Creative Placemaking and comprehensive community development

Anchored in the examination of foundation-supported creative placemaking initiatives and applied research on inequity and the roles of arts and culture in community development that preceded the advent of creative placemaking, this chapter discusses important developments in the evolution of the creative placemaking field and related evaluation practices and needs. It discusses the challenge of describing creative placemaking and presents a way of making sense of the diversity of creative placemaking activity and how it intersects with strategies to address inequity. The chapter identifies field challenges to be considered, promising trends, and introduces key concepts that help enable new ways of working in the absence of well-tested, off-the-shelf tools and frameworks that allow us to adequately account for the roles of arts, culture, and design in comprehensive community development and planning. These include a call for recalibration of community development theories of change, creative placemaking impacts understood as preconditions for the types of change conventionally sought by community developers and planners, and the use of indications vs. indicators in efforts to document creative placemaking impacts.