Presentation
Defending Place in Creative Placemaking
Urban Affairs Association Annual Conference
(2017)
Abstract
'Creativity’ is exploited in countless ways for urban economic development - including, crucially, in local placemaking, revitalization, and neighborhood branding efforts. What's more, the ability of community members to participate in acts that are deemed 'the right kind of creative’ is severely limited by factors of privilege and status. So-called ‘creative placemaking’ can thus be doubly exclusive, from conception and design to the spaces that result. Yet some grassroots and quasi-informal projects enacted by and in underprivileged communities present alternative - and hopeful - models for creative action in urban space. Some explicitly resist gentrification, displacement, and elite aesthetics. This paper, based on current community-engaged work in New York and California (and drawing on four years of other related research in cities around the US), presents these models and the people behind them while contrasting them with a variety of the more problematic instantiations as well. In doing so, it frames creative placemaking - at its best and its worst - in the context of a neoliberal urbanism of which it is product, symptom, reaction, and contributor.
Disciplines
Publication Date
April, 2017
Location
Minneapolis, MN
Comments
Paper presented at the panel: Reclaiming Creativity: Tactics of Agency in the Urban Economy.
Citation Information
Gordon Douglas. "Defending Place in Creative Placemaking" Urban Affairs Association Annual Conference (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gordon-douglas/34/