THE SCENIC ROUTE

Getting Started with Creative Placemaking

Our Eight Approaches

Great places rely on good infrastructure combined with a meaningful mix of programming, public spaces and diverse economic opportunity for the people who then inhabit and bring them to life. The eight approaches outlined below represent proven avenues to improve partnerships while better knitting together all of the above.

By using these approaches for tapping into the social networks built around arts and culture, you can earn the trust of your community. By identifying sites of cultural significance, you can be mindful and inclusive of them in planning infrastructure and redevelopment projects.

In The Scenic Route, we outline eight basic approaches to creative placemaking to help you get started. Each approach consists of three things: an intro page with some basic information about the approach, a section called “Get Inspired: Local Examples” that typically provides at least one local, concrete example to provide some inspiration, and a section called “Go Deeper” which provides more detailed resources. The eight approaches we unpack in this resource below are not a linear list, nor do they represent the limit of what’s possible for you and your region or community.

Click on any approach below to jump right in.

 

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New tools for a new era

For those of you planning, designing and building transportation projects, creative placemaking is an emerging approach that every community should consider, and this primer can help you get started.

America’s cities, towns and suburbs are rapidly changing and evolving, and transportation investments play a catalytic role in that transformation. As of 2013, for example, there were more than 700 rapid bus and rail projects planned in 109 regions and all indications are that the number has grown since then.1 Some of those projects have been planned to meet the booming demand for jobs and homes better connected by public transportation. According to research by Smart Growth America, between 2010 and 2015 more than 500 companies moved to downtown locations, in large part to take advantage of more walkable and transit-connected locations demanded by their workforce. 2

Perhaps thousands more projects will retrofit urban roadways to accommodate multiple transportation modes, address bottlenecks and lay the groundwork for the revitalization of older areas.

One of Jack Mackie’s dance steps installations in Seattle
One of Jack Mackie’s dance steps installations in Seattle. Creative Commons Flickr photo by John Henderson. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jbhthescots/6858612077/

However, major transportation projects, particularly in older and more populated areas, disrupt the surrounding community and frequently disrupt or even displace existing residents and businesses. Yet, as you will see through the examples in this resource, these projects can utilize a more holistic — and humanistic — approach to integrating transportation infrastructure into existing and future communities.

Local leaders and transportation professionals know that projects like these live or die depending on the level of support from community members. Experience tells these leaders that their job is made much easier — and the impact of the work is greater — when communities have a sense of ownership and stewardship because they see their values, culture and heritage expressed throughout the process and in the end result. Leaders measure a project’s success not only by the level of economic and population growth it supports, but also by the ability to help rather than displace the community.

Such displacement would be an especially disheartening outcome for redevelopment-oriented projects, because many actually aim to repair damage done to low-income neighborhoods and communities of color during previous rounds of urban renewal and freeway construction.

Beyond merely avoiding displacement, leaders employ infrastructure projects as building blocks of economic development and incorporate local arts, culture and heritage so that neighborhoods become distinct and unique places — destinations in their own right.

Pop Up Placemaking 004
Pop-up placemaking at the ACT: The Boulevard event in San Diego. Photo courtesy of City Heights Community Development Corporation.

Next: Why should I do it? What are the benefits?
Previous: Getting Started

  1. Reconnecting America tracks planned transit projects on their Transit Space Race map http://reconnectingamerica.org/spacerace/spaceracemap.html
  2. Read Smart Growth America’s Core Values report from 2015: http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/core-values

About Us

Transportation for America

Transportation for America is an alliance of elected, business and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions — because these are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity.

t4america.org

Thank You

This report was made possible through the generous support of the Kresge Foundation.

The Kresge Foundation “focuses on the role arts and culture play in re-energizing the communities that have long been central to America’s social and economic life,” believing that “arts and culture are an integral part of life and, when embedded in cross-sector revitalization activity, can contribute to positive and enduring economic, physical, social and cultural change in communities.” Kresge also supported projects detailed in this report in Nashville, Portland, San Diego and Detroit.