How planning with the arts has made me a more creative planner
How planning with the arts has made me a more creative planner By Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP Executive Director, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking Except for an art class in high school and too few guitar lessons, I have no formal training or background in what most people would call the arts. I’m mostly an urban planner, a person trained to think like an ‘objective’ social scientist. My teachers and mentors treated the arts like decorations on the urban fabric. Usually, we never talked about arts. I was trained to focus on ‘serious’ subjects like housing, parks, roads, and economic development. About seven years ago, I was running a training institute for urban planners at Rutgers, and was asked to do some classes on improving communities through the arts. The request came from Karen Pinzolo, a former student of mine who now heads the South Jersey Cultural Alliance in Hammonton, NJ. ‘Sure, ok,’ I said. At the time, like many planners, I thought the arts w...