
knowledge 45, 52; local engagement for
Waitt, G., and Gibson, C. 30, 33, 35 local change 49–53; overview 5, 43;
walkability 71, 78 situated art 43–4; social and cultural
Walker, A. 18 capital engagement 50–1; Talking Dirty;
Walker, D. 183 Tongue First! 47; Thames Estuary 44–6,
Walker, J. 5; and Marsh, S. 5–6, 109–10, see 47, 49, 51
also collaborating artist and curator
conversation Yates, J.J., and Kim, A.M. 6–7
Walmart 116, 117 YoHa 44, 45, 48
Washington County Commissioners Yokokoji, M. 44
89–91
welfare state: and social capital 146; Zebracki, M., and Palmer, J. 52–3
Sweden 97; United Kingdom (UK) 133 Zuidervaart, L. 180, 181