ArtPlace America selected PolicyLink in 2015 to lead the research and documentation components of the Community Development Investments (CDI) program. As a consulting partner to ArtPlace, PolicyLink has worked collaboratively with ArtPlace staff, partners, and CDI grantees throughout the program’s duration to harvest the knowledge gained, lessons learned, and impacts observed when arts and cultural strategies are deployed in service of comprehensive community development and planning.
 
The documents shared on this page include the Research Framework, composed of themes  and core questions created jointly by PolicyLink, the CDI grantees and ArtPlace in the first year of the project, and an essay completed in 2020 which describes how the research methods were chosen and deployed and the nature and implications of key findings. Also cross-referenced on this page is the new brief on Creative Documentation, which explores the ways in which artists served as researchers at the CDI sites and describes the approach taken by Chris Johnson in his video documentation project.

Finally, The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, edited by Cara Courage and published in 2021, is a diverse compendium of 45 articles including pieces by Victor Rubin, Jeremy Liu, Jamie Hand, Maria Rosario Jackson, Sara Calderon, Erik Takeshita, and other PolicyLink and ArtPlace partners and colleagues.