Placemaking in your community
Creative activity is a driver for building this connectivity. This Section looks at the principles of placemaking and the ways in which the arts can contribute to the development of cultural tourism.
Placemaking in the arts and cultural context relates to the engagement of people by connecting them through arts projects that encourage their interactivity with a particular place or space. It enables the stories of the people and the place to be visible and either celebrated or commemorated by the community.
There are many stories to be told about special places in our communities:
- those of the original inhabitants of the land
- current stories and characters
- future desires of the community for the development of that land
All of these stories are important and help to articulate the identity of communities. Arts in public spaces projects are a creative way to capture those stories. The capturing of community stories and the activation of public spaces are current strategic priorities within Queensland government policy, as reflected in Arts Queensland’s Creative Communities: Queensland Arts Industry Sector Development Plan 2007-2009 (2006:22).
There are many ways in which you and your community can engage in placemaking activity through the arts. Public art, interpretive trails or the creation of virtual spaces that act as a repository for community stories are just some of the ways.
Placestories is a database and software system that Feral Arts has been developing as a part of their Arts Queensland and the Australia Council funded community cultural development programs in remote regional Queensland communities.
The first prototypes were conceived ten years ago as a digital keeping-place for Dajarra - a small, mainly Aboriginal township in northwest Queensland. The community in Dajarra wanted a way to gather, store and manage local cultural and community histories for use in arts projects, in cultural education and for future generations. The system needed to provide individuals and family groups from across the whole extended community (living either in Dajarra or elsewhere) with the means to individually control access to the information. By the same token, users also needed options to connect, share work and collaborate across distances. So from the outset, a solution required both an online database, and an offline database hosted in a local software client tool. Placestories meets these needs.
The software that they have developed will help many communities develop their own digital stories that can be shared today and stored for the next generation.
For more, check out www.placestories.com
Resources for digital stories
Digital stories are a powerful tool in placemaking. Here is a list of some of the resources collected by long time digital story teller Daryll Bellingham. Email. mail@storytell.com.au.
You can go directly to his digital stories on www.storytell.com.au/digital.html
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) www.acmi.net.au/
ACMI runs a Digital Storytelling Program at its centre in Melbourne. ACMI works with communities and key organisations such as the Australian Heart Foundation and Alzheimer's Australia (Victoria) to develop specific digital storytelling projects.
Center for Digital Storytelling - www.storycenter.org/ht
The Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley, California, is a non-profit training, project development, and research organization dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives. Their focus is on developing large-scale projects for community, educational, and business institutions.
Silence Speaks - www.silencespeaks.org/about.html
is a project of the Center for Digital Storytelling. Workshops provide survivors, witnesses with support, skills and equipment to create digital stories of courage and healing.
Capture Wales - www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/
This is an ongoing program in Wales running community digital storytelling workshops and projects and publishing movie on this BBC website. It was instigated by Daniel Meadows in April 2001.
Tim Sheppard's Digitalstorytelling Links
An eclectic mix of articles, sites, and lists about digital storytelling.
Tech Head Stories - Digital Storytelling Links
A huge list of links for sites, programs, articles, resources.