10 Years Ago Mesa Invested $98 Million in an Arts Center > Tool for Planning & Development

Well, it's more than that: Arts & Entertainment Center, Public Performance Space, Contemporary Art Museum, Studios and Classrooms, Offices, Lecture Halls, and Theaters - it's the largest in the State of Arizona and an International Design Award-winning venue, but what has that gigantic investment done to create economic development in close proximity from all the "foot traffic" of about a million visitors in downtown Mesa? . . .  they come for a couple of hours and then leave, right?
Scroll down below to take the time to watch this 12:01 YouTube video recorded from November of last year. Jamie Bennett works with ArtPlace America and addresses a questions like the one above and asks "Who are your artists?

ArtPlace America just recently announced

Call for Field Scan Research: Housing, Public Health, and Public Safety

Jun 25, 2015 By: Jamie Hand, Director of Research Strategies

Calling all cross-disciplinary researchers! Today marks ArtPlace's second open call for research consultants. We currently seek to commission three “field scans” that document and explore the relationship between arts and culture and the following community development sectors: Housing, Public Health, and Public Safety.  
Check out the full Call for Research Consultants for detailed information about the opportunity and instructions on how to apply. Submissions are due Thursday, August 6, 2015, and scans are expected...Read More

ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) is a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that works to position arts and culture as a core sector of comprehensive community planning and development in order to help strengthen the social, physical, and economic fabric of communities.

ArtPlace focuses its work on creative placemaking [a new phrase in the urban lexicon] which describes projects in which art plays an intentional and integrated role in place-based community planning and development that in the best of circumstances must be locally informed, human-centric, and holistic.

In practice, this means having arts and culture represented alongside sectors like housing and transportation – with each sector recognized as part of any healthy community; as requiring planning and investment from its community; and as having a responsibility to contribute to its community’s overall future.

In scanning the community planning and development field, we found five types of stakeholders working across ten sectors that, while not comprehensive, capture a majority of work taking place in communities: It's called the Community Development Matrix http://www.artplaceamerica.org/about/introduction#matrix

ArtPlace Community Development Matrix

It is ArtPlace's goal to demonstrate the unique value add that arts and culture can bring to each of the 50 cells of this matrix.The call in the June 25th announcement is focused on only three of the sectors.

In going back to the opening of this post, readers can begin to use this matrix as a reference point to what the Mesa Arts Center has contributed to the new urban downtown's future for both strong points and for areas in which more planning and getting results may be needed.

ArtPlace believes that successful creative placemaking projects do four things:

1. Define a community based in geography, such as a block, a neighborhood, a city, or a region
2. Articulate a change the group of people living and working in that community would like to see
3. Propose an arts-based intervention to help achieve that change
4. Develop a way to know whether the change occurred