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Learn how three cities are using arts and culture to address their transportation challenges

Hear from local leaders in three communities who are using the arts and creative practices to address pressing transportation challenges. (Updated)

Dothan’s Artist in Residence, Cosby Hayes, captures the stories of residents living along a dangerous high-traffic corridor.

(Updated: 9/20/2018) Catch up with the recording of the webinar here.

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It’s been about a year since T4America kicked off the Cultural Corridor Consortium to equip three cities to use arts and culture to tackle entrenched transportation challenges and come up with more creative solutions. On Monday, September 17, we’ll feature project leaders from each of these three cities—Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Dothan, AL—who will share stories about their creative placemaking work.

On the hour-long webinar, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the integral role that art, culture, and artists themselves have had in transforming typical community engagement processes and the design of streets in these communities. From hiring an artist-in-residence to lead community outreach for a highway corridor revitalization project in Dothan, AL to creating artistic interventions along Indianapolis’s new bus rapid transit lines to boost ridership, the 3C participants have found a myriad of ways to use the arts to bolster transportation projects.

Join us on the webinar at 2:00 p.m. EST, on Monday, September 17 to hear from local leaders about their projects’ successes, challenges, and next steps. It may even leave you inspired with ideas for how arts & culture can play a role in solving your own community’s unique transportation-related challenges.

Planning for a better future with arts and culture

With generous support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America is helping three communities across the country use arts & culture as a vehicle to shape local transportation investments. So what has been happening in Dothan, AL; Indianapolis, IN; and Los Angeles, CA over the last few months?

Many of us are used to thinking about arts and culture as a dance performance at a theater, a museum exhibition, or mural across a building’s side. But arts and culture can extend far beyond the performance or physical structures we typically recognize as art. These three cities in Alabama, California, and Indiana are engaging with community members, building local capacity for civic engagement, and helping build bridges of collaboration by using arts and culture in transportation projects.

Dothan, Alabama

Dothan has been working to shift its culture of planning, transportation, and community engagement towards one that focuses on infrastructure for mobility and walkability. Bob Wilkerson, the city’s long-range planner, has been spearheading efforts to change the physical, cultural, and social landscape of Dothan, particularly along Highway 84, which connects Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, Southeast Alabama Medical Center, and Dothan’s historic downtown.

Highway 84 is a suburban arterial road focused on moving cars as fast as possible, and lacks sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks. The highway is an important corridor, yet it lacks even basic infrastructure that would allow people to walk or bike safely along the highway. In an effort to change the traditionally technocratic and top-down planning process, T4America supported Dothan’s first interactive community workshop this year in hopes of soliciting the input of residents that are typically left out of the planning process.

Dothan held their landmark community planning meeting at the Wiregrass Museum of Art (WMA)—a natural choice for the meeting’s location, as it’s been a welcoming place for people of all ages and backgrounds due to its signature educational programs for visitors from across the state. But WMA became more than just a meeting place; after the first community planning meeting, the City of Dothan and the museum formed an official partnership to pioneer a new culture in Dothan’s planning practices where the city prioritizes safety, accessibility, and the community’s unique character over just concrete and pavement.

Students from the Boys and Girls Club gather after a tour and art making class at the Wiregrass Museum of Art.

With T4America’s support, Dothan and WMA recently launched an artist-in-residence program and selected Cosby Hayes as their resident artist. Hayes will work closely with Dothan’s low-income communities to ensure their voices are included in city-led planning processes. Hayes will focus on using art as a means for social engagement and community building with the aim of building long-term and trusting relationships between Dothan and its lower-income communities. According to Wilkerson, “the formalization of a partnership between the city and WMA is a positive step forward in the development of a new approach to community building. Such partnerships will serve as strong and valuable assets in the future arena of funding procurement for public infrastructure.”

Los Angeles, California

T4America has partnered with LA Commons to support creative placemaking projects in Hyde Park, a 97 percent non-white neighborhood in southern Los Angeles known for its jazz, hip hop, and black cinema scene. By 2019, Hyde Park will be home to a stop on the Crenshaw/LAX light rail, which will connect Hyde Park to the city’s growing light rail system and the Los Angeles International Airport. Light rail will hopefully bring long-term benefits to Hyde Park residents, but in the meantime, the at-grade construction has brought loud and disruptive noises, unsightly messes, and led to the destruction of roads and sidewalks, which all pose threats to the community’s economic, physical, and emotional vitality. This construction has been especially disheartening to Hyde Park residents, as many in the community opposed the at-grade light rail construction and favored an underground alignment instead (which would have been less intrusive, but far more expensive).

In light of the disruptive construction, LA Commons is using arts & culture to foster ownership and pride among longtime residents, as well as a long-term economic development strategy for local businesses. As Karen Mack of LA Commons explains, “every neighborhood is fantastic and we just need artists to unleash the stories within them.”

Community leaders first began by collaboratively selecting artists to engage with the community. Despite the fact that artists from around the world applied for the position, the panel chose local artists from Hyde Park who could personally relate to and understand the community.
Hyde Park residents gathered at “The Heart of Hyde Park” free event to tell stories, write, and eat together to celebrate the existing community living in the neighborhood, share stories about the neighborhood, and to brainstorm ideas of what a better future for Hyde could look like.

Artists Moses Ball and Dezmond Crockett facilitated the Stories Summit where Hyde Park residents shared their experiences living, working, and growing up in the community. Mack says that the Summit helped “fill a hole in the heart of the community that needs to be healed.” The artists initially collaborated with youth, mentors, and other community members to create non-visual and temporary art, but the projects gained so much enthusiasm that the community is determined on creating permanent visual art pieces, too.

Permanent creative placemaking projects that are currently in the works include light pole medallions and a mural, as well as an ambitious 1.1-mile long installation called Destination Crenshaw, led by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the architectural firm of Perkins + Will, LA Commons, and other community organizations. The project will culminate in an outdoor museum adjacent to the Crenshaw/LAX Line that will celebrate Hyde Park’s rich Black identity.

Check out this video of youth working on the Hyde Park Mural from LA Commons.

Indianapolis

When it comes to transit, Indianapolis has had some inspiring recent successes—from passing a local transit ballot referendum in 2016, to securing $75 million in grant funding from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), to starting construction on an all-electric bus rapid transit (BRT) line through the city and county.

Today, a coalition of nonprofits and public agencies is working to ensure that all of Indy’s residents—independent of zip code—get the most out of the city’s investments in transit. With Indianapolis ranked as one of the most economically immobile metro areas in the country, there’s a strong desire to see BRT and improved bus service help address residents’ poor access to jobs, grocery stores, and community institutions.

An important component of improving access is the creative placemaking that was included in the Marion County Transit Plan. Building off of the city’s intensive outreach that led to successfully passing that transit plan, a cohort of artists have partnered with Transit Drives Indy and the Arts Council of Indianapolis to work with communities along the planned bus routes. The artists are primarily focused on using art to build excitement for and familiarity with IndyGo’s future Red and Purple BRT routes.

In order to create a culture of public transit ridership, the artists are working to engage communities along the planned Red and Purple lines through a multi-year creative placemaking program in advance of the routes’ construction, which starts this summer. Through storytelling, videography, signage, and other creative mediums, artists are working to promote public transit in even the most isolated and auto-dependent communities.

Each of the artists bring their own unique skills and experiences to each project. Big Car Collaborative is using wayfinding to highlight destinations, like schools, pharmacies, recreation centers, and grocery stores within a mile of the four Southside transit stops. Sapphire Theater Company (STC) is using visual and performance techniques to help people imagine themselves in alternative scenarios—since many of Indy’s residents have never ridden public transportation before. STC is using theatre to help residents act through the initial fear of sitting next to a stranger on the bus or being lost and not knowing if you’re heading in the right direction.

Purple Line artist, Wil Marquez of w/ Purpose, leads a workshop to make pinwheels as a tool to help communities think about how the upgraded transit system will improve their access to necessities and opportunities.

Julia Muney Moore, Director of Public Art at Indy’s Arts Council, notes that the selected artists all have diverse creative mediums and started out with varying degrees of experience in community-based arts. The artists met regularly during the development phase of their projects, which helped the artists learn from each other and build their capacity to work at the intersection of civic engagement, arts, and transportation.

Read more about what the artists are doing around the soon-to-be bus stops here.

Curious about what creative placemaking looks like ‘big-picture’?

This is not the first time that T4America has worked directly with cities interested in using art to produce better transportation projects. Three years ago, T4America teamed up with several other cities, as well as a Portland-based non-profit, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), to help build arts-based engagement in the Jade and Division-Midway districts of Portland. Over a two-year period, more than 20 creative placemaking projects—focusing on issues like transportation, anti-displacement, economic development, and social justice—covered 23 neighborhoods in North, Northeast, and Southeast Portland. Check out this interactive placemaking map that was created in partnership with the Portland State University Geography Department.

Announcing the winners of our three creative placemaking grants

Transportation for America is pleased to announce the selection of three communities to receive $50,000 creative placemaking grants through our Cultural Corridor Consortium program. The three winners, from Dothan, AL, Los Angeles, CA, and Indianapolis, IN, all propose to apply artistic and cultural practice to shape transportation investments — positively transforming these places, building social capital, supporting local businesses, and celebrating communities’ unique characteristics.

“After reviewing more than 130 applications from cities and towns representing nearly every state in the country, the demand for new and creative approaches to transportation planning and design is clearly evident,” said Ben Stone, T4America’s director of Arts and Culture. “I’m encouraged by the level of sophistication with which transportation professionals and artists across the country are proposing to collaborate, and I’m thrilled to work with Dothan, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis over the next year.”

These three new projects are made possible by a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation, which also supported the last two years of similar work with groups from Nashville, TN, San Diego, CA, and Portland, OR.

In those three cities, our partners have integrated an approach known as creative placemaking, incorporating arts and culture into the process of transportation in order to elevate the voices of local community members, enabling and empowering true community-led visions for these transportation projects. We’ve witnessed artistic and cultural practice sparking lasting public engagement, facilitating the difficult — but necessary — conversations required to create better projects that more fully serve the needs of these communities and celebrates what makes them culturally vibrant and distinct. (Read more about those three projects here.)

And the three winners this year are no different, proposing creative solutions to address a diverse range of new transportation investments — a highway project, a bus rapid transit project, and a light rail project. We’re excited to support their efforts as they use arts and culture to produce better end products and processes that not only better serve their communities, but reflect their unique culture and heritage.

Here’s a short summary of the three winners, drawn in part from information in their applications.

City of Dothan / Dothan, AL

Dothan, Alabama is a small southern city in lower Alabama (pop. ~68,000) with a retail and medical services hub-market serving over 600,000 that has fallen victim to the adverse impacts of years of sprawl and auto dependency. The vast majority of the area’s recent transportation funds have been utilized solely for roadway construction and expansion, often out at the fringe of this small city. There is no mass transit service, the sidewalks — where they exist — are generally in poor condition, and there are no designated bicycle lanes within the City of Dothan. Within the historical core of Dothan, there are pockets of “extreme poverty” as defined by census tract data.

Compounded by both struggling communities and auto dependency, those who walk or ride bicycles as a regular means of transportation face challenging and dangerous circumstances.

This winning group from the City of Dothan intends to integrate arts and culture into the development of a four-mile segment of the Highway 84 corridor to address mobility, connectivity and aesthetics to tell a story of their history, people, achievements, and future. As they wrote in their application, “the city will have an opportunity to shape a new and exciting development format which places livability at the forefront of how we utilize the built environment. It’s a format that makes possible the use of transportation corridors for alternative means of transportation, promotes active lifestyles, engages visual poetry in the design of infrastructure, streetscapes, and landscapes, and enables mixed-use developments that in-turn generate vibrant communities within the urban context.”

LA Commons / Los Angeles, CA

Hyde Park, one of the oldest communities in Los Angeles, is a working-class neighborhood (median income: $39,600) with relatively low levels of college education and many single parent households in the heart of African American L.A. While the neighborhood today lacks connections to the city’s growing network of rail lines, that will soon change. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (Metro) is hard at work on the new Crenshaw-LAX (C-LAX) transit corridor that will connect Hyde Park (and Crenshaw Boulevard) to the Los Angeles International Airport, scheduled to open in 2019.

These direct connections to the airport and the rest of the city will provide Hyde Park residents with greater mobility, and employment and education opportunities. But in today’s climate where businesses and residents alike are clamoring to be in places that are well-connected to transit, real estate in close proximity to light rail will also become much more attractive to investors.

The real estate market is bigger than any one neighborhood and it’s hard to address the potential negative effects of gentrification block by block, but it’s crucial for local groups to lead the conversations and engagement around this topic. Through this grant, a group known as LA Commons will implement a process of gathering stories, led by a team of artists and local youth, who will ultimately transform them into an artistic intervention with high local resonance.

With Metro’s vision to create “transit-oriented communities” (TOCs), an approach to development focused on compact, walkable and bikeable places in a community context (rather than focusing on just a single development parcel), integrated with transit, it’s critical to foster a community-based response to such investment during early planning phases that aligns with and highlights the unique assets and identity of the area. Using arts and culture, LA Commons will be a part of crafting these transit oriented communities around the new station (TOCs).

Transit Drives Indy / Indianapolis, IN

Indianapolis is hamstrung by an inadequate transit system that not only poorly serves those who depend on it, but makes talent retention and attraction a challenge for the region’s business community. According to a Brookings Institution report profiling transit in the U.S.’s top 100 metro areas, Indianapolis is the 14th largest city, yet boasts only the 83rd largest bus fleet, and t he majority of riders experience an average 60-minute wait time.

Improving that service has been a top priority for Indianapolis’s business community and many of the city’s elected, civic and faith-based leaders, who recognize that investing in transportation options is vital both for connecting low-income workers to economic opportunity and for the competition for talented workers and new businesses. And their new transit expansion plan, paid for by voters through an income tax increase approved at the ballot last November, will deliver a 70 percent increase in frequency and extend hours of operation s, while also starting the buildout of an impressive bus rapid transit network to connect yet more neighborhoods and people to opportunity.

As a coalition of businesses, organizations, and individuals whose collective-impact mission is to engage and educate around public transit, Transit Drives Indy, the winning applicant, aims to encourage, monitor, and facilitate the implementation of the new transit plan.

Transit Drives Indy sees an enormous opportunity to create a new culture of public transit in Indianapolis. Their primary strategy with this grant is to activate artists, communities, and arts partners through a multi-year creative placemaking program that integrates the arts into the design and implementation of the Marion County Transit Plan, specifically the 2019 opening of the Red Line, the first of the three planned all-electric bus rapid transit corridors.

We’re eager to get to work with these three communities and are looking forward to sharing stories of their progress. Stay tuned here at t4america.org to read more about them as their projects unfold over the coming year.