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Transportation systems can and should be a powerful tool to help people access opportunity, drive economic development, improve health and safety, and build the civic and social capital that bind communities together.

And when artists team up with transportation professionals at a project’s outset, their collaboration can lead to new, creative, and more comprehensive solutions to today’s transportation challenges. This process known as creative placemaking is happening in communities across the country and transportation professionals are eager to know, what are the key trends and best practices?

Introducing Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan, a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in the transportation planning process. Released today by Transportation for America in partnership with ArtPlace America, this new resource identifies ways that transportation professionals can integrate artists to deliver transportation projects more smoothly, improve safety, and build community support.

Download the report

This field scan explores seven of the most pressing challenges facing the transportation sector today, identifies how arts and culture contribute to solutions, and offers case studies from diverse community contexts:

1. Generating creative solutions for entrenched transportation projects
2. Making streets safer for all users
3. Organizing transportation advocates
4. Engaging multiple stakeholders for an inclusive process
5. Fostering local ownership
6. Alleviating the disruptive effects of construction
7. Healing wounds and divisions

In addition to transportation professionals, this new resource is designed for artists and other arts and cultural practitioners. The field scan aims to help these two audiences develop a shared language and set of mutual goals, so that communities will benefit from these powerful, cross-sector synergies.

Join the live webinar discussion

For a deep dive into Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan, register now for the live webinar discussion happening on October 13, 2017 from 1:00-2:00 pm EDT.

Register for the webinar

You’ll hear from Ben Stone, Director of Arts & Culture at Transportation for America, Jamie Hand, Director of Research Strategies at ArtPlace America, and Peter Svarzbein, an artist and El Paso City Council member whose work is featured in the field scan.

And continue to follow along for the rest of the week as we wrap up Arts & Culture month with a few more stories on the blog.