Valuing Creative Placemaking
Placemaking plays an important role in how Landcom builds healthy and inclusive communities. Creative placemaking uses the arts to make a place more vibrant, socially engaging, and interesting by co-ordinating arts-based activities within the physical environment, such as public art projects that reflect local histories. Creative placemakers encourage the presence of arts-related businesses, or the staging of arts-related programming and cultural events or activities.
To foster a greater understanding of the value of creative placemaking and how to integrate activities into Landcom projects, we partnered with the University of Newcastle, Macquarie University, the University of NSW and City People to review existing international literature and practices as part of Landcom’s Roundtable. Together we developed a toolkit designed to assist in the evaluation and understanding the impact of creative placemaking. The literature review was published in July 2018.
Preparation of the toolkit synthesised hundreds of indicators from existing tools into a set of four tools that can be used by placemakers to plan and evaluate creative placemaking activities. This included an Organiser Tool, Business Owner survey, Facilitator pre-survey, and Attendee survey.
The toolkit was tested at community events held at Green Square, Sydney, Honeysuckle, and Newcastle in 2018 and assessed to ensure alignment with the Green Star Communities rating tool.
The toolkit is designed to help the people behind creative placemaking projects capture the value of these activities and understand where they can be improved. It’s intended to be easy to use, scalable depending the users’ needs, and to help busy people in a wide range of organisations.
The toolkit and a user guide will be made available on Landcom’s website once published.
A Landcom hosted creative placemaking event.
