Browsing by Subject "Creative Placemaking"
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Item THE 510 AND THE 93: THE INTERSECTION OF ARTISTS, URBAN EVOLUTION, AND PRESERVATION IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA AND SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE(2022-05) Fry, Julie M.; Bradley, Betsy; MA in Historic PreservationUrban areas need artists and cultural assets to thrive, and through adaptive reuse of historic buildings for artists, cities can both retain the histories and cultures of their people and provide solutions to gentrification, displacement, blight, and inequities in how cities develop. While arts and culture cannot mitigate all these issues, they can help to create a connective tissue among people, a connection that can make communities stronger and more inclusive. I found that it is imperative to meet the arts sector’s needs for safe, functional, affordable and stable spaces to live and work. Historic building stock (industrial, commercial, residential) can be adapted to meet those needs in an equitable way, while also helping to redevelop underutilized urban neighborhoods. This treatise examined the intersection of these components in two similar cities on the margins, Saint-Denis, France and Oakland, California, which provided a cross-cultural opportunity to consider new approaches and perspectives to the challenges both countries face at a time of particularly polarizing global unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, and social justice issues are affecting how we live and how we relate to each other in a civil society, underlining the need to strengthen the places that people gather, a role that arts and culture fulfills. Progress in both countries requires joining financial resources, decision- making power, and the built environment in a sustainable way in partnership with artists and residents. A top-down, bureaucratic approach needs to be replaced by community collaboration. I made recommendations that address this critical urban need in a variety of ways through real estate and urban development models, funding models, historic preservation policies, and methods to better value the arts in public spaces. For example, cities can provide financial incentives to convert unused office space into artist studios, apartments, galleries, or performing arts venues. They can embed artists in municipal preservation offices so that local preservation policies can account for the needs of the cultural sector. Cities can create cultural/preservation zones to provide equitable capital and operating support for hyper-local arts engagements that revitalize marginalized communities through the built environment. By forging new links with each other while imagining in tandem new ways of equitable and creative city-building, both the French banlieues and diverse American cities will thrive.Item Organizational Resilience and Nonprofit Arts Organizations(2023-05) Sutherland, Rachael; MA in Arts AdministrationItem “WHAT WOULD JANE DO?” SUSTAINING FOLKLORE VILLAGE’S FUTURE THROUGH COLLECTIVE MEMORY(2017-01-13) Dreyer, Alessandra; Eleuterio, Susan; MA in Cultural SustainabilityIn 1967, folk dancer Jane Farwell opened a rural and traditional arts organization in the middle of Southwest Wisconsin. She called it Folklore Village, “a happy personification of fine recreation, combining game, music, and folk materials .” As described on the organizational website, “Jane created a unique philosophy of recreation that blended seasonal celebrations, ethnic traditions, and emphasizes the importance of rural communities, family, and people of all ages creating their own "fun.” Over the years since, Folklore Village has grown as a community where traditional dancers can learn ethnic dances from leaders in the Folk Dance field. Some members of this community have been around since its initial founding fifty years ago. Despite these deep roots, funding for Folklore Village has been on the decline: donations are steadily dropping 20% each year. Between the financial difficulties and the aging Folklore Village community, it has become clear that collecting and preserving community knowledge must be part of the conversation about sustaining the organization’s future. Using Farwell’s philosophy, “Live, Preserve, Teach,” which Farwell suggests as a way for people of different cultural backgrounds to come together and connect via cultural exchange , and melding it with Oldenburg’s theory of “The Great, Good Place , where people from different communities can come together to form a “Third Space,” this paper, framed through my experience as an intern being trained to present rural arts programming, will look at how “third spaces”, spaces that meet the middle ground between work and home, can be used to preserve and sustain community. In creating this archive for the organization, I propose that it will act as a “third space” within Folklore Village, giving people contributing to it a place to connect with one another over a shared history with the organization.