Creative Placemaking: Creating Change by Building Partnerships

Arts, artists, and creative strategies can be critical vehicles for achieving social, economic, and community goals. Creative placemaking is one type of arts-led planning that incorporates the goals of communities with stakeholder participation. Questions exist, however, around who participates in the creative placemaking process and to what end. This study explores a case where a state-sponsored workshop brought together people from diverse backgrounds to facilitate community development and engagement through creative placemaking. The study highlights how a one-shot intervention can reshape perceptions of creative placemaking that are held by planners, nonplanners, artists, and nonartists. The study shows that while pre-workshop participants focused on identifying resource-based challenges, post-workshop participants focused more on initiating collaborations and being responsive to community needs. The different attitudes before and after the state-sponsored workshop demonstrate the importance of not only building stakeholder understanding but also facilitating stakeholder engagement for successful creative placemaking.

neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities" (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010, p.3).This definition features strategic actions initiated through cross-sector partnerships and place-oriented enterprises through and with the arts (Markusen & Nicodemus, 2014).
In general, creative placemaking contributes to three important goals: livability, diversity, and economic revitalization.These goals are intended to address local residents' concerns about public safety as well as their aesthetic and expressive needs while also promoting environmental transformation by improving public infrastructure and design landscapes.Arts and culture-based creative placemaking also helps to attract more local spending that can result in additional local government tax revenue.For instance, community members can spend more on local venues instead of traveling to other towns for entertainment and cultural activities (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010).Indeed, according to the Arts and Economic Prosperity 5 report (Cohen, 2017), the arts and cultural sector generated nearly $28 billion in total government revenue and created about 4.6 million full-time equivalent jobs in 2015.
Creative placemaking "revitalizes public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired" (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010, p.3).The goal is to create places that are "cultural industry crucibles where people, ideas, and organizations come together, generating new products, industries, jobs, and American exports" (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010, p.5).The creative placemaking approach differs from other planning and cultural policy initiatives because it involves a much boarder array of stakeholders, emphasizes the role of nonarts stakeholders, and cultivates non-traditional arts funders (Nicodemus, 2013).Further, creative placemaking constructs a platform through which unique cross-sector partnerships can be built.In the past few years, arts agencies in cities like San José and Minneapolis have collaborated or merged with economic and community development agencies to leverage their partnerships to become central players for planning (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010).This kind of initiative has brought artists to the center of community planning, highlighting their potential for creatively designing "locally informed, human-centric, and holistic" solutions ("Introduction | ArtPlace," n.d.; Redaelli, 2016).
The present study focuses on a concrete intervention designed to foster creative placemaking initiatives among local stakeholders, with a specific focus on small and/or rural communities.The section that follows briefly discusses the role of artists as well as arts and cultural organizations in the planning process.This is followed by a description of the intervention, which is a state-sponsored workshop about creative placemaking.
The study is intended to explore how stakeholders perceive the role of arts and culture in creative placemaking before and after the state-sponsored workshop.Findings highlight the need for stakeholders to enhance their shared understanding of the goals of creative placemaking and focus on building platforms for collaboration among artists, planners, nonartists, and nonplanners.Successful creative placemaking cases have often emphasized that building partnerships across sectors and levels of government was key to their success (e.g., Kovacs & Biggar, 2017;Redaelli, 2016).Yet, forging partnerships and assembling adequate financing have constantly come up as challenges in these endeavors (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010).As such, the concluding section discusses how a one-time intervention, such as a state-sponsored workshop, can be a cost-effective means of amplifying the efficacy of creative placemaking.
processes."The artist in today's society has a mandate to act in ways that no other agents of governance could themselves afford to do" (Metzger, 2011, p.222).Artists can disrupt linear thinking (Gordon, 2005) by introducing informational entropy (Lehrer, 2012;Thomas, Pate, & Ranson, 2014) and illuminating social dynamics between stakeholder groups (Gordon, 2005).Artists can also shape cultural atmospheres (Metzger, 2011) and provide avenues to understand social dynamics (Gordon, 2005).
Even though planning can, and should, span several disciplines, the actual planning process can often fall short of properly incorporating local voices since planners tend to be defined by their "established professional role" (Metzger 2011, p.222).They are not, for example, trained as storytellers (Dang, 2005).However, because planning affects many stakeholders, the planning process should incorporate diverse voices (Cilliers & Timmermans, 2014) in order to tell a community's unique story.This type of planning approach fosters the contribution of a broad range of perspectives from local community members-many of whom likely prioritize microlevel issues rather than the macro-level focus of top-down leadership (Pollock & Sharp, 2012).
Existing research highlights the role of artists as well as arts and cultural organizations in planning (e.g., Evans, 2005).However, a need exists to examine how meaningful interventions can bring in artists and nonartists as planning catalysts.As Metzger (2011, p. 215) has noted, Both Sandercock (2003Sandercock ( , 2004) ) and Hillier (2002Hillier ( , 2003) ) have used art analogies to expand our mode of thinking about planning theory and practice, but neither of them suggests any concrete measures as to how the analogies between art and planning can be put into concrete practice in the form of planner-artist collaborations within the planning process.
Further, arts and culture-focused planning research focuses mainly on urban cities (Evans & Foord, 2008;Florida, 2002;Hall, 2000;Landry, 2006) leaving cases in suburban or rural areas largely out of the picture.Finally, successful artist-planning collaborations rely on nonartist, nonplanner stakeholder support for implementation.The literature to date, however, tends to focus mainly on the role of professional planners and, to a lesser degree, artists.
Successful creative placemaking initiatives combine intentional incorporation of artist expertise and creativity along with diverse local voices.They are expected to be prompted by an initiator with innovative vision and drive, tailor strategy to distinctive features of place, mobilize public will, attract private sector buy-in, enjoy support of local arts and cultural leaders, and build partnerships across sectors, missions, and levels of government.(Markusen & Gadawa, 2010, p. 5) Dynamic stakeholder relationships are critical to successful creative placemaking initiatives; as such, these relationships require sufficient time to foster trust exchanging ideas (Kovacs & Biggar, 2017).As with many planning initiatives, creative placemaking encourages a bottomup focus that incorporates a wide range of stakeholder views.However, as Ashforth and Kavaratzis (2016) noted, questions exist around the idea of which stakeholders participate and how they influence the process.
One key to successful integration of artists and creative initiatives is intentional incorporation of their participation in the process, rather than bringing in artists as auxiliary participants after all major decisions have been made (Garrett-Petts & Klohn, 2013).Unfortunately, the incorporation of artists and creativity thus far has been mostly perfunctory or tokenistic, such as the incorporation of Aboriginal arts during the 2000 Sydney games (Garcia, 2004).Indeed, as Mathews (2014Mathews ( , p. 1030) ) described in relation to Toronto, Ontario's Distillery District redevelopment, "The rote incorporation of artists and craftspeople at the Distillery results in tokenism, highlighting how the 'just add artists and stir' mentality is fraught with issues related to retention and engagement."If done intentionally, however, incorporating artists into the ranks of other planning actors can make creativity a central means to achieving community health, safety, and economic well-being.

The Present Case: A State-Sponsored Creative Placemaking Workshop
In recognition of the factors leading to successful creative placemaking collaborations, the Indiana Arts Commission (IAC) implemented a creative placemaking workshop with the goal of fostering collaborations across placemaking actors.The IAC targeted local community leaders, planners, economic developers, tourism or cultural administrators across the state and assembled them in one place.The IAC promoted the workshop with preference given to participants coming from small and/or rural communities as follows: "This high-energy day and a half-long workshop will introduce the practice of creative placemaking as a viable strategy for small and/or rural Indiana communities and neighborhoods" (Prosperity Indiana, 2017).The IAC requested that each community send at least two representatives (preferably one nonartist).
The program for the day-and-a-half long workshop emerged from a series of meetings with local artists, planners, and community stakeholders.Given that some communities had already been actively engaged in creative placemaking initiatives, the workshop offered concurrent sessions on two tracks: a "foundations track" for those new to the approach and a "deepening track" for more experienced creative placemaking stakeholders.The workshop also included panels for all participants; networking opportunities with representatives of statewide creative placemaking stakeholders, including the IAC, Office of Community and Rural Affairs, and Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority; a bus tour of creative placemaking in Indianapolis (open only to participants from communities with more than one participant, thus ensuring session participation); and a live creative placemaking activation as a concluding event.
Before the workshop, attendees were asked to fill out a survey that served as a registration form.This survey was designed to get participants to identify their connections to and perceptions of creative placemaking, including its roles and challenges as well as their own local priorities.Out of 120 participants, 110 submitted usable pre-workshop surveys that also served the registration purpose (representing a 91.67% response rate).The registration and evaluation surveys are provided as appendices.
After the day-and-a-half long workshop, attendees were asked to fill out a post-workshop survey.This survey asked attendees to identify their key takeaways, any unexpected learnings, whether their pre-event questions were answered, remaining questions that they had, and creative placemaking-related actions that they were committed to taking within the next 30 days.Of the workshop attendees, 74 participants submitted usable post-event evaluation surveys (representing a 61.67% response rate).

Findings
The findings are presented in three sections: the characteristics of participants, pre-workshop participant perceptions, and post-workshop participant perceptions.

Characteristics of Participants
Since the IAC specifically prioritized participation of small and/or rural Indiana communities, findings are disaggregated according to this classification.Purdue University's Indiana County Classification Scheme informed the categorization of each county as rural, rural/mixed, or urban.Just under half of participants (48%) came from either rural (22%) or rural/mixed (26%) counties.The remainder came from urban counties.
Creative placemaking relies on artist input, planning capacity, political support and funding.As such, participants were asked to label their identification with placemaking based on their role as either artists, planners/political stakeholders, or non-political resource-controlling stakeholders: 1. Creators: These included artists and nonplanners engaged in arts and culture-based placemaking initiatives, 2. Coordinators: These included nonartists, planners, public officials, or other stakeholders with political, regulatory, zoning, or other such responsibilities in the community.These individuals were often non-funders, 3. Catalysts: These included nonartists, nonplanners, non-political placemaking stakeholders.These individuals were often funders, or 4. Consumers: These included nonartists, nonplanners, non-resource controlling stakeholders.These individuals were often patrons of arts and culture-based placemaking initiatives.
The terminology for these roles evolved during pre-workshop planning sessions with various community stakeholders.Those engaged in the planning sessions agreed that these roles adequately captured the breadth of connections that people can have with creative placemaking without being too technical or full of jargon.Table 1 maps the artistic, planning/public, and nonpolitical roles to the terminology developed by the IAC's stakeholders.
Over half (57%) the participants identified themselves as creators, and 66% of the remaining participants identified their role as coordinators.Sense of Creative Placemaking.During registration, participants responded to the following prompt: "An example of a creative placemaking initiative in my community is…" No definition of creative placemaking was included.This was a deliberate choice in order to obtain a snapshot of what the term meant to participants.We used the information provided by participants to research these projects online on their respective organizational and community websites (where available).Using these publicly available descriptions of these projects we categorized the responses (again using ArtPlace's Community Development Matrix categories).
As Table 4 shows, over 80% of all initiatives identified were related to economic development, most of which were tied to art in some ways, including cultural districts and events around gallery hops (e.g., First Fridays).The only other initiative type with a double-digit share in any given county type was education/youth-related projects.These projects represented 10% of initiatives in urban counties (and 5% of total initiatives in all counties).
Creative Placemaking Challenges.Challenges to creative placemaking generally fell within three categories: resource-based, community buy-in, and political/government buy-in.As Table 5 shows the first two categories accounted for over two-thirds (68%) of challenges identified.In rural and rural/mixed counties, a greater number of creators identified challenges related to community buy-in as compared with resources, while urban creators focused on resource-based issues.It should be noted, however, that the need for more buy-in also represents resource-based issues.Participants across all counties identified issues related to the value of arts (without specifically mentioning community support).

Post-Workshop Participant Perceptions
Over 88% of survey participants in the post-workshop survey indicated that they obtained answers to their primary pre-workshop questions about creative placemaking (discussed above).The following section presents participant takeaways from the workshop and creative placemaking action items that participants indicated they planned to take following the workshop.

(49%)
Workshop Participant Takeaways.Participants were asked to identify up to three takeaways (responses are summarized in Table 6).The top takeaways focused on networking/communication, idea generation, planning+creativity, and recognition of stakeholder needs.Of note, resource-based takeaways reflected 9% of all of the participants' takeaways.
Participants also reflected on new or unexpected learnings.Some of the themes from the key takeaways appeared in these learnings, including idea generation (e.g., ideas for public art), the need for "cross communication between all levels focused on economic development celebrating and recognizing place," the diversity of participants and the attendant strong networking, and evidence of successful projects, including "the need for small victories."The IAC's focus on small and/or rural communities is reflected here as well, with participants noting the following: • "many great ideas that can be applicable to rural communities," • "how to direct conservative community members when working in smaller towns," • "seeing creative placemaking in rural communities were pleasant surprise [sic] based on conversations I have had with attendants." Next Steps.During the post-survey, participants shared creative placemaking actions that they would be willing to take within the 30 days following the workshop.

Discussion and Conclusion
Creative placemaking combines intentional incorporation of artists' experience with the expression of diverse local voices, including arts and nonarts stakeholders.This case examined the impact of a state-sponsored creative placemaking workshops on individual perceptions of the concept and implementation challenges.Prior to the workshop, the majority of participants identified initiatives related to economic development.Resource limitations and community buy-in represented over two-thirds of the challenges that participants identified, reflecting both tangible and intangible resource development-related challenges to creative placemaking.After the workshop, participants focused more on the intangible aspects of creative placemaking, including networking, idea generation, and recognition of stakeholder needs.
As with most social science research, this study has several limitations that must be noted.This case study approach yields results that are mainly exploratory and not generalizable.Future research should build on these exploratory findings to further examine the mechanism to create artist-planner and nonartist-nonplanner collaborations to achieve broader community needs as well as the community factors that may influence such mechanisms.
The study is also limited in that individual pre-workshop and post-workshop forms were only able to be linked for a small number of responses (29 out of 120).This matched set was too small to provide statistically significant effectiveness of the workshop on individual participants.Still, the descriptive findings allowed the opportunity to observe the role of such platforms to foster collaborative creative placemaking.
Despite these limitations, this case highlights the impact that short interventions can have in educating communities about creative placemaking and fostering the collaborations necessary for such implementation.The participants of the creative placemaking workshop indicated challenges related to education about the value of arts, culture, and creative placemaking in general.Ultimately, this one-time intervention helped to enhance stakeholder understanding and engagement and can potentially create lasting spillover effects on communities.
Creative placemaking stakeholders can also use the language of economic development to demonstrate the value of these initiatives as well as to foster community support for collaboration.the value of arts and culture in communities with its Arts & Economic Prosperity project (for example, see Cohen, 2017).This project aims to address the "misconception that communities support arts and culture at the expense of local economic development" and to emphasize that "communities are investing in an industry that supports jobs, generates government revenue, and is the cornerstone of tourism" (Cohen, 2017, p. 9).
Even though participants identified resource-based issues to be the major challenge when asked during the pre-workshop survey, resource-based takeaways reflected only 9% of the participants' takeaways from the workshop.This aligns with research showing that barriers to network goals and collaboration are not only (or often primarily) resource-based (Levine Daniel & Moulton, 2017).This also suggests that participants walked away from the workshop focused on the collaborative and creative elements connected to arts and culture-led planning.
The actions to which participants committed themselves when leaving the workshop also reflected a shift in focus away from resources and toward community engagement and collaboration.Since the majority of participants were creators initially (concerned with resource-based challenges), this type of intentional intervention demonstrates one way to move creative placemaking discussions beyond (or potentially in the face of) resource-based capacity issues.Indeed, an earlier study that examined multiple cases of creative placemaking identified forging partnerships across sectors to be one of the prominent challenges.This study emphasized the need to attract buy-in from the private sector as well as from the general public (Markusen & Gadawa, 2010).The results of our case study suggest that intentional intervention led by local government as well as arts and cultural leaders can make it easier to overcome such challenges.
Further, the need to reach out to various community members brings the role of artists into the spotlight.Artists are valuable assets with entrepreneurial talents ripe for development in creative places.They have the capacity to use creative ways that amplify many community voices as well as bring diverse perspectives to coordinators and catalysts, which traditional planners often fail to address.This approach has broader applications for other institutions and sectors that are involved with revitalization and combating exclusion (e.g., sports) (Lees & Melhuish, 2015).The exploration of a one-shot government intervention described in our case study provides insights into how to overcome one of the biggest challenges in the creative placemaking approach, where artists and arts organizations serve as catalysts for planning.
Ultimately, this study addresses gaps in the creative placemaking literature related to implementation of stakeholder outreach and engagement as well as creative placemaking in nonurban areas.A creative placemaking approach should allow us to better answer the question of "who is a stakeholder?"The framework employed here demonstrates multiple connection levels to creative placemaking and further allows us to answer the questions of "what should we do?" and "how can we achieve the goals of arts-and culture-led planning?"Answering these questions will make creative placemaking approaches more successful and help to create intentional, inclusive collaborations that expand beyond artists and planners.

Disclosure Statement
Mirae Kim is an associate editor for JPNA.Current Issues in Practice manuscripts, however, are reviewed by the Current Issues in Practice editor.Other than this, the author(s) declare that there are no conflicts of interest that relate to the research, authorship, or publication of this article.

Table 2 .
Table2provides participant details related to role identification and county location.As Table3shows, participants identified economic development as the top priority across all county types, accounting for 32% of all priorities.Infrastructure was the only other priority representing slightly over 10% of identified priorities.In addition, participants from all Participant Role Self-Identification, by County Type

Table 4 .
Participant Perceptions of Creative Placemaking, by County Type

Table 5 .
Creative Placemaking Challenges Identified by Role and County Table 7 summarizes these responses.Almost all (97%) participants answered that they would focus on outreach of various kinds, implementing specific initiatives, or brainstorming/idea generation.Only a few (approximately 3%) participants specifically mentioned resource acquisition.The focus on Note: #=number of challenges; %=percent of challenges

Table 7 .
Types of Proposed Actions