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This chapter offers a case study counter-history rooted in the “Rust Belt” city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This counter-history is meant to both complement and challenge versions of the past that inform mainstream contemporary creative placemaking. By recognizing these parallel histories in a place few observers examine, it is our hope that we can offer a new wellspring of ideas for placemaking efforts. Far from the sources of the so-called creative economy, we see an urban history that sets the contours for a new approach to creative placemaking. Focusing on Milwaukee allows us to see how history informs placemaking in ways that many contemporary practitioners and observers have yet to fully realize. At the same time, it highlights a history that is often overlooked, shed in favor of a “post-industrial” urban order. Counter to contemporary neoliberal arguments, that is not the only choice. In this chapter, all of these issues will coalesce around the budding field of urban agriculture, in which Milwaukee has emerged as a hub with global influence. To its practitioners, urban agriculture is more than about growing food, it is about growing community and new forms of urban redevelopment. It is also about creating and navigating new relationships.

This chapter focuses on community gardening as an intervention aimed at addressing obesity. Community gardens originally sprang up in the United States as a response to social and economic crises dating back to the late nineteenth century. When these gardens are planted and cultivated by the community, they achieve a variety of key social, economic, political, educational, and health-related goals. A social justice perspective adds an important dimension to community gardens, particularly in its emphasis on community inclusion and participatory democracy. This chapter begins with a historical overview of urban farming before defining the phrase urban garden program. It then discusses the history of urban community gardening and potential pitfalls of community gardening. It also presents case examples that illustrate how community gardens facilitate comprehensive approaches that successfully allow health promotion to be conceptualized along a range of dimensions, including social justice-inspired change.

This chapter examines the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company's use of educational and recreational programs to socialize children to become reliable workers as well as “good citizens” during the period 1901–1918. The dramatic growth of immigrant populations in the industrializing United States motivated Progressives to focus on “Americanization” programs that would educate women about health, food preparation, and parenting. The emphasis on Americanizing immigrants grew during the Gilded Age and was adopted by the Progressive reformers working for racial uplift. This chapter discusses the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company's Americanization of immigrant children by creating educational curriculum, establishing kindergartens and gardening programs, and sponsoring field days and sporting events.

This chapter considers George Frideric Handel's career after the famous Covent Garden programme where he stood triumphant against the Opera of the Nobility. The period 1737–41 saw Handel switching between Italian opera and English oratorio in his work. He seemed to want to keep both options open, from season to season, developing one line or the other according to the opportunities that presented themselves. After writing and performing The ways of Zion do mourn for the funeral of Queen Caroline, Handel performed Faramondo and Serse, to prove to himself that he could repeat the intensity of the previous year's creative energy The chapter also describes how this period proved to be a turning point in his reputation with the London public. Although he would continue to have ‘enemies’ among influential opera patrons, he was becoming an accepted part of London life.