Exploring the Boundary-Crossing Nature of ‘Creative Placemaking’: The Stove as ‘Adaptor/Converter’

Abstract

The Stove is a cultural organization based in Dumfries and Galloway, in the South of Scotland, that works alongside their local community within their particular context, with a vision to “use arts and creativity to encourage, to gather, learn and bring life back to our town centre and wider region.”[1] Such place-based, community-oriented, creative activity, however, is not a new phenomenon and there are significant historical examples that exemplify this practice: From 1968 to 1978, the artist David Harding became Town Artist during the construction of Glenrothes New Town (Scotland) in which he was committed to “involve the people of the town in making their own contribution to their own physical and cultural environment.”[2] The Black-e (Originally the Blackie) in Liverpool similarly began operating in 1968 as the “the UK’s first community arts project”[3] where artistic practices were central to address the concerns of local communities, and has been operating for over half a century now. The Craigmillar Festival Society[4] began in 1962, operating with a cultural methodology to speak to the site-specific concerns of the local population including industry, employment, identity, among other subjects and, despite a pause from 2015 – 2021, has recently been reinvigorated by citizens of Craigmillar looking to artistic activities as a way to speak to their specific contexts. More recently, other similar projects such as Rig Arts (Inverclyde) or WHALE Arts (Mid Lothian) operate in their localized area, using a creative methodology to explore the intersection of people and place, including interventions into education, social life, civic governance, and food production.[5] Alongside these artistically driven projects, there are a multitude of place-oriented policies and funds within the UK that have guided a host of short- and long-term projects, including the Creative People and Places fund (Arts Council England), Place Partnerships (Creative Scotland), Place, Space & People, and Spatial Policy (Arts Council Ireland), and Ideas, People, Places (Arts Council Wales), to name a few.