FIVE YEARS OF THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PLACEMAKING | Section 4: Art, artists, and placemaking
This is the section I edited myself, and it opens with a participant from Homebaked in Liverpool saying that the art is in what we are doing. That is the argument in a sentence. Not art placed in a city, but a city that is already culture. I wrote there that the city does not create culture and that culture is not in its service.
The section's claim is that artists working in place hold a relational understanding of space that most built environment professions do not, and a specific skill: the art process becomes a relational object through which contested things can be talked about. Not consensus in the sense of everyone agreeing, but a settled position in which people have been heard and have been active in the decision.
Catherine Fennell and Daniel Tucker, an anthropologist and an artist, revisit in 2020 the dialogue on displacemaking they first published in 2015, widening it from Chicago to Philadelphia and New York. Adelina Ong, writing as anti-East Asian violence spread across Britain in early 2020, on making place through parkour and Art du Déplacement while still not feeling settled in London after seven years. Frances Whitehead on a decade of the Embedded Artist Project and what she calls epistemic disobedience, the artist inside civic process as a kind of double agent. Gail Skelly and Tim Edensor on Lighting the Legend, a lantern parade Ordsall has held every November for 26 years, in a neighbourhood that lost around 18,000 dwellings to slum clearance and is now watching development arrive again. Tom Borrup on artists in public participation processes across 25 states. Sherry Dobbin on four years running Times Square Arts and what transferred to London Bridge. Trude Schjelderup Iversen on Suzanne Lacy's The Circle and the Square in Brierfield, 18 months of work culminating in Sufi chanters and shape-note singers and a banquet for 500.
It does not let arts-led practice off. Art in place has been used as a salve over social cleansing, a placewash as much as an artswash. The question I put is whether artists are complicit in that or whether they have the agency to take development into their own hands and turn it towards a social and cultural agenda. Placemaking does not work towards the ideal but with the real. Herein lies its radical potential.
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