ABSTRACT
What happens when arts and cultural strategies are deployed towards community planning and development goals? How can the arts sector support the outcomes already articulated by various fields within community development? Recognizing that the community development field is comprised of many professional disciplines, ArtPlace America developed a matrix to illustrate 10 segments of the field that are commonly understood as discrete sectors: Agriculture & Food, Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, Housing, Immigration, Public Safety, Transportation, Workforce Development, and Youth Development. Using this matrix as a road map, ArtPlace set out over five years to analyze, make legible, and give language to how arts and cultural practitioners have long been partners in helping to achieve each of these 10 sectors’ goals. Beginning with an overview of the creative placemaking research and evaluation landscape in 2014, this chapter lays out the methods and values driving ArtPlace’s Translating Outcomes initiative – a segmented, interdisciplinary approach to research designed to lay the groundwork for the creative placemaking field to embrace a multidimensional array of success measures, and to invite community development practitioners of all kinds to step into a new, creative approach to their work. The chapter concludes with emerging reflections on what this cross-disciplinary strategy has revealed about measurement, collaboration, and future evaluation practices.
