placemaking

Equity in Practice: Strategies
from Alternate ROOTS’ History
of Creative Placemaking
BY CARLTON TURNER
SINCE 1976, ALTERNATE ROOTS’ network of artists has been
leading the charge for arts as a conduit for the development of
healthy communities in the United States South. During that time,
our artists have been developing performances, creative interventions,
and cultural organizing practices that foster equity and justice while
making art that grows out of communities of tradition, place, and
spirit. Our members use their art as an entry point for communities
to voice their ideas and thoughts on the challenges they face.
Over the past few years, the rapid pace of gentrification as a form
of economic development has become a primary concern of our
constituents. Too often, communities become invisible throughout
the planning, design, and development process, as these processes
are often designed and built by development entities using
corporate practices that negate community input. As a result, this
work is driven by economic indicators and is largely disconnected
from the needs of the existing communities and residents.
Equitable creative placemaking employs practices that center on
understanding how power, access, and resources can be used in
the service of justice. In this work, justice is the acknowledgment,
support, and empowerment of existing communities throughout
the development process. In pursuit of justice, we must expand
our understanding of creative placemaking beyond economic
indicators to include practices that improve people’s ability both
to live and share space together, and to imagine and then build
more sustainable, equitable communities for themselves and
future generations. In my 14 years with ROOTS, three cornerstones
of equitable creative placemaking have continually risen up;
I offer them here, as a grounding for thinking about your own
creative placemaking work.
10 • NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS