Get Started Guide
About the Rural America Placemaking Toolkit
The Rural America Placemaking Toolkit is a resource guide to showcase a variety of placemaking activities, projects, and success stories across rural America. USDA Rural Development has made investments in placemaking since 2020, and entered into a cooperative agreement with University of Kentucky’s Community & Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky (CEDIK) in 2022 to host the first ever Placemaking in Small & Rural Communities online conference. CEDIK developed this website as a way to highlight the importance of placemaking in rural communities, as well as provide comprehensive resource that will be regularly updated to feature new projects, activities and successes from rural America.
What is Placemaking?
This is a question we get all the time! The truth is, there is no one singular definition of placemaking. Placemaking is a comprehensive, intentional, wrap-around approach to community development by exploring what it means for a community to have an identity. Just as a child develops a personality as they grow, places develop a personality as well. Placemaking is a way for community residents to pinpoint what that sense of place is and how to incorporate it in their roads, storefronts, and community activities to celebrate individual cultures within a community as well as a shared identity.
Our friends at the Project for Public Spaces have written and researched a short article that explains placemaking very well. We encourage you to hop to their site for this less-than-five-minutes read. Go ahead! We’ll wait.
Are there different types of placemaking?
There are. Michigan State University has done an excellent job of gathering years of research around placemaking and categorizing the definition into 4 different themes:
1. Standard Placemaking
This type of placemaking is the widely accepted definition, and refers to the definition that Project for Public Spaces uses in the article button link above.
2. Creative Placemaking
This is the type of placemaking that engages arts, culture, music, and design activities. Think National Endowment for the Arts, our nation’s leading agency on arts and culture. They define creative placemaking as:
“Creative placemaking integrates arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities. Creative placemaking requires partnership across sectors, deeply engages the community, involves artists, designers and culture bearers, and helps to advance local economic, physical, and/or social change, ultimately laying the groundwork for systems change.”
For additional information on NEA’s definition of creative placemaking, as well as the Our Town Program’s Theory of Change and other resources, visit www.arts.gov/impact/creative-placemaking
3. Tactical Placemaking
Tactical placemaking refers to the projects and activities you see pop up in abandoned spaces, alleys, parking lots, or temporary installations. Think parklets, pallet furniture, or temporary art installations that aren’t meant to last, but they are meant to inspire and test new concepts. They’re a low-risk, fun, low-cost way to experiment with placemaking ideas before going through the formal (and usually long term) process of purchasing expensive furniture, fixtures, or conducting renovations. Tactical placemaking is a great way to demonstrate to community leaders that a public space or project is worth investing more money into. Check out https://street-plans.com/ for a great example of Tactical placemaking (also referred to as tactical urbanism).
4. Strategic Placemaking
Strategic Placemaking is a comprehensive approach that the MIplace ™ Partnership Initiative advocates. This is a laser-focused, intentional placemaking plan that will happen over 5-15 years. This is your long-term plan that includes affordable housing, job retention and creation, economic development, recruiting and attracting new talented workers to move to your community, and mixed-use developments. This also can include transportation systems, broadband infrastructure, and healthcare amenities. The MSU Land Policy Institute coined this term and explores it in-depth at the guidebook linked above.
You mentioned tactical urbanism.
Why are you talking about urbanism on a rural website?
Great question. The movement called Urbanism (sometimes New Urbanism) is different than living in an urban, or metropolitan area. Urbanism means to study how residents move around in towns and cities. It looks at walkable neighborhoods, social and cultural patterns, and designing spaces around people instead of cars. The principles of urbanism can scale to apply to rural downtowns and Main Streets across the country. In fact, the principles have caught on so well that The New Ruralism Initiative of the Northern New England Chapter of the American Planning Association (NNECAPA) has coined the term “New Ruralism” as a term to use to apply these practices to small towns. Check out this article by Jared Green for a quick read about new ruralism or download the New Ruralism Initiative’s report: Lessons in New Ruralism for case studies that exemplify these practices.
How do you define “rural”?
It seems that every agency defines ‘rural’ slightly differently. For our site, we are focusing on communities with a population of 50,000 or less. Many of the activities on this site are scale-able to any size community, but we really want to celebrate our smaller towns across the country.
Why did you create a rural-specific placemaking website?
There’s so many placemaking resources already out there, and we think they are amazing. We use them all the time. But it took us many years of searching to realize there just isn’t a comprehensive collection of rural resources on placemaking. It can be challenging and time-consuming to browse the internet to find placemaking projects that look and feel like your small town. It can also be hard to know which keywords to use in a search engine to find rural-relevant projects. The scale of projects that happen in a major metropolitan area are much different than a project that happens in a town of 800 people, but the fundamental principles are the same. Having a site that is dedicated to activities, projects, and successes that have already happened in rural communities will give you the inspiration to select a project (or sequence of projects) that you know is relevant to a town like yours.
I’m ready to get started! What do I do next?
We thought you’d never ask. First, if you haven’t taken our Placemaking Assessment Survey, do it now! There’s many in-depth, detailed assessments for your community available to choose from in our assessment section, but this survey is a way to gain a snapshot of your community readiness in 5 minutes or less. For each question, select the answer that is most reflective of your community. At the end, you will receive your results and a “toolkit road map” for projects and inspiration that connects to your readiness level.
I already know where we’re at on our placemaking journey, I just need more ideas! Where do I find them?
Our website is organized into 4 major sections:
Creative Community Conversations
Community & Cultural Assessments
Public Spaces & Gathering Places
Cross-Sector Partnerships
We know there are many, many steps that go into a comprehensive placemaking strategy, but all strategies involve something that falls within these 4 major themes. Our website isn’t a step-by-step model for placemaking as there is no one-size-fits-all approach. We encourage you to browse the project pages, read about the descriptions and create a customized plan that is right for you. Each project page highlights 4 major elements:
A 1-2 sentence summary of the project to determine if it is right for you.
A 2-4 paragraph project description that goes a little more in-depth on the details.
A breakdown of the time-frame to complete, cost, key words, and project source.
A link to the How-to Guide that gives you access to the step-by-step instructions to implement this in your own community.
We also have Spotlights in each section to showcase those projects that may be a little harder to replicate quickly, but demonstrate quality placemaking principles and approaches through a rural lens and can serve to inspire, educate, and motivate you to plan towards a similar project in your own community.
I have a really great project that should be on this site!
How do I get featured?
Our favorite thing about this site is that it is ever-changing. We are learning about new projects every week and can’t wait to get them loaded onto the site for you to explore. We also know that there’s thousands of projects, activities, or spotlights out there we haven’t heard about yet. If your community has a great example, please share it with us!
I still have questions. Where do I go for more information?
For more information about USDA Rural Development, please visit https://www.rd.usda.gov/
For more information about the University of Kentucky Community & Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky, please visit https://cedik.ca.uky.edu/
Suggested Citation:
“Get Started Guide.” Rural America Placemaking Toolkit, 2022. Accessed at https://www.ruralplacemaking.com/get-started-guide