The City Creative: The Rise of Placemaking in Urban America is the first book to contextualize what has come to be known as "placemaking," inside its seemingly contradictory grassroots, academic, and policy origins. Drawing on ten years of participant observation, archival research, interviews, and documentary photography from over 200 projects in 42 US cities, the book asks a series of questions: What is placemaking? What are its promises and pitfalls? What are its consequences for urbanity and its transformation?

Michael H. Carriere is associate professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, environmental studies, and urban design. He has written for publications, such as the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban History, Cultural History, Reviews in American History, Punk Planet, Pitchfork.com, and Salon.com. His first book, Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of Liberalism in Postwar America, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Carriere received his bachelor's degree from Hampshire College and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.

David Schalliol is assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College, and explores the transformation of urban centers through mixed-methodology projects. His writing and photographs have appeared in publications, such as Places, the New York Times, and Social Science Research, as well as in numerous exhibitions, including the Belfast Northern Ireland Photo Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Project. He is the author of Isolated Building Studies (Utakatado, 2014), and regularly contributes to documentary films, including Almost There (ITVS/Kartemquin Films) and Highrise: Out My Window (National Film Board of Canada), an interactive documentary that won the International Digital Emmy for Non-Fiction (2011). He is currently making The Area, an ethnographic film about the displacement of more than 400 families on Chicago's South Side. Schalliol received his bachelor's degree from Kenyon College and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.