Creative Placemaking: Building Partnerships to Create Change

Abstract

Arts, artists, and creative strategies can be critical vehicles for planning to achieve social, economic, and community goals. Creative placemaking is one type of arts-led planning that incorporates both stakeholder participation and community goals. Yet, questions exist around who participates in the creative placemaking process and to what end. Our study discusses a case where a state-sponsored workshop brings people from diverse backgrounds together to facilitate community development and engagement through creative placemaking. In particular, the event discussed in this study highlights how a one-shot intervention can reshape perceptions of creative placemaking held by planners, non-planners, artists, and non-artists. Our study also shows that while pre-workshop participants tended to identify resource-based challenges, post-workshop participants focused more on initiating collaborations and being responsive to community needs. The different attitudes before and after the state-sponsored workshop demonstrate the importance of facilitating stakeholder understanding and engagement for successful creative placemaking.