Apologies for Cross Posting: Final Call for Papers. Deadline Sun 25th Oct, 2015
AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016
Session title: Creative Placemaking and Beyond: Continuing and re-invigorating the arts-led conversation.
Sponsored by the Cultural Geography Specialty Group (CGSG)
Convenors: Cara Courage, University of Brighton and Anita McKeown, SMARTlab, University College Dublin.
This session will continue the interrogation of notions of creative placemaking started at the RGS 2015 annual conference, aiming to take this conversation to the US and broaden international and sectora/practice discussion.
The creative placemaking (Landesman 2009) term has entered the arts-driven placemaking sector narrative presented as a ‘new [U.S.] policy platform across all levels of government’ (Markusen and Gadwa 2010:26) with a particular ethos; a cross-sectoral approach to arts-led regeneration (Markusen and Gadwa 2010) and of including non-arts stakeholders within community revitalisation (Poticha, 2011).
With contemporary debates around creative placemaking and its relations now reaching a moment in maturity and diversity a critique and a deeper understanding of practice is necessary.
Persistent questions arise around issues of arts practice/process, power relations, individual and community agency and creative placemaking’s relation vis-à-vis the neoliberal. As such, this session encourages a re-consideration of the role of the arts and creativity within socially-engaged placemaking practices for their potential to encourage self-organisation and how citizens can take the initiative in effecting their lived spacetime (McCormack 2013). It seeks to broaden the constituents in the creative placemaking discourse through presenting an international conversation that focuses on socially practiced, co-produced and citizen-led placemakings, addressing issues of scale, interdisciplinarity and radical practices within creative place production and co-production.
Given the vital need also for theorists to be in dialogue with practitioners, this session is seeking abstracts from both constituencies, with papers spanning theory and practice and examples of where the two intersect in the academy or in the field. It thus aims to provide a critical assessment of creative placemaking and of community driven placemaking (Hou and Rios 2003) and social design across all settlement types and conceptual, empirical, methodological papers are invited.
Papers might address, but are not limited to:
• Challenges to the concepts of creative placemaking and citizen-driven placemaking
• Examination and re-imagination of radical practices within arts-led community regeneration.
• The role of the individual and the artist/practitioner and other professionals in ‘open source’
placemaking
• Performing and un-performing place
• Systemic approaches to creative placemaking and Place-based design - Dealing with
complexity.
• The role of administrations and policy development effected by grassroots placemakings
• The personal is political – behavourial related interventions of placemaking beyond party
political agendas.
Please submit an abstract for consideration, of no more than 250 words, by 25th October, to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] Successful applicants will be informed by 27th October for their timely registration to AAG 2016.
