Creative Policymaking: Taking the Lessons of Creative Placemaking to Scale

As political forces reshape the role of localities, creative practitioners are uniquely positioned to directly affect the direction of development in new ways that build community power and position cultural considerations at the heart of governance. Social justice advocates believe that policy change offers the most direct route to advancing equity and transformation at scale. Inclusive practices like creative placemaking, an emerging model of equitable development, has the potential to help facilitate the development of participatory policymaking in ways that ensure that the voices of those with less historical political access and influence aren't excluded from transforming the systems that allocate power and resources. Despite this knowledge, equity-focused strategies often stop at the programmatic level. To date, key actors are investing in horizontal strategies to integrate creative practices across organizations, sectors, and systems. However, insights gained from local successes have not been fully translated vertically into systems-level policy change or to galvanize into a coherent ecosystem of social innovation. This paper examines how the rules of civic problem-solving are evolving to prioritize citizenship and leverage local knowledge, one expression of culture, by drawing on longstanding discourse in fields that range from architecture and planning to economics, political science, philosophy, sociology, and community psychology. The insights revealed suggest that by grounding practices within a systems change framework, acquiring new competencies, evolving institutional structures and roles, and expanding the application of creative practices to participatory policymaking, an inclusive set of stakeholders can advance a more transformative model of equitable development. Participatory policymaking should not be seen as an end in itself, but rather an effective means by which to promote human agency, intercultural dialogue, and societal wellbeing. Doing so can help to strengthen creative democracy, which recognizes that human imagination is the generative basis on which individuals and societies successfully engage with complexity, envision alternative futures, transform systems, and successfully adapt to change.