Thursday, April 3, 2014

Creative Placemaking

This past Thursday I attended a symposium in Lexington on Creative Placemaking presented by LexArts' Art Means Business Forum and the Gaines Center's Lafayette Seminar in Public Issues.

There was an earlier presentation in the day presented by Anne Gadwa Nicodemus who works as a consultant at Metris Arts Consulting, has co-authored, Creative Placemaking (2010) and authored, Fuzzy Vibrancy (Cultural Trends, 2013).

The symposium was set up as a round table discussion of the 'movers and shakers' in Lexington as well as business professions, a lawyer, a professor, and financial guru for Downtown Lexington.


Since 'creative placemaking' is still in the early stages of being develop as a term and accepted in the world of art history as well as community, there was a very interesting beginning discussion about what this ACTUALLY means. Many phrases were thrown out like: organic collaboration, highlighting assets of a community, cultural, heritage, and cross-sector organization.

Ms. Nicodemus' defines it as this: In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, nonprofit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, tribe, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.

This discuss took me down many different roads of what this 'placemaking' can be. We discussed not only PLACE but RITUAL such as WaterFire in Providence, Rhode Island where the community comes together at random times to light lamps along the river side and other coordinating events.

All of this discuss has got me thinking about Georgetown College's Create Places --- do we have any? if so, where are they? if not, how do we make them? what people are involved?




1 comment:

Earl Grey said...

Looks like this was a fabulous seminar. I'm so glad you got to go to it and share it with us. And, this is a great question: I think we probably have a lot of ritual activities here on campus (such as Tiger events and traditions) but, are there any such rituals or events that are organic and coming from the students?

Students?