2024 South and Appalachian Creative Placemaking Summit
Arts Center MARTA window treatments by Jaime Hayon.
The 2024 South and Appalachian Creative Placemaking Summit opened with an examination of the juxtaposition of Atlanta as a modern city. To give a sense of place in time to the attendees, Atlanta City Council president Doug Shipman laid out five key forces that define the “context of Atlanta.”
City Council President Doug Shipman giving a welcome to Atlanta.
It starts with race and commerce — Atlanta exists simply because of the crossing of two railroads. It ends with growth: the era of the automobile (1950s), white flight (1970s), and Atlanta’s endless sprawl due to lack of natural geographic barriers. The middle is made up of how vastly under-resourced in public support (vs private and/or corporate) Atlanta is as a city. This is the stage set for the gathering of over 500 attendees/leaders from across the Southeastern United States at Woodruff Arts Center. It gave us all either a reminder, or an introduction, to this place that is Atlanta.
The Creative Placemaking Summit brings together community members and professionals representing rural and urban areas throughout the Southeast to share knowledge, ideas and experiences in placemaking. Jessyca Holland (SouthArts) presented the theme for the Summit: People, Planet, Prosperity before turning the mic over to the keynote speaker, Ryan Gravel. For those who aren’t familiar with the name, his GATech thesis project is The BeltLine. Or rather, his idea was to convert the 22 miles of abandoned and overgrown railroad tracks that encircle the city into a multi-modal interconnected trail. Placemaking at its best, at least in theory.
In reality, The BeltLine left the community behind when it turned from a grassroots movement to an infrastructure project. In this case, The BeltLine turned vacant and neglected property into prime real estate as the trail transformed the space around it. The appeal of a walkable space, in a city of endless traffic, quickly made BeltLine-adjacent living desirable. Live-work-play condos began to pop up along the East Side Trail, the first finished portion of the multi-year, multi-phase massive infrastructure project. This idea of a walkable, interconnected city worked, but not for everyone. The implementation of the BeltLine ultimately neglected the residents who were already in-place at the location being place-made.
A gloATL dancer moves within the remnants of the First Saint Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Many in the community dislike the term placemaking and prefer placekeeping instead. Yet in a city— in a country— built on commerce the idea of placekeeping feels so vastly ill-aligned with capitalism.
Placekeeping has been described as “the active care and maintenance of a place and its social fabric by the people who live and work there,” by the US Department of Arts and Culture
Creative Placemaking is understood as “the use of arts and culture by diverse partners to strategically shape the physical and social character of a place in order to spur economic development, promote enduring social change and improve the physical environment,”
At present, Atlanta is devoid of many placekeeping efforts. We are a city of progress, a city of tear-it-down-and-rebuild-it-better while neverminding the past. Placekeeping calls to the table intentionality, y engagement, and deep investigation of a community. It’s something we claim to do in theory but, as Doug Shipman said, we are a city of planning where the plans sit on shelves rather than go forward into implantation. Successful adaptive reuse projects have transformed places like Huntsville, Alabama but those successes don’t always translate as smaller communities have distinct advantages over sprawling metropolises like Atlanta.
Atlanta, on its mission of growth and progress, so rarely calls in the community. Placekeeping is recognizing the humanity of a place l; Atlanta misses the mark as it builds institutions to the past but continues to neglect the present. The Creative Placemaking Summit even fell short in this often forgotten gesture of goodwill as the highlight cultural gathering was a “private event” in public space in the middle of a Black, working class neighborhood where residents weren’t invited.
Dancers from gloATL move to the music of Mausiki Scales and the Common Ground Collective.
In Atlanta, The Heart of the Arts initiative is a good example of placemaking that directly benefits artists without displacement. The initiative reimagines Midtown as an dynamic experience where storefront art, public art commissions, and community programming enriches the identity of the area. They offer artist residencies where artists get 18 months of free studio rent (and $2,500 stipend to cover direct costs like insurance) in various pocket studios across Midtown. The program is a product of cross-organization partnership between the Midtown Community Improvement District (CID), the Midtown Alliance, Emory University, and other private property owners. Together, these institutions and governing bodies have been responsible for the revitalization of Midtown for the past decades. In that time, the district has encountered massive growth, investment, and an influx of residents.
Heart of the Arts unusual studio space in Midtown Atlanta.
The Heart of the Arts program infuses art and culture, to a degree, into an area that is devoid of much social infrastructure. However, the artists are often in isolated spaces —in the ground floor of a parking deck or the lobby of a highrise. The transformative power of the arts is lost when artists aren’t given the intangible tools —community, connection, collaboration— to thrive. Yet, The Heart of the Arts is a win for property owners who receive safer streets, activated public spaces, and the fuzzy feeling that comes with doing good. It’s also a win for the artists who can participate in the program. However, after the 18-month opportunity is over, there is not a pipeline for continued support . It is back to the drawing board in a city without a ladder for artists, especially when it comes to mid-career artists like those in the program.
With program titles like “Making Space for Culture - Integrating Art and Culture into our Contemporary Urban Landscapes” and “From Vacant Places to Vibrant Spaces: How Local Policy Catalyzes Vacant Property through Creative Placemaking,” the summit felt a bit hard to navigate at times. This is partially due to the placemaking pipeline where good ideas transform into the big bucks economic development and often leave the “good idea” behind in the dust. A lot of this comes down to the policy of a place. A panel member read the definition of policy as, “a course or principle of action adopted or proposed by a government, party, business, or individual.” In Atlanta, our policies create the parameters for the success of our urban fabric.
This is partially because the field of placemaking extends more broadly than the arts and culture sector. Programs such as Soccer in the Streets transform vacant public spaces while offering services— soccer fields— to the community. Yet sports is something Atlanta already does well so it doesn’t feel applicable to other programs. It goes back to the narrative of a place and, as Doug Shipman pointed out, Atlanta has so many competing narratives.
Storytelling is a huge component of placekeeping. Keynote speaker Ryan Gravel is currently working on a book called American Land which explores how the stories of greatness we tell ourselves are not only lies or half-truths but are leading us down the wrong paths now and into the future.
Ryan’s major take away is the need for constant vision in light of the (slow) speed of change as ideas hit the metaphorical door of policy. Now governing bodies like NPUs (Neighborhood Planning Units), PDAs (Public Development Authorities), CIDs (Community Improvement Districts), take over the conversation. It can be hard to hold the vision when ideas become acronyms and conversations begin happening behind closed doors rather than in the public space. Placemaking often stops, and claims success, at the beautification of space. Yet we know that spaces, especially vibrant ones, do not exist without constant community care.
Ultimately, the Creative Placemaking Summit succeeded in painting a picture of place across the Southeastern Region. Successful adaptive reuse projects have transformed places like Huntsville, Alabama but those successes don’t always translate to sprawling metropolises like Atlanta, as smaller communities often have distinct advantages over larger cities.
Many of the attendees were government officials, city planners, and institutional leaders but the conference was missing the other side of the table. The private sector —developers, corporate leaders, and those businesses who dictate much of the urban landscape and often benefit the most from community-driven placemaking efforts— was loudly absent from the conversation Many of the sessions felt like “preaching to the choir” yet the arts cannot continue to support itself without greater understanding and buy-in from those outside of the field.
