4 minute read
National Trends & Best Practices
National Trends and Best Practices
Celebrating and leveraging the breadth of the cultural arts ecosystem
Cultural arts activity in a city goes far beyond any one facility, program, or public art initiative. It is helpful to think of the arts sector as an ecosystem. Much like a natural ecology, the cultural arts ecosystem is made up of different physical, programmatic, organizational, and individual elements that all take on different roles, and support the larger system in different ways. From the arts economy to cultural celebrations to the impact of the arts on the built environment, these parts contribute to a dynamic and multifaceted system. This system can address and support a municipality’s broader goals, such as regional visitor attraction and tourism, or high quality of life and civic participation for all residents in all parts of the community.
The diagram below illustrates the complexity of the arts and culture ecosystem. Each individual aspect comes together as part of the whole and can be considered an area of opportunity for the Garland Cultural Arts Plan.
One of the key ways that the City of Garland distinguishes itself from other municipalities is the way in which it embraces the arts as a tool for helping to support other community goals, such as supporting communications, building community cohesion, and fostering local identity. Arts-based community development practices have come to the forefront nationally over the last ten years under the umbrella term “creative placemaking.” This idea of bringing the arts into the center of how we develop our towns and cities is not new – from Greek theater, to turn of the century municipal arts movements, to contemporary social arts practices, people have always sought ways to infuse deeper layers of community building and meaning making into the ways they form their cities and communities. Today we see cross-sector teams in the municipal and community development sectors working with artists and arts organizations to find out how they can partner on project that can bring in community members in meaningful ways.
At their core, creative placemaking projects are about place – a place’s history, its people, and its stories. The best projects are rooted in local communities, with specific concerns, histories, economies, visions, and aspirations. Another essential element of creative placemaking projects is that they leverage the power of arts and culture strategies to help achieve the changes they’re looking to create - the arts are not an afterthought, but are rather a core aspect of achieving the change. Bringing artists, arts organization, and culture bearers to partner on issues where they may not have traditionally had a seat at the table allows new perspectives, new ideas, and new networks to emerge.
Today we are seeing an explosion of projects happening across all fifty states and a wide range of community issues and sectors. In each of these projects, partnerships between municipalities and artists and arts organizations are collaboratively creating place-based change. The critical component of each project is that the “creative” in creative placemaking
ABOVE: An example of a tactical creative crosswalk project, courtesy of the Office of Neighborhood Vitality.
Find out more about these strategies in the Working With Partners Toolbox in the appendix. is an adverb describing the making (or ‘keeping’!), not an adjective describing the place. In other words, arts and culture strategies become the way community goals are met, and the power that the arts bring to community equations can be seen in housing, transportation projects, public safety initiatives, and community health. Artists are becoming partners with local governments in furthering community goals.
One of the key ways to understand creative placemaking within the local government sector is to understand the difference between doing projects ABOUT arts and culture and doing projects WITH arts and culture. Great creative placemaking work involves doing projects WITH arts and culture partners to help support OTHER city goals. These projects could look like artists being embedded within city departments to tackle old problems in new ways, engaging mural artists to help support local public health strategies by creating positive messages about a neighborhood, or any other number of possibilities.
The City of Garland is already taking actions to bring cultural arts into the conversation about larger city goals, from neighborhood revitalization to visitor attraction to youth skill-building. Indeed, as the planning process revealed, Garland artists and creatives are impressively civic minded and ready to partner on projects to support and improve the communities they live in. New avenues for funding, training, and other technical assistance to support this work are emerging as part of the growing national practice of creative placemaking.
