Civic arts practices : emerging practices at the edges of urban planning and the arts

Within the planning profession, the arts and culture sector has been emerging over the past a decade as a vital component of urban and rural planning processes. Once considered to be only adjacent to the more central issues of housing, economic development, and infrastructure planning, the arts sector is now becoming an integrated part of each of these areas of practice. Planning frameworks most often incorporate arts and culture in the form of “discrete elements,” such as the creation of a public art piece, or the formation of a cultural district or performing arts center; however, this framework for how the arts can serve municipal development has changed rapidly within the past few years. Today, an emerging set of practices are starting to take shape where the arts and culture sector works in partnership with municipalities to co-produce projects around mutually understood goals. In this dissertation, I analyze this other dimension of professional planning practice, when arts professionals work in collaboration with municipal staff to further urban and rural development goals. This dissertation is structured in two parts. After contextualizing practices within the intersection of the planning discipline and the newly emerging field of creative placemaking, the first part of the research looks directly to practitioners to understand the broader set of practices that make up a subfield of emerging practices artists and planners work in direct collaboration to achieve mutual goals. Through a year-long Delphi process, a set of 50 professionals from the arts and planning sectors were interviewed and surveyed to find out how their projects came together, what the dynamics were between professionals from divergent backgrounds, and how each set of professionals viewed the effects of their work. After developing a broader understanding of the different dimensions of these collaborative practices, the second part of the research narrows the focus to look specifically at a three-year case study that focused on the specific issues of civic engagement and civic capacity-building that surround a particular municipal issue.Community and Regional Plannin