Creative placemaking in Kabul:  does house painting by the authorities really improve the lives of impoverished migrants in the city’s informal periphery? Does it promote pride of place or mere aesthetic improvement? The debate reflects the views of local residents, as quoted in The New York Times (30 May 2017):

While many of the residents have been supportive of the effort, it has also stirred some backlash among activists who say it is a type of whitewashing of the poverty that prevails in those neighborhoods.

Musa Khan, a resident of Joy Sheer, said the government was better off focusing on paving paths to the homes high up the mountains or providing water to those houses whose residents still have to carry buckets on their backs.

“Every day, children slip and fall down on their way to school and return home with broken arms or broken heads,” Mr. Khan said.

But Gul Jan, 50, who was transporting buckets of water on her back from the foot of the mountain in Joy Sheer, was less critical.

We started the day with a check-in asking what we were doing for self-care, considering the times we were heading towards. There were some about taking care of our physical health, some to do with spending time with friends and family, I talked about my latest destressing activity – embroidery!

We started the day with discussing some highlights from the ArtPlace Virtual Summit that happened last week. It was great to listen to everyone talk about their experiences attending workshops, affinity groups and plenaries. I especially remember attending a workshop called Art and Culture: Essentials for Racial Equity by Robert Bedoya and Maria Rosario Jackson. I was humbled to have been sharing the virtual space with these experts that I was in awe of and their work has been key in doing this work. They discussed how art and cultural integration at community development is crucial for radical systemic change and a racially equitable one at that. They did this through storytelling, facts and grace. 

After that, we shared out personas and design principles and provided and received feedback on the same. We then looked at each other’s themes and insights and assessed them through the Design Kit Insights Checklist. We shared our key takeaways and this helped better understand the process of writing insights. Looking at the insights, it was important to understand if they were facts or information or seemed more than mere observations.

The next step was a rapid-fire ‘How Might We Session’. In our groups, we took about 10 minutes to look at the insights we had formulated, make the changes and come up with different questions that would serve as design opportunities. We then voted for each one to gauge which statements accurately commented on the themes, their data points and insights. The final exercise was to simplify the themes, insights, opportunities along with picking the key quotes and observations that represented these. This created a base for the next step which will be ideation.

It’s all coming together:  (After ten years of talking about it,) Mattapan Cultural Arts Development is finally launching its 1st Annual Neponset River Arts Festival!   Mem Nahadr is headlining. 

Track us @ArtsMattapan for daily updates and details. As always, with gratitude to Trinity Management’s team at the Foley Residences for allowing us to bring creative play to their Mattapan Campus Unity Day event.

Our team participated and presented Tópio and our collaboration with The City at Eye Level and the Bernard van Leer Foundation for the “The City at Eye Level for Kids” project at the the international conference “Children Spaces or Spaces for Children?” that took place between the 19th and 21st of May in Thessaloniki.

Thanks to all the participants for the valuable feedback and the conference committee for an excellent organisation and an inspiring and thought-provoking 3-day event.

Special thanks to Fyllio Katsavounidou for the support.

“Creative placemaking” is the process of transforming and building characteristics of a place through art, culture and creativity with the intention of improving a sense of community in a neighborhood. There is a tremendous amount of effort and resources that go into this kind of projects. In fact, Kresge Foundation contributes $3.5 million to support nationwide creative placemaking projects. On a local level, businesses, organizations, and institutions also contribute to the transformation in local neighborhoods. 

For example, Black Cat Alley is a collection of outdoor wall murals in an alley in East Side. It is funded by local businesses and organizations to transform previously referred to as “Rape Alley” or “The Oriental Drug Store” to a new Instagram destination in Milwaukee. Public parks, plazas, and many other communal interaction points are being transform in many neighborhoods throughout the U.S. to bring social life and energy back to the cities. 

However, while some places successfully pull the communities together and attract people with their unique vibes, other places failed in many ways. 

First is the lack of design in a public space. Often, organizations collaborate on public projects and businesses contribute through funding, donations, services, etc. Sometimes, donated elements do not work well with one another or in the existing space. This results an overcrowded place with haphazard display of art and design work a little consideration for people’s experience in the space. In the case of the Paliafito Eco-Arts Park, a small plot of land at a corner block in Milwaukee, the oversize rock sculpture and the rock landscaping elements in creates barriers in the space rather than inviting people into the park. 

To have a well-designed space, the project must be well organized and carried out by professionals, not volunteers who has little understanding of the work that you are doing. Sometimes, “fixing” does not means “adding” more things but rather “subtracting” so the space can have room for people to dwell and interact with one another and with the surrounding environment.

Then again, sometimes, even professionals fail to create a place with characteristics and meaning. Creative placemaking is not about urbanize spaces and making them look new. It is about embracing the history and the culture of the neighborhood and creating a special place that showcase those characteristics. However, often organizers believe that by placing a glass and steel frame building in a distressed area for communal use is creative placemaking. How does this building make this neighborhood different from a million other urban areas with glass and steel? 

There are other times when professionals are too absorbed into their ideas and vision that they fail to see the primary needs of the community. This lead to empty new buildings that just drain resources without being used by the communities that they are built for. In a case the Center Village project, a social housing project in one of the poorest urban areas in Canada, it fails due to one single overlook, safety. The new apartments are aesthetically unique with much consideration for the living styles of all ages from children to seniors. The courtyard is designed as a playground for children and community interaction for neighbors. However, being the in a high crime-rate neighborhood, the courtyard becomes a place drug dealings and the narrow gaps between apartment buildings become crime scenes. The residences huddle in their small apartments every night knowing something bad is taking place on the other side of their walls. 

Creative placemaking is very difficult. It is easier to add to something to make it better than to transform something from bad to good. It does not mean we should give up but rather try harder and smarter. Designers and organizers should be more sensitives to the primary needs of the people who will be using the space. Safety should the top priority in these places and it often can be resolved with architectural design. We should also ask the community and work with them on what they need or what they like to have to call home instead of giving them an architectural or creative site that can exist everywhere, but in fit in nowhere. However, each failure contributes to the success in the future. Each success will contribute to a better living standard of our society because society is a composition of people of all social and economic classes.

Sources: http://www.archdaily.com/779899/when-designer-social-housing-goes-wrong-the-failures-of-winnipegs-center-village-project

http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2016/10/27/in-public-a-riot-of-good-intentions/

http://www.giarts.org/article/placemaking-and-politics-belonging-and-dis-belonging

http://createquity.com/2012/05/creative-placemaking-has-an-outcomes-problem/

https://www.arts.gov/publications/creative-placemaking

http://www.lumpenmagazine.org/a-placemaking-reading-list/

http://jamessrussell.net/enough-of-bogus-placemaking/