Herberger Institute Dean Steven J. Tepper has called creative placemaking “the most important innovation in arts and cultural policy over the past decade.” The practice holds that designers and artists are critical assets for working with cities and communities to ensure that they are sustainable, prosperous, equitable and inclusive places.

Maria Rosario Jackson is one of the nation’s leading authorities on creative placemaking/creative placekeeping. As an Institute Professor with appointments in Herberger Institute’s The Design School and in ASU’s Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, Jackson has been building the foundations of the new Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable Communities at ASU, including the studio’s Faculty Academy program and its online Principles of Creative Placemaking course. The work has been supported in part by a grant from the Kresge Foundation.

The Faculty Academy program builds the bench of faculty at ASU focused on creative placemaking/placekeeping and is a joint effort of the Herberger Institute and Watts College. It comprises faculty members from the visual and performing arts, design and architecture, criminal justice, social work, and community resources and development. This year-long program includes an immersive seminar on creative placemaking principles and practice, workshops on creative placemaking teaching and research and the creation of curricular and knowledge building assets created by cross-disciplinary teams from the Herberger Institute and Watts College. In August 2019, participating faculty traveled to Tucson for a two-day intensive convening hosted by 2017-18 ASU creative placemaking policy fellow Maribel Alvarez, who serves as the associate dean for community engagement at the University of Arizona.

The Principles of Creative Placemaking course, which will launch in October 2019, is a seven-week online course taught by Jackson and Sarah Calderon, managing director of ArtPlace America. A joint effort between Herberger Institute, Watts College and ArtPlace America, the course focuses on the roles of arts, culture and design in more effective comprehensive community planning and development, especially in low-income and historically marginalized communities.

This year, Herberger Institute launched a new podcast on creativity, place and equitable communities, in which Jackson talks with creative placemaking field leaders and scholars to explore key questions and issues. The inaugural season’s guests included Craig Calhoun, the former director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science, who joined ASU as a University Professor of social sciences in July 2018; Christine Gaspar, executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy; designer, urbanist and social innovator Liz Ogbu; Jackson’s fellow Institute professor Michael Rohd, who is the co-founder of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice; and Jason Schupbach, director of ASU’s The Design School and formerly the director of Design and Creative Placemaking programs for the National Endowment for the Arts. 

In the words of 2017-18 policy fellow Alvarez, “The Herberger Institute vision is to really understand place as a laboratory of civic engagement. It’s not just about this region, it’s about what lessons, what models, what practices can be developed. Because if it’s happening in Arizona, you better believe it’s happening in Iowa — and if not now, then it will happen. That’s the exciting part of why do this work.”