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Good morning. I'm delighted I can join you today from a quarter way around the world,
and I'd like to thank the Glasgow School of Art, the U.K. Fulbright Program, and Destiny
Media Studios for helping make this happen. A year ago, the Mayors' Institute for City
Design asked us to research and write a piece on art and culture as placemaking. They wanted
to know how this happens, who are the initiators and partners, where do the energy and resources
come from, and what are the results. And the results along are along several dimensions,
including: artistic creativity, quality of life, sustainability, and economic development.
My colleague Anne Gadwa and I of Metris Arts Consulting agreed. We loved to be called to
service in this way! In our resulting study, we define creative placemaking as happening
when partners from public, nonprofit, private, and community sectors join to strategically
shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city or region around
arts and cultural activity. So, partners strategically shaping around arts and cultural activities.
In other words, instead of thinking of arts and culture as happening inside artists' studios
or inside buildings that exhibit or present their work, we show how arts and cultural
leaders contribute to and take credit for their embeddedness in real communities and
places. We decided to pursue this mission by doing an extensive scan of completed arts-centric
projects around the U.S. We talked to literally hundreds of people, we identified dozens and
dozens of cases and we investigated these in greater depth. In the end, we chose 15
for inclusion in our report,we could have profiled many, many more, the 15 we chose
are representative across the country of communities large and small and their distinctiveness
in both art forms and larger community mission. In our study we identify three key ingredients
in successful placemaking. First ingredient: initiators. In every one of these cases someone
steps forward to lead an arts-centric project. Often, it was an individual artist, more often
than we expected. Sometimes it was a public sector agency or staff member, a community
development corporation, or a commercial business. Often it was a nonprofit arts organization.
Sometimes it was a mayor or a city council member. The vision and drive of these initiators
and their talent at cooperating with others are crucial to success. An example. In Paducah,
Kentucky, an artist moved into Lower Town, old abandoned industrial buildings along the
Ohio River and rehabilitated two homes, one of which he used as an artist live-and-work
studio. He could see the potential for that area to really become a vibrant artist-anchored
area. He approached the mayor, convinced him of this vision, and between the two of them
they changed city zoning, the got the Economic Development Department to buy and turn over
the housing, they recruited artists from all over the country and the world. They arranged
with local banks to finance low-interest loans for the artists to rehab the home themselves,
and, long and short, in a decade's time they leveraged $30 million, attracted 70 artists
to redo 80 buildings, and have now revitalized the whole area as not just artist live-and-work
buildings but also gallery spaces and a place for people in the community to hang out. So,
initiators. The second ingredient is distinctiveness and local orientation. We found that most
successful cases of creative placemaking do not make large physical capital investments
in facilities similar to those in competitor cities, and they do not target tourists as
their major audience. Instead, they build on existing distinctive creative energies
and spaces that already exist in their community. Their aim is to capture a larger share of
their own residents' discretionary income by offering good arts and cultural options.
Often they make smaller-scale, talent-based investments dispersed throughout their cities
in multiple venues. And they consciously seek to offer a new dimension of identity for their
city or neighborhood. An example, in Silicon Valley, a high-tech entrepreneur decided a
decade ago that it would be a great idea to have a festival that tried to marry art with
technology. Artists are actually underrepresented in Silicon Valley and the city of San Jose,
seeing the opportunity, helped provide bridge financing to start the festival. A new nonprofit
arts organization was formed, Zero One, and this fall it completed its third international
biennial of joining arts and culture and doing it by recruiting through all the different
arts organizations in Silicon Valley, artists that work on projects that embody technology
and using the arts organizations' spaces and venues for the biennial. They built support
from philanthropic organizations and corporate funders and they really worked to encourage
businesses to grow art out of this arts and technology interface. This last biennial they
had 55,000 people and they really are consciously trying to use this event as a way of creating
a new identity for people in Silicon Valley. The third ingredient is partnerships, and
I've already mentioned some of these other cases. But,in all cases initiators sought
partners and in unusual quarters. They have to win public will and that means both interest
on the part of the general population but also a champion in City Hall, the mayor or
somebody on the city council. They have to attract the support of local arts and cultural
leaders not competition from them. They have to find private sector buy-in and resources.
They have to build partnerships across sectors, across commercial, nonprofit community sectors.
Across missions, often these arts and cultural advocates found partners in transportation,
housing and community development, education, environment, health care where their arts
and cultural offerings helped to serve the mission of these other agencies and organizations. And
across levels of government. So local government, county, state, and federal government. An
interesting example: in Cleveland in the late nineties, a community development corporation
found itself with a defunct theater. It had the vision that it could redo its area as
the Gordon Square Arts District. It recruited another theater group that also had a live
performance defunct theater and another group that served youth through drama that was operating
in the upstairs of a church. They put forward an idea that they could do a streetscape that
would really redo their main drag, by the way, all the major arts institutions in Cleveland
are on the east side of the city, this is on the west side of the city – and they
first got support through the city council for community development block grant money
from the federal government to do the streetscape. From then they went on to raise money to rehab
the theaters and they got it from economic development agencies, the regional transportation
agency, local foundations, Cleveland Public Power, private sector developers, and they
used new market and historic preservation tax credits. Ten years later, they've raised
$30 million for the streetscape and the renovations and two of the theaters have opened and are
operating. The whole commercial area is vibrant. So, three cases. Three ingredients: initiators,
distinctiveness, and partnerships. We included only finished case studies, only finished
cases in our studies, so that we could really demonstrate outcomes. We find that art-infused
placemaking does the following (this is a very short summary, I hope we can talk more
about it in the Q & A), animates public and private spaces; brings diverse people together
to celebrate, create, inspire and be inspired; rejuvenates structures and streetscapes; improves
local business viability, community spirit, and public safety; creates jobs and income
within and beyond the arts and cultural sector; and, not least, nurtures artistic innovation
and expands arts audiences.We find that if arts and cultural community leaders can find
the energy and vision to cooperate among themselves and with other actors in their immediate environments,
they can amplify the space for, participation in, and quality of arts and cultural experience
in this country. We also conclude that creative placemaking's livability and economic development
outcomes have the potential to radically change the future of American towns and cities. You
can find out study on arts dot gov. And, again, from my co-author Ann Gadwa and myself Ann
Markesun, thanks to the Mayors' Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts for
the opportunity to write and present this study.