Strengthening communities with arts at the core.

Artistic placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities. Creative placemaking requires partnership across sectors, deeply engages the customs, involves artists, designers and culture bearers, and helps to accelerate local economic, physical, and/or social alter, ultimately laying the background for systems alter. This definition is intentionally open and broad because creative placemaking draws on all creative disciplines, and can be deployed as a strategy to address a broad range of community issues or challenges from public health to safe, economic development to housing.
Arts, civilisation, and design tin assistance to strengthen communities past:

  • Bringing new attention to or elevate primal customs avails and problems, voices of residents, local history, or cultural infrastructure.
  • Injecting new or additional energy, resources, activity, people, or enthusiasm into a place, community issue, or local economic system.
  • Envisioning new possibilities for a community or place - a new hereafter, a new style of overcoming a claiming, or approaching problem-solving.
  • Connecting communities, people, places, and economic opportunity via concrete spaces or new relationships.

Grantmaking

Our Town logic model graphic

Logic Model for Our Town: JPG | PDF

Our Boondocks is the National Endowment for the Arts' creative placemaking grant program with an almanac deadline of Baronial. Since 2011, the bureau has funded over 700 projects in all l states, DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands. Our Boondocks supports local partnership projects that accept social, economic or physical impacts. The ultimate goal of Our Town is to sustain support and recognition of arts, design, and cultural strategies as integral to every phase of customs development across the United States. To view past awards, go to Recent Grants search.

To learn more most the programme: Our Town: A Framework for Agreement and Measuring the National Endowment for the Arts' Creative Placemaking Grants Program.

Technical Assistance

Since 2016, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported the Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance Programme, in partnership with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). The program is designed to help participants implement successful creative placemaking projects that lay the background for longer-term systems change. Grantees and their partners are invited to opt into the program to receive tailored advice from experienced creative placemaking practitioners on a range of topics from embedding equity in their projection to documenting and communicating success. In fall 2021, LISC will launch a website that volition offer tools, videos, and other resources to the general public on a range of creative placemaking topics.

Knowledge Building

From 2015 to 2019, the Our Town program invested in knowledge edifice grants. Grants were available to arts service or blueprint 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 broad range of resources for the field, including publications, trainings, convenings, capacity building resources, and pilot programming to innovate creative placemaking non-arts sector leaders. To learn more, check out the projection descriptions of knowledge building grants.

Past Publications and Resource

  • How to Do Creative Placemaking Book is an action-oriented guide for making places ameliorate. This book includes instructional and thought-provoking case studies and essays from today'southward leading thinkers in creative placemaking. Information technology describes the various ways that arts organizations and artists tin play an essential part in the success of communities beyond America. Nov 2016.
  • Exploring Our Town features over 70 case studies of past Our Boondocks-funded projects. 2015.
  • Across 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 ameliorate 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 report to validate the NEA's proposed Arts & Livability Indicators. These metrics employ national, publicly accessible data to rails outcomes of interest to communities engaged in artistic placemaking activities. The report includes a typhoon "user's guide" to the indicators and their appropriate utilise.  April 2014.
  • Creative Placemaking white paper, written by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, was commissioned in 2010 by the Mayors' Constitute on City Design, a leadership initiative of the NEA in partnership with the U.s.a. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. This publication was determinative in the establishment of the Our Town program at the NEA. 2010.

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