CSF Update: Our Advocacy for Creative Placemaking So Far

Since CreativeSpaces-Fredericton’s founding in late December 2024, our first year of operation in 2025 has gone by quickly. In the past year our four person volunteer Board devoted its time to building CSF’s online presence, releasing our snapshot survey to show our city’s artists need for affordable studio spaces, and meeting with key officials at City Hall to discuss the importance of artists having suitable studios for their art practises. We also met with representatives of the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design (NBCCD), and several NB arts organizations to share our mission and suggest working partnerships to realize new arts and cultural hubs in Fredericton. Additionally, we arranged the showing of large spaces offered to us by State Street Properties to several arts organizations to see if they’d be suitable to lease for their purposes. And, by year’s end we strategized on how in 2026 we would seek to engage other private property managers in offering spaces for artist use.

Out of our first year of activity, we’ve come to realize that, while the need for affordable artist studio space in Fredericton has only grown over the years since when this issue was first identified, and that our city’s artists are impatient to see it resolved, it takes time and effort to build understanding and momentum to change things for the better. Also it takes an opportune moment. This we now have with the city launching in February its public consultations for its Creative City Strategy. CSF will take advantage of this opportunity to present how other Canadian cities are handling their artists’ need for studio space, making the case for Fredericton to do same. Further, we encourage our city’s artists who wish to have either private or collaborative studio space to either participate directly in these consultations, or, following city elections this spring, to write your city counsellor to express your need and why it is important to your practise. The more artists the consultants developing the city’s new arts plan hear from on this issue the more likely it will be given priority for action in their proposed plan. Further, it will serve to bolster CSF’s advocacy which is being done on your behalf.