Arts Intranet

Bill Roper

On behalf of the Orton Family Foundation, I was recently visiting communities in Montana and Colorado, assessing whether they would make good Heart & Soul Community Planning demonstration projects. Part of my message during this tour was that community building and planning is broken in the United States.

Approaches to engaging the public over the last 30 years have become top-down, tired, and seemingly irrelevant. Who wants to come to a meeting to provide input on a plan developed behind closed doors and when it’s pretty clear a decision has already been made? Who ever catches the notices in the newspaper or on the bulletin boards that all look the same, are always in the same places and use technical or hot button words like updates, zoning, transportation trip levels, etc.?

In a country that expects another hundred million people by 2050, we’ve got to wake up and shake up the usual way of doing business.

To move from the left brain to the right brain, to excite people and entice them or inspire them to participate, to open up the government model and build on the assets found in our human, social, and natural landscapes. Art and the creativity it embodies and unleashes can play a critical role in this regard.

One the community gardens operated by the Norris Square Neighborhood Project. (Photo Courtesy of Norris Square Neighborhood Project)

Throughout the first half of the Animating Democracy Blog Salon, several have spoken to the powerful potential of creative placemaking for igniting engagement and change at the local level.

By capitalizing on community assets, placemaking can aid in elevating the potential of a neighborhood’s space, reinvigorating both the physical and the psyche of the local environment.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to wander through Las Parcelas, one of the six community gardens operated by the Norris Square Neighborhood Project (NSNP) in Philadelphia.

Consisting of over three dozen plots and coming alive through the vibrant colors found within bird houses, benches, garden ornaments, murals, and a rural Puerto Rican casita, the garden has breathed life back into a community historically plagued by low-income levels, high drop-out rates, and a deadly drug culture.

Las Parcelas has created an important third space for Norris Square youth and neighbors alike to embrace their heritage and celebrate the identity of the neighborhood through gardening, community gatherings, and educational programming.

Liesel Fenner

Modernist plazas. Those large vast expanses of concrete often in the heart of a city’s downtown, perhaps lined with an allée of trees, a modernist sculpture, and a water feature.

I have fond memories of spaces like these - running as a child as fast as I could from one end to the other then looking up at skyscrapers that seemed to touch the sky. Wind, air, city smells, all combined to inform of my earliest aesthetic preferences and my professional career in landscape architecture and public art.

Many examples of these plazas include: Boston City Hall, the Christian Science Church in Boston, and Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco are significant places designed by some of the twentieth-century’s most outstanding designers - Hideo Sasaki and Lawrence Halprin to name a few.

Place is personal. Understanding what informed our earliest memories of spaces helps us understand our preferences in creating new places in conversation with community - people who have all had different life experiences and ideas of what define place.

Xavier Cortada

In using arts and culture to build community, we often forget that the greatest resource isn’t necessarily the program we design, or the object we create, or the idea we generate. It is the people themselves. We somehow forget that art is theirs; that for a very long time now people have intuitively used it to better connect with one another.

Sixty-thousand years ago, our deep ancestors in Africa began a slow-motion journey that populated that continent and the rest of our planet. Responding to nature, they hunted and gathered as they made their way. Along their migration through the land, some took to growing their own food and settled. Others continued on their path until they found a place to call home.

At each stop, they worked communally to build their society. They developed language and customs. They passed these on through rituals and stories. We see this in the artifacts archeology reveals to us today. They developed their culture in the context of their land. Grounded by nature, they built community.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost that sense of place, that connection to each other and the natural world. I use my art to try to help find our way.

In 2006, I developed the Reclamation Project -- an eco-art intervention that invited my fellow South Floridians to engage in protecting their coastal ecosystem.

Radhika Mohan

It’s no secret that cities are becoming larger and more diverse. The newest 2010 Census numbers speak for themselves:

• Over 80% of our current population lives in a metropolitan area;
• The Hispanic population grew by over 40% in the past ten years, now making up 16% of the total U.S. population;
• The Asian population in the country also grew by over 40%;
• Those identifying themselves as “two or more races” increased by over 30%;
• Nearly 50% of the U.S. Western region’s population is minority.

What is it about cities that attract such diverse groups to one place?

I think on one level it is about comfort- as humans in an age of globalization and displacement, we find comfort in communities that feel like home. Cities are able to remind us of our heritage through access to specialized foods, clothing, and other goods and institutions: think of Chicago’s Devon Avenue, Philadelphia’s Italian Market, or even Tampa’s historic Ybor City.

Amongst all these different demographic and census groups, languages, and modes of communication that exist within cities there is something we all can understand about places and that is consistently aided with urban design.

In many ways, urban design is a universal human language, something that can traverse our differences and connect us all through visual and sensual interventions.

As an example, I will draw from my own neighborhood in Washington, DC: Columbia Heights.

Brendon Greaves

I just returned from several days in Wilson, NC, where I am assisting with the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park Project. This ambitious project involves conserving twenty-nine of local artist Vollis Simpson’s monumental wind-powered kinetic sculptures and relocating them from a field outside his repair shop at a crossroads in rural Lucama to an expressly designed downtown sculpture park in nearby Wilson.

This weekend was the annual Whirligig Festival, a street fair inspired by the community’s affection for Mr. Simpson’s artworks, which already adorn several public locations downtown, providing an aesthetic identity and metereological indicator for Wilsonians.

Despite enthusiastic sanction and financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, ArtPlace, the Educational Foundation of America, the North Carolina Arts Council, and many others, the true power of this remarkable placemaking project resides in its grassroots foundation.

The concept of using vernacular art to leverage investment in the community for the goal of cultural tourism and arts-driven economic development originated with local stakeholders concerned about both Mr. Simpson’s legacy (he is 92 and can no longer climb the 55-foot sculptures to grease bearings and repaint rusting surfaces) and the economic future of Wilson in a post-tobacco economy (Wilson once boasted the title of the world’s largest tobacco market).