Put the power of arts and culture to work in your community Part 1 of this unique guide distills research and emerging ideas behind culturally driven community development and explains key underlying principles. You'll understand the arts impact on community well-being and have the rationale for engaging others. Find inspiration and ideas from twenty case studies Part 2 gives you ten concrete strategies for building on the unique qualities of your own community. Each strategy is illustrated by two case studies taken from a variety of cities, small towns, and neighborhoods across the United States. You'll learn how people from all walks of life used culture and creativity as a glue to bind together people, ideas, enterprises, and institutions to make places more balanced and healthy. These examples are followed in Part 3 with six steps to assessing, planning, and implementing creative community building projects: 1. Assess Your Situation and Goals; 2. Identify and Recruit Effective Partners; 3. Map Values, Strengths, Assets, and History; 4. Focus on Your Key Asset, Vision, Identity, and Core Strategies; 5. Craft a Plan That Brings the Identity to Life; 6. Secure Funding, Policy Support, and Media Coverage. Detailed guidance, hands-on worksheets, and a hypothetical community sample walk you through the entire process. Each section includes additional resources as well as an appendix listing books, web sites, organizations, and research studies. By understanding the theoretical context (Part 1), learning from case studies (Part 2), and following the six steps (Part 3), you'll be able to build a more vibrant, creative, and equitable community.

Urban and regional planners, elected officials, and other decisionmakers are increasingly focused on what makes places livable. Access to the arts inevitably appears high on that list, but knowledge about how culture and the arts can act as a tool of economic development is sadly lacking. This important sector must be considered not only as a source of amenities or pleasant diversions, but also as a wholly integrated part of local economies. Employing original data produced through both quantitative and qualitative research, Creative Communities provides a greater understanding of how art works as an engine for transforming communities. "Without good data and analysis—much of it grounded in economic theory—we cannot hope to strengthen communities through the arts or to achieve any of the other goals we set for the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest nationwide funder of the arts." —from the Foreword by Rocco Landesman Contributors: Hasan Bakhshi (Nesta UK), Elisa Barbour (University of California, Berkeley), Shiri M. Breznitz (Georgia Institute of Technology), Roland J. Kushner (Muhlenberg College), Rex LaMore (Michigan State University), James Lawton (Michigan State), Neil Lee (Nesta UK), Richard G. Maloney (Boston University), Ann Markusen (University of Minnesota), Juan Mateos-Garcia (Nesta UK), Anne Gadwa Nicodemus (Metris Arts Consulting), Douglas S. Noonan (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis), Peter Pedroni (Williams College), Amber Peruski (Michigan State), Michele Root-Bernstein (Michigan State), Robert Root-Bernstein (Michigan State), Eileen Roraback (Michigan State), Michael Rushton (Indiana University), Lauren Schmitz (New School for Social Research), Jenny Schuetz (University of Southern California), John Schweitzer (Michigan State), Stephen Sheppard (Williams College), Megan VanDyke (Michigan State), Gregory H. Wassall (Northeastern University)

This Handbook is the first to explore the emergent field of ‘placemaking’ in terms of the recent research, teaching and learning, and practice agenda for the next few years. Offering valuable theoretical and practical insights from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, it provides cutting-edge interdisciplinary research on the placemaking sector. Placemaking has seen a paradigmatic shift in urban design, planning, and policy to engage the community voice. This Handbook examines the development of placemaking, its emerging theories, and its future directions. The book is structured in seven distinct sections curated by experts in the areas concerned. Section One provides a glimpse at the history and key theories of placemaking and its interpretations by different community sectors. Section Two studies the transformative potential of placemaking practice through case studies on different places, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. It also reveals placemaking’s potential to nurture a holistic community engagement, social justice, and human-centric urban environments. Section Three looks at the politics of placemaking to consider who is included and who is excluded from its practice and if the concept of placemaking needs to be reconstructed. Section Four deals with the scales and scopes of art-based placemaking, moving from the city to the neighborhood and further to the individual practice. It juxtaposes the voice of the practitioner and professional alongside that of the researcher and academic. Section Five tackles the socio-economic and environmental placemaking issues deemed pertinent to emerge more sustainable placemaking practices. Section Six emphasizes placemaking’s intersection with urban design and planning sectors and incudes case studies of generative planning practice. The final seventh section draws on the expertise of placemakers, researchers, and evaluators to present the key questions today, new methods and approaches to evaluation of placemaking in related fields, and notions for the future of evaluation practices. Each section opens with an introduction to help the reader navigate the text. This organization of the book considers the sectors that operate alongside the core placemaking practice. This seminal Handbook offers a timely contribution and international perspectives for the growing field of placemaking. It will be of interest to academics and students of placemaking, urban design, urban planning and policy, architecture, geography, cultural studies, and the arts.

The Power of Culture in City Planning focuses on human diversity, strengths, needs, and ways of living together in geographic communities. The book turns attention to the anthropological definition of culture, encouraging planners in both urban and cultural planning to focus on characteristics of humanity in all their variety. It calls for a paradigm shift, re-positioning city planners’ "base maps" to start with a richer understanding of human cultures. Borrup argues for cultural master plans in parallel to transportation, housing, parks, and other specialized plans, while also changing the approach of city comprehensive planning to put people or "users" first rather than land "uses" as does the dominant practice. Cultural plans as currently conceived are not sufficient to help cities keep pace with dizzying impacts of globalization, immigration, and rapidly changing cultural interests. Cultural planners need to up their game, and enriching their own and city planners’ cultural competencies is only one step. Both planning practices have much to learn from one another and already overlap in more ways than most recognize. This book highlights some of the strengths of the lesser-known practice of cultural planning to help forge greater understanding and collaboration between the two practices, empowering city planners with new tools to bring about more equitable communities. This will be an important resource for students, teachers, and practitioners of city and cultural planning, as well as municipal policymakers of all stripes.

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.