Place Leadership Network

APA Arts & Planning

Winter | 2022

In Salem’s El Punto neighborhood, public art is a strategy to amplify community pride and identity.

Photo courtesy of North Shore Community Development Corporation.

Place Leadership Network: Investing in Culture and Place

By F. Philip Barash

As Boston’s neighborhoods rapidly transform under housing pressures and rising tides, public spaces — and the culture that animates them — are at risk. From Boston’s historic Chinatown to Afrocentric Nubian Square, community leaders are grappling with keeping the shared spaces of the city creative, vibrant, and inclusive. Serving as a fellow at the Boston Foundation, I launched a pilot program, the Place Leadership Network, to invest into community groups that steward and activate shared places across the region. The pilot funded a cohort of place-based leaders whose work — primarily in communities made vulnerable by strategic disinvestment — strengthens the cultural assets of their neighborhoods. The emphasis on culture was intentional. Some leaders in the cohort saw cultural identity as a key anti-displacement strategy, while others deployed arts and creativity to counter stigmatization and harmful narratives.

The Place Leadership Network convened an extraordinary group of urban agents: a continuum of place-based organizations that ranged from parks conservancies to Main Streets districts to Community Development Corporations. In partnership with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, we developed a yearlong peer-learning program intended to amplify the work of each community organization and to build a coalition. For a year, eight participating groups met once a month in one another’s neighborhoods. We shared ideas and practices, commiserated, hosted more than forty guest speakers and facilitators, leveraged $435,000 in funding, and, at least on one occasion, danced in each other’s arms. With an expanded capacity and a growing solidarity, this cohort is now leading transformative policy and placekeeping projects in their communities. Their work is as diverse as the communities they serve, as examples below demonstrate.

In Central Square, a Cambridge neighborhood defined by music venues, dance studios, and offbeat retailers, the Central Square Business Improvement District (CSBID) has reinvented the taxing district model with a focus on placekeeping. Rather than limiting its mandate to keeping this crativative district “safe and clean,” CSBID is using policy and value capture tools to retain small businesses, develop new platforms for creative expression, and advocate for affordability.

Bowdoin Geneva Main Streets, an Afro-Caribbean district where most businesses are immigrant-owned, is working with property owners and city agencies to re-envision vacant spaces. Strategies including street performances and urban gardens engender a sense of pride and help drive visitation to the district. By supporting creativity in domains such as fashion, performance, and culinary arts, the Main Streets organization celebrates the diverse cultures of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

And in Nubian Square, the historic epicenter of Black Boston, the Roxbury Cultural District (RCD) is defining priorities for future development in a rapidly transforming neighborhood. By aligning civic leaders, educators, business owners, and residents around a common agenda, the organization is influencing how new developments support existing cultural assets. Additionally, RCD presents regular cultural programming that brings visibility to local artists and entrepreneurs.

This work continues to build and accelerate in the year since the pilot concluded. Along with community leaders who participated in the Place Leadership Network, I was gratified to share lessons with the field via a policy forum at the Boston Foundation, panel discussion at the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities annual conference, and a white paper in the Brookings Institution, among other venues.

I am looking forward to reuniting with three alumni of the Place Leadership Network at an upcoming public forum hosted by the Initiative on Cities at Boston University. I will be speaking with Michael Monestime, Tania Anderson, and Anita Morson-Matra, leaders of, respectively, Central Square Business Improvement District, Bowdoin Geneva Main Streets, and Roxbury Cultural District. Notably, all three have transitioned into new roles in the past year, leveraging this body of work into greater political and institutional power.

Join us on March 15th at 4:00pm EST for a virtual “reunion”: How Culture and Creativity Build Power in Communities of Color to explore the impact that culture and creativity make in places. This event is part of a series on Race, Place, and Space, co-hosted by the IOC, the BU Arts Initiative, and BU Diversity & Inclusion (D&I). The series explores the ways in which racial and ethnic groups access, inhabit, occupy, shape, and are memorialized in urban contexts—as well as the ways their contemporary and historical contributions have been made invisible, disregarded, or denigrated.

F. Philip Barash is an urban change and placemaking expert with experience in writing, visioning, facilitation, program development, strategic partnerships, and institutional philanthropy. He works with communities and institutions to shape more vibrant and just places. He is on faculty at City Planning and Urban Affairs Program, Boston University, and writes and consults throughout the United States.

Place-based leaders shared ideas and practices as part of the yearlong Place Leadership Network.

Photo by F. Philip Barash.

NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

UPCOMING EVENTS

Registration is live for the National Planning Conference (NPC22). As communities continue to navigate the effects of the pandemic, NPC22 is an opportunity to reconnect and re-envision post-pandemic futures. The content of this year’s in-person and virtual events will be distinct, but both events will galvanize discussion around key planning topics, including Climate Change Impacts and Action, Economic Restructuring, Housing, Planning with Intention for Inclusion and Equity, and Transportation Infrastructure. Let us know if you plan to attend, look out for Arts & Planning sessions in the program and come through our Social Event in San Diego! Register for the conference here.

Attend the 2022 Northeast & Mid-Atlantic Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit, April 18-22, online and in Schenectady, NY. The Summit offers more than two dozen sessions online and in-person; many of them will be submitted for AICP CM credit. Session topics cover diversity, equity and inclusion; youth and community engagement; community healing and revitalization; self-care and organizational sustainability; public financing of the arts; international perspectives on creative placemaking, and more. There will also be a community art-making event on Saturday, April 23. Learn more and register here.

ARTS AND PLANNING OPPORTUNITIES

Americans for the Arts: Applications are now open for the 2022 Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design! The prize recognizes an individual working in planning, transportation, or land use development to address community-driven goals through the arts and includes a $30,000 cash award. (See webinars below for information about an upcoming intensive led by last year's awardee, Allentza Mitchel.) Deadline to apply or nominate is Friday, March 4th. Learn more and apply here.

Monument Lab is hiring: This position is open to candidates who have experience in arts administration, higher education, museum studies, and/or nonprofit management. The ideal candidate will have a wide-ranging understanding of the arts and humanities, as well as civic engagement and social justice. Learn more and apply here.

RFSQ for Health Departments Artist Roster: The Department of Arts and Culture’s Civic Art Division (Civic Art) is inviting emerging and established professional artists residing or working within Southern California to submit qualifications for a Health Departments Artist Roster. Artists selected for the Health Departments Artist Roster will be considered for upcoming projects for the LA County Departments of Mental Health, Health Services, and Public Health (Health Departments), including both purchases of existing artworks and site-specific commissioned artwork. Learn more and apply here.

WEBINARS

Placemaking vs. Placekeeping: Steps to Doing More Equitable Art Interventions

March 10th from 12pm-4pm EST: During this four-hour workshop led by Allentza Michel, founder and creative director of Powerful Pathways and awardee of the 2021 Jorge and Darlene Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design, we will break down the origins and difference between placemaking and placekeeping, discuss the definition of social equity and how it related to social practice arts, and provide participants with content on how placekeeping works and is necessary for inclusive diverse processes. Register here.

AIR Overview: Join Smart Growth America’s Arts & Culture team and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) for a review of the groundbreaking artist-in-residence program’s second year. Hear from current Transportation Equity Fellow, Marcus Young, and DOT staff about lessons learned, navigating the pandemic, and goals accomplished during this innovative program. Watch the video here.

If you are interested in becoming more involved as we transition to a division, please reach out by sending a message to the email below.

The Interest Group provides a forum for identifying, developing, and refining policy and planning tools that promote the integration of arts and culture into community development and planning. This includes exploration of topics like creative placemaking and placekeeping, cultural planning, public art planning, cultural economic development, and zoning pertaining to arts uses and facilities.

Have an announcement or a project you would like to share? Email a brief description and link to [email protected].