It's about Time Creative placemaking and performance analytics

TLDR

Creative placemaking, a philanthropic approach that mobilizes art for civic, social, economic, and environmental goals, has attracted unprecedented institutional investment and sparked debate, yet the role of time and sustained interaction in these long‑term residencies remains underexplored. The authors propose that the extended durations of creative placemaking residencies offer a critical opportunity for performance scholarship.

Abstract

The U.S. philanthropic discourse known as “creative placemaking” unites a historically unprecedented number of institutional investors in the instrumentalization of art toward civic, social, economic, and environmental goals. Since coining the term in 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported 256 arts interventions in all fifty states with funds totaling more than $21 million. Not without its critics, “place-based” grant programs hail artists to collaborate on municipally driven, often six-figure budget initiatives that use culture as a backdrop for “comprehensive community cultural development.” Compared to the characteristic shortsightedness of institutional approaches to arts philanthropy in the U.S., many “placemaking” residencies offer significantly expanded periods of cultural engagement between artists, community members, and institutional liaisons. While the discursive emphasis on “place” by institutional investors has incited much debate among policy makers and practitioners, less attention has been paid to the instrumentality of time and embodied interaction within these elongated arts residencies. These exceptional circumstances signal a crucial point of intervention for performance scholarship.