ABSTRACT
What is unique about the practice of creative placemaking that makes it particularly suited to tackling the challenges and opportunities of equitable development? Equitable practice in creative placemaking is not distinct from any other form of equitable place-based development in that it requires a constant questioning of who benefits, who pays, and who decides. In the Maroon settlements of the Great Dismal Swamp, Indian Canyon in California, the Puerto Rican Casitas of New York City, and the Chinatowns past, present, and emergent, communities have practiced and are practicing a form of placemaking as liberation in the face of slavery, racism, zoning, capitalism, and other social, political, and economic structures that impose a domineering cost while inhibiting an equitable future. Asserting these examples as an important legacy for redefining creative placemaking as an equitable practice is necessary for this emergent field of practice that has successfully engaged people in making places better where past attempts and other forms of development have failed. One reason is that creative placemaking has attracted interest, resources, and attention not just from community builders and developers, artists and culture-bearers, and struggling communities but also and particularly from for-profit real estate developers and investors and other agents of a capital market that harvest development potential for short-term return, externalized interests, and White Supremacy. This chapter will describe examples of equitable practice in creative placemaking that draw from the social history of placemaking, the political and organizing history of community development, and the creative legacy of artists working equitably in place.
