Making Up Creative Placemaking

Creative placemaking is an increasingly prevalent form of planning practice that invokes arts and culture as tools for revitalization. Planners, policymakers, funders, and practitioners are engaged in a discursive struggle to define what is meant by creative placemaking and what value it holds for cities. Using frameworks developed by Foucault and Hacking, I analyze the emergence and ongoing contestation of this term, contrasting the way creative placemaking is understood and enacted by actors in Philadelphia with definitions employed by national funders. I argue that practitioner and community voices deserve amplification in the unfinished work of creative placemaking as urban practice.