Creative Placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design into community development to strengthen local identity, revitalize spaces, support economic vitality, and build social connection.

Economic Deveopment

  • Contributing to a community’s economic vitality by making places more active, distinctive, and inviting. By providing opportunities for artists and keeping resources circulating within the community.

  • Drawing people into public spaces encourages time spent in a neighborhood, business, or space, creating opportunities for artists and businesses to benefit.

  • Generating economic activity for nearby businesses and creating a vibrant arts scene to draw people who want to contribute to the identity. Making it a place where people want to visit, live, work, and invest.

Social Impact

  • Investing in the places we live and gather, that carry stories about who belongs there, whose experiences are recognized, and whose voices are heard.

  • Making space for experiences and perspectives that have been overlooked or underrepresented, inviting contributions to the stories, traditions, and knowledge that help develop a sense of identity and ownership of these special places we call home.

  • Drawing connections between people who might not otherwise interact by making something together, attending an event, sharing a story, or simply providing a gathering place to strengthen relationships and reduce isolation.

Collaborative Partnerships

  • Bringing together artists, cultural organizations, community members, local businesses, nonprofits, and other partner sites allows for a broader range of voices and expertise to shape a project.

  • Creative placemaking encourages development to happen with the community. Artist-in-Residence brings new ways of seeing and imagining a place, while residents contribute resources, expertise and connections.

  • A community art event, workshops, artists’ presentations and performances can introduce people and organizations to one another, building lasting relationships toward a shared community goal of investing in each other.

Physical Transformation

  • Reimagines the built environment through murals, pop-up galleries, adaptive reuse of vacant properties, and creative infrastructure design.

  • Artists help communities reimagine the built environment by bringing creativity, experimentation, and local identity into physical spaces.

  • Changing the way people experience a space can change what they believe is possible there; by finding new possibilities for existing buildings, research spaces, and gardens, we ensure the space remains useful and meaningful into the future.

Creative Placemaking