What is the Texas Placemaking Initiative (TXCPI)?
The Texas Creative Placemaking Initiative (TXCPI) is an emerging network of artists, community development practitioners, and community members who want to build, foster, and support equitable and vibrant arts-based community development practices in Texas. Through the sharing of successes and challenges, TXCPI aspires to support the development of cross-sector, state-wide relationships and networks that can work together to support and advocate for policy efforts that advance this work in Texas.
Why does Texans for the Arts Support TXCPI?
Texans for the Arts is a member of the core organizing team behind TXCPI, in partnership with Civic Arts and the Texas Association for Community Development Corporations. This work needs support in more ways than one and working to create structural changes at the level of state policies is one of the critical paths needed for sustained funding and broad-based support. As a collective, TXCPI communicates the value of creative placemaking/placekeeping to state politicians and works to garner more financial resources and expanded opportunities for this work throughout the state.
What is Creative Placemaking?
Creative placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities. Creative placemaking requires partnership across sectors, deeply engages the community, involves artists, designers and culture bearers, and helps to advance local economic, physical, and/or social change, ultimately laying the groundwork for systems change. This definition is intentionally open and broad because creative placemaking draws on all artistic disciplines, and can be deployed as a strategy to address a wide range of community issues or challenges from public health to safety, economic development to housing.
Arts, culture, and design can help to strengthen communities by:
- Bringing new attention to or elevate key community assets and issues, voices of residents, local history, or cultural infrastructure.
- Injecting new or additional energy, resources, activity, people, or enthusiasm into a place, community issue, or local economy.
- Envisioning new possibilities for a community or place - a new future, a new way of overcoming a challenge, or approaching problem-solving.
- Connecting communities, people, places, and economic opportunity via physical spaces or new relationships.
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Photo credit for home page photo: "Tree of Life" mural by artists Vincent Thomas and Cade Kegerreis in Waco. Photo courtesy of Creative Waco.
