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El Paso’s Transnational Trolley: How art can help imagine creative transportation solutions

What begun as a sort of arts-driven guerilla marketing campaign for the fictional return of a historic streetcar in the border communities of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is becoming a reality, a demonstration of the power of art to capture the imagination of a community and help them look at old problems in different ways and imagine creative solutions.

This story is part of arts and culture month at T4America & Smart Growth America, where we’re telling a handful of stories about how arts and culture are essential to building better transportation projects and stronger communities. It’s adapted from a longer case study that will be featured in Transportation for America and ArtPlace America’s upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation.

Unlike San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico, which are separated by 20 miles, El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico sit immediately adjacent to one another, separated only by the width of the Rio Grande River and the international border between the United States and Mexico. Until 1846, El Paso was in fact part of Juárez and Mexico, and the two independent cities today form the world’s largest binational metroplex, with thousands of daily crossings by foot, car, and bus; billions of dollars of trade; and five border crossings connecting the two cities and region. For generations, residents on both sides of the border have crossed frequently for work, school, recreation, and to visit family; more than 80 percent of El Pasoans identify as Latinx.

Until it was closed down in 1974, these border crossings were facilitated in part by an international streetcar system that connected the downtowns of both cities. As in many American cities, the streetcar system ran President’s Conference Committee (PCC) streetcars, with a sleek Art Deco design that was introduced after the Great Depression to lure new car owners back onto public transportation.

The iconic streetcars and stories of their transnational past served as the inspiration for Peter Svarzbein’s Masters of Fine Arts thesis project at New York’s School for Visual Arts. In 2012 Mr. Svarzbein, a native of El Paso, created the El Paso Transnational Trolley, which could be described as part performance art, part guerrilla marketing, part visual art installation, and part fake advertising campaign. The project began with a series of wheatpaste posters advertising the return of the El Paso-Juárez streetcar, and continued with the deployment of Alex the Trolley Conductor, a new mascot and spokesperson for the alleged new service. Alex appeared at Comic Cons, public parks, conferences, and other public spaces to promote the return of the streetcar, while additional advertisements appeared across El Paso, sparking curiosity and excitement for the assumed real project.

Eventually, Svarzbein admitted that the project was a graduate thesis masquerading as a streetcar launch, but rather than graduating and moving on, he decided to move back home to El Paso.

When Svarzbein learned that the City of El Paso planned to sell the historic PCC streetcars, he lobbied the city to cancel the sale, and instead return the streetcars to the streets of El Paso. Thanks to the region’s dry climate, the streetcars have remained in relatively good shape for the past four decades even though they’ve been stored in the open desert at the edge of El Paso.

After gathering thousands of signatures in support of the project and with the strong backing of the City of El Paso and Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Commissioner Ted Haughton, the El Paso trolley won a $97 million grant from TxDOT. It is now slated to begin service in El Paso in 2018. The third phase of the project will include a connection to the Medical Center of the Americas, while the second will include the much anticipated transnational connection to Juárez.

In one of the most surprising twists in this long tale, shortly after this funding was awarded, Svarzbein rode the wave of public support for the once-fictional project to win a seat on El Paso’s City Council.

Svarzbein’s approach as an artist transformed the discussion. The project’s website quotes artist Guillermo Goméz-Peña: “An artist thinks differently, imagines a better world, and tries to render it in surprising ways. And this becomes a way for his/her audiences to experience the possibilities of freedom that they can’t find in reality.”

Clearly, Svarzbein credits his creative campaign with helping to get the project off the ground and building the community support needed to win funding, claiming that “there is a sort of responsibility that artists have to imagine and speak about a future that may not be able to be voiced by a large amount of people in the present. I felt that sort of responsibility. If I couldn’t change the debate, at least I could sort of write a love letter to the place that raised me.”

This story is another example of how transportation professionals are exploring new, creative, and contextually-specific approaches to planning and building transportation projects. They are collaborating with artists and the community in new ways to transform transportation systems into powerful tools to help people access opportunity, drive economic development, improve health and safety, and build the civic and social capital that binds communities together.

This project is just one of the many case studies that will be featured in our upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation, commissioned by ArtPlace America. The field scan is intended to examine the ways in which arts and culture are helping to solve transportation challenges while engaging the community in a more inclusive process.

Stay tuned for more about arts and culture during the entire month of September.

Celebrating a month of arts and culture in transportation

Throughout the rest of September, along with our parent organization Smart Growth America, we’ll be celebrating the positive, measurable impacts that arts and culture can have on transportation projects by sharing a handful of inspiring local stories, culminating with the release of a new examination of creative placemaking we produced with ArtPlace America at the end of this month.

Why spend the better part of a month talking about arts and culture? And what does it have to do with building better transportation projects?

Every great place — whether small town, big city, local neighborhood — also has a unique sense of itself that’s reflected in or supported by the arts 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 smart growth, which is all about building great, sustainable, lovable places.

We’re going to spend the rest of this month sharing a handful of stories about how arts and culture are essential to building better transportation projects that do more to lift up and celebrate what’s unique about the local communities where they are located.

Hopefully you’ve already pored over The Scenic Route, T4America’s primer to creative placemaking in transportation. But we’ve got more coming: ArtPlace America selected T4America to partner with them to undertake a rigorous 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.

As we get prepare to release this “field scan” later in September with ArtPlace America, we are going to share a handful of stories that bring this issue to life; stories that show how arts and culture are not a “nice to have” when it comes to transportation or local community development projects — they’re essential.

Tune in throughout the rest of September as we share stories each week on our blog and on social media. Here are the stories that we’ve shared so far:

El Paso’s Transnational Trolley: How art can help imagine creative transportation solutions

September 8, 2017
What began as a sort of arts-driven guerilla marketing campaign for the fictional return of a historic streetcar in the border communities of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is becoming a reality, a demonstration of the power of art to capture the imagination of a community and help them look at old problems in different ways and imagine creative solutions. Read more >>

Engaging east Portland to plan a more inclusive bus rapid transit line

September 12, 2017
When roughly 14 miles of a bus rapid transit line was proposed along Division Street in East Portland, the effort was greeted with interest in an often-neglected area of the city, but also concern about the possibilities of displacement and development poorly engaged with the unique local culture. To address those concerns, community members throughout the Jade and Division Midway districts were engaged through arts and culture projects to recalibrate the plan to better serve community needs. Read more >>

National brain trust gathers to strategize around arts, culture and transportation

Last month, a group of twenty four transportation officials, engineers, planners, artists, policymakers, and advocates from around the country gathered together in Indianapolis to sweat and scheme about how to use arts and culture to build support for more equitable transportation infrastructure.

Twenty-four leaders, ArtPlace America and T4America gathered in Indy for a rare opportunity to talk transportation and creative placemaking.

Transportation for America (a program of Smart Growth America) and ArtPlace America co-hosted this working group, which was graciously hosted by Big Car Collaborative and the Harrison Center for the Arts, two of many incredible organizations working at the intersection of arts, culture, and community development in Indy.

We chose Indianapolis partly because Indy voters approved a 0.25 percent income tax hike back in November 2016 to drastically improve bus service. The new tax will raise more than $54 million annually for the construction of three bus rapid transit lines, new buses, increased route frequency and new sidewalks and bus shelters. But the devil is in the details, and Indy-based transportation, community development and arts organizations and individuals are keen on ensuring that these new investments serve existing residents by centering community input through arts and culture. Local organizations like Transit Drives Indy, LISC, House Poem, Big Car, IndyGo, and others have invested in creative placemaking practices to tackle the role of transportation in improving access and quality of life for everyone in the Indianapolis region. (T4A will also be working closely with Transit Drives Indy over the coming year as part of the Cultural Corridor Consortium.)

Geoff Anderson, President of Smart Growth America, welcomes the working group.

During our time in Indianapolis, the working group visited a few sites including a complete streets project at Maple Crossing, part of Great Places 2020, and Big Car’s Artist & Public Life Residency, an artists’ housing and community land trust development. We also heard from leaders of creative placemaking projects around the country; working group participants Amanda Newman, Joseph Kunkel, Alan Nakagawa, and Peter Svarzbein shared stories from their roles as the creative instigators behind incredible arts-driven transportation projects in Takoma Park, MD, Kewa Pueblo, NM, Los Angeles, CA, and El Paso, TX, respectively.

We ended our time together by breaking into four groups — federal, state and regional, local municipal, and local advocacy — to brainstorm specific ideas and initiatives to further support the adoption of arts and cultural strategies as crucial to solving challenges within the transportation sector.

A storefront in the Maple Crossing corridor where Harrison Center for the Arts is fostering arts programming that engages the local community.

Several themes emerged as the working group participants reflected on our team’s ongoing research:

The need to define “community engagement”

Considering how arts and culture can help transportation agencies better engage communities is just one, narrow aspect of how creative work can help produce better transit infrastructure. There are also varying degrees and definitions of community engagement. While to some it may conjure images of an inaccessible public sector official sitting behind a desk while community members yell at them, others see community engagement as a more significant power shift where transit planning is led by residents themselves. Many working group members agreed that approaching transportation planning through arts and culture helps us go beyond the cursory or surface-level community engagement that is all too common.

Leading with equity and inclusion

The inclusion of arts and cultural strategies doesn’t automatically lead to transportation projects that serve everyone fairly or reflect the diversity of all stakeholders. Equity must be part of the DNA of any project. One participant identified the need to be clear about what ethnic and socioeconomic communities a project is intended to serve and what kinds of cultural heritage the arts and transit project would lift up: If the neighborhood is predominantly African American, yet the arts presented are culturally European, what message does this send regarding the project’s audience? Another participant suggested that because some communities have experienced a history of disinvestment — notably communities of color, immigrant communities, and lower- or mixed-income communities — an equitable approach to transportation investment will actually require disproportionate investment to level the playing field.

Making a stronger argument for how arts and culture impact key transportation priorities: safety, congestion, schedule, and cost

The transportation field operates with these four core considerations, and participants noted that we must effectively demonstrate how arts and culture impact these concerns to be taken seriously. Others felt that the inclusion of arts and cultural approaches should and could actually help shift which considerations are important and what transportation professionals actually evaluate as success, moving away from impersonal quantitative metrics to a more holistic picture that includes the quality of experience. Yet, other participants prioritized the importance of continuing to identify the key traditional transportation stakeholders who need to understand and advocate for the impact of creative placemaking, and create tools that can empower these allies.

Changing arts and culture from being a “nice to have” to a “need to have”

Many in this field have been working for decades to build beautiful public art at transit stops and on bus and train lines. However, our group noted that an area for growth is the opportunity to impress upon transportation leaders that apart from this more visible form of the arts, arts and culture can play a vital role in the actual transportation planning processes, implementation, policymaking, and more.

Making better use of a variety of forms of expertise, including lived experience, technical knowledge, and political power in our planning, design, and maintenance of transit infrastructure

We spent a lot of time discussing the different barriers to better integrating cultural approaches to transportation. For example, engineers may not feel comfortable with or be encouraged to communicate transparently with residents, and residents may feel unmotivated to share their experiences after past histories of being negatively impacted or disrupted by new transportation projects. Participants discussed how to overcome these kinds of barriers, articulating that this kind of synergy is required to get us to better community outcomes and that arts and culture can help lead the way.

Stay tuned for the release this fall of our Arts, Culture and Transportation Field Scan — an examination of creative placemaking in practice across the country by T4A’s Arts and Culture team, commissioned by ArtPlace America — which includes deeper exploration of the ideas discussed above. Sign up for our newsletter here to receive ongoing updates.

This post was written by Mallory Nezam for T4America and Danya Sherman from ArtPlace America.

Working group participants:

Geoff Anderson, Smart Growth America
Chris Appleton, Wonderroot
Emiko Atherton, National Complete Streets Coalition
Scott Bogren, Community Transportation Association of America
Rochelle Carpenter, Nashville Metropolitan Planning Organization
Stephanie Gidigbi, Natural Resources Defense Council
Tedd Grain, Local Initiatives Support Corporation Indianapolis
Neil Greenberg, Detroit Department of Transportation
Susie Hagie, Colorado Department of Transportation
Sabina Haque, Artist
Scott Hercik, Appalachian Regional Commission
Joseph Kunkel, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative
Joung Lee, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials
Dana Lucero, Oregon Metro
Alan Nakagawa, Los Angeles Department of Transportation
Amanda Newman, Health for America, Artist
Peter Svarzbein, Artist
Anthony Taylor, Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota
Shin-Pei Tsay, Gehl Institute
Sarita Turner, PolicyLink & Transportation Equity Caucus
Jim Walker, Big Car
Patricia Walsh, Americans for the Arts
Orson Watson, Consultant
Sara Zimmerman, Safe Routes to School

About Transportation for America’s Arts & Culture Initiative

In 2016, T4A began its arts and culture initiative with the launch of The Scenic Route, an interactive creative placemaking resource for transportation professionals. More recently, T4A launched the Cultural Corridor Consortium, a grant making and technical assistance program that supports communities to use arts and culture to solve local transportation challenges. T4A is currently producing a field scan in collaboration with ArtPlace America examining the impact of arts and culture on transportation projects. T4A is a leader in the national creative placemaking movement, which seeks to support and institutionalize the role of artists in contributing to community development projects, especially in advancing smart and equitable transportation solutions.

About ArtPlace America’s Research Strategies

ArtPlace Research Strategies seek to understand both the processes undertaken and the outcomes achieved by creative placemaking practice. By looking deeply into the activities and learnings surfaced in both the National Creative Placemaking Fund and Community Development Investments program, we bring the arts and cultural work happening in communities of all sizes and contexts together with an analysis of key trends and measures of success in community development practice. Rather than attempting to develop a single approach or system for evaluating creative placemaking project impacts – which vary widely depending on local context, stated goals, and partners – ArtPlace research products are intended more broadly to support practitioners and organizations interested in taking up creative placemaking work. Our partnership with Transportation for America is part of a broader research initiative that we refer to as the Translating Outcomes initiative.

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.

T4America’s creative placemaking work gets another boost from the NEA

T4America is pleased to announce that we’ve received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support our ongoing work to help transportation professionals learn how to engage with artists and design better transportation projects that better reflect and serve local communities.

“The American people are recognized for their innovative spirit and these grants represent the vision, energy, and talent of America’s artists and arts organizations,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “I am proud of the role the National Endowment for the Arts plays in helping advance the creative capacity of the United States.” This grant comes from the NEA’s “Our Town” program:

Our Town is the NEA’s signature creative placemaking program that supports partnerships of artists, arts organizations, and municipal government that work to revitalize neighborhoods. This practice places arts at the table with land-use, transportation, economic development, education, housing, infrastructure, and public safety strategies to address a community’s challenges. Creative placemaking highlights the distinctiveness of a place, encouraging residents to identify and build upon their local creative assets.

Within the transportation sector, creative placemaking is an approach that incorporates arts, culture, and creativity to allow for more genuine public engagement in planning processes. This can be a particularly impactful tool for historically underrepresented communities, providing a platform and process to more directly involve community members in the systems that impact them. This produces transportation projects that better serve the needs of the local community and reflect the local culture and heritage of the populations that these projects serve.

For nearly two years, T4America has been on the leading edge of translating this emerging topic area and explaining its benefits to transportation professionals (planners, engineers, local elected officials and others). This grant will help us continue a transition from defining how this approach works in transportation, into actively equipping and training both transportation professionals and artists to work with each other on transportation projects.

Our arts & culture team is currently wrapping up a field scan — a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation — to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges.

Through this grant — and incorporating what we learn from the aforementioned field scan — we’ll be partnering with Americans for the Arts to actively train transportation professionals to engage with artists and arts organizations and vice versa, equipping them with the requisite skills to complete creative placemaking projects. (Stay tuned soon for more on this training opportunity.)

We’ll be holding trainings in three competitively selected cities on specific transportation issues, such as improving pedestrian safety or reducing disruptions caused by road construction, all while working to reflect local culture and bolster local capacity. We’re aiming for the trainings to lead to tangible policy improvements that will facilitate more collaborations between artists and transportation professionals. As a product of these trainings, we will also produce web-based toolkits to help others lead similar efforts in their own communities.

“We have increasingly heard both from transportation professionals who are interested in creative placemaking, and from arts and culture practitioners who are eager to deepen their civically engaged practice,” said Ben Stone, Director of Arts and Culture for Smart Growth America/T4America. “These two fields have a lot to gain from working together to better engage communities in transportation planning processes, and this generous grant from the NEA will allow us to help make that happen.”

Webinar wrap: Creative placemaking grants informational session

Earlier this month we hosted an informational webinar detailing our expectations and tips for our Cultural Corridor Consortium (3C) grants. Transportation for America is accepting applications to support creative placemaking projects addressing transportation challenges or opportunities in three U.S. cities.

After our last round of 3C projects in San Diego, Nashville and Portland, Transportation for America is seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new locations that engage residents, attract the attention of local public works and transportation agencies, and spark new conversations that bring more people to the table to plan and implement new transportation investments.

We are especially committed to funding collaborative projects that expand transportation opportunities and local control for low-income people, recent immigrants, and people of color living in communities that have experienced disproportionate disinvestment. We are accepting applications from communities of any type and size, including indigenous, rural, urban, suburban.

A full recording of the webinar is available here, or through the video above.

Applications may be completed online via a form on the T4America website at https://t4america.org/creative-placemaking-grants/, and you can also download the full application form there for the full information or to submit via email.

Application are due by June 2nd at 5 p.m. EST

Note: Unfortunately, due to our previous work with projects in San Diego, Nashville and Portland, OR, proposals from those cities are not eligible.

More questions? Email 3CGrant@t4america.org

To learn more about arts and culture in the transportation sector, check out The Scenic Route, our introductory guide to creative placemaking in transportation released last year. http://creativeplacemaking.t4america.org

Good luck!

T4America is supporting arts and culture projects that tackle transportation issues

How can cities and regions apply artistic and cultural practice to shape transportation investments planned for diverse and rapidly changing neighborhoods? How can they positively transform these places and build social capital, support local businesses, and engage the community to celebrate the stories, cultural history, and diversity of existing residents — rather than displacing them? T4America has new grants available to help communities answer these questions.

After working closely with Nashville, Portland and San Diego over the last few years, Transportation for America is seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new cities that engage residents, attract the attention of local public works and transportation agencies, and spark new conversations that bring more people to the table to plan and implement new transportation investments. We are especially committed to funding collaborative projects that expand transportation opportunities and local control for low-income people, recent immigrants, and people of color living in communities that have experienced disproportionate disinvestment.

Applications may be completed online via a form on the T4America website at https://t4america.org/creative-placemaking-grants/. The application deadline for this opportunity is Friday, June 2, 2017 at 5:00 p.m. EST.

Don’t miss the informational webinar happening on Thursday May 11 at 4:00 p.m.

This opportunity is made possible through the generous support of the Kresge Foundation.

Arts and culture are helping three cities transform neighborhoods in a positive way

From new light rail systems to bus rapid transit lines, cities are planning major new transportation investments to spur economic development and better connect people to opportunity. But how can they ensure that these investments — often in diverse and quickly evolving parts of their cities — transform neighborhoods in a positive way by building social capital, supporting local businesses, and celebrating the stories, cultural history and diversity of existing residents rather than displacing them?

Through a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation, over the last two years we’ve worked alongside local partners in three rapidly changing, diverse communities around the country to explore how arts and culture and more creative forms of engaging the public can provide positive answers to the questions asked above.

We’re seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new cities for 2017-2018. Find out more about the grant opportunity and apply today.

Learn More & Apply

In three specific cities outlined below (and elsewhere), an approach known as creative placemaking has helped engage community members in a deeper way than traditional transportation and public works agencies have managed to do, enabling and empowering true community-led visions for the projects at hand. This approach demonstrates tremendous promise for transportation agencies and local governments at a time when many have historically failed to win deep public support for important projects, often delaying or derailing implementation.

Over the last two years of our Cultural Corridor Consortium project, as it’s called, we’ve witnessed artistic and cultural practice sparking deep public engagement, facilitating the difficult — but necessary — conversations required to create better projects that more fully serve the needs of these communities and reflect what makes them unique in the first place. The consortium consists of trusted local partner organizations working in transit corridors in neighborhoods just outside urban cores: the Nolensville Pike Corridor in Nashville, the University Avenue corridor in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, and Division Street in Portland’s Jade and Division-Midway Districts.

Here are brief versions of each of their stories:

Nashville

In south Nashville, the Nolensville Pike corridor is a thriving community of recent immigrants, primarily of Latin, Kurdish, Somali, and Sudanese origin. Today, Nashville welcomes more than 1,000 refugees a year, has the fastest growing immigrant community in the United States, and is home to one of the largest Kurdish populations outside the Middle East. Nolensville Pike, which has been dubbed the “International District,” serves as the focal point of these immigrant communities.

Nolensville Pike is also a congested, typical arterial highway that carries 60,000 automobile trips a day while also serving adjacent commercial uses and residential neighborhoods. Though it serves as the central commercial spine of immigrant life in south Nashville, it has eroded or non-existent sidewalks, few crosswalks, insufficient bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and no bus shelters, making travel outside of a car a downright unpleasant and often dangerous experience.

In 2015, Conexión Américas began hosting community meetings — facilitated by artists — to solicit ideas for transforming the road and surrounding spaces. At these meetings, the public expressed their desire for unbroken, connected sidewalks, artistic crosswalks, slower traffic, public art, and bus shelters. To bolster this work, we supported Conexión Américas and the Nashville Area MPO to facilitate community-based arts and culture public engagement to plan and implement improved bus service and, eventually, light rail.

Through a student-led bus shelter design/build project, an intergenerational oral history project, and dynamic “Creative Labs” community meetings, the community came together to dream about the future of Nolensville Pike. This work was documented in Envision Nolensville Pike and led to the creation of the city’s first-ever bilingual crosswalk, situated on Nolensville Pike.

Supported by new analysis that T4America and Conexión Américas are releasing in the coming weeks, these partners are producing a plan to avoid commercial displacement and cultural gentrification along the corridor while building a better Pike for everyone. The next phase of this project will bring some of these visions to fruition to test ideas, push boundaries, and further build relationships along the diverse corridor.

The Nashville MPO formally launched its creative placemaking efforts with the adoption of its most recent regional transportation plan, and recently hosted a Creative Placemaking Symposium that convened area elected officials, transportation planners and engineers to think through applying creative placemaking to transportation projects.

San Diego

Since the mid-1990s, the neighborhood surrounding the intersection of 50th Street and University Avenue in the eastern City Heights neighborhood of San Diego has been a landing pad for newly arrived refugees from Somalia and other East African countries. Nearly three decades later, the bustling neighborhood, often referred to as as Little Mogadishu or Little Somalia, continues to serve the Somali and other East African communities. It’s a regional hub for other East Africans from throughout San Diego, a neighborhood hub for those that have been living there for years, and continues to be a welcoming home to new refugees. Many of those who arrived in the 1990s have become established business and community leaders, pillars of a strong local social fabric. In the neighborhood you’ll find Somali businesses, mosques that attract and support new arrivals, and affordable housing apartment complexes, all which contribute to the rich sense of culture and home.

Despite the sense of community that the the neighborhood has nurtured, it’s a dangerous area to walk, with high rates of pedestrian fatalities and other safety issues. The City Heights Community Development Corporation (CHCDC) has been engaging the community to envision how they can integrate their art, culture and history with a safer streetscape. Picking up on that work, Circulate San Diego, alongside CHCDC, initiated new programs to engage with largely East African and Somali residents to define community assets, and discuss how these assets can be reflected in art to improve the overall transit ridership experience with bus rapid transit on El Cajon Boulevard.

All of this public engagement has led to the development of parklets, gathering spaces, a pop-up coffee shop, local farmers market and traffic calming murals that have helped solidify sense of place, strengthened community ownership, and increased pedestrian safety.

The neighborhood’s “Take Back the Alley” mural project brought community members together to create a mural near a BRT station. This public art piece, and the positive effects it has on the surrounding area generated inertia, encouraging a small business owner nearby to clean up an adjacent parking lot and repurpose it as a café space, now leased by a local start-up coffee cart business.

Our partners also spearheaded the new San Diego Neighborhood Placemaking Collaborative, a collection of five neighborhood-based organizations who meet regularly to advocate for creative placemaking in the region. Last year, Circulate San Diego produced A Place for Placemaking in San Diego as a roadmap to overhaul the regulations and permitting policies that negatively impact creative placemaking projects in San Diego. The white paper is already helping to shape new permitting procedures by defining creative placemaking in San Diego’s Municipal Code and subsequently providing for a new process for community organizations and other applicants interested in pursuing neighborhood placemaking projects. Circulate San Diego and CHCDC also recently participated as key stakeholders in a city-led “Complete Boulevard study” to bring a complete streets design concept and creative placemaking elements to El Cajon Boulevard and this neighborhood in particular.

Portland

In Portland, arts-based engagement has helped build a positive dialogue between local agencies and the community to ensure that a new planned bus rapid transit line serves the residents of ethnically diverse, working class districts in the eastern part of the city. The Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) and the Division-Midway Alliance, two nonprofits located respectively in the Jade and Division districts along Division street in Portland, have been empowering residents, businesses, and students through arts and culture to shape the evolving BRT project.

This area is home to many immigrant families that give the area a rich ethnic and cultural diversity that is increasingly rare in Portland. In a corridor with members from such diverse backgrounds, creative tactics allow the community to advocate, express, and communicate their needs and interests related to this new transportation proposal.

By building public awareness and pressure through placemaking work and community organizing, APANO and Division-Midway Alliance helped to pause construction of the BRT planning process until the Portland Bureau of Transportation, Trimet, Metro, and others made formal community benefit agreements by agreeing to mitigation measures to ensure that the new vital transit service would transform the community in a positive way.

Similar to Nashville and San Diego, our partners in Portland also developed a community-based vision — the Jade-Midway Districts Art Plan — to guide their arts and culture solutions to transportation challenges. To further build local capacity, our partners built a Placemaking Steering Committee comprised of eight civic, nonprofit, and government members to guide creative placemaking plans in the district. APANO also launched a creative placemaking project grant program, which funds the creation of cultural worker-led projects in the district. These cultural workers then participate in a cohort known as the Resident Artist Collaborative, in which they receive training to help prepare to produce community-engaged work.

One of the most exciting products of this work is the creation of a new community placemaking grant program at Metro, which will institutionalize this cultural work through the Portland area. Metro, the Portland region’s MPO, kicked off their inaugural Community Placemaking Grant last month, and we were on hand, and we were on hand.

Arts and culture contribute to the unique identity of a city and exert a powerful emotional pull. They’re intrinsic to preserving what’s great about the places people already love, and for creating new places worth caring about. We firmly believe that engaging the public through the arts and culture helps produce better projects, promote social equity, and is part of building better places that are loved and cared for by a more diverse community of people.

In all three of these cities we’ve seen a deep commitment to community-building between local organizations and municipal agencies lead to new institutional creative placemaking programs that will last long after these isolated projects are finished. The pilot projects have led directly to new funding programs and policy changes to build a sustained practice of creative placemaking in the three cities, while bringing new voices to the table.

Bring creative placemaking to your city through a new grant opportunity

After working closely with these cities over the last few years, we are eager to expand on this work — we’re seeking to award $50,000 (each) to creative placemaking projects in three new cities for 2017-2018.

Find out more about the grant opportunity and apply today.

Learn More & Apply

This post was produced by Mallory Nezam and Ben Stone on our arts and culture team.

New to the world of creative placemaking? Catch up with our recent work

At T4America, we’ve stepped up our work in the arena of creative placemaking, traveling the country to learn from what others are doing and sharing the experience of our growing staff when it comes to this emerging approach for transportation planning.

National examination of the practice of creative placemaking. Late last month we announced that Transportation for America has been commissioned by ArtPlace America to undertake a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges. T4America was chosen to lead this transportation field scan research and subsequent working group convening because of our “strong institutional commitment to creative placemaking, comprehensive knowledge of the transportation sector and recent commitment to the creation of an arts & culture program with Ben Stone at the helm,” according to Jamie Hand, ArtPlace’s Director of Research Strategies.

Portland, OR

Kicking off Portland’s new community creative placemaking grants. Our creative placemaking work also recently took us to Portland, Oregon where our arts & culture team met with key stakeholders and toured the creative placemaking projects we support through a grant from the Kresge Foundation.

In east Portland, the Jade and Midway Districts — led by our partners at APANO — are building public support and awareness to ensure that a new bus rapid transit project best serves the needs of the local community. Our team also presented at the launch of Metro’s new Community Placemaking grants, which have been inspired by the implementation of the APANO’s Jade-Midway District Arts Plan.

A creative city going deeper with a creative approach to engaging the public. The Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) is deepening its commitment to engaging the community in creative ways, and integrating artists into community development and transportation projects. The Nashville Area MPO recently launched its creative placemaking efforts with the adoption of its most recent regional transportation plan and has a long-term goal of emboldening and equipping their members to facilitate more valuable public engagement and further community outreach in local planning efforts.

Nashville, TN, Creative Placemaking Symposium

In March, the Nashville MPO convened their first Creative Placemaking Symposium, bringing together area elected officials, transportation planners and engineers from local and state governments to learn how and why creative placemaking works. Rochelle Carpenter, T4A Program Manager and Nashville MPO Senior Policy Analyst, was a key organizer for the symposium, and brought in our Director of Arts & Culture, Ben Stone, to share his insights on how to build effect creative placemaking projects.

How are artists and municipal officials learning to work together? The integration of arts and culture as new tools to help solve civic challenges is an exciting new development in the field. We’ve seen these tools better involve community members, and help to create places that are more meaningful to and reflective of the people that live, work and play there. The artists and cultural workers bridging the conversation between local communities and civic/transportation professionals are now serving an important role as co-problem solvers. But how are the municipal officials and artists being equipped and trained to work together and build these valuable partnerships?

Hear more by catching up with the recording of our most recent webinar on creative placemaking, Training for Artists and Civic/Transportation Collaboration, where we learned about these programs from the perspective of a national practitioner, local training organizer, and an alumna of a training program who also happens to be one of our newest staff members, Mallory Nezam.

Through this webinar we learned how these practitioners are being equipped to work in multiple sectors, communicate with diverse stakeholders, and harmonize the goals of different players. These programs train artists in both practical skills — like writing contracts — and community organizing skills–like how to work with diverse populations. As a result, these training programs are preparing artists to think outside of their traditional role and work with local communities, civic professionals, and local governments. When artists understand the benefits they can bring to the civic sector, we are able to work together to create thriving places that work for everyone.

Lastly, if you haven’t yet, please do check out our guide to creative placemaking, The Scenic Route, intended for a lay audience of elected officials, planners, or other local leaders.

Bolstering creative community engagement in the Nashville region

Considering the enduring creative energy in Tennessee’s principal city, it’s no surprise that Nashville is deepening its commitment to engaging the community in creative ways, and integrating artists into community development and transportation projects.

We believe that incorporating the arts into the process of planning and building transportation projects results in projects that better serve local communities, are championed by locals, and more fully reflect the community’s culture and values.

There’s been a surge of interest around the country in this approach; in developing strategies to be more responsive to a community’s transportation needs and the unique cultural components of place. Nashville, Tennessee is no exception. Through the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (MPO) leadership, the region is deepening its commitment to creative community engagement and integrating artists into community development and transportation projects.

The Nashville Area MPO recently launched its creative placemaking efforts with the adoption of its most recent regional transportation plan. The MPO’s long-term goal is to embolden and equip their members to facilitate more valuable public engagement and further community outreach in local planning efforts.

On March 1st, the MPO convened area elected officials, transportation planners and engineers from local and state governments for a Creative Placemaking Symposium to learn how and why it works, and begin thinking through how this approach could address the challenges and opportunities in their own cities.

Through the symposium, the MPO educated attendees about the difference between creative placemaking — a method to engage the community in planning transportation projects — and simply plopping public art at a bus stop that is out of context and not reflective of the neighborhood.

But where should planners or local officials get started, especially when it seems like a new, perhaps unfamiliar approach? Symposium speakers inspired those in attendance to start by getting to know artists in their communities and work with them to identify and document transportation challenges and solutions.

El Paso Councilman Peter Svarzbein delivered a the keynote address on his successful arts-based campaign to bring back a historic streetcar between El Paso and Mexico. T4A’s own Director of Arts and Culture, Ben Stone, offered examples of creative placemaking projects across the country. Additionally, local leaders Caroline Vincent, director of public art for Metro Nashville Arts, Gary Gaston, executive director of the Nashville Civic Design Center and Renata Soto, executive director with Conexión Américas provided examples of their work in the Middle Tennessee region.

From left, Rochelle Carpenter with T4America/Nashville MPO, Renata Soto with Conexión Américas, Caroline Vincent with Metro Arts, Ben Stone with T4A/Smart Growth America, Gary Gaston with the Nashville Civic Design Center and El Paso Councilman Peter Svarzbein.

The symposium served as a forum for planners to think through how and why creative placemaking might benefit projects in their own towns and cities.

“Creative placemaking is first and foremost about public engagement,” said Rochelle Carpenter, who works for the MPO and T4America. “By facilitating community discussions that inspire people to express their feedback, we hope it will lead to greater participation in the transportation planning process, better transportation projects and more public support for those projects.”

To learn more about creative placemaking in Nashville, read about:

Profiled in our Scenic Route guidebook, the story of creating the region’s first-ever bilingual crosswalk along Nolensville Pike, in partnership with the MPO and Conexión Américas.
Envision Nolensville Pike: a community-led plan to improve walking, bicycling and transit use along Nashville’s most diverse corridor
Tactical urbanism initiated by the Nashville Civic Design Center and its program, TURBO
The Learning Lab, a professional development program for artists in civic, social and placemaking practices by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts

[VIDEO] Training artists to collaborate with civic and municipal officials

In cities across the country, artists are helping to solve civic problems. We recently held a great discussion about how some artists and cultural workers are being trained to collaborate effectively with cities to improve transportation planning and community development.

Cities and artists are coming together, integrating arts and culture to help solve civic challenges and create places that are more meaningful to and reflective of the people that live, work, and play there. Did you miss our recent discussion on the topic? Click here or below to view a recording of the full session.

Artists and cultural workers serve an important role as co-problem solvers by bridging the conversation between local communities and civic/transportation professionals. But to do this work effectively, they must be equipped to work across sectors, communicate with diverse stakeholders, and harmonize the goals of different players. The training programs we discussed are a crucial component of working together to create places that work for everyone.

We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation about creative placemaking and the arts in transportation, so stay tuned. Sign up for email to be notified of opportunities like this in the future.

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T4AMERICA SELECTED TO LEAD ARTPLACE AMERICA’S TRANSPORTATION FIELD SCAN

We also recently announced that Transportation for America has been commissioned by ArtPlace America to undertake a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges. Learn more about this work.

T4America selected to lead national examination of creative placemaking in transportation

We’re proud to announce that Transportation for America has been commissioned by ArtPlace America to undertake a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges.

Flickr photo by John Henderson. View on Flickr

T4America was chosen to lead ArtPlace America’s transportation field scan research and subsequent working group convening because of our “strong institutional commitment to creative placemaking, comprehensive knowledge of the transportation sector and recent commitment to the creation of an arts & culture program with Ben Stone at the helm,” according to Jamie Hand, ArtPlace’s Director of Research Strategies.

ArtPlace America is a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that works to position arts and culture as a core sector of comprehensive community planning and development in order to help strengthen the social, physical, and economic fabric of communities.

For several years T4America has been committed to helping communities across the country better integrate arts, culture and creative placemaking into neighborhood revitalization, equitable development and transportation planning efforts. Creative placemaking in particular is one approach to planning and building transportation projects that taps local arts and culture to produce better projects through a better process.

While best known for grantmaking through their National Creative Placemaking Fund, ArtPlace also runs a research program through which they dive deep into the intersections between arts and cultural practice and various community development sectors like health, housing, public safety, agriculture and food, economic development, education and youth, environment and energy, immigration, and workforce development. A “field scan” is the first step in each sector-specific inquiry.

What goes into a field scan?

Through in-depth interviews and research on relevant projects and literature, Ben Stone and Mallory Nezam, T4A’s arts & culture team, will produce the field scan this spring to help educate the transportation sector on the opportunities presented by working with artists, designers, and cultural workers. This will give us a chance to drill down and better learn how (and where) artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and other community partners to solve transportation challenges.

Our work with ArtPlace will culminate in July 2017 with a convening of a working group comprised of transportation and arts professionals who will provide feedback on the field scan and make recommendations for future research that demonstrates the value of creative placemaking strategies within the transportation sector.

The field scan will build on our Scenic Route resource, in which we aimed to explain an emerging topic (creative placemaking) to potentially skeptical planners & municipal local officials through case studies, identification of approaches to creative placemaking, and other resources.

In all of this work, we’re aiming to make a tangible case that the arts have a positive, measurable impact on transportation projects, and to inspire transportation professionals to take on this new approach.

With our experience producing a primer on creative placemaking, our history of managing creative placemaking projects across the country, and with both transportation and arts experts on staff, no one is better positioned in the transportation sector to integrate transportation practitioners into the creative placemaking dialogue.

Additionally, T4A has been providing subgrants and technical assistance to directly integrate arts and culture into transportation projects in San Diego, CA, Nashville, TN, and Portland, OR, with support from the Kresge Foundation.

Interested in learning more about how we might be help your community integrate arts and culture into transportation projects? We’d love to discuss the possibilities with you — get in touch with us.

How are artists being trained to collaborate with civic leaders on transportation & planning projects?

In cities across the country, artists are helping to solve civic problems. But what sort of training is helping them and other cultural workers facilitate smoother collaborations and better projects? Our third webinar on creative placemaking will continue exploring how cities and artists are working together in transportation planning and community development.

Whether it’s bringing people to an empty plaza through performance, improving navigation options through better design, or connecting neighborhoods through interactive installations, artists bring a unique perspective to many municipal challenges.

But artists and civic professionals do not always speak the same language, however. These two groups often answer to different stakeholders and work along different timelines. With the proliferation of new programs integrating arts and culture into community development—like municipally sponsored artist-in-residence programs—artists and cultural producers need to be trained to work with government agencies and community members, and to inhabit interdisciplinary roles that extend beyond the traditional duties of an artist.

Recognizing this need, several organizations have launched programs to train artists and cultural workers to facilitate smoother collaborations and better projects. Projects like the Regional Arts Commission Community Arts Training Institute in St. Louis, Intermedia Arts’ Creative Community Leadership Institute in Minneapolis, Nashville Metro Arts Commission’s Learning Lab, Creative Capital’s Community Engagement Workshop, and the Center for Performance and Civic Projects are all designed to help better integrate arts into civic and transportation projects.

Learn more about these training programs during Training programs for artist and civic/transportation collaboration, a webinar on Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 2:30 PM EDT. This is the third webinar in our series exploring the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development.

Register for the event to hear from experts who have trained, taught or worked alongside alumni of these innovative and exciting programs. We’ll also be taking your questions about how you can use these programs in your own community. We hope you’ll join us for this conversation next week.

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.

Get to know our new arts and culture outreach associate

Smart Growth America and Transportation for America are pleased to announce the hiring of Mallory Nezam as an arts and culture outreach associate, assisting our efforts to help communities across the country integrate arts, culture and creative placemaking into neighborhood revitalization, equitable development and transportation planning efforts.

For the last few years, Mallory has been working in digital marketing, focusing on content strategy, account management, copywriting, and guerrilla marketing. Simultaneously, she has been operating as both a public artist and cultural organizer in community-based and social practice art, which utilizes art to engage pressing social issues in communities. One interesting project of hers worth highlighting here is Mirror Casket, a “visual structure, performance, and call to action for justice” following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and subsequent protests. (See images and more information at the bottom of this post. -Ed.)

She spent a summer with Creative Time in New York City and The Lab in San Francisco, and has worked extensively with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Arts Museum St. Louis. She loves doing freelance writing and teaching yoga as well.

Get to know Mallory and more about T4America’s and Smart Growth America’s arts and culture work with this short Q&A below.

Why did you want to transition to this larger world of transportation, growth and development? Why Smart Growth America and T4America?

I’ve spent the last few years working in the Rust Belt, specifically St. Louis, MO; an incredible city. I was able to work at a very deep grassroots level while in St. Louis, but after the events in Ferguson, MO in August 2014, I realized that I needed more tools to move my community forward, and became more interested in intersectional work that bridged national and local alliances. I’ve also worked deeply in the space of art, but wanted to branch out to leverage the tools of art and culture in other ways. I’m inspired by public transportation, as I think it is one of the most democratizing resources available. I love how you can hop on a bus and be surrounded by all types of people from every part of the community — something that happens in relatively few spaces.

What kind of work will you be doing here at SGA/T4? What are you really excited about doing in 2017?

I’m going to be serving on both the Arts & Culture and Outreach Teams. I’m looking forward to helping to refine our creative placemaking strategies, processes and tools, and ultimately empower more communities to think about developing places with arts and culture at the helm. I think arts and culture can be both a tool to develop as well as an outcome that is nourished through development.

Why should those of us involved in planning, smart growth, neighborhood revitalization, transportation or the like be thinking about arts and culture? What role can and should the arts and culture play in improving neighborhoods and the places we call home?

Arts and culture can be incredible communication tools to better understand the experiences of people in communities and more deeply engage with them. And on the flip side of the process, I believe integrating arts and culture can help keep communities engaged in the changes happening where they live, making them educated, direct participants, which can ultimately lead to more sustainable implementation of projects that better serve the needs of those people.

We say in our creative placemaking guide that a smart starting point for any proposed transportation project is this question: “How can the distinctiveness of this place and the people in it contribute to the success of this transportation project and the community around it?” How can incorporating arts and culture into the process of building transportation projects — or really any projects to build parks or buildings or anything of the sort — result in better, more prosperous, more equitable places for all of us to live?

We all know there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. At least, I hope we know that! I believe that placemaking gives people ownership of their place and the changes occurring within it, and likewise makes both the process and any final product deeply relevant, functional and meaningful to a community.

Utilizing arts and culture in this way allows community members to articulate the uniqueness of their place, and allows for the project to be designed and implemented in more nuanced ways that make the final product something the community will use and love and that will improve their overall well-being.

And lastly, people need to love where they live, work and play. We need to be designing and developing communities in ways that will make people feel good, feel invited and feel special. And when people love their home, they work hard to make it the best place it can be! This builds stronger and more resilient communities, and a sense of empowered autonomy at the local level.

Thanks, and welcome to the team, Mallory!

View Mallory’s personal website at http://www.mallorynezam.com/. You can learn more about Mirror Casket from the project site and from this article in Smithsonian Magazine (image #7) about artifacts now in the collection of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Webinar wrap: How artist-in-residence programs can embed creativity in city agencies

The second webinar in our series further exploring the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development was a terrific discussion of two cities’ artist-in-residence programs.

creative placemaking webinar presentation play

Click to play the full webinar recording

On September 21, we had a great online discussion about artist-in-residence programs, hearing from experts and exploring some recently created and established artist-in-residence programs in city agencies.

Did you miss the webinar? Catch up with the full recorded presentation here.
Download the accompanying slide presentation here. (pdf)

Minneapolis, Seattle, Saint Paul, Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities across the US run artist-in-residence programs, embedding local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking, attract attention to mundane but crucial municipal processes, and shift narratives about city residents and workers.

Rather coincidentally, and proving even further that these programs are topical, the New York Times published an article on NY Department of Sanitation Artist in Residence Mierle Ukeles yesterday. Finally, if you’re interested in following along with progress in St Paul’s City Artist program and LA DOT’s Artist-in-Residence program, visit their websites here and here.

Back in February, T4America launched The Scenic Route, an online interactive guide to creative placemaking in transportation to introduce the concept to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.This series of webinars is continuing to explore the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development. Catch up with the first one from August here.

How can cities embed creativity through artist-in-residence programs?

Join us for the second webinar in our series further exploring the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development, as we discuss two cities’ artist-in-residence programs.

The Architecture of Endlessness designed and painted by NKO, a mural on the Red Wall surrounding the Link Capitol Hill Station. Flickr photo by Sound Transit

In 1977, Mierle Laderman Ukeles became the first, and still only, artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, a job she still holds today. Four decades and thousands of handshakes later, Ukeles’ pioneering work has become a model for cities engaging with artists to bring a creative approach to municipal challenges.

Today, Minneapolis, Seattle, Saint Paul, Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities across the US run artist-in-residence programs, embedding local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking, attract attention to mundane but crucial municipal processes, and shift narratives about city residents and workers.

Register to join us on September 21, 2016 at 4 p.m. EDT for our online discussion about artist-in-residence programs and hear from experts as we explore some recently created and established artist-in-residence programs in city agencies.

Ben Stone, Director of Arts & Culture, Smart Growth America/Transportation for America
Seleta J. Reynolds, General Manager, Los Angeles Department of Transportation
Alan Nakagawa, Creative Catalyst Artist in Residence, Los Angeles Department of Transportation
Colleen Sheehy, President & Executive Director, Public Art Saint Paul.

To continue building on that work, we’ve launched this series of webinars to further explore the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development. Catch up with the first one from August here.

How can the arts and design help neighbors envision the future?

Developing an inclusive vision for a community’s future is challenging work and it frequently suffers from not including enough voices. What role can artists and designers play in improving the visioning process? Join us for the first in a new series of webinars further exploring the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development.

Back in February, T4America launched The Scenic Route, our online interactive guide to creative placemaking in transportation with an online conversation designed to introduce the concept of creative placemaking to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.

To continue building on that work, we’re launching this new series of webinars further exploring the role of arts and culture in transportation planning and community development. Join us for the first of this series, as we discuss the practice of community visioning exercises, and how artists and designers can help improve those processes. Join us on Thursday, August 11, 2016 from 4-5 p.m. EDT.

About our speakers

James Rojas, PLACE IT!
James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. He has developed an innovative public-engagement and community- visioning method that uses art-making as its medium. He has collaborated with municipalities, non-profits, community groups, educational institutions, and museums, to engage, educate, and empower the public on transportation, housing, open space, and health issues.

Renata Soto, Conexión Américas
Renata Soto is co-founder and Executive Director of Conexión Américas, a nonprofit organization based in Nashville and founded in 2002 to promote the social, economic and civic integration of Latino families.

Ben Stone, Smart Growth America
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.

Creative placemaking in practice in the Twin Cities

The Scenic Route is T4America’s primer on creative placemaking in transportation. But what does creative placemaking look like in practice? We can see the evolution of this approach, and the potential benefits from it, in the recent experience of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Reminder: Have you browsed our new guidebook to creative placemaking yet? Visit

Have you browsed our new guidebook to creative placemaking yet? Visit http://creativeplacemaking.t4america.org

In the early 2000’s, Minneapolis built their first light rail line, now called the Blue Line. A comprehensive public art process during the planning and construction of the Blue Line resulted in unique station designs that reflected local histories, but that uniqueness and community participation seemed to end at the station. Community leaders saw missed opportunities to strengthen their neighborhoods. Regional leaders saw missed opportunities to tap the transformative potential of transit-oriented-development (TOD).

The region followed a different approach in building the Green Line connecting Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul.

Vowing to be neither top-down nor laissez-faire about what kind of development and other changes would occur, city leaders and planners took risks to develop unprecedented partnerships with funders, neighborhood organizations, artists, and cultural groups well ahead of the groundbreaking. Their goal was community-led transformation that would help existing businesses thrive during and beyond construction, create new economic opportunities for residents, and preserve the neighborhoods’ unique cultural characters and institutions.

Photo courtesy of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative

Civic groups held visioning sessions to determine what the community wanted to see. Creative events helped businesses stay afloat during construction. Community organizers ensured the line would serve all communities, and local governments worked with artists to develop robust civic arts programming at the opening. Not only was the line built without the acrimony of previous projects, but dozens of artists and community collaborators participated in hundreds of initiatives large and small that have left a powerful civic legacy.

Placemaking that includes artists, cultural institutions and community creativity offers new ways to take advantage of these kinds of transformative investments and the associated planning processes to engage, elevate, and empower affected communities.

It can lead not only to a better, more inclusive process, but also to better projects that better serve the community.

Visit The Scenic Route to read a much more detailed version of the Twin Cities’ story of success and check out some fresh templates for bringing local creativity and culture into your work.

Photo courtesy of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative

Walking the talk with Mark Fenton in the Portland region

Back in December, two T4America members in the Pacific Northwest (Portland Metro and the City of Portland) and other allies organized events to bring in Mark Fenton, a leader in clear thinking on transportation, health and walkable communities.

The Portland region was Mark’s first stop on a speaking tour of Oregon supported by the state Department of Land Conservation and Development. I attended both events, and I was most impressed by Mark’s persuasive arguments for charting the smartest course for making our communities the best places they can be, even if it cuts against the pervasive conventional thinking about moving cars.

SGA Local Leaders Council member Mayor Denny Doyle kicked off the morning event at the Beaverton Public Library by sharing the work this light rail suburb on the west side of the Portland metropolitan region has been doing to boost its downtown vibrancy and walkability.

Then Mark took the stage, and after having us close our eyes and recall our first memories of being physically active, led the audience through a few points of agreement:

Generation Xers and Baby Boomers (the vast majority of those in attendance) grew up “free range” and experienced physical activity that way – with their friends and typically without adult supervision.
Most kids do not have the same opportunities for free range physical activity today.
Everyone in the audience agreed kids would benefit from being more free range today.

So, “What are you doing about it?” Mark asked.

He then put forward a compelling argument that right land uses, complete active transportation networks and welcoming community design are the key issues to to make walking, biking and transit safe, convenient and intrinsic to daily life. Doing so can act as a foundational component of getting people physically active again so that we can address the public health crisis and escalating costs to taxpayers — America spends 30 percent of its GDP on health costs.

Along the way Mark invited participants to air concerns and addressed them.

Stranger danger is the same today as it was in the 1970’s.
Legal pressures against free-range parenting are overblown. In Bethesda, Maryland, where two kids were scooped up by the police for being a half-mile from home, the city has since adopted a resolution supporting free-range parenting.
Cultural norms around active transportation aren’t going to shift if the infrastructure doesn’t change. Cultural norms around tobacco use shifted because public policy compelled changes in bars, restaurants, planes, and workplaces.

Mark also met with community leaders and city staff in East Portland’s Jade District, where T4A has been working with Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) on creative placemaking around the proposed Powell Division bus rapid transit line.

The proposed BRT improvements have raised local hopes of improved transportation in their neighborhoods, but also heightened fear of displacement as property values and rent costs increase when the neighborhood becomes more desirable. This conflict can lead disadvantaged communities to resist necessary improvements they would otherwise want because they’re scared that if the neighborhood becomes too desirable, they’ll be priced out.

Mark’s take: gentrification is already happening, so arguing for the “B-version” won’t prevent displacement, but will certainly result in a neighborhood that is less than it could be. Instead, Mark argued, leaders should push for both: the best anti-displacement strategies and the best possible project. (Something that a creative placemaking approach can help achieve.)

I’ll be watching to see how these ideas resonate and impact the conversation amongst members and allies in the Portland region.