Creative Placemaking and the COVID-19 Pandemic in NYC: An Acceleration of State-Supported Equity

Abstract

Creative placemaking is when “arts are given a seat at the community development table.”1 NYC’s policymakers have regulated this field since the 1960s. The pandemic forced a revaluation of this mechanism of community development by forcing a radical reorganization of the rules and norms of public space. The most notable was the shift of indoor activities to the outdoors. The policy response to the implementation of outdoor creative placemaking projects changed over time and reflects a change in values for this field in the city during the pandemic.

In response to crisis, the NYC government started with direct top-down governance, but after several pivots, it shifted to delegating the placemaking of these outdoor areas to local community organizations. This adoption of grassroots private-public partnerships reflects the history of local nonprofit community organizations using arts and culture as a mechanism of change, namely economic growth, and urban revitalization since the 1960s. Yet, recent scholarly literature challenges these aims for causing inequitable social and economic displacement.

So, in the past five years, creative placemaking professionals began to prioritize equity and supporting marginalized communities, by means of emphasizing non-economic successes over economic growth. These non-economic projects benefitted from federal, state, and local government grants. So, considering this momentum towards equity, the hypothesis is that the pandemic then accelerated the role of direct State aid for equitable creative placemaking in NYC.

This thesis analyzes two structurally different creative placemaking case studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: residential 34th Avenue in Queens and mixed-use Downtown Brooklyn in Brooklyn. The Queens case study is an underserved residential neighborhood led by a volunteer-run nonprofit. The Brooklyn case study is a nonprofit supporting three Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) led by a professional staff. These placemaking projects have significantly different financial resources, different governance structures, and serve different demographics, yet similar creative placemaking projects are important to these places’ success.

Chapter 2 analyzes existing scholarship about placemaking, creative placemaking and BIDs in NYC. A presentation of existing policy documents from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Department of Transportation follows in Chapter 3. These executive agencies’ policy plans are an important lens to understand the problem, and how or even whether the problem was reframed during the pandemic. These two chapters affirm that before the pandemic, creative placemaking had started to emphasize equity and non-economic measures of success in addition to economic development goals. For the two case studies in Chapters 4 and 5, I then use site visits, planning documents, news stories, and other primary source documents to analyze how the pandemic shifted both private and public stakeholders’ approaches and valuations of creative placemaking projects.

The evidence in Chapters 4 and 5 confirms the accelerated shift from an emphasis on economic development to non-economic success over the twenty months of the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC. This is evident in the political mainstreaming and creation of city-supported creative placemaking programs. Specifically, the government increased financial and professional development support for creative placemaking in underserved communities without access to private funding. At the same time, stakeholders supported by private funds also embraced the idea that more equitable creative placemaking, can support more sustainable economic growth. Paradoxically the pandemic allowed more decentralized governance in creative placemaking, yet the city government now has more of a role in financing these devolved creative placemaking projects because of the pandemic. Wanting to support underserved communities is not new to the pandemic, rather the government equitably investing more funds and institutional support is.