Artists,Temporality,and the Governance of Collaborative Place-Making

Introduction

Every day and across time, places are actively made and remade by people through cultural, discursive, and material practices of ingenuity, transformation, and maintenance—what urban scholars refer to as place-making (e.g., Benson and Jackson 2013; Elwood, Lawson, and Nowak 2015; Musterd and Kovacs 2013; Palermo and Ponzini 2015). When place-making is formalized in policy at the neighborhood scale through municipally led cultural redevelopment initiatives, its inherent political dimensions are intensified. This article approaches place-making as a policy exercise rooted in a politics of both space and time that can be studied through the temporal sequencing of discursive relations and governance networks in cultural redevelopment. ¹ It illustrates the fallacy of place-making via proxy by documenting the hidden expectations of artist stakeholders and the overextension of their capacities in their municipally delegated and self-assumed roles as “strategic” and “collaborative” partners with local government.

Civic leaders often mistakenly expect artists to be able to socio-spatially enact coproduced place-narratives through their mere programming and presence. Artists’ activity is assumed to simultaneously foster social inclusion and social control while also activating community engagement in ethnically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The legacies of a strong communicative planning tradition aspire to generate place-narratives by and with all stakeholders; however, in practice, these normative goals are seldom consistently realized in strategic cultural redevelopment partnerships. Instead, this article argues that contrary to collaborative and participatory governance ideals, artists are often singularly responsibilized by civic leaders to realize place-narratives for a community rather than with them, which creates a fundamental barrier to community engagement.

The article begins by drawing upon critical urban studies and cultural economy scholarship to analytically frame the role of artists in place-making and the corresponding expectations of civic leaders. Collaboration is then theorized from within planning and administrative studies literatures to consider how collaborative capacity might be assessed temporally across input, throughput, and output phases of preoccupancy and postoccupancy place-making. Following a consideration of research design and methodology, a case study that problematizes the strategic political partnership established between artists as community stakeholders and a local government is introduced. The remainder of the article critically assesses collaborative place-making capacity within the context of a former industrial site on the edge of Berlin’s borough of Mitte—Güterbahnhof Moabit—that has been the object of public intervention through multilevel government funding, planning, and policy to address local urban decline and deprivation through cultural redevelopment.

Understanding the Role of Artists in Place-Making

In critical urban studies and cultural economy circles, artists are widely celebrated as socio-spatial risk-takers who are driven by the radical “other-worldliness” of their “aesthetic disposition” to transform places from “junk to art and then on to commodity” for the middle class (Ley 2003, p. 2537 and 2528). Deploying Zukin’s (1982) concept of the “artistic mode of production,” Ley presented aestheticization as an accumulation strategy of elite urban actors to extract new value from industrial built forms through real estate development. Following Zukin, a significant trajectory of critical urban studies scholarship documents artists’ involvement in neighborhood redevelopment and gentrification (e.g., Bain 2006; Catungal, Leslie, and Hii 2009; Harris 2012; Lloyd 2006; Mathews 2010; Pratt 2009), raising questions about their social responsibilities. In the context of rent increases and social displacement in New York City, for example, Deutsche and Ryan (1984, pp. 104–105) asserted that artists “cannot be exempt from responsibility . . . they need to decide whether they want to be part of a process that destroys people’s lives.” The political agency of artists is interpreted as choosing “not [to] act in their [own] best interest” in the selection of live/work space by neither aestheticizing poverty nor exploiting the character of a neighborhood. In this article, we, too, examine the political and social responsibilities of artists, extending the discussion to include municipally imposed expectations.

In a more recent study of the working lives of artists in Berlin and London, Forkert (2013) uncovers an explicit lack of political engagement by artists in anti-gentrification campaigns. She attributes this disengagement to individual locational choices rather than necessity, rendering “the artist’s role as ultimately a transient one which does not by definition include involvement in local politics” (Forkert 2013, p. 62). Our research reveals a more widespread and sustained political engagement by artists in processes of neighborhood change and place-making in Berlin. Where Forkert’s (2013, p. 3) research is particularly resonant, however, is in its identification of the policy consequences of a mistaken assumption that “artists can simply create from nothing.” Forkert contended that the way in which the art world positions artists as exceptional—as functioning according to different societal rules and as experiencing the conditions of poverty, spatialization of inequality, and gentrification differently from other local residents—has contributed to a romanticized understanding of creativity as “driven by scarcity.” The neglect of the material and social conditions of cultural production permits policy makers to frame creativity as self-reliance. Consequently, as our case study reveals, artists are often left alone to negotiate the practical and banal dimensions of urban spatial politics as well as the instabilities, risks, and insecurities of cultural production. Civic leaders expect artists to multitask with efficiency and administrative competency, pursuing funding opportunities while also securing studio space, producing works of art, and contributing to place-making processes.

Within urban neoliberalism, artists and grassroots arts organizations are valorized by policy makers for “bringing the light of creativity and urban development to neighborhoods” (McLean 2016, pp. 4–5) through participatory or socially engaged art projects (Laister, Lederer, and Makovec 2014). These performances can facilitate speculative, imaginative, and active engagements with the material conditions of the city (Beswick, Hawkins, and Kohlmaier 2016; Olsen and Hawkins 2016). Such community-based, interactive arts practices are not always complicit in urban revitalization efforts; “sometimes artists and activists performatively and playfully push back” at the multiple exclusions entrenched in creative city policies, “and these acts contribute to broader efforts to contest exclusionary urban development” (McLean 2014, p. 670). Artist activists intervene in urban political and economic processes (e.g., Felshin 1995; Firat and Kuryel 2011, and also use their subjective and collective agency to become involved in policy activity (e.g., Landau 2016; Woddis 2014). While much critical urban scholarship has focused on how artists have contributed to the creation, transformation, and maintenance of urban places through their physical presence and artistic practice, “there is a scarcity of sustained or in-depth discussion of arts organisations and artists as participants in the policy process” (Woddis 2014, p. 496). By attending to the role of artists in collaborative place-making, this article foregrounds artists as key agents in policy processes while also highlighting how civic expectations about capacities constrain that very same involvement.

Collaborative Planning and the Temporality of Urban Governance

Collaborative planning strives to increase public involvement in urban planning so as to uphold participatory democracy, improve the quality of planning processes and political decision making, and enhance local ownership over outcomes (Healey 2006). For problem-solving to be truly collaborative, however, the power of different stakeholders needs to be “balanced enough to make them interdependent, to make their problem-solving a joint enterprise, not the decision of one party visited upon the others” (Sandercock 2003, p. 178). When collaboration is institutionalized through targeted “top-down” or “bottom-up” government policy interventions (Alcock 2004), joint enterprise is often realized through partnerships between actors from different public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Such cross-sector “collaborative institutions” (Cowell 2004) have given rise to what Skelcher (2000) characterized as the “congested state” where “many hands” intervene to address urban issues (Sullivan 2003). While joint partnerships may be long or short term and strategic or instrumental to tailor policy programs to local circumstances to foster social inclusion and integration, they rely upon “collaborative capacity” to enhance the participation and engagement of local residents (Sullivan, Barnes, and Matka 2006). Collaborative capacity extends beyond mere procedural involvement; it is understood as the ability to manage power differentials between stakeholders in a collective endeavor so as to facilitate joint decision taking and action without loss of autonomy or security in the relationship. To temporally disaggregate the differential involvement of stakeholders can, as this article reveals with respect to place-making, be a useful way to assess collaborative capacity.

Time is a variable that permeates all facets and phases of political life and decision making, yet the relevance of temporality has, thus far, been underexamined in administrative and policy research. For Howlett and Goetz (2014, p. 486), time in politics and policy making is

institutionalized . . . through rules that govern the length and configuration of terms, mandates and tenures of elected and unelected officials; through rules that determine when (timing), in what order (sequence), how quickly (speed) and for how long (duration) actions can be taken; and at the level of policy, which is concerned with allocation in time and over time.

In her book In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural politics, Sharma (2014) explains how the temporal is an experience of lived time that is politically and economically structured, operating as a form of social power that differentially locates people in and out of time. Inspired by Sharma, this article considers the temporal significance of the phases of stakeholder engagement in collaborative place-making.

Drawing from Schmidt’s (2010) study of the procedural dimensions of democratic decision making in the European Union, this article understands temporal phases of place-making as input, throughput, and output. It deploys Schmidt’s (2010, p. 7) concept of “throughput legitimacy”—“a performance criterion centering on what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of the political system, between the input and the output”—to focus on the procedural dimensions of decision making. The three dimensions of input, throughput, and output mirror the mode of inclusion of stakeholders. Input engages with decision making being produced by the people, where individuals and groups articulate their ideas, visions, and claims. Output deals with outcomes (i.e., policies, regulations, and laws) that are produced for the people. Throughput bridges input and output, and refers to decision making with the people. The process-based qualities of the throughput phase of decision making emphasize how social relations are often structured by the routines, discourses, and practices of governance.

Research Design and Method

This article is part of a larger research project on the socio-spatial impacts that German and Canadian artists, and the spaces and organizations they establish, have upon neighborhoods through their presence, programming, and practice. In each of the four project cities of Berlin, Leipzig, Toronto, and Hamilton, a contemporary and ongoing artist-run space case study was selected that showcases active neighborhood engagement and local resident outreach. Semistructured interviews were conducted with municipal politicians, planners, arm’s-length organization administrators, arts managers, artists, and residents. The interview questions were designed to flexibly address four thematic areas as relevant to the expertise of the different stakeholder informants: utility of municipal cultural planning and policy frameworks and processes; visual, material, and symbolic impacts of artistic practice upon the urban built fabric; relationships between artists and nonartist residents and neighborhood institutions; and place-making practices of artists. The interview findings were augmented by document analysis of relevant local municipal planning and policy reports and participant observation on- and off-site at a range of different arts and community events and organizational meetings. For the wider project, between 2013 and 2016, eighty-five key informant interviews were undertaken, eighteen of these in Berlin ² specifically examining the role of artists as place-makers in the cultural redevelopment of Güterbahnhof Moabit.

Güterbahnhof Moabit: The Making of Place in Berlin

Berlin is Germany’s postreunification capital and most cosmopolitan city (Arandjelovic and Bogunovich 2014), yet its economy has remained stagnant since 1990 (Gornig and Häussermann 2002). Nevertheless, migrants, libertines, and young professionals continue to be attracted to Berlin because of its unorthodox history of ideological and spatial division. This is a city of urban social transformation and reinvention, where its civic leaders aspire to world city status through the deployment of creative city policy that promotes cultural production and cultural consumption as essential urban development tools (Jakob 2013).

A creative city policy discourse was first mobilized in Berlin in 2001 (Colomb 2012). The Berlin Senate initiated creative industry policy strategies “to improve conditions for cultural industries, support new business start-ups, create new urban environments to meet the needs of creative industries and encourage ‘creative clustering’ in ‘underutilized urban spaces’” (Novy and Colomb 2013, p. 1823). Berlin city leaders at different administrative spatial scales—from the micro-level unit of the lived experience of a couple of streets within a neighborhood (Kiez), to the neighborhood (Nachbarschaft), to the district (Stadtteil), to the borough (Bezirk), to the Land of Berlin (Land Berlin)—have since differently instrumentalized cultural and subcultural capital to further civic economic competitiveness and social inclusion agendas (Lanz 2013). The remainder of the article focuses on the cultural redevelopment place-making process in the district of Moabit on the site of Güterbahnhof.

Moabit is located in the West of the borough of Mitte, on the edge of Berlin’s largest inland port, Westhafen. In the twentieth century, Moabit was a manufacturing and transportation hub from which goods were transported via the railway and port to and from Berlin. A contemporary decline in manufacturing, however, has put economic pressure on residents. In this district of 75,000 people, 44% of residents are immigrants representing sixty different countries, with prominent Turkish and Arabic communities, and with high percentages of working poor, unemployed, and child poverty (Dagenbach 2011).

One of the largest district management (Quartiersmanagement) areas in Berlin was established in Moabit in 1999 as a response to the Berlin Senate’s program for the social revitalization of declining urban areas (Stadtumbau West). This social program also plays a part in a broader urban development plan for former railway lands in Berlin in which open space is designated as compensation for increased densities elsewhere. In Moabit, industrial railway land was made available for redevelopment through a collaborative planning process that transformed it into a public park, playground, community garden (1,200 m²), and arts hub (Figure 1). The following discussion considers two stages of place-making, preoccupancy and postoccupancy, to investigate the collaborative capacity of stakeholders in the production and enactment of a place-narrative.

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Figure 1.

Map of the Güterbahnhof Moabit redevelopment site.

Preoccupancy Place-Making Inputs and Throughputs: Deconstructing Phases of Collaboration

The Güterbahnhof Moabit site includes a park (Stadtgarten Moabit), a community garden (Bürgergarten), and two buildings. It was formerly owned by Deutsche Bahn, occupied until 2007 by industrial tenants, and then acquired by the German Society for Urban Development. In the same year, an engineering feasibility study recommended that two of four buildings on-site be preserved and renovated at a cost of one million Euros. A second feasibility study recommended undertaking an open call for proposals to find a site tenant.

The commissioned agency StadtMuster undertook an “idea bazar” (Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin 2009, p. 2) with local residents to gather input on their ideas, visions, and needs for the future park. The outcomes of this public consultation exercise were summarized and rationalized in a publicly circulated brochure titled Moabiter Stadtgarten—Werkstatt zur Entwicklung eines Parks, which explicitly establishes a collaborative framework: the park “should not only be created for the residents, but also with them [emphasis added]” (Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin 2009, p. 2). Three landscape architecture firms developed designs for the park that residents provided feedback on during consultation workshops organized by an intermediary, arm’s-length agency. In 2009, a municipally led selection committee consisting of local politicians, expert planners, and a single Moabit citizen representative assigned the contract to the firm of Glaßer und Dagenbach. This proposal was chosen because it could provide what local residents “are missing, and what they wish for, what they are enthusiastic about and what they find interesting” (StadtMuster 2007, p. 2). A primary concern of the selection committee was to choose a proposal that left open space for the wishes and needs of local residents, particularly children.

Local children were consulted and invited to appropriate the site on an interim basis; they spent time designing playground equipment and planting seeds as ways to “haptically experience” the development and “feel that the space belongs to them” (landscape architect, pers. com., July 8, 2016). The site consultation process was described by the lead landscape architect as “remarkably goal-oriented and fair to both planners and citizens” and a successful opportunity to rethink the role of planners as “service providers to the citizens”; furthermore, “the political will of the Bezirk to initiate this process has paid off” (Dagenbach 2011, p. 27 and 24)—emphasizing that collaborative place-making was initiated, led, and coordinated by the local administration. He goes on to explain (pers. com., July 8, 2016), “public consultation is useful and has an integrative effect in the planning phases, but is not useful in the implementation or construction phases.” Public involvement is assessed as positive in the planning phase (input), but not in the implementation phase (output). Moreover, there is no apparent appreciation of throughput engagement wherein place-making would continue apace with citizens. Yet, for Schmidt (2010), throughputs lend procedural legitimacy to governance and enhance the quality of decision making. In the Güterbahnhof Moabit place-making process, the consultation of the public was restricted to envisioning the park (which included the future community garden, but excluded the buildings) and did not include input on tenant selection. The park and garden site designs were largely developed without consulting the future artist tenants (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Community garden with view to parched public park at back of site.

Postoccupancy Place-Making Throughputs and Outputs: Changing Expectations

The artist-tenant Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U; http://www.zku-berlin.org) was opened in 2012 by the Berlin-based artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK (http://www.kunstrepublik.de/en/). This artist collective produces site-specific projects that appropriate land for artistic interventions and performances and critically address the privatization of public space. In 2008, KUNSTrePUBLIK sought a permanent workspace in Berlin’s central city, but like other artists and arts organizations was repeatedly displaced by real estate speculators. Their quest for spatial security was realized with a forty-year tenancy agreement for the Güterbahnhof Moabit site, but funding to renovate the buildings took another three years to secure. KUNSTrePUBLIK has turned Güterbahnhof into ZK/U—a material and discursive space for artistic experimentation that reflects critically upon the intersection between art, the urban, and neighborhood development.

Negotiating Collaborative Place-Making Relationships

ZK/U cofounders are perceived by the site’s landscape architect (pers. com., July 8, 2016) to be in a “difficult collaborative relationship” with the municipality because they are “over-worked” and challenged to understand and engage with a bureaucratically complex world of “a lot of if-then-constructions.” Navigating the structural instability, density, and complexity of local government is immensely time-consuming. A ZK/U cofounder (pers. com., July 13, 2016) describes negotiating bureaucratic hierarchies to have a lease issued: “The administrator we talked to was never really in power, she pretended . . . she was just communicating and other people decided . . . We had to go steps higher, even to the Mayor, to get things done.” For the cofounders, not possessing a legal tenancy agreement prior to undertaking renovations within a mandated grant funding cycle required the assumption of significant personal financial risk.

The artist-tenant’s lease eventually materialized with a maintenance agreement that required the upkeep of the surrounding park property (e.g., cleaning, litter collection, watering, and cutting the grass) without additional staff or financial resources. These additional responsibilities are perceived by the landscape architect (pers. com., July 8, 2016) as overburdening the artist-tenant: “ZK/U doesn’t know how all of this is going to end, but they are being made responsible . . . to be present on site . . . to keep the premises clean and maintained.” For example, when a broken water pump broke and produced a parched landscape and numerous resident complaints, it took ZK/U two months of administrative follow-up with the district to negotiate a repair. In frustration at “the [municipal] gap between saying and doing,” a cofounder (pers. com., July 13, 2016) explains, with respect to local administrators that “We don’t communicate much. The communication is sometimes phone calls, e-mails, and letters, but there is nothing else. There was no meeting.” Nevertheless, it is ZK/U that carries the responsibility of dealing directly with public complaints. When parents of children in the playground complain about unrepaired equipment and rats, they hold ZK/U responsible (Figure 3). However, the playground equipment and garbage cans are district property and both have remained broken for a year despite numerous written repair requests from the artist-tenant. Many of these tensions on-site derive from misperception about what areas are considered public and what areas are designated and understood as private property.

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Figure 3.

Children’s playground behind turnstiles at the entrance to the site.

The publicness of the park can be seen and experienced in the multiplicity of public activities designed for the site (e.g., boules, playground, and community garden). There are, however, no public toilets; instead, the private toilets at ZK/U are publicly accessible during bar opening hours. The privately operated ZK/U bar is located on the terrace behind the buildings and is an important venue of community sociability but its opening hours correspond to art programming, and this limitation is a source of resident frustration (Figure 4). The terrace is perceived by Moabit residents as part of the public realm and, as a consequence, like the park, is often heavily littered. The artist-tenant has considered “putting up signs to make residents aware that this is private property” and they cannot leave garbage or bring their own drinks “but we don’t put up these signs because our idea for the space is to make it look open” (cofounder, pers. com., July 13, 2016). Resultant misunderstandings about appropriate behaviors, ownership, and maintenance are the responsibility of the artist-tenant to address and negotiate. The contractual relationship with the district has placed the artist-tenant in the role of property caretaker, which has unwittingly morphed into responsibilities for social control.

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Figure 4.

Signage on front entrance fence indicating limited opening hours of bar.

The question of social control is first addressed in the Call for Proposals for the community garden (Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin 2009, p. 2) rather than for the building: “the desired community garden shall support the integration of residents with migrant background and constitute a pre-condition for a peaceful, neighbourhood-driven conviviality of different cultures. Simultaneously, the social control of the park shall be secured that way.” This quotation not only showcases strong normative expectations, but also causally links multiethnic inclusion in the spaces and activities of the park with its securitization. Notably, the call for proposals for the building tenant makes no reference to social control. In theory, the artist-tenant is not tasked with social control, but in practice “[t]he district wants something—we want social control” (municipal urban planner, pers. com., July 5, 2016), and ZK/U remains the only private-property stakeholder consistently on-site. Due to their spatial proximity, the artist-tenant extends their sense of ownership and responsibility to the park: “[w]e don’t want to be the police, but through the property maintenance we get in that role . . . we don’t want to tell people off, but we end up telling them off because it is our direct surroundings” (cofounder, pers. com., July 13, 2016). This quotation illustrates that social control is collectively understood by ZK/U and the administration as a means to ensure the security of property and people on-site.

Security issues have ranged in severity from littering, to graffiti, to vandalism, to theft. More serious criminal offenses (e.g., breaking and entering into buildings and pickpocketing) have been addressed with calls to police, court cases, and offender sentences that have included both prison time and community service. A ZK/U intern (pers. com., August 7, 2015) frames the crimes as attacks by the neighborhood on the nonprofit art institution for its perceived wealth and isolated geographic location:

I find this really horrible because those are people from the neighborhood that organize in order to act against ZK/U . . . Technically, ZK/U is an open space that belongs to everybody. The idea is that everybody should be able to hang out here and everybody should be able to join. And, yet, there are people who don’t get that and see ZK/U as an institution that needs to be fought.

The perception by artists, civic leaders, and professional place-makers is that Güterbahnhof is a public space open to diverse users and uses. In practice, however, such diversity is carefully managed through “soft” and “hard” social control strategies. Walls, fences, gates, and a turnstile enclose the site, and opening hours have been established from 7:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. in the winter and 9:30 p.m. in the summer. A municipal urban planner (pers. com., July 5, 2016) acknowledges that “the regulation of the space through opening and closing hours is technically a responsibility of the district, but it doesn’t work well.” Consequently, a security company has been hired by the district to open and close the doors. However, given that much of ZK/U’s programming occurs in the evening and their artists-in-residence come and go, the artist-tenant is still informally tasked with ensuring that the gates are locked. In the physical design and management of the site, the district has prioritized social control over social inclusion.

The district and the artist-tenant do share a similar vision for the long-term occupancy of the site: “[w]e are happy that there are people on the premises that do something—the park is heavily used. ZK/U has no regulatory tasks, but they are expected to be there so that the park looks at least somewhat acceptable” (municipal urban planner, pers. com., July 5, 2016). Echoing this administrative understanding of their role, a cofounder (pers. com., July 13, 2016) affirms that “[t]hey don’t just want a building that could be used, but they want us or someone to be there. The openness and accessibility of our cultural events is an ideal situation for them.” Together, these two quotations highlight that ZK/U has been designated the task of being there, but what this entails is contested. From the district’s perspective, ZK/U is informally expected to oversee, or in the words of a municipal urban planner, to “handle the space” (pers. com., July 5, 2016) and through their ongoing presence and programming, to facilitate social inclusion and social control. From ZK/U’s perspective, their presence over the long term is an investment in, and enactment of, the place-making narrative but also a “self-investment through which they generate a particular habitus” that enables this artist collective to socially and materially grow into the site and into Moabit (Benson and Jackson 2013, p. 806).

Conclusion

Municipally led collaborative place-making at the spatial scale of the neighborhood has been shown to be a contentious political process in which power and control, over space and time, is unevenly distributed among stakeholders—artist-tenant, residents, landscape architect, urban planners, and local administrators. While the coproduction of a place-narrative seeks to invite people to collectively imagine the transformation of places, ultimately that transformative vision needs to be enacted together as well. Given the inherently political nature of place-making, the collective enactment of a place-narrative can only be realized through sustained collaboration.

The case study of Güterbahnhof Moabit has revealed a number of important temporal distinctions within the place-making process that are relevant to other cities. First, the temporal distinction between preoccupancy and postoccupancy of the site reveals stakeholder exclusions of two kinds: a lack of citizen engagement beyond a consultation with professional and political leaders to frame a place-narrative and an exclusion of future site occupants and enactors of a place-narrative. Second, the distinction between place-making inputs, throughputs, and outputs unpacks the practice of place-making as sequential collaboration by, with, and for people. This disaggregation reveals the ways in which stakeholders can be variously invited (or not) at different times to collectively make decisions. The application of the governance concept of “throughput” to place-making, as a bridge between input and output, opens the “black box” of place-making planning processes. It not only permits an appreciation of the procedural dimensions of decision making about place but also promotes a degree of political accountability. Place-making as an ongoing political process does not conclude when techno-administrative decisions about a site have been made, but rather necessitates continued stakeholder engagement over a longer time horizon.

In Moabit, as in other neighborhoods in transition, culture has been leveraged as a redevelopment tool. Culture-led redevelopment practices “as progressive as their inceptors may want them to be in terms of their benefits for vulnerable, deprived, or marginalised populations, are limited by their inherent instrumentalisation of ‘culture’” (Colomb 2011, p. 95). To extend Colomb’s argument to the Güterbahnhof site, the instrumentalization of culture—more specifically, the functionalization of artists—has resulted in the overextension of their assumed place-making capacities. Artists have been municipally responsibilized not only for an extensive range of property maintenance tasks to ensure the site’s ongoing functioning and cleanliness but also for striking a difficult balance between social inclusion and social control. The popular social framing that Forkert (2013) presents of artists as exceptionally self-reliant and resourceful has been shown to problematically predominate in administrative logic.

This case study has demonstrated that civic leaders perceive artists to be active and adaptable stakeholders who possess the capacities and resources to enact place-making policy—in particular, relational and interpersonal capacities designed to develop social capital (e.g., to empathize, build trust, communicate, understand complexity, manage uncertainty, think laterally, and challenge professional and organizational norms) (Williams 2002). While artists may enjoy an influential role at the place-making enactment stage, this article has shown that they often have significantly less involvement when the terms of place-making policy are first established. The power to temporally sequence stakeholder involvement in place-making and to establish the terms of transformative engagement with a site is rarely shared; instead it is unidirectional and often retained by the local state with little adjustment in goals or operating culture.

In sum, multistakeholder engagement in collaborative place-making has largely been planned by political and professional leaders and administrators who have the time, resources, and money to influence when and how place-making occurs and who is involved. A formally administered process of place-making, with its designated points of departure and completion and specified terms of engagement, renders power and authority legible. Artists may have the power and symbolic authority to help constitute the social world of a place and to shape the temporalities and rhythms that underpin its functionality, but that power is contractually bestowed upon them through an administrated process that delimits the spatio-temporal scope of how they might engage with place-making. Lease and maintenance contracts, established by bureaucratic and legal authority, set the terms of engagement with place. Such contracts establish the place-making priorities and the rules of collaboration between artists and the local state. They are a form of legitimation—recognition of the “right” of artists as individuals and a group to speak authoritatively about this place with decision makers in the governance process—but they also simultaneously “recreate existing relations of economic, social, and political dependency” and disempowerment (Atkinson 1999, p. 63). Thus, while collaborative place-making policy may appear to open up decision making to a broad group of stakeholders, in reality, it cannot go much further than a consensus around an already agreed-upon place-making agenda (Jupp 2008). Administrators have determined the composition as well as the duration and scope of stakeholder involvement; their techno-administrative understanding of place-making—as balancing social mix and social control—and the proxy role of artists within it ultimately inhibits a more intuitive and fulsome collaborative enactment of place.