Fuzzy concepts, proxy data: why indicators would not track creative placemaking success

Abstract

Policy and community organizing around creative placemaking has spread from initial European initiatives to formal US arts and cultural policy and variations in many other places, including Japan and South Korea. In the USA, an indicators approach has been mounted to evaluate funding outcomes at the National Endowment for the Arts and a nationwide philanthropic funding consortium, ArtPlace. But the effort is confounded by fuzzy concepts and a reliance on data external to the funded projects and the particularity of place. Various indicators are supposed to capture traits such as ‘vitality’, ‘vibrancy’ and ‘livability’ that mean different things to different people. A further problem is that most good secondary data series are not available at spatial scales corresponding to grantees’ target impact areas. Relying on ill-defined and poorly operationalized indicators could backfire politically. First, their use could be off-putting to grantees and would-be grantees, including mayors, arts organizations, community development organizations and the many other partners to these projects. Second, creative placemaking grants create competitors, generating losers as well as winners. Third and most troubling, funders may begin favouring places that already perform well on the indicators. Rather than rely on generic indicators, I propose that funders and policy-makers (1) commit to real evaluation based on the criteria designed for specific programmes by the grantees themselves; (2) build cooperation among grantees to share their experiences and learn from each other and (3) provide technical assistance to creative placemaking grantees.