CREATIVE PLACEMAKING
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ENSURING MAINTENANCE AND SUSTAINABILITY Maintaining space, streetscapes, and artwork and sustaining programming pose big challenges. Often it is easier to garner private sector, public sector, and philanthropic support for money to build or renovate buildings than it is to
convince the same parties to provide maintenance and operating support over the long run. American cities are riddled with over-sized infrastructure projects that later become white elephants. Outdoor murals in many cities pose preservation
problems. Portland’s TriMet is already thinking through the durability of the art in its transit stations. Building these concerns into an initiative’s design is advisable.
AVOIDING DISPLACEMENT AND GENTRIFICATION Arts-initiated revitalization can set off gentrification pressures that displace current residents and small businesses, including non-profit arts organizations.25 In other words, they may be too successful. In Kentucky, Paducah’s Lowertown now faces a dwindling stock of properties available for the artist relocation program as well as greater residential demand from non-artists. In the absence of deed restrictions that encourage Paducah’s relocated artists to
sell their homes to other artists rather than the highest bidder, the district may lose its artistic integrity. Hollywood Boulevard’s rejuvenation prompted at least one small theater group to decamp for other city locations, and endangered other arts groups. Low income and minority residents are sometimes at risk from creative revitalization. There are, however, creative ways to guard against displacement or respond
to it. In the Hollywood case, the City’s Community Redevelopment Agency responded with an innovative Arts Retention Program. To keep them affordable and committed to artists, non-profit developer Artspace Projects commits to owning and managing the artist live/work and studio buildings that it builds and renovates. Land banking and community land trust have been used in other locales to preserve arts and cultural renovations.26
DEVELOPING METRICS FOR PERFORMANCE AND EVALUATION As creative placemaking efforts succeed and get smarter, advocates and funders are beginning to desire and demand documentation of progress and measures of success. They want to be able to demonstrate outcomes to funders, public officials, and community members, often prerequisites for future support and new projects. They want to know: What is the impact on artists? On the surrounding arts community? On local businesses? On residents of the neighborhood? On property values, tax revenues, and public service demand? On local quality of life? On civic engagement? Is the project worth what we spent on it? Is it superior
to alternatives that might have used the same resources? It is quite difficult to determine the precise impacts of a localized intervention, because so many other things are simultaneously influencing the environment. Surprisingly, there are almost no good studies of other types of urban interventions such as stadiums or public housing. Impact analyses are often written as advocacy documents before the fact, but their data are hypothetical. However, recent pioneering evaluation studies have developed and applied methodologies for showing the impact
of arts and cultural placemaking. Two that deserve mention are economist Stephen Sheppard’s documentation of the impact of museums and other arts spaces on neighborhood property values and social networks, and urban planner Anne Gadwa’s multi-faceted study of several artist live/work buildings on artists, arts communities, neighborhoods, and businesses.27 These efforts demonstrate that it is possible to evaluate and provide metrics, and there is likely to be a surge in good scholarship on this front. V