Culture and Urban Revitalization: A Harvest Document

Advocates have long argued that the economic benefits of the arts and culture provide a firm rationale for public support. Recent scholarship on the "creative class" and "creative economy" is simply the latest effort to link cultural expression to community prosperity. In contrast, the social benefits of cultural engagement have received relatively little attention, even though -- as we shall see -- they provide a stronger case.We need to avoid a simplistic either-or choice between the economic and social impacts of the arts. People who live in our cities, suburbs, and countryside are simultaneously consumers, workers, residents, citizens, and participants. Culture's role in promoting community capacity and civic engagement is central to its potential for generating vital cultural districts. To separate the economic and the social impacts of the arts makes each more difficult to understand.This document provides an overview of the state-of-the-art literature on culture and urban revitalization. In Part 2, we place the creative sector in contemporary context with a discussion of three social dynamics. The "new urban reality" has restructured our cities by increasing social diversity -- fueled by new residential patterns, the emergence of young adult districts, and immigration; expanding economic inequality; and changing urban form. Shifts in the economic and political environment have changed the structure of the creative sector. Finally, the changing balance of government, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions in social policy development -- the shift to transactional policymaking -- has profound implications for cultural policy and the creative sector broadly defined. These three forces -- the new urban reality, the changing structure of the creative sector, and the emergence of transactional policy-making -- define the context within which culture-based revitalization takes place

The Social Wellbeing of New York City's Neighborhoods: The Contribution of Culture and the Arts

This report presents the conceptual framework, data and methodology, and findings of a two-year study of culture and social wellbeing in New York City by SIAP with Reinvestment Fund. Building on their work in Philadelphia, the team gathered data from City agencies, borough arts councils, and cultural practitioners to develop a 10-dimension social wellbeing framework—which included construction of a cultural asset index—for every neighborhood in the five boroughs. The research was undertaken between 2014 and 2016.The social wellbeing tool enables a variety of analyses: the distribution of opportunity across the city;identification of areas with concentrated advantage, concentrated disadvantage, aswell as "diverse and struggling" neighborhoods with both strengths and challenges; and analysis of the relationship of"neighborhood cultural ecology" to other features of a healthy community

Review of Glenn Firebaugh, \u3cem\u3eThe New Geography of Global Income Inequality\u3c/em\u3e

Glenn Firebaugh\u27s The New Geography of Global Income Inequality has a clear thesis that it supports with a mountain of evidence. The thesis can be stated simply: global income inequality, which grew during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, is now declining because of the industrialization of Asia

Rethinking Social Impact: We Can\u27t Talk About Social Well-Being Without the Arts & Culture

Mark Stern wrote this blog post as part of Animating Democracy’s “Social Impact and Evaluation Blog Salon” in 2012

Is All the World Philadelphia?: A Multi-city Study of Arts and Cultural Organizations, Diversity, and Urban Revitalization

This paper takes on the question—to what extent to are the relationships between diversity, social capital, and revitalization that SIAP has documented in Philadelphia present in other cities? This paper uses available data to give a first approximation of the relationship between these variables in other U.S. cities. For this first multi-city investigation, SIAP chose four cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco—that share similarities but exhibit contrasts as well. They all have sizable ethnic minorities, although their ethnic composition varies greatly. They represent the four basic regions of the United States defined by the Census Bureau. Two represent established cities that have had to accommodate the restructuring of the world and national economies over the past several decades, while two represent the “Sunbelt.” Finally, two of the cities have a classic nineteenth-century core with concentric circles of later settlement, while the other two represent the urban form of the automobile age with multiple “centers” and a more dispersed pattern of development. As a “first-cut” on a multi-city study, the results of the analysis are striking. Each of the three major patterns found in Philadelphia are also present in the other cities. Each city had a substantial set of economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. In each city these neighborhoods were home to a large number of cultural organizations. Finally, in each city diverse neighborhoods with many cultural organizations were those most likely to experience revitalization during the 1980s. This paper therefore lays an important foundation in demonstrating that SIAP findings from Philadelphia are not idiosyncratic. In at least this respect, all the world really is like Philadelphia

The Geography of Cultural Production in Metropolitan Philadelphia

In previous work on Philadelphia, SIAP found that nonprofit arts and cultural organizations tended to concentrate in economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. This paper uses data on for-profit cultural firms to document whether they too cluster in diverse neighborhoods or if they have a different logic of agglomeration. The paper uses two data sets for the five-county Philadelphia region: the nonprofit inventory of over 1,200 cultural providers—including incorporated and “informal” programs—compiled by SIAP in 1997; and a for-profit database of approximately 1,300 cultural firms derived in 1999 from a yellow-pages compilation of selected industries. The paper concludes with a description of five “natural” cultural districts in metropolitan Philadelphia with a focus on the mix of firms in each. It calls for further analysis of the synergies between the for-profit and nonprofit cultural sectors to understand how they share resources—especially audiences and artists—and what sustains these “natural” cultural districts. The implication is that cultural district planning could expand from tourist destinations to arts and cultural production districts

Types of “Natural” Cultural Districts: Opportunities for Policy Development

This policy brief outlines SIAP’s concept of “natural” cultural district, three types of districts, and different policy strategies for each. The material is a synthesis of previous research and provides a conceptual framework for the three-city study of natural cultural districts

Social Networks and Inequality in New York City\u27s Cultural Sector

This paper uses NYC Department of Cultural Affairs data on grantee program sites to address questions about structural inequality associated with the geography of cultural resources across New York City. The analysis supports and expands SIAP findings documented in its March 2017 report about the geography of culture in New York City. On the one hand, the distribution of program sites across the City is consistent with that of other cultural assets. Program sites tend to reinforce rather than mitigate the shortfall of cultural opportunities in the majority of lower-income neighborhoods. At the same time, it demonstrates that civic clusters—low-income neighborhoods with relatively large numbers of cultural assets—have stronger and more diverse institutional networks. This paper suggests that improving social wellbeing in lower-income neighborhoods requires strengthening both local and regional networks

Beyond Livability (ArtPlace blog)

Mark Stern wrote this blog post in December 2011 as part of CultureBlocks, the Philadelphia cultural assets mapping project, funded by the NEA’s Our Town Program and ArtPlace America