The Creative Economy: Nashville Case Study Featuring Joe Nickol

Creative Placemaking has come of its own within the last year, with art and culture at the heart of a portfolio of integrated strategies to drive community transformation through creativity and diversity. The understanding of the value capture of creative placemaking is thanks in no small part to the work of organizations like ArtPlace in the US, the do-it-yourself Artscape in Canada, and private practitioners like Joe Nickol.

Joe will lead this webinar on an exploration of recent breakthroughs in the creative economy, using his UDA work in Nashville as a case study to the elements of creative cities and how they drive innovative economies. In Joe’s words: ”What about our cities enables and sustains this creativity is not a world where there is an artist colony and a separate place that everyone else occupies but a common set of town-building parameters that we all need in order to exercise the inherited or acquired creativity we have to offer. The same set of physical characteristics and relationships that allow a city to harbor world-class music, for example, are equally necessary to develop the newest technologies or innovative economies we thrive on.”

Joe is a leader in urban design, planning and real estate development projects in North America and abroad. His focus is on the regeneration of our towns, cities, and neighborhoods and using the lessons of those places to inform the design of new districts and towns that are inherently highly adaptable and resilient. At Urban Design Associates, Joe has directed design and implementation for dozens of projects ranging from small to over a million dollars in design fees. He leads teams of two to ten designers as well as multi-disciplinary teams of economists, ecologists, engineers, artists, architects, and planners.  His active clients include both public entities and developers with projects in over twenty states and seven countries. Joe co-founded Street-Sense.org, a web-based platform dedicated to helping our towns, cities, and neighborhoods adapt, grow, and prosper.

This event carries one hour CNUa credit.