‘This place becomes a place’: Artists and placemaking on the margins

Abstract

Culture and creativity are active but often overlooked processes in contemporary urbanisation. This paper contributes to scholarship on the cultural and creative industries, as well as urban placemaking on the margins, by adopting a placemaking approach in which artists are positioned at the centre of the analysis. The focus is on why artists choose to be located away from national cultural hubs, how this shapes their work, and how their work in turn shapes the city. Qualitative research was conducted in the northern Ghanaian city of Tamale with artists based in three creative and cultural industries: film, music and visual arts. The paper makes three important contributions to the literature: first, sense of place, attachment to place and feeling at home are shown to be key to artists’ decisions to be based in peripheral locations; second, the material and cultural attributes of place and associated access to resources influence the work artists produce when located far from cultural urban hubs; and third, artists are changing the perceived marginality of their home cities by shaping urban infrastructure and projecting new geographical imaginaries.