Creative Placemaking

Cara Courage is an arts and placemaking academic and practitioner and is Head of Tate Exchange, Tate’s programme and spaces dedicated to socially engaged art and the role of art in society. Her book, Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (2017), presents case-study research on social practice placemaking. Cara has also completed a project as Research Adjunct on the metrics of creative placemaking with Thriving Cities, an initiative of University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, and continues her own social practice arts in place projects. Anita McKeown is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher working in creative placemaking, Open Source Culture/Technology and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education. Anita works for Art Services Unincorporated (ASU), an itinerant strategic platform which co-creates local-scale interventions that are context-responsive and ecologically sensitive, arising from extended relationships with people and place. ASU’s interventions are underpinned by the permacultural resilience framework and practical toolkit, a critical praxis for Creative Placemaking, trialled in London, Dublin and New Mexico (2008–15). Anita’s current research includes codesres: Co-designing for resilience in rural development through peer-to-peer networks and STEAM.

Introduction Curating Research, Theory and Practice (Cara Courage and Anita McKeown) Section One – Evolving Ecologies 1 Creative Placemaking: Reflections on a 21st Century American Arts Policy Initiative 2 Spaces of Vernacular Creativity Reconsidered Section Two – Dialogical Ecologies 3 Turning local interests into local action: Community-Based Art and the case of Wrecked! On The Intertidal Zone 4 Arrivals and Departures: Navigating an Emotional Landscape of Belonging and Displacement at Barangaroo in Sydney, Australia 5 A Case for Human-Scale Social Space in Mumbai Section Three - Scalable Ecologies 6 A Rural Case: Beyond Creative Placemaking 7 Creative Placemaking in Peri-Urban Gothenburg – Mission Impossible? 8 A Conversation between a Collaborating Artist and Curator: Placemaking, Socially Engaged Art, and Deep Investment in People Section 4 – Challenging Ecologies 9 Temporary Spatial Object/Architecture as a Typology for Placemaking 10 Place Guarding: Activist Art against Gentrification 11 Outros Espaços: Apathy and Lack of Engagement in Participatory Processes Section 5 – Extending Ecologies 12 Towards Beauty and a Civics Of Place: Notes From The Thriving Cities Project13 From Indicators to Face Validity to Theory—and Back Again: Measuring Outcomes of U.S. Creative Placemaking Projects Conclusion Moving into the beyond – what’s next for creative placemaking?