Ben Stone, Author at Transportation For America

About Ben Stone

Ben Stone is Director of Arts & Culture at Smart Growth America and its program Transportation for America. Ben leads the organization’s broad efforts to help communities across the country better integrate arts, culture, and creative placemaking into neighborhood revitalization, equitable development, and transportation planning efforts. Ben holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a Bachelor in American Studies from Tufts University; and a Master in City Planning from MIT, where he focused on land use planning, urban design, and the intersection of the arts and community development. Prior to joining SGA, Ben served as Executive Director of Station North Arts & Entertainment, Inc., at which he employed an arts-based revitalization and placemaking strategy to guide development in the state-designated Arts District in Baltimore. Under Ben’s leadership, Station North became a national model for creative placemaking and equitable development through the arts and innovative collaboration. Ben has also served as an architectural designer/planner for the Baltimore Development Corporation, working on revitalization projects in Baltimore’s Middle Branch, Central Business District, and Station North. As a frequent conference speaker and guest lecturer and critic, Ben has advised students, practitioners, and artists on creative placemaking and community-engaged art. Ben has been recognized as a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators (2014), a Baltimore Business Journal 40 under 40 Honoree (2014), and a Next City Vanguard (2012). Ben can be reached at bstone [at] smartgrowthamerica [dot] org.

New yearlong fellowship will help individuals build skills in creative placemaking and transportation planning

T4America is proud to announce the creation of a new yearlong Arts, Culture, and Transportation (ACT) Fellowship to help those already working at the nexus of arts and transportation take their work to the next level.

This new fellowship, created with funding from the Kresge Foundation, builds upon the deep knowledge and expertise T4America has established over the last four years in arts and culture in transportation. The fellowship, which will be filled by a class of approximately 10-15 professionals already working at the intersection of the arts and transportation, will help them elevate their work to the next level.

Over the last year, we provided training to three communities to help them build connections between local arts agencies and departments of transportation. This ACT fellowship expands the scope of that type of training to help a wide range of individual transportation and community leaders from across the country share creative placemaking practices and challenges with their peers. Fellows will learn from one another and develop the tools and expertise to train novices who want to learn more about this emerging practice.

We are now accepting applications from interested teams of candidates (at least two but no more than four people per team) from the same locality. We recommend that your team has a mix of unique or shared experiences in the arts & culture, transportation, and community development sectors.

Apply as a team

For more information, or to ask questions that you encounter while preparing your application, watch our webinar Watch here >>

Fellows will deepen their creative placemaking skills and knowledge of the transportation planning and design process. Fellows will remain employed by their organizations and agencies during the fellowship.

Teams should apply if their goals include any of the following:

Strengthening skills to develop equitable transportation projects that better serve your local community.
Gaining mentorship and learning from peers and nationally recognized thought leaders in creative placemaking and transportation.
Peer-learning through a curated fellowship cohort.
An opportunity to workshop your projects through hands-on, in-person convenings.
Becoming leaders at the intersection of arts, culture and transportation. You’ll have the chance to apply what you’ve learned by delivering technical assistance through T4America’s future workshops.

The ACT fellowship will include an online distance learning component and three in-person convenings. T4America and SGA staff, as well as a team of national experts, will educate fellows on best practices in various areas of transportation, arts, and culture, while fellows will have an opportunity to share their own challenges and learn from one another and from the cities that host the in-person convenings.

The next step for creative placemaking in transportation

The ACT Fellowship is the next logical step in T4America’s work to help transportation professionals learn how to harness the power of arts and culture to develop transportation projects that better serve those who use them.

Released three years ago, The Scenic Route: Getting Started with Creative Placemaking in Transportation, introduced transportation planners and local leaders to the concept, shared successful case studies, and provided guidance to transportation professionals on working with artists.
A year later, our Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan explored how artists contribute to transportation solutions, identifying seven challenges and seven solutions involving artists. Our Cultural Corridor Consortium, also launched two years ago, supported three cities per year with direct funding, technical assistance, and peer learning opportunities to incorporate artistic practice into transportation projects.
Last year, our State of the Art Transportation Trainings educated transportation professionals in three cities on artistic practice and educated arts administrators and artists on transportation planning, while helping both collaborate more effectively with one another.
And most recently, we launched artist-in-residency programs at the DOTs in Washington state and Minnesota to bring a creative approach to their work and embed artistic practice in both agencies.

Please email Ben Stone, director of Arts & Culture, with any questions.

Coming soon: our newest resource on creative placemaking

By integrating arts and culture into the planning process for transportation projects — an approach known as creative placemaking — communities can plan and build transportation projects that better reflect and celebrate local culture, heritage, and values. But where is this happening and what does it look like in practice?

On September 27, we’re releasing a rigorous new national examination of creative placemaking to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges.

Do you want to be the first to read the Field Scan in two weeks? Sign up now for this new Arts & Culture email list from T4America & Smart Growth America.

Every great place — whether small town, big city, local neighborhood — also has a unique sense of itself that’s reflected in or supported by artists and local culture. Because the arts are a core part of strengthening the social, physical, and economic fabric of communities, they’re also a key part of smarter growth, which is all about building great, sustainable, livable places.

The power of creative placemaking is gaining wider recognition among transportation professionals, and the art world is responding and finding new ways to collaborate.

The ArtPlace Transportation Field Scan, a forthcoming report from Transportation for America in partnership with ArtPlace America, will examine creative placemaking projects across the U.S. that demonstrate how arts and culture involvement can deliver transportation projects more smoothly and quickly, improve safety, and build community support. The Field Scan also aims to introduce arts audiences to the transportation challenges and opportunities faced by local officials, so that artists may more effectively engage with them.

Stay tuned for the official release on September 27. Click here to sign up now for our new arts & culture focused list where we’ll occasionally share more about this work.

In the meantime, we’re holding a month-long celebration of the positive impact that arts and culture have on our communities through a handful of inspiring local stories. Follow Arts & Culture Month as we demonstrate how arts and culture are not a “nice to have” when it comes to transportation or local community development projects — they’re essential.

On the road with creative placemaking

When it comes to planning or development, more communities are thinking outside the box. Local leaders are interested in developing community projects that better reflect their local culture, heritage, and values, and creative placemaking is an approach that can help them accomplish those goals.

Creative placemaking is an approach that incorporates arts, culture, and creativity into the planning process to allow for more genuine public engagement — particularly in low-income neighborhoods, communities of color and among immigrant populations.

Transportation for America has been ramping up efforts over the last three years to help people across the country incorporate arts and culture into their community development projects, focusing first on transportation projects.

In 2016 we released The Scenic Route: Getting Started with Creative Placemaking and Transportation, an interactive guide for transportation planners, public works agencies, and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects. I came on board at Transportation for America and Smart Growth America in 2016, and soon after we launched a webinar series covering the role artists and designers can play in improving the visioning process, along with the ways city agencies are benefiting artist-in-residence programs. More recently, we welcomed our new arts & culture associate, Mallory Nezam, who brings her background in cultural organizing, digital marketing, and theater to our creative placemaking initiative.

We’re doing a lot more than producing valuable resources at this point, though, and we’re expanding our work to helping diverse communities across the country learn how this approach can reap tangible benefits.

In December 2016, a team of us from Smart Growth America traveled to Zanesville, OH to deliver a technical assistance workshop. I was there to explain how creative placemaking and leveraging the town’s burgeoning artist community could help attract new businesses and residents to the disinvested downtown, boosting the economy in a way that would also honor and elevate the city’s history and culture.

Zanesville was once a thriving economic center for manufacturing and logistics, but has undergone the loss of nearly half of its residents since the 1950’s. The community has been working to bring investment back to its downtown by transforming its burgeoning arts scene into an established community and tourist attraction. I shared with Zanesville’s leaders an array of creative placemaking strategies to build on the town’s artistic energy, including artist attraction programs, renovation loans, façade grants, layered tax incentives, small business and artist support programs, and festivals and events to employ artists and build social cohesion. Workshop attendees came away with lessons from successful case studies of similarly sized communities such as Paducah, KY and Cumberland, MD.

I also presented Open Walls Baltimore, an international street art project I developed in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District, as an example of how connecting local artists with invited foreign artists can accelerate local artists’ careers, bring positive press to a neighborhood, and inspire civic participation first in the mural project, then in future community meetings and projects. Open Walls leveraged Station North’s street artists to put the district on the map; the same could certainly happen in Zanesville.

Our experience in Zanesville is really just the tip of the iceberg — T4America and SGA are ramping up this work and rounding out the technical assistance that we’re able to offer to local communities.

In just the last few months, we’ve been with the citizens of Williamson, WV, and Portsmouth, OH, and I’m looking forward to trips to Carrizozo, NM, Youngstown, OH and Twin Falls, ID, the latter two of which are communities using small-scale manufacturing and place-based development to create economic opportunity. I’m looking forward to sharing more about their experiences.

Creative placemaking is just one of the ways we work with towns and cities to improve communities. Contact us to learn more about our creative placemaking work and how we might be able to help your community.

How best to stitch a community back together divided by an interstate?

USDOT is in the midst of a new initiative to address some of damage created by interstates driven through the heart of urban areas. Last week a group of experts traveled to Nashville to discuss ways to repair the damage inflicted upon a part of North Nashville by a segment of Interstate 40.

Jefferson Street overpass over Interstate 40. Photo by Rochelle Carpenter

More than a half-century ago, the new Interstate Highway System connected millions of Americans, creating new, valuable economic connections between cities and speeding the movement of goods and people across the country in a new network of roads that were the envy of the world. But the social costs weren’t shared equitably, and inside many urban areas, interstates were most frequently constructed through communities of color, disrupting, disconnecting, and displacing them.

Acknowledging this unfortunate reality, Secretary Foxx and the US Department of Transportation announced the Every Place Counts Design Challenge in May, which “seeks to raise awareness and identify innovative community design solutions that bridge the infrastructure divide and reconnect people to opportunity,” according to USDOT. Through an open competition, USDOT selected Spokane, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Philadelphia, and Nashville to receive pro bono design guidance to mitigate the disastrous effects of urban highways in each city.

On July 11th and 12th, a team with representatives from Transportation for America, USDOT, The Congress for The New Urbanism, Toole Design Group, and others participated in Nashville’s design challenge, focusing on North Nashville’s Jefferson Street corridor and its two intersections (one overpass, one underpass) with Interstate 40.

Jefferson Street in Nashville during a walk through the corridor. Photo by Rochelle Carpenter

North Nashville, and especially Jefferson Street, has been the cultural and educational heart of black Nashville, and is still home to three historically black colleges and universities (Meharry, Fisk, and Tennessee State University). Though more than a dozen music venues once called the corridor home, all but one have been demolished — some by the construction of I-40, and some from the later decline aided by it. (Some of the historic venues were also torn down before Interstate 40 was built.)

Today, Jefferson Street suffers from a relatively high rate of vacancy, a lack of adequate sidewalks and connections across I-40, and property owners holding on to buildings with the hope that property values will increase, rather than selling or developing. Despite this, the corridor is also home to a collection of small cultural institutions, including the Art History Class Lounge and Gallery, Woodcuts Gallery, and the nearby Norf Walls street art project. In Nashville’s hot real estate market, the very real physical barrier of I-40 encircling downtown here has contributed to slowing development in North Nashville — much to the relief of renters and the chagrin of many property owners.

It was in this context that the design team met with stakeholders representing local, state, and federal government agencies, local residents and business owners, anchor institutions, and design professionals for two days of visioning exercises. Ideas generated included everything from widening sidewalks and removing right turn lanes, to decking over I-40 and building aerial parks à la downtown Dallas.

Thaxton Abshalom Waters, founder of the Art History Class Lounge, asked the designers and experts to “focus on tapping back into the same sources that made the neighborhood a beautiful and culturally rich landscape in the first place.” It’s a reasonable request: much of the positive momentum on Jefferson Street today comes, as it did before I-40, from artists and performers, building community through cultural production, art walks, and creative resuse of structures and spaces along Jefferson Street.

Discussions during the design charette. Photo by Rochelle Carpenter

Long before the term was coined, Jefferson Street has benefited from creative placemaking, an approach to community development that acknowledges the integral role that arts, culture, and creativity play in community development and in ensuring that communities better reflect and celebrate local culture, heritage and values.

Creative Placemaking

To learn more about the ways in which corridor revitalization and transportation projects benefit from the arts, explore T4A’s guide to creative placemaking, the Scenic Route.

The design interventions generated by the two-day charrette are a good start, but on their own, they won’t be enough to produce the kind of positive change sought by the local leaders and residents who’ve been fighting an uphill battle to see some of the pride and glory restored to their neighborhood. But the process proved to be a great organizing tool for bringing together leadership from the neighborhood, government, business community, and transportation planners and engineers.

USDOT, with assistance from The Congress for the New Urbanism and Toole Design Group, will release a report summarizing findings and suggestions from the two-day event in the fall.