This paper discusses developments in the conception and assessment of Creative Placemaking initiatives and, more generally, the assessment of comprehensive community-development strategies.
The observations and insights presented here draw from an examination of selected rantees of The Kresge Foundation Arts & Culture team’s Creative Placemaking initiative ho are operating primarily in low-income neighborhoods around the United States This examination included review of grantee reports and other documents, interviews and focus group discussions in the first several years of Kresge’s Creative Placemaking
strategy implementation. These observations and insights also stem from a small, but growing, body of research on the roles of arts and culture in communities, as well as from well-established literature on urban poverty and inequality.
Previous papers in this series have discussed the evolution of The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program strategy and its embrace of Creative Placemaking, as well as introduced observations about the development of the field and work required toensure that Creative Placemaking contributes to the expansion of opportunity for historically marginalized communities.3
This paper begins to delve more deeply into some of the field needs introduced in previous writings, specifically the need for a more
nuanced understanding of urban inequality; how arts, culture and community-engaged design intersect with strategies to expand opportunity; how residents in low-income communities may benefit; as well as the need to re-think how we conceive of and track neighborhood change.