Creative Placemaking

Strengthening communities with arts at the core.

Creative placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design in efforts to advance local economic, physical, and other community-desired outcomes. These may include promoting local artistic and cultural resources, improving a neighborhood’s design, and/or strengthening local economies to promote investment and job creation. 

Creative placemaking often takes the form of: 

• Planning activities, including artist/designer-facilitated community planning, cultural planning, cultural district planning, mapping creative assets, or public art planning, that incorporate artists as key project leads.
• Community design processes, including design of artist spaces, design of cultural facilities, charrettes, or public space design.
• Strengthening the creative economy to include artists working in non-arts settings, professional development for artists/designers, arts instruction, and other support for creative industries.  
• Opportunities to highlight a community’s artistic and cultural resources through artistic excellence in arts festivals, performances, workshops, and public art.

A continuous thread through all successful creative placemaking is the presence of local cross-sector partnerships to undertake the work. Partnerships may establish new or deepen existing relationships between nonprofits organizations, local governmental or quasi-governmental entities, and others with relevant expertise to work on shared community goals. 
 

Grantmaking

The NEA supports creative placemaking through the Design & Our Town discipline within the Grants for Arts Projects program, with application deadlines in February and July of each year. Projects must integrate the arts, culture, and design in efforts to advance local economic, physical, and other community-desired outcomes. Projects must be place-specific (such as a community, neighborhood, or cultural district) and should focus on community priorities. Project activities may involve a wide range of artistic disciplines. To view past awards, go to Recent Grants search.

To learn more about the program: Our Town: A Framework for Understanding and Measuring the National Endowment for the Arts’ Creative Placemaking Grants Program.

Knowledge Building around Creative Placemaking

From 2015 to 2019, the Our Town program invested in knowledge building grants. Grants were available to arts service or design service organizations, community development membership organizations, and/or other national or regional membership, policy, or university-based organizations. These projects required a partnership to facilitate knowledge sharing and/or exchange on creative placemaking. Projects resulted in a wide range of resources for the field, including publications, trainings, convenings, capacity building resources, and pilot programming to introduce creative placemaking non-arts sector leaders. To learn more, check out the project descriptions of knowledge building grants.

To learn more about the program’s history: Our Town: A Framework for Understanding and Measuring the National Endowment for the Arts’ Creative Placemaking Grants Program.

Past Publications and Resources

• How to Do Creative Placemaking Book is an action-oriented guide for making places better. This book includes instructional and thought-provoking case studies and essays from today’s leading thinkers in creative placemaking. It describes the diverse ways that arts organizations and artists can play an essential role in the success of communities across America. November 2016.
• Exploring Our Town features over 70 case studies of past Our Town-funded projects. 2015.
• Beyond the Building: Performing Arts & Transforming Place convening, which was held by the NEA with support from ArtPlace America in November 2014, focused on developing a better understanding of how performance-based arts organizations and the artists they engage practice creative placemaking and transform places through their artistic practices. November 2014.
• Validating Arts & Livability Indicators report, prepared by the Urban Institute, describes the methodology and findings of a study to validate the NEA's proposed Arts & Livability Indicators. These metrics use national, publicly accessible data to track outcomes of interest to communities engaged in creative placemaking activities. The report includes a draft "user's guide" to the indicators and their appropriate use.  April 2014.
• Creative Placemaking white paper, written by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, was commissioned in 2010 by the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a leadership initiative of the NEA in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. This publication was formative in the establishment of the Our Town program at the NEA. 2010.