Creative Placemaking: An Interview With the Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation funds in areas like “economic fairness” and “metropolitan opportunity.”
How does creative placemaking fit Ford’s priorities?

The Ford Foundation has, for over five decades, invested in the arts and invested
in community and economic development. The research that generated this idea
of creative placemaking has its roots in both community development and in arts
and culture. In some ways, creative placemaking is about a new paradigm at the
intersection of both.

The use of arts projects, cultural facilities, and the creative process in communities
to enliven and enrich the community experience, while at the same time
contributing to economic development, is a really appealing idea to us. Creative
placemaking was a way to bring together two long-standing areas of work of the
foundation.

The Ford Foundation has always looked for the innovative edge. When it
comes to the vitality of places, that innovative edge might be social programs.
Certainly that was true historically. It might be catalytic uses of capital, what’s
now called impact investment. Or it might be the arts. Creative placemaking is
at Ford because it is consistent with the foundation’s culture of taking a risk and
innovating.

There is also a second reason: There has been a clear shift over the last 10 to 20
years in the leading thinking about places and what makes them vital and attractive.
It has gone from a near obsession with the hardware of place—the physical
systems—to a much deeper appreciation for the role of human capital, knowledge,
and creativity. Our support of creative placemaking reflects this shift.

A lot of attention has been paid to the “creative economy.” What’s the connection between
a creative economy and a creative place?

The creative economy is centered on livelihoods. Creative placemaking is about
revitalizing a small town, or a neighborhood in a bigger city.

One of the ways in which the creative economy and creative placemaking
come together is through talent and production: These are both rooted in place. Exchanges happen in place. It’s through a percolating of talent—through
ideas riffing off each other—that places behave in creative ways and produce
creatively.

There is a culture of place that evolves through tradition, a sense of memory, and
a narrative of a place—all things artists address in their work. And this culture is
deeply connected to the economic activity of a place.

Art needs an audience—a community if you like. Does that mean all art is creative placemaking?

No. I think it’s very important for those of us who are supporters of the creative
placemaking movement to be rigorous and to be analytical about what actually
constitutes creative placemaking. If everything that an artist does is creative placemaking,
then nothing is. The challenge for us all is to bring some sense of rigor to
our understanding.

Being a painter and just living in a place doesn’t necessarily equate to creative
placemaking. But, if you have an artist housing complex that houses 50 artists,
and that housing complex includes a community center, and there is a creative
output from the artists living there that is impacting the community—through
the creation of livelihoods or by transforming the physical space—and, if that
artist housing is part of a broader strategy for revitalization of the community,
then that’s creative placemaking.

You’ve got to be clear about what the community development elements are.
Is it jobs? Do physical design and redesign play a role? I think that we have to get
more rigorous. The early work of economists and researchers like Ann Markusen1
or Mark Stern2 helped to do just that. It was formative, and even they would argue
that it needs to be further refined. There continues to be a very robust research
agenda around this idea of creative placemaking. We at Ford, as supporters of
this movement, are investing in that research agenda. Ultimately you’ve got to
have data to back up this idea.

Placemaking, for a variety reasons, is necessarily defined by the boundaries of
place; community does not have to be. Audience for a theater company or visitors
to a museum may come from a wide geographic area. And there are large
numbers of people—including some of the most disadvantaged—who have
a place that serves as a base camp for them, though they don’t actually reside
there. It’s where their important relationships are—the ones they treasure, the
ones that define their routines—the place that anchors their church community,
where they are from, where their extended kin still live.

But, I don’t think that fact about communities being unfettered by physical location
changes the possibilities for placemaking. Place is defined by boundaries
plus a distinctive character. An important place can be quite micro. You think of
the Mission District in San Francisco, and the famous mural alley there,3 which
was a center for Latin American political art. That place was tiny, but it was incredibly
meaningful.

“Creative placemaking” is a newly coined term. What has been the historical relationship
between community development and the arts?

In the past, community development and the arts were in parallel play. There has
not been a lot of interaction, even when both were happening in the same places.
Until recently, community development has not included a deliberate effort to
create new kinds of economic opportunity through the arts. This is despite the
fact that some of the places that have received the most community development
investment have also been the cradle of important artistic movements, like the
Bronx and hip-hop.

This lack of interaction is in part because, in this country, community development
since the 1960s has had a problem-solving frame: delineating problems
and fixing them. It has been very heavy on financial investment and social
programs. Community development has also had elements of a social movement,
with community members making claims on government and the wider
society.

Artists and cultural institutions can take on an anchor quality in a community,
particularly when they decide to be community serving and to be productive in
place. But there is, understandably, a concern about compromising artistic standards
for the sake of some community cause. That can be an important conversation,
something to be talked through between artists and community constituents.

What do artists and arts organizations add to the work of traditional community development
actors (like Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), vocational
training programs, small business incubators)? And do artists need traditional community
development partners for their creative placemaking activities to be successful?

Artists often draw on the place where they are—give voice to that place. They learn
about the neighborhood’s history and patterns in a way that goes beyond day-today
experience. Artists help access the historical context of the community.

Community development has not consistently focused on the community
narrating itself. I think that artists can help community developers to connect,
engage, listen—all things that are very central to successful community development.
The artists I’ve met who are deeply engaged in their communities, like the
artists at Project Row Houses, have these kinds of community conversations.

This is good for the artists as well as the community. It gives the artists allies. It helps the artists to generate audiences and to imagine the larger social significance
of what they do. Artists can be part of the dialectic about where the
community is headed—about what are the critical issues.

And artists can also gain a lot from teaming up with traditional community developers.
There is a wide array of hard skills—like project management, budget
management, taking financial risk—where community developers have a lot of
experience working with projects at scale and ensuring projects run on time.

Artists and artist-led projects in communities often become platforms for community
resilience. They help create social capital. There are many, many examples:
from the Ashe Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, to Rick Lowe’s Project Row
Houses in Houston, to Theaster Gates’s work in Chicago, to Mark Bradford’s redevelopment
work in Los Angeles. There are many. When we look at those kinds of
projects, artists’ contribution to community resilience and building social capital,
it is both tangible and intangible. It’s hugely important.

Creative placemaking seems to assume every community has embedded creativity. What
about under-resourced communities where much of the population has moved away,
poverty is high, crime is high? Is creative placemaking possible in poor and vulnerable
communities?

There’s cultural production and culture in every community. I reject the idea that
a community that is poor can’t be a place of creative placemaking. It may take
an intervention. The creative process may need to be organized, leveraged, and
oxygenated, but you often find that creativity is there. Whether it is in song or
dance or in some other art form, it’s there.

People may not identify it as culture, in the kind of high art elitist way in which
many people think of culture, but it is often there. The discovery of that inherent
creativity is what is so exciting. It doesn’t mean that, in a poor neighborhood, in
order to have creative placemaking, you have to have artists move in. I reject that
idea categorically.

However, we’d be ignoring history if we didn’t take into account that the more
cultural production becomes commodified, the more it becomes attractive to
a mainstream audience and the more a community will become attractive as a
place to live and work. It is then that the issues of gentrification, and some of the
tensions inherent in transformation, become salient.

Communities of place have always shown a certain amount of turnover. They’re
not static sandboxes. That turnover is a source of vitality. There are times
when it can come with pain and conflict, it’s true. But the question is how the
newcomer—including the newcomer artist—finds home, finds a place, relates to
neighbors, becomes productive in a whole new direction in that place, and is
inspired by that place.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when it comes to community development,
it’s all about outcome data. What are some of the factors you consider to measure whether
a creative place is a strong and healthy community?

This idea of what makes a healthy community has evolved a lot in recent decades and recent years. Happily, it is a more multidisciplinary conversation now.
Sometimes, it’s literally about health—things like health indicators. Sometimes,
it’s about norms, behaviors, and the membership metrics that Bob Putnam4
and others have done so much to illuminate. Sometimes it is rightly about the
community as a place of investment: flows of capital, buying power.

I think that it’s a good thing that measurement is more multidimensional now.
But, we still have a lot to learn about how to capture the impact of creative placemaking
on communities. I don’t think that creative placemaking has necessarily
made a big impact on how success is measured in communities, though it has
much to offer and the potential is there.

You travel around the United States and the world visiting Ford programs. Do you
have any favorite examples of “creative places”—communities that have been shaped by
creativity?

Yes, many. These are communities suffused with cultural energy and creative
production that is central to the sense of place. New Orleans, of course, and
Salvador da Bahia in Brazil. Havana, Cuba, has that same, intensely creative
energy, many neighborhoods in New York City, Berlin, Amsterdam. What’s so
amazing, though, is that a place does not have to be big and cosmopolitan—like
those “world” cities—to be a very creative place.

Two projects are standouts: The GoDown in Nairobi founded by the remarkable
Joy Mboya. The GoDown is a repurposed industrial park on the outskirts of the
city that houses artists housing and studios, creative design SMEs, NGOs, and an
artist gallery collective. The other is the Townhouse in Cairo situated close to the
central business district and somewhat derelict. It’s a series of former auto repair
and manufacturing buildings that were refashioned as a community arts center
including a large theater, gallery, and local vendors. During the Arab Spring, the
Townhouse was a place for public discussion and debate, and it served as a refuge
during confrontations on the streets of Cairo. It’s a model of ingenuity and innovation
in a very challenging context.