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 were nice, but not that important.
But as I learned more about the arts, through teachers like Louise Stevens, Ann Markusen, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and Tom Borrup, I learned that the arts were as important to quality of life as the ‘serious’ things. In fact, for urban planners, the arts could be a more cost-effective vehicle for lasting change.
You probably know the talking points about the many ways arts can make communities better:
• Children who participate in arts tend to do better in school; seniors involved in the arts tend to age healthier.
• People who are involved in the arts tend to also be more engaged in enhancing their communities.
• The arts attracts wealth, which can lead to new job and entrepreneurship opportunities, and help some local businesses. (Of course, the flip side is that successful arts initiatives can also spur gentrification. But that’s another conversation.)
• The arts can bring people together, which is one of the most important ways to deal with big problems in a community.
And sure, housing, parks, roads, and commercial development can have major impacts in communities. But those often take years – and thousands to millions of dollars – to become reality. With the arts, you can do a something quickly with a little bit of money. Yes, no single art project – from a children’s festival to a major performing arts center – changes everything for the better in a community. But no single anything does. It’s the cumulative effect – the rolling snowball growing as it goes – that makes the difference.
Creative Placemaking, the white paper that started the movement of the same name, helped me understand the depth and breadth of the value of arts in communities. But it wasn’t until I started doing the work myself that I learned how the arts could affect my thinking and practice.
We planners talk about how we work to make communities better. But most people hire us to manage risk and help them control change. (Or at least play to their illusions of control.) So we tend to be cautious and conscientious. We do things certain ways – like hold town hall meetings – because that’s what we were taught to do. We tend to think in straight lines: Determine goal, identify values, gather relevant data from relevant sources, select optimal strategies. We try not to fail or even make mistakes. After all, we’re professionals – we ‘profess’ knowledge. If we don’t know, or to be more exact, if our clients think we don’t know, then they might find someone else who does (Or does a better job of ‘professing’.) Might not be the best way, but hey, the devil you know…
People involved in the arts tend to be more open to experimenting; to trying something out and learning from it. Artful people don’t stick to the same sources for information; they may try to learn from sources we planners (and public officials) may not even think to consult.
If a planner is doing a project related to affordable housing, he or she may go to the Census Bureau for information about income levels, family sizes, and rent levels. Then the planner would interview elected officials, realtors and housing administrators. Because as fellow professionals, they would know more than anyone else about affordable housing, right?
An artful person might invite housing residents to tell stories, draw pictures or act out the experience of living in affordable housing. An artful person might ‘read’ the buildings to see what the architecture tells us about how the society sees affordable housing (no matter what the officials say.)
A typical planner would look for the ‘best feasible solution’ - usually the one preferred by the people cutting the checks. An artful person might think ‘there are a lot of good solutions,’ so ‘let’s just try something.’
(That’s not to say that artful people always have better ideas. Over the past decade, I’ve heard thousands of ideas. Some of them were crazy enough to work, and some were just plain crazy.)
Artful people seemed to have more fun than planners. Planners struggle to get people into those boring meetings where people talk about things that may or may not happen, and that they don’t know how to do anything about anyway.
Artful people do events, which can lead to really good and productive conversations. And maybe some people willing to work together on something.
So now, art and artfulness are woven into the fabric of my practice. Instead of town hall meetings, I try to have interactive events where people can be serious and have fun too. (Having fun at a meeting? Who’da thunk?)
I’m still careful, but not as unnecessarily cautious. I used to try to be like a weather forecaster, trying to accurately predict the future. (But I forgot that even forecasters don’t try to go more than a week in advance.) Now, I’m more like a climatologist. I have a sense of what a certain future may hold, but don’t try to predict when it will happen, or what exactly will make it that way.
A community, I learned, is like a giant moving canvas that is painted by hundreds, thousands, or millions of people – many of whom we don’t know or see.
So yea, I don’t always know. But the truth is, communities are too complex and complicated for any single person to know by themselves, and certainly to accurately predict how change in one part can affect change in another.
My planning education and early work taught me to be both insecure and arrogant. Creative placemaking has helped me become more humble but confident. And I’m having more fun.
Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, is a national award-winning planner who specializes in community and local economic development, as well as leadership development. He is a nationally-recognized leader in the fields of culturally competent placemaking and creative placemaking. He is the founding Executive Director of The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking in Union, NJ; a Senior Associate with Nishuane Group in Montclair, NJ; and lead designer and program director of the Certificate in Creative Placemaking program at New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH. He is the co-editor of Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities and author of Leading from the Middle: Strategic Thinking for Community Development and Urban Planning professionals.
He can be reached at leo@artsbuildcommunities.com or 973-763-6352, x1
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 were nice, but not that important.
But as I learned more about the arts, through teachers like Louise Stevens, Ann Markusen, Anne Gadwa Nicodemus and Tom Borrup, I learned that the arts were as important to quality of life as the ‘serious’ things. In fact, for urban planners, the arts could be a more cost-effective vehicle for lasting change.
You probably know the talking points about the many ways arts can make communities better:
• Children who participate in arts tend to do better in school; seniors involved in the arts tend to age healthier.
• People who are involved in the arts tend to also be more engaged in enhancing their communities.
• The arts attracts wealth, which can lead to new job and entrepreneurship opportunities, and help some local businesses. (Of course, the flip side is that successful arts initiatives can also spur gentrification. But that’s another conversation.)
• The arts can bring people together, which is one of the most important ways to deal with big problems in a community.
And sure, housing, parks, roads, and commercial development can have major impacts in communities. But those often take years – and thousands to millions of dollars – to become reality. With the arts, you can do a something quickly with a little bit of money. Yes, no single art project – from a children’s festival to a major performing arts center – changes everything for the better in a community. But no single anything does. It’s the cumulative effect – the rolling snowball growing as it goes – that makes the difference.
Creative Placemaking, the white paper that started the movement of the same name, helped me understand the depth and breadth of the value of arts in communities. But it wasn’t until I started doing the work myself that I learned how the arts could affect my thinking and practice.
We planners talk about how we work to make communities better. But most people hire us to manage risk and help them control change. (Or at least play to their illusions of control.) So we tend to be cautious and conscientious. We do things certain ways – like hold town hall meetings – because that’s what we were taught to do. We tend to think in straight lines: Determine goal, identify values, gather relevant data from relevant sources, select optimal strategies. We try not to fail or even make mistakes. After all, we’re professionals – we ‘profess’ knowledge. If we don’t know, or to be more exact, if our clients think we don’t know, then they might find someone else who does (Or does a better job of ‘professing’.) Might not be the best way, but hey, the devil you know…
People involved in the arts tend to be more open to experimenting; to trying something out and learning from it. Artful people don’t stick to the same sources for information; they may try to learn from sources we planners (and public officials) may not even think to consult.
If a planner is doing a project related to affordable housing, he or she may go to the Census Bureau for information about income levels, family sizes, and rent levels. Then the planner would interview elected officials, realtors and housing administrators. Because as fellow professionals, they would know more than anyone else about affordable housing, right?
An artful person might invite housing residents to tell stories, draw pictures or act out the experience of living in affordable housing. An artful person might ‘read’ the buildings to see what the architecture tells us about how the society sees affordable housing (no matter what the officials say.)
A typical planner would look for the ‘best feasible solution’ - usually the one preferred by the people cutting the checks. An artful person might think ‘there are a lot of good solutions,’ so ‘let’s just try something.’
(That’s not to say that artful people always have better ideas. Over the past decade, I’ve heard thousands of ideas. Some of them were crazy enough to work, and some were just plain crazy.)
Artful people seemed to have more fun than planners. Planners struggle to get people into those boring meetings where people talk about things that may or may not happen, and that they don’t know how to do anything about anyway.
Artful people do events, which can lead to really good and productive conversations. And maybe some people willing to work together on something.
So now, art and artfulness are woven into the fabric of my practice. Instead of town hall meetings, I try to have interactive events where people can be serious and have fun too. (Having fun at a meeting? Who’da thunk?)
I’m still careful, but not as unnecessarily cautious. I used to try to be like a weather forecaster, trying to accurately predict the future. (But I forgot that even forecasters don’t try to go more than a week in advance.) Now, I’m more like a climatologist. I have a sense of what a certain future may hold, but don’t try to predict when it will happen, or what exactly will make it that way.
A community, I learned, is like a giant moving canvas that is painted by hundreds, thousands, or millions of people – many of whom we don’t know or see.
So yea, I don’t always know. But the truth is, communities are too complex and complicated for any single person to know by themselves, and certainly to accurately predict how change in one part can affect change in another.
My planning education and early work taught me to be both insecure and arrogant. Creative placemaking has helped me become more humble but confident. And I’m having more fun.
Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, is a national award-winning planner who specializes in community and local economic development, as well as leadership development. He is a nationally-recognized leader in the fields of culturally competent placemaking and creative placemaking. He is the founding Executive Director of The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking in Union, NJ; a Senior Associate with Nishuane Group in Montclair, NJ; and lead designer and program director of the Certificate in Creative Placemaking program at New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, NH. He is the co-editor of Diálogos: Placemaking in Latino Communities and author of Leading from the Middle: Strategic Thinking for Community Development and Urban Planning professionals.
He can be reached at leo@artsbuildcommunities.com or 973-763-6352, x1
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