Urban planning architecture has much to learn from art practice.

Interviewee: Mary Jane Jacob

The so-called participatory practice of urban planning and architecture has much to learn from this in-depth art practice. I’ve been working in Charleston for the Spoleto Festival USA over some 20 years. In the middle of the 2000s an idea came up from the Mayor to create an International African American Museum. The city’s planning division hired a firm to get community input. I was appalled by their process, that is, what their profession felt was participation. They used an empty storefront and over two consecutive weekends were open for people to come in give feedback by putting up post-it notes; people were just to write down ideas without a facilitated discussion; there was no face to face relationship with the reality of how do you create communication with people.  Artists, however, have been engaging citizens through invested means of dialogue that leads to unearthing or making real meaning, sharing thought, evolving ways of being together and moving into the future. Artists and curators have been developing these practices for over decades now, but what goes for professional practice in other fields—that claim to be more substantive than art can end up meaning nothing, as well as being a waste of money in the process. Artists are still considered to be less significant and less professional in their practices because there is still a professional hierarchy in which art is less than architecture, but there are enormously rich and wise processes that  have been developed through social practices.