Methodology for Rating Evidence

We use the following definitions for placement on the graph and for describing benefits in the document.

Does the evidence indicate that the benefit exists?

• Yes: the majority of the available evidence supports the claim
• No: the majority of the available evidence opposes the claim
• Mixed: neither of the above conditions is true

How strong is the quality of the evidence?

• High: multiple studies with causal designs (experimental or quasi-experimental)
• Medium: a single study with a causal design, or multiple studies that otherwise make a compelling case for causal interpretation in the judgment of our team
• Low: neither of the above conditions is met

In cases where the supporting, mixed, and opposing evidence is of differing strength, the stronger evidence is given more weight in determining whether the evidence supports the claim.

In the body of the article, we use the qualifier “probably” to describe effects in the Yes/Medium cell of the matrix, “may” to describe effects in the Yes/Low, No/Low, and all Mixed cells of the matrix, “probably not” to describe effects in the No/Medium cell of the matrix, and “does not” to describe effects in the No/High cell of the matrix.

Note: in general, we support methodological diversity, and are not dogmatic about valuing “gold standard” study designs such as randomized controlled trials at the expense of all other types of research. However, in practice, studies with causal designs tend to be much rarer than descriptive and case-study-based research, and therefore more valuable due to their scarcity and the fact that they are typically more challenging to conduct. In addition, given that the questions explored in this review are inherently causal in nature – can we trust that an activity or intervention makes some kind of benefit more likely – it is appropriate to privilege designs that make a convincing attempt to rule out alternative hypotheses for any observed effects. Our rating of evidence strength takes these considerations into account.

Full Bibliography

Below is a full list of resources which informed this research investigation. Much of our research focused on literature reviews or meta-analyses, and we have included here works that were consulted directly, as well as resources that were encountered within a review and factored into our findings. Works that received a thorough review from Createquity are marked with an asterisk (*).

Arts Council England. (2006). The Power of Art. Visual arts: evidence of impact. Part 2. London. Retrieved from www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/ documents/publications/phpOCmaHq.pdf

Arts Council England. (2014). The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society: An Evidence Review. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Value_arts_culture_evidence_review.pdf

Arts Midwest, & Metropolitan Group. (2015). Creating Connection: Research Findings and Proposed Message Framework to Build Public Will for Arts and Culture. Retrieved from http://www.artsmidwest.org/sites/default/files/ArtsMidwest_BPWReport.pdf

Asbury, C. H., & Rich, B. (2008). Learning, arts, and the brain: The dana consortium report on arts and cognition. Dana Press.

Bakhshi, H., Freeman, A., & Higgs, P.. (2013). Dynamic Mapping of The UK’s Creative Industries. NESTA. Retrieved from www.nesta. org.uk/publications/dynamic-mapping-uks-creative-industries

Baxter, C., Tyler, P., Moore, B., Morrison, N., McGaffin, R., & Otero-Garcia, M. (2005). Enterprising Places: Sustaining Competitive Locations for Knowledge-Based Business. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge–MIT Institute.

BOP Consulting. (2011). Edinburgh Festivals Impact Study. Final Report. London. Retrieved from www.eventscotland.org/ resources/downloads/get/56.pdf

*Brown, A. (2006). An Architecture of Value. GIA Reader, 17(1). Retrieved from http://www.giarts.org/article/architecture-value

Brown, E. D., & Sax, K. L. (2013). Arts enrichment and preschool emotions for low-income children at risk. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(2), 337–346.

Bygren, L. O., Johansson, S.-E., Konlaan, B. B., Grjibovski, A. M., Wilkinson, A. V., & Sjöström, M. (2009). Attending cultural events and cancer mortality: A Swedish cohort study. Arts & Health, 1(1), 64–73.

Carnwath, J. D., & Brown, A. S. (2014). Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experiences: A Literature Review. WolfBrown and Arts Council England. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/Understanding_the_value_and_impacts_of_cultural_experiences.pdf

CASE programme: understanding the drivers, impacts and value of engagement in culture and sport. (2010). Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/case-programme-understanding-the-drivers-impacts-and-value-of-engagement-in-culture-and-sport

CEBR. (2013). The contribution of the arts and culture to the national economy. London. Retrieved from www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/CEBR_economic_ report_web_version_0513.pdf

Clarke, E., DeNora, T., & Vuoskoski, J. (n.d.). Music, Empathy, and Cultural Understanding. 2014: Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Clawson, H. J., & Coolbaugh, K. (2001). The YouthARTS Development Project. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Washington, D.C.: Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED454130

Clift, S, Hancox, G, Morrison, I, Hess, B, Stewart, D, & Kreutz, G. (2008). Choral Singing, Wellbeing and Health: Summary of Findings from a Cross-national Survey. Sidney De Haan Research Centre for Arts and Health, Canterbury Christ Church University. Retrieved from https://www.canterbury. ac.uk/health-and-wellbeing/sidney-de-haan-research-centre/ documents/choral-singing-summary-report.pdf

Clift, S., Skingley, A., Coulton, S., & Rodriguez, J. (2012). A controlled evaluation of the health benefits of a participative community singing programme for older people (Silver Song Clubs). Sidney De Haan

*Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2016). Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project. United Kingdom: Arts & Humanities Research Council. Retrieved from http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/documents/publications/cultural-value-project-final-report/

Research Centre for Arts and Health, Canterbury Christ Church University, Folkestone, Kent, UK. Canterbury Christ Church University, Folkestone, Kent, UK: Retrieved from http://www. Ahsw. Org. uk/userfiles/Other_Resources/SSCRCTsummaryreportOct12. Pdf

Daykin, N., & Byrne, E. (2006). The impact of visual arts and design on the health and wellbeing of patients and staff in mental health care: A systematic review of the literature. University of the West of England.

Development Services Group, Inc. (2016). Arts-Based Programs and Arts Therapies for At-Risk, Justice-Involved, and Traumatized Youths. Washington, D.C.: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Retrieved from http://www.ojjdp.gov/mpg/litreviews/Arts-Based-Programs-for-Youth.pdf

Education Endowment Foundation. (2016). Hallé SHINE on Manchester: Evaluation report and executive summary. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/our-work/projects/shine-on-manchester/

Everitt, A., Hamilton, R., & White, M. (2003). Arts, health and community: A study of five arts in community health projects. University of Durham.

Falck, O., Fritsch, M., & Heblich, S. (2011). The phantom of the opera: Cultural amenities, human capital, and regional economic growth. Labour Economics, 18(6), 755–766.

Feldman, A. F., & Matjasko, J. L. (2005). The Role of School-Based Extracurricular Activities in Adolescent Development: A Comprehensive Review and Future Directions. Review of Educational Research, 75(2), 159–210. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543075002159

Fujiwara, D. (2013). Museums and Happiness: The Value of Participating in Museums and the Arts (The Happy Museum). Retrieved from http://www.happymuseumproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Museums_and_happiness_DFujiwara_April2013.pdf

*Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L., & Dolan, P. (2014a). Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304899/Quantifying_and_valuing_the_wellbeing_impacts_of_sport_and_culture.pdf

*Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L., & Dolan, P. (2014b). Quantifying the Social Impacts of Culture and Sport. Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304896/Quantifying_the_Social_Impacts_of_Culture_and_Sport.pdf

Garrod, B. (2014). Investigating the role of Eisteddfodau in creating and transmitting cultural value in Wales and beyond. Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Gerry, D., Unrau, A., & Trainor, L. J. (2012). Active music classes in infancy enhance musical, communicative and social development: Active music classes enhance development. Developmental Science, 15(3), 398–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01142.x

Giordano, P. C., Cernkovich, S. A., & Rudolph, J. L. (2002). Gender, crime, and desistance: Toward a theory of cognitive transformation1. American Journal of Sociology, 107(4), 990–1064.

Graham, G., Chattopadhyay, S., & Lakhanpal, J.R. (2014). Using New Metrics to Assess the Role of the Arts in Well-Being: Some Initial Results from the Economics of Happiness. The Brookings Institute. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Brookings-Final-Report.pdf

Greene, J. P., Kisida, B., & Bowen, D. H. (2014). The educational value of field trips. Education Next, 14(1).

Grodach, C., Foster, N., & Murdoch III, J. (2014). Gentrification and the artistic dividend: the role of the arts in neighborhood change. Journal of the American Planning Association, 80(1), 21–35.

Grossi, E., Blessi, G. T., Sacco, P. L., & Buscema, M. (2012). The interaction between culture, health and psychological well-being: Data mining from the Italian culture and well-being project. Journal of Happiness Studies, 13(1), 129–148.

Guetzkow, J. (2002). How the Arts Impact Communities: An introduction to the literature on arts impact studies. Presented at the Taking the Measure of Culture Conference, Princeton University: Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies. Retrieved from https://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP20%20-%20Guetzkow.pdf

Hacking, S., Secker, J., Spandler, H., Kent, L., & Shenton, J. (2008). Evaluating the impact of participatory art projects for people with mental health needs. Health & Social Care in the Community, 16(6), 638–648.

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Hervas-Olivier, J., & others. (2011). The Importance of Creative Industries Agglomerations in Explaining the Wealth of European Regions. DRUID. Retrieved from http://druid8.sit.aau.dk/acc_ papers/3u3ov4ld8gx1uvxa4pgddeivjeg5.pdf

Hesmondhalgh, D., & Pratt, A. (2005). Cultural industries

Hetland, L., & Winner, E. (2001). The arts and academic achievement: What the evidence shows. Arts Education Policy Review, 102(5), 3–6.

Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy. Demos London.

Hyyppä, M. T., Mäki, J., Impivaara, O., & Aromaa, A. (2006). Leisure participation predicts survival: a population-based study in Finland. Health Promotion International, 21(1), 5–12.

Ings, R., Crane, N., & Cameron, M. (2012). Be Creative Be Well. Arts, wellbeing and local communities. An evaluation. London: Arts Council England. Retrieved from www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/BCBW_final.pdf

*Jackson, M. R., & Herranz, J. (2002). Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement (Research Report). The Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310834_culture_counts.pdf

*Jackson, M. R., Kabwasa-Green, F., & Herranz, J. (2006). Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators. The Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/projects/cultural-vitality-indicators/publications.cfm

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. (2010). Soul of the Community – Overall Findings. Retrieved from http://www.knightfoundation.org/sotc/

Jones, S. (2010). Culture shock. London: Demos.

Kattenstroth, J.C., Kalisch, T., Holt, S., Tegenthoff, M., & Dinse, H. R. (2013). Six months of dance intervention enhances postural, sensorimotor, and cognitive performance in elderly without affecting cardio-respiratory functions. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 5, 5.

Kay, A. (2000). Art and community development: the role the arts have in regenerating communities. Community Development Journal, 35(4), 414–424.

Kay, A., & Watt, G. (2000). The role of the arts in regeneration. Scottish Executive.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.

Konlaan, B. B., Bygren, L. O., & Johansson, S.-E. (2000). Visiting the cinema, concerts, museums or art exhibitions as determinant of survival: a Swedish fourteen-year cohort follow-up. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 28(3), 174–178.

Lambert, C. (2014). The Value of Live Art: experience, politics and affect. Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Lobo, Y. B., & Winsler, A. (2006). The effects of a creative dance and movement program on the social competence of head start preschoolers. Social Development, 15(3), 501–519.

Lowe, S. S. (2000). Creating community art for community development. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 29(3), 357–386.

Manchester, M, & Pett, E. (n.d.). Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective. Arts & Humanities Research Council.

*Mark J. Stern. (2007). Culture and Urban Revitalization: A Harvest Document. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved from https://www.reinvestment.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Culture_and_Urban_Revitalization_A_Harvest_Document-Report_2007.pdf

*Markusen, A., & Gadwa, A. (2010). Arts and culture in urban or regional planning: A review and research agenda. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29(3), 379–391.

Martin, A. J., Mansour, M., Anderson, M., Gibson, R., Liem, A., & Sudmalis, D. (2013). The Role of Arts Participation in Students’ Academic and Nonacademic Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study of School, Home, and Community Factors. ResearchGate, 105(3), 709–727. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032795

*Matarasso, F. (1997). Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Comedia. Retrieved from http://www.feisean.org/wp-content/uploads/Use-or-Ornament.pdf

*McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E., Zakaras, L., Brooks, A., & RAND. (2004). Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. RAND. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG218.pdf

McLean, J., Woodhouse, A., Goldie, I., Chylarova, E., & Williamson, T. (2011). An evidence review of the impact of participatory arts on older people. Edinburgh: Mental Health Foundation. http://baringfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/EvidenceReview.pdf Luettu, 16, 2013.

Medeiros, K. de, & Basting, A. (2014). “Shall I Compare Thee to a Dose of Donepezil?”: Cultural Arts Interventions in Dementia Care Research. The Gerontologist, 54(3), 344–353. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnt055

Medvedeva, M., Novak-Leonard, J., Brown, A,. (2011). Audience Impact Study: Literature Review. WolfBrown and the National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/Audience-Impact-Study-Literature-Review.pdf

*Menzer, M. (2015). The Arts in Early Childhood: Social and Emotional Benefits of Participation. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/arts-in-early-childhood-dec2015-rev.pdf

Morley, E., & Winkler, M.K.. (2014). The Validating Arts & Livability Indicators (VALI) Study: Results and Recommendations. Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/VALI-Report.pdf

*National Endowment for the Arts. (2012). How Art Works. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/How-Art-Works_0.pdf

National Endowment for the Arts. (2013). The Arts and Aging: Building the Science.

Newman, M., Bird, K., Tripney, J., Kalra, N., Kwan, I., Bangpan, M., & Vigurs, C. (2010). Understanding the impact of engagement in culture and sport: A systematic review of the learning impacts for young people. Retrieved from http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/16334/1/Understanding_the_impacts_main_report.pdf

Nicolopoulou, A., Barbosa de Sá, A., Ilgaz, H., & Brockmeyer, C. (2009). Using the Transformative Power of Play to Educate Hearts and Minds: From Vygotsky to Vivian Paley and Beyond. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 17(1), 42–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749030903312512

Niemi, L. (2014). The Arts & Economic Vitality: relationships between the Arts, entrepreneurship, & innovation in the workplace (working paper). Washington, DC: NEA. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works- BostonCollege.pdf

*Noice, T., Noice, H., & Kramer, A. F. (2013). Participatory Arts for Older Adults: A Review of Benefits and Challenges. The Gerontologist, gnt138. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnt138

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Petrie, K. J., Fontanilla, I., Thomas, M. G., Booth, R. J., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2004). Effect of written emotional expression on immune function in patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection: a randomized trial. Psychosomatic Medicine, 66(2), 272–275.

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Ritblatt, S., Longstreth, S., Hokoda, A., Cannon, B.-N., & Weston, J. (2013b). Can music enhance school-readiness socioemotional skills? Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 27(3), 257–266.

Roger Tym & Partners. (2011). Economic Impact of the Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium. Manchester. Retrieved from www.larc.uk.com/wp-content/ uploads/2011/10/LARC-Economic-Impact-Final-Report.pdf

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“Catalog” by Flickr user Beyond DC

The platitudes are on the lips of every arts supporter, ready to be recalled at the first sign of a public hearing or potential funding cut. “The arts are essential – a necessity, not a luxury.” “The arts help kids learn.” “The arts are the foundation of the knowledge economy.” It feels good to say those things, especially if you’re someone who has spent a life in the arts. But are they actually true? Are we pulling a fast one on ourselves and our audience by saying them? Or are we doing a service to the world by spreading the good news?

Over the past half century, hundreds of researchers have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars grappling with these questions. And while the literature still has a ways to go before we can consider the answers definitive, it is becoming clear in at least several arenas that it’s not just our imagination: arts participation really does improve lives. In particular:

• Participatory arts activities help to maintain the health and quality of life of older adults. As discussed in our previous feature, singing improves mental health and subjective wellbeing; taking dance classes bolsters cognition and motor skills; dancing and playing a musical instrument reduce the risk of dementia; and visual arts generate increases in self-esteem, psychological health, and social engagement.

• Arts therapies contribute to positive clinical outcomes, such as reduction in anxiety, stress, and pain for patients. Music interventions tend to dominate studies in this area, mostly characterized by passive forms of participation (e.g., listening to music).

• Arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development. For example, teachers report fewer instances of shy, aggressive, and anxious behavior among preschoolers taking dance classes, and toddlers receiving music instruction demonstrate increased social cooperation with other children.

• Student participation in structured arts activities enhances cognitive abilities and social skills that support learning, such as memory, problem-solving, and communication. (While arts participation may improve academic attainment as well, any effects are fairly small.)

We’ve catalogued these and other benefits in an interactive graphic we’ve created – the first of its kind – that explores the various benefits claimed for arts participation along with the strength of evidence backing those claims. See how the benefits stack up against each other at a glance, or zoom in to read what the research has to say about specific questions. (Read about our methodology here.) We recommend viewing in full-screen mode for best results.

Before we dive in further, a little context-setting is in order. The first thing to note is that what you’re going to read below is a work in progress. The literature on the effects of arts participation is vast and of highly uneven quality. To arrive at the conclusions we express here, we’ve relied heavily on existing literature reviews and meta-analyses on the topics in question, which means that any errors of interpretation or questionable judgments in those reviews are likely repeated here. Over time, we intend to get to know the underlying studies and publications and fill in gaps or make corrections as needed. In addition, new research on these topics comes out on a regular basis, and sometimes it challenges conclusions that we had previously drawn about a topic. For both of these reasons, you can expect that we will make tweaks both to the interactive and the content below as we gain access to new information going forward.

Second, it’s important to remember that the focus of this review is quite broad, and looks for general effects on a general population. It’s likely that in practice, there is quite a bit of variation between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation, and between participants (e.g., different personality types). We can already say, for example, that music is both the most-studied intervention and the one that seems to have the most robust evidence behind it. As we get to know the literature better via the process described above, we’ll be able to identify these kinds of nuances with more precision.

Readers interested in the details behind the evidence in the article are encouraged to take a look at our capsule reviews on participatory arts for older adults, cultural arts and dementia, arts and early childhood, and arts and at-risk youth, all of which are based on in-depth literature and systematic reviews conducted by others and outline common methodological shortcomings and recommendations for future research. Of particular note is our capsule review on the Cultural Value Project (CVP), which shares the results of the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council’s three-year investigation into the value of culture. While the full bibliography to this article is far more extensive, our investigation relied heavily on the above sources.

Feelin’ Good: Physical and Mental Health

Of the four broad areas of arts impact that we identified in our review, the most robust research has taken place in the areas of education and personal development and physical and mental health. In fact, the evidence underlying the benefits of the arts for older adults is so compelling that we decided to write a whole separate article about it. A variety of participatory arts activities improve older adults’ mental and physical health, and in some cases, lessen the likelihood of developing dementia later in life. For instance, weekly singing has been shown to decrease anxiety and depression; weekly dance has been shown to improve cognition and attention, posture and balance, and hand and motor skills; and lifelong engagement with music, particularly playing an instrument, is correlated with improved memory among older adults. The arts also play a role in improving the overall quality of life for older adults more generally, such as attitudes toward social life.

While this was some of the most compelling evidence uncovered by our review, older adults aren’t the only beneficiaries. Arts therapies have been shown to improve clinical outcomes among patients. For example, a 2004 review of more than 400 pieces of literature exploring the arts’ and humanities’ relationship to healthcare and the arts’ effects on health identified a number of impacts for arts therapies. This includes visual art and music helping to reduce anxiety and depression among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, an association between music and reduction in anxiety and blood pressure in cardiovascular care, and reduction in use of pain medicine following surgery. Music tends to dominate these studies, with a generally positive effect on anxiety, stress, and pain reduction among patients. Another strain of studies has explored the related claim that visual art and design may help to improve the quality of healthcare settings, thus improving patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. While the methodological quality of the evidence in this area is considerably weaker than that described above, initial results support the claim..

The arts may also generate health impacts beyond dedicated healthcare settings. We found that community arts activities probably contribute to healthy living habits and improved understanding of health. Using a mixed-methods approach that included a community-randomized design, an evaluation of 100 small participatory arts projects across impoverished parts of London found increases among participants in healthy eating, physical activity, and positive feelings. Similarly, a 2003 mixed-methods evaluation of the Wrekenton Lanterns Project, a community arts project drawing attention to coronary heart disease, suggested that arts activities contributed to healthy personal development, including healthy eating and mothering, mental health improvements, and increased absorption of health information. In the absence of longitudinal studies, however, it is difficult to know if participants sustained these habits over time.

The strongest and most consistent evidence for the health impacts of the arts relate specifically to mental health: in particular, reductions in depression and anxiety. It should come as no surprise, then, that arts participation is associated with subjective wellbeing, or one’s perceived quality of life. Over the past several decades, growing scholarship on wellbeing has sought to address just how well a person thinks they’re doing, with ongoing development of indicator systems that, in more recent years, have begun to incorporate measures related to arts, culture, and creativity. Createquity has been interested in the connection between arts participation and subjective wellbeing for some time. In our own analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, we found no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life. However, a subsequent research spotlight revealed that among a large sample of Americans, more active forms of cultural participation including playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making were positively associated with life satisfaction.

Our current review of the literature suggests that while causal attribution remains difficult to pin down, arts and cultural participation probably improves self-reported happiness or life satisfaction. A 2010 study of 1,500 randomly selected Italians analyzed two data sets on general wellbeing and cultural participation, yielding surprising results: cultural experiences – in this instance, passive modes of participation such as cinema, theatre, concert, and museum going – were the second most important determinant of psychological wellbeing, second only to the incidence of diseases, and ranking above factors like job, income, and education. And while not all arts participants are necessarily “doing well,” there is some evidence that unhappy people might be worse off it not for their cultural activities. For instance, a 2008 study of 1,124 choral singers in England, Germany, and Australia found that among respondents who scored on the lowest third of the psychological wellbeing scale, singing in a choir had a significant impact on their ability to cope with physical and mental health issues, among other personal challenges. There is some work being done to explore these issues in the US, but existing data sets on wellbeing and arts participation are not as easy to cross-reference. For instance, a 2014 study found an association between arts participation and wellbeing, but the study design made it difficult to determine if it was indeed attributed to arts participation and not other factors.

From Jungle Gyms to Jobs: Education and Personal Development

Although some of the strongest evidence we’ve come across speaks to the value of participatory arts for older adults, one doesn’t have to be a senior citizen, or for that matter even an adult at all, to benefit. On balance, the evidence suggests that the impact of arts and culture on psychological wellbeing is consistent across the lifespan, as far back even as early childhood.

A recent NEA literature review found ample evidence that arts participation in early childhood (birth to eight years) promotes social and emotional development. For example, a 2013 randomized controlled trial of 102 toddlers found that those participating in classroom-based music education were more likely to increase their level of social cooperation, interaction, and independence (as reported by their teachers) than a control group that did not receive a music education program. Similarly, a 2006 study of 40 preschoolers found that those that met with a dance group for eight weeks had stronger improvements in social skills and showed noticeable reductions in shy, anxious and aggressive behavior compared to a control group.

For slightly older kids, student participation in structured arts activities enhances cognitive abilities and social skills that support learning (e.g., memory, problem-solving, and communication). A 2010 systematic review of the Culture and Sport Evidence (CASE) database in the UK concluded that participation in “structured arts activities” could increase young people’s performance on a range of indicators of cognitive and social ability. Perhaps even more importantly, there is good reason to believe that arts education programs are disproportionately impactful for lower-income children. The NEA literature review on early childhood mentioned above includes a Head Start arts education experiment with 88 preschoolers from low socioeconomic status families. Those who participated in music activities showed improved cognitive abilities and increased ability to pay attention than children in the control group that received regular Head Start instruction. According to the NEA literature review, other specific benefits to lower-income youth include increases in confidence, student behavior and social skills. These findings are consistent with those from the well-known randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of field trips to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Benefits such as enhanced critical thinking skills and improved measures of tolerance were two or three times higher for children attending schools in rural areas or that served predominantly low-income households.

An earlier systematic literature review of 188 studies, the landmark 2001 Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) study, offers another perspective on the evidence base for non-arts academic outcomes of arts education. After comparing 275 effect sizes across groups of comparable studies, the researchers found strong causal evidence for the impact of music listening on spatial-temporal reasoning; learning to play music on spatial reasoning; and classroom drama instruction on verbal skills. However, the evidence was weaker in several other areas, including most effects on reading and math performance.

Indeed, one puzzle embedded in the extensive literature on arts education is how little the aforementioned benefits to learning and cognitive capabilities seem to translate to traditional measures of academic attainment such as standardized tests. Evidence from a wide body of literature suggests that even if there is a positive effect, it is so small as to be practically meaningless. The CASE systematic review cited above found that overall, participation in structured arts activities only improved attainment in high-school-aged students (as measured by standardized tests) by one to two percent. Similarly, a review from the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK concluded that arts participation had “positive but low” effects on academic learning in English, math, and science.

A major drawback within this literature is a lack of longitudinal studies. Short-term experimental designs that assign some students to an arts program and others to a control group are useful for isolating the effects of that particular program, but they usually only measure temporary effects on participants. Both the NEA’s early childhood literature review and the Cultural Value Project note the dearth of research that might isolate the long-term effects of arts participation in childhood over a lifetime.

Arts as Economic Engine, Sort of

In contrast to the health and educational literature described above, research on the economic and social impacts of the arts does not paint as straightforward a picture of benefit to society. In some cases this is because the available research simply is not very robust (unsurprising, given that measuring effects at a community level is far more difficult than doing so at an individual level); in others, it is because the evidence is conflicting, or the implications of it unclear.

Arguably the most convincing case to be made here is that cultural assets (organizations, venues, etc.) probably contribute to higher real estate values at a neighborhood level, but this insight is complicated by questions around the potential negative impacts of gentrification. For instance, a 2013 study on how cultural districts reshape neighborhoods found evidence that cultural districts “have significant impacts on property values,” although the evidence of effects on poverty, education, and families was weaker. A 2006 case study of MASS MoCA and its surrounding neighborhood in rural Massachusetts found significant increases in property values following the opening of the contemporary art museum. Similarly, between 2006 and 2008, a multi-pronged investigation by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) revealed a relationship between concentrated cultural assets and rising real estate values. It remains unclear, however, whether this effect generates benefits for existing, non-property-owning residents, like rising income levels or job prospects, or alternatively, brings potential harm through disruption of existing population dynamics. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a general lack of evidence that the arts contribute to concrete negative neighborhood revitalization impacts like displacement, but little attention has been devoted to “fuzzier” outcomes like feeling a loss of ownership.

Another common type of research in cultural economics is the much-touted (and much-criticized) economic impact study. If you work in the arts, chances are you’ve seen a press release at some point in the past decade announcing that the arts generate some large dollar amount in revenue and impressive number of jobs in your community. Claims of this nature may be true in a literal sense, but are usually far less meaningful than they first appear. Sure, the arts industry creates jobs, but so does literally every other industry. The more relevant question is this: “do the arts spur spending in the economy that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?” Evidence for that more ambitious proposal is mixed. For example, a review of 36 studies by the UK-based What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth found that the effects of large-scale facilities on local employment are limited at best; however, the review included both cultural and sports facilities, and was heavily weighted toward the latter.

Speaking of employment, one of the few studies that examines the longer-term effects of arts and cultural participation suggests that cultural participation may contribute to capacity for innovation within the workforce. In an analysis of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Laura Niemi compared more than 7,000 Americans’ history of arts participation as children to their career history as adults. Niemi found a strong association between interest in the visual arts in adolescence and later innovation and entrepreneurship, which held true even when controlling for personality traits associated with innovation (like a willingness to take risks) and educational attainment. Family income, however, was not tested as a control factor.

If the arts help produce more innovative individuals, it stands to reason that the presence of arts and cultural activities and creative industries in a region may contribute to increased productivity and innovation in other industries in that region. For example, a 2015 empirical study of 2,000 creative enterprises in Austria found evidence to support three theories for how creative industries affect an economy’s overall innovation performance: being a major source of innovative ideas, products and services; offering services that lend themselves to innovative activities in other enterprises; and using new technologies to encourage further development in tech production. Do creative industries similarly make a region wealthier? Maybe: a 2011 study examining the relationship between manufacturing, service, and creative industry agglomerations and the wealth of 250 European regions found that for every percent increase in employment in the creative industries, there is a little over a half-percent increase in GDP. As with much of this literature, though, including that seeking to test Richard Florida’s hypothesis that creative industries draw talented workers and employers to a region and increase wealth that way, causation and correlation are difficult to tease out.

Come Together: On the Arts and Social Cohesion

The state of the evidence is even muddier when it comes to the impact of the arts on the social fabric between and among communities. As with economic vitality, evidence in this arena suffers from a lack of experimental and quasi-experimental designs that would help us better understand the social benefits of the arts. However, much of the difficulty is also rooted in the theoretical complexities that complicate coming to a shared definition of terms in this area. Social benefits of the arts have been described by many names, including social capital, social wellbeing, social inclusion, arts for social change, and more. We even struggled with what label to use to describe benefits in this area, and consider “social cohesion” to be a preliminary designation.

One of the better-studied research topics in this area is the relationship between participation in the arts and pro-social or civic behaviors like voting, volunteering, or attending community meetings. A 2014 Arts Council England evidence review found “growing evidence that children and young people’s engagement with arts and culture has a knock-on impact on their wider social and civic participation.” More specifically, based on British and American systematic reviews, high school students who participate in the arts “are twice as likely to volunteer than those that don’t…and 20 percent more likely to vote as young adults.” However, the major problem with research of this nature is that it does not test the very plausible counter-hypothesis that a common personality trait or set of values drives both arts engagement and civic behavior. Experimental work in this area would be extremely valuable for answering that question.

What about the relationship between arts assets and indicators of social wellbeing at a neighborhood level? The best work on this front has been conducted by SIAP’s Stern and Seifert, who attempted in a recent project to analyze multiple dimensions of economic and social wellbeing in Philadelphia. Their investigation, however, failed to find correlations between cultural assets and most indicators of social wellbeing after controlling for race and economic vitality, casting significant doubt on this effect.

Can the arts help increase trust and understanding between people of different backgrounds through dialogue or creating spaces for storytelling? In the United States, Animating Democracy and SIAP have both conducted qualitative and descriptive research into this phenomenon. However, the literature is almost entirely bereft of control groups, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions. One of the few exceptions is the aforementioned Crystal Bridges study on field trip attendance, which reported an increase in tolerance and “historical empathy” among students who attended the museum compared to students who didn’t. It’s difficult to know, however, how meaningful the proxy measure used in this study is in practice. Furthermore, one of the problems for this area of research is that it seemingly matters a lot what messages are being communicated through the artwork when it comes to building bridges across social divides, complicating attempts like this one to assess in general terms whether this type of intervention “works.”

What It All Adds Up To

Last year, Createquity explored the literature on wellbeing and quality of life in general, and noted that culture is often missing from frameworks that seek to capture a holistic definition of wellbeing. This investigation, and the ongoing work that will flow from it, demonstrates how and where the arts fit most naturally into such a framework.

• Arts participation contributes directly to quality of life by increasing self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. This is probably the case for the population in general, and is almost certainly true for the subset of that population that pursues sustained engagement in arts activities over time. In addition, robust effects of arts participation on reducing anxiety and depression have been demonstrated for people in healthcare settings and older adults, two potentially vulnerable populations. This research validates Createquity’s thematic focus on ensuring equitable access to opportunities to participate in the arts across society as a whole.
• Arts participation contributes indirectly to wellbeing via, at a minimum, its effects on education and personal development (particularly the development of emotional and social skills in early childhood, and the development of cognitive capabilities and communication skills in later childhood), and physical health (particularly in healthcare settings). Other indirect effects to wellbeing may exist as well, but the research is not yet at a place where these can be demonstrated conclusively.

This review likewise highlights where additional investments in research would be especially productive. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are extremely rare in the research on the economic and social impacts of the arts; initiatives to fill this gap, though likely expensive and difficult to implement, would prove enormously helpful in resolving many of the causation vs. correlation conundrums that currently pervade this literature. Even in the health and education areas where these techniques are more common, however, there remains considerable room for further research and greater methodological ambition. There is a strong need in these areas for studies that examine the effects of arts participation over a long period of time, and for randomized controlled trials that use larger sample sizes.

As stated in the beginning of this article, both the research literature itself and our understanding of it are works in progress. We will continue to update and adjust the infographic describing benefits as new research comes to light in the months and years to come. As we learn more about how the arts benefit lives, the knowledge will inform our ongoing inquiry into the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.

“Taiwanese Performance” by East-West Center

Title: Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

Author(s): Maria Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, and Joaquin Herranz

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2006

URL: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/cultural-vitality-communities-interpretation-and-indicators

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

Methods: literature review, indicator construction using existing data

What it Says: This report builds on the Arts and Culture Community Indicator Project (ACIP)’s 2002 study, “Culture Counts in Communities.” In this report, ACIP introduces the term “cultural vitality” and defines it as follows: “Cultural vitality is the evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in communities.”

The authors find that while a growing number of urban and community indicator systems are including arts and culture both in the US and abroad, the definitions of arts and culture that are used are rather narrow, traditional definitions.

Of the four domains laid out in the 2002 framework, the authors only consider three appropriate for measurement through indicators: presence, participation, and support systems.

The indicators they propose are:

Presence of Opportunities for Cultural Participation

• Nonprofit, public, and commercial arts-related organizations
• Retail arts venues (bookstores, music stores, film theaters, craft and art supply stores)
• Non-arts venues with arts and cultural programming (parks, libraries, ethnic associations, societies, and centers)
• Festivals and parades
• Arts-focused media outlets (print and electronic, including web-based venues)
• Art schools

Participation

• Amateur art making
• Collective/community art making
• K-12 arts education
• Arts after-school programs
• Audience participation
• Purchase of artistic goods (materials for making art as well as final arts products)
• Discourse about arts and culture in the media

Support

• Public expenditures in support of the arts in all sectors (nonprofit, public, and commercial)
• Foundation expenditures in support of the arts (nonprofit, public, and commercial)
• Volunteering and personal giving to the arts
• Presence of working artists
• Integration of arts and culture into other policy areas and corresponding allocation of resources (e.g., community development, education, parks and recreation, etc.)

The authors go on to describe what types of data would be necessary (and what limited data is currently available) to include arts and culture in quality of life indicators. Among the currently available data they distinguish between four “tiers”, based on factors such as whether the data is publicly accessible, nationally comparable, locally generated, sporadic or recurrent, quantitative or qualitative.

They have been unable to identify any Tier 1 data (publicly accessible, nationally comparable) for the indicators in the Participation domain. In fact, they only have Tier 1 measures for seven of the indicators: four for the Presence and three for the Support domain.

In later sections of the report, the authors describe individual communities based on indicators from across several “tiers” of data, and compare the cultural vitality of several US Metro Areas based on the available “Tier 1 data”.

What I think about it: The proposed indicators are a mix of outputs (presence, support) and outcomes (participation). The indicator system proposed here doesn’t actually demonstrate that cultural vitality contributes to wellbeing. Based on an admittedly cursory review of the report, this seems to be taken for granted (a closer read would be necessary to fully assess this point).

Several of the indicators still lack definition, so that comparisons across communities would involve a lot of judgement calls (e.g., at which point does an ethnic association provide enough cultural programming to be counted as a cultural entity?).

What it all means: It seems to me that the general approach of thinking about the arts in relation to community development and the expanded definition of cultural activity/participation proposed by ACIP are the most significant portions of this study. The actual indicator system proposed here probably does as well as one can with the available data, but as a model it seems neither fully developed conceptually nor well tested as of 2006.

“Atto primo ▼ Picnic” by BAAM Milano

Title: Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement

Author(s): Maria Rosario Jackson and Joaquin Herranz

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2002

URL: http://www.urban.org/research/publication/culture-counts-communities

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

Methods: Literature review, consultations (interviews and focus groups) with experts and community members

What it says: The Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP) was launched in 1996. “Recognizing that arts and culture had too frequently been neglected in efforts to assess quality of life” the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned the Urban Institute to “explore the possibility of integrating arts and culture-related measures into neighborhood indicator systems.”

The researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with arts professionals and community residents, and reviewed the available literature. They found that there is neither much empirical data nor theoretical work on the ways in which arts and cultural participation contribute to social dynamics, and the data that is available primarily focuses on formal arts and culture venues. Since the existing research is insufficient as the basis for an indicator system, the authors propose principles and parameters for research and measurement that were developed through a series of workshops and conferences.

The authors present four “guiding principles” for indicator development in communities, which highlight the need to allow the communities that are being studied to define “arts,” “culture,” and “creativity” in ways that are appropriate for their community, the need to be open to broad definitions of participation and the multiplicity of meanings art can have simultaneously, and the fact that opportunities to participate require both arts and non-arts resources.

They go on to propose a conceptual framework that has four domains:

• presence (qualitative and quantitative cultural inventorying)
• participation
• impacts (contribution to community building outcomes)
• systems of support

Regarding the impact domain, the authors point out that the necessary fuzziness around the definition of arts, culture and creativity make it difficult to pinpoint their impact on community building outcomes.

While the data is considered inadequate to support any definitive conclusions, the authors identify “a list of important impacts that participation in arts, culture, and creativity at the neighborhood level may have” [emphasis added] based on their review of the literature. Directly or indirectly, the arts, culture, and creativity may contribute to

• supporting civic participation and social capital;
• catalyzing economic development;
• improving the built environment;
• promoting stewardship of place;
• augmenting public safety;
• preserving cultural heritage;
• bridging cultural/ethnic/racial boundaries;
• transmitting cultural values and history;
• creating group memory and group identity.

The authors acknowledge that their principles and conceptual framework are just a beginning and that further theoretical development and empirical research is necessary.

What I think about it: This is an important initiative/study that shifted the conversations about arts in communities by introducing expanded definitions of participation and including practitioners and community members in the research/definition of outcomes. It’s really at the beginning of the whole creative placemaking conversation.

Nonetheless, there are some weaknesses: The “Systems of Support” domain in the ACIP framework seems like a measure of outputs rather than outcomes. The same might be said about the mere “presence” of cultural opportunities. Moreover, in the discussion of potential impacts that the arts have on communities little attention is paid to the fact that arts and culture can also work in the opposite direction: they can increase cultural/ethnic/racial boundaries, obscure cultural values and history, etc.

What it all means: ACIP’s objective of including arts and culture in systems of quality of life indicators parallels our work on wellbeing at Createquity, but since they’re focused on neighborhoods it’s not clear that much of their work would carry over to assessments of wellbeing at the national level. For instance, ACIP’s desire to let the communities under investigation develop their own definitions of “arts,” “culture,” and “creativity,” and set their own indicators of cultural participation may make sense at the neighborhood level, but it would be extremely difficult to arrive at a national consensus on these matters through community consultations. Similarly, it is easier to imagine incorporating qualitative data that sheds light on local history and local cultural meanings in the context of neighborhoods than in national indicator systems.

Museum Camp is a creation of Nina Simon and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Createquity readers might recognize Nina and her fantastic work at Santa Cruz MAH from such Top 10 Arts Policy Stories posts as 2012‘s, not to mention many shout-outs before and since in blog posts here and there. Nina used to be a rockstar experience design consultant in the museum field and earned a measure of fame at the beginning of this decade as the author of The Participatory Museum, which you can read online for free. A couple of years ago, she decided to take the job as director of the Santa Cruz MAH, and she and her team have been up to amazing things since then, including a previous version of Museum Camp that sounded like pretty much the most fun anyone has had in a museum ever.

All that fun ultimately adds up to something significant, though, and it’s important to be able to describe what’s meaningful about what we do effectively and convincingly to people who weren’t there – not to mention ourselves. So my colleagues at Fractured Atlas and I are happy to be helping Nina bring a new edition of Museum Camp to life focused on social impact assessment, a three-day event in which small teams of people will develop creative ways to evaluate the work that diverse organizations are doing to transform communities. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes–like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity–that are not commonly covered in standard evaluative practices. This is a learning experience with a heavy focus on actual doing throughout the event. In addition to representatives from Fractured Atlas and MAH, we’ll have “camp counselors” from the United Way, WolfBrown, Harder & Co., Animating Democracy, and more on hand to help attendees navigate the conceptual and practical issues associated with measuring what matters.

If you are interested in attending, you can fill out an application through February 28. Space is extremely limited, so the sooner the better. We look forward to seeing you!

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. Over time, SIAP has established mechanisms to help us measure how the arts benefit the areas they inhabit. Culture and Community Revitalization is the result of two years of research done between 2006 and 2008 and consists of summary materials, a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus. The Rockefeller Foundation, which commissioned Culture and Community Revitalization, asked SIAP to partner with The Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution, and find ways to “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization.

The literature review covers a vast array of research on the relationship between the creative sector, economics and social benefits, ultimately determining that while most research explores the connection between culture and economic gains, more work needs to be done better understand the less-quantifiable social impacts. The policy briefs make the case for local policymakers to place more of an emphasis on the arts as a way to unlock the human capital in urban areas. Finally, the community investment prospectus provide practical recommendations and case studies that demonstrate different approaches to investing in cultural clusters.

The main strength of the report is its innovative approach to quantifying the ways arts and culture contribute to community revitalization. One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is a methodology called the Cultural Asset Index. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. Conversely, the study fails to fully grapple with the potential downsides of neighborhood cultural investment strategies, particularly when it comes to issues around gentrification and displacement. Stern and Seifert’s research leads them to conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks.

Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space;  pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Stern and Seifert’s research has been applied in practice since the publication of Culture and Community Revitalization. Most notably, the national creative placemaking initiatives Our Town and ArtPlace have used SIAP’s work in varying degrees to shape their approach to arts funding.

(For a much briefer version of this analysis, please see the Executive Summary.)

SUMMARY

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. After all, “if the arts and culture do, in fact, have an important role in improving the lives of ordinary people, we should be able to measure it.” SIAP has completed 13 projects and dozens of related publications since its founding in 1994 and in recent years has frequently partnered with The Reinvestment Fund on its research.

From 2006 to 2008 SIAP’s Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert researched and compiled a set of documents that sought to investigate the real impact of the “creative economy” on community and economic development. The Rockefeller Foundation funded SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to partner and “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” The project’s publications included a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus in addition to a range of summary materials. This project led SIAP to frame its subsequent work around the concept of “natural” cultural districts, or specific geographic areas dense with cultural assets that have evolved in grassroots fashion.

Literature Review

The centerpiece of Culture and Community Revitalization is an expansive literature review covering three main areas related to the creative sector: culture in the current context, current theories about culture-based revitalization, and the neighborhood-based creative economy. Stern and Seifert argue that, in contrast to the wealth of literature on quantifying the impact of the creative economy, a nuanced approach to the social and community benefits of developing creative sectors has yet to be fully explored. In the end, it may be the community-building influence of the creative sector that will prove the most impactful.

Culture in the Current Context

Stern and Seifert begin the literature review with a tour of various longitudinal shifts that they see as critical to understanding the context in which the creative sector now operates. They begin by analyzing what they call the “new urban reality,” characterized by a few specific factors: increasing social diversity, expanding economic inequality, and the physical reshaping of the city’s industry hubs.

Whereas the middle of the 20^th century was characterized by the exodus of middle and upper class citizens fleeing the urban core for suburbs, the last three to four decades have seen this trend dramatically reverse. An influx of new residents has shifted the types of diversity in urban neighborhoods, especially in the makeup of households (more unmarried households) and the age of inhabitants (more young adults). Additionally, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are increasing the ethnic diversity of urban centers and introducing new forms of artistic engagement into the mix. Meanwhile, income inequality in cities has been exacerbated—as the urban core becomes more attractive, the cost of living has also increased accordingly, pushing out low-income residents. The authors note that the cultural economy is specifically susceptible to the plight of “winner-take-all” markets, a theory promoted by Robert Frank and Phillip Cook that “changes in the American labor market have expanded the number of job categories in which the most skilled members reap a disproportionate share of rewards.”

These demographic and economic changes in cities have also contributed to changes in cities’ physical and geographic structure. Buoyed by the resurgence of cities in general, rehabilitated downtown areas began to serve increasingly important business, entertainment and recreational functions. Production clusters, or decentralized collections of small firms operating in related industries in close proximity, have emerged as a “new kind of spatial organizational form” that is particularly relevant to creative occupations.

Meanwhile, a significant reshaping of the nonprofit cultural sector has been taking place. The authors suggest that “the marketization of the nonprofit cultural sector—the increased stress placed on earned income and financial performance—has been the dominant policy of the cultural sector for the past 15 years.” Over the years these financial pressures, exacerbated by expectations placed on nonprofits by their funders, have put pressure on mid-sized organizations and further stratified the field. The number of small cultural organizations has exploded, but cooperation between community-based groups and large cultural institutions has proven challenging. In the context of this shifting landscape, the dominant paradigm of the cultural sector has changed from high culture vs. mass entertainment to large and broad vs. small and niche.

Given the changes noted above, the notion of a centralized “cultural policy” in the U.S. is essentially obsolete. The arts have never had much of a stronghold in the policy arena, but the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 was born out of a time when top-down, ambitious social and cultural policy goals were the norm. With the subsequent rise in power of global corporations and special interest groups however, government is now “more likely to find itself brokering transactions between contending interests than setting its own agenda.” Nevertheless, the lack of an entrenched cultural bureaucracy and special interests has its advantages. As Stern and Seifert see it, their absence may make it easier for the cultural sector to innovate and be integrated into other areas of policymaking.

The Current State of the Literature

Stern and Seifert divide current research on the economic and social value of the arts into two main categories: creative economy literature and community-building literature. In addition, there is an emerging third category that looks at the negative effects of culture-based revitalization; however, this literature has largely been ignored by researchers who tend to focus on the first two categories.

The first wave of interest in economic development and the arts began with a 1983 study by the Port Authority of NY and NJ that calculated the economic impact of the arts based on nonprofit expenditures and cultural consumption. Similar studies soon followed and contributed to the formation of the first “cultural districts.” A second strand of creative economy literature focuses on creativity’s role in an area’s overall economic productivity. Over time creative economy scholars have expanded the definition of the cultural sector to include both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors; the oft-cited Richard Florida has a particularly broad definition.  Stern and Seifert choose two bodies of research for more in-depth examination: the Center for an Urban Future’s economic impact study of New York City creative industries and Ann Markusen’s work on the economic role of artists. The Center for an Urban Future suggested that policymakers should begin to look at the arts as an economic sector and take bold steps to help neighborhoods working toward permanent cultural development. Markusen focused on the “hidden contributions artists make to regional economies,” concluding that the unique contribution of artists provides an “artistic dividend” to economic development.

Geography is another important factor in the economic development of the arts.  A 1996 study of the Los Angeles design industry by Allen J. Scott suggested that firms choose to be in close geographic proximity to one another because doing so encourages efficiency, innovation, and process improvements. Stern and Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project applied these ideas to Philadelphia, eventually leading them to the concept of “cultural clusters” or “natural cultural districts” that take into account both production and consumption and both economic and social lenses of impact, all at the neighborhood scale.

In contrast to the research on the economic benefits of the cultural sector, studies focused on community building and culture tend to focus on grassroots and community engagement practices. The bodies of work Stern and Seifert examine in depth are Maria Rosario Jackson’s work with the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project, Alaka Wali’s studies of informal arts in Chicago, the Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley studies of immigrant and participatory arts, and SIAP’s own work on metropolitan Philadelphia. The Urban Institute’s initial study made suggestions for a “conceptual framework” for research and measurement in the field that would include a broad definition of culture. A later report catalogued “initiatives to integrate culture into broader indicators of metropolitan well-being.”

These studies also began to define the “unincorporated,” “participatory,” or “informal arts” to describe cultural activities that take place outside of traditional institutions. Alaka Wali’s Informal Arts project assembled 12 ethnographic case studies of informal arts activities in the Chicago metro area. The report concluded that informal arts strengthen the entire arts sector, bridge social boundaries that sustain inequality, and build community assets.  Wali followed up on Informal Arts with a study for the Field Museum that looked at cultural, social and artistic practices in the Chicago-area Mexican immigrant community, concluding that “through engaging in informal arts…, Mexican immigrants are creating significant social resources, promoting economic participation, developing civic skills, and reaching out to non-immigrants.”

The Silicon Valley studies, by Pia Moriarty and Maribel Alvarez, sought to place the informal arts into local community context and existing models of cultural production. They introduced the concept of “bonded-bridging” (in-group bonding that supports out-group connections) to the literature, and found that despite informal arts practitioners’ “modest and concrete” goals, a “facture [between formal and informal arts contexts] runs through the Valley’s self-identified ‘cultural community.’”

Despite the considerable volume of research on the cultural sector, Stern and Seifert still feel that the potential negative effects of urban revitalization represent a significant gap in the literature. Without closing the door to new evidence, they argue that the “empirical documentation of art-based gentrification is not particularly strong” and suggest the connection between arts-based urban revitalization and gentrification has been overhyped to date. By contrast, Stern and Seifert maintain that economic inequality in the creative sector is a much more pressing, and well-documented, issue. In fact, their study of artists in six American cities “between 1980 and 2000 found that artists were consistently among the individual occupations with the highest degree of income inequality.” Many of the high-paying jobs in the creative sector require advanced schooling, creating a lack of opportunity for residents who have education equivalent to a high school degree or less.

An Ecosystem-Based Approach

SIAP proposes a new way of thinking about community-based revitalization in the creative sector that integrates both economic and social perspectives on the arts which they term the “neighborhood-based creative economy.”  Stern and Seifert see this framework as providing a potential path toward activating the cultural economy of urban neighborhoods, further integrating local residents with the regional economy and civil society.

In SIAP’s conception of the community cultural ecosystem, nonprofit arts organizations must share the “cultural opportunity provider” role with other entities including street festivals and performances, for-profit cultural firms like dance academies or movie theaters, and non-arts community-based organizations. This is not to say that nonprofits cannot still play an important role beyond serving as direct-service providers. They are also fiscal sponsors and networking agents between regional entities and creative sources; additionally, they often open their physical space to smaller groups. Overall the community cultural ecosystem is interdependent, no matter if the arts organization is a for-profit, nonprofit or “informal” artistic entity.

To provide a quantitative counterpart to this theoretical notion of the community cultural ecosystem, Stern and Seifert constructed a matrix for Culture and Community Revitalization called the Cultural Asset Index. SIAP identified four cultural asset measures–nonprofit cultural organizations, commercial cultural firms, individual artists, and regional participation rates–and localized each of these measures to block groups within the Philadelphia region. Using a factor analysis, Stern and Seifert were able to reduce these four measures to a single variable (a “cultural asset score”) that explained 81% of the variance in the four measures. Then, through regression analysis, they developed an equation to model predicted cultural asset concentrations in Philadelphia based on per capita income, % non-family households, and distance from the city center. Finally, they identified neighborhoods that had higher-than-expected cultural asset scores based on those inputs. One of the purposes of this analysis was to integrate SIAP’s work with the Market Value Analysis methodology of their project partner, The Reinvestment Fund, which resulted in some of the findings reported elsewhere in this summary. Stern and Seifert suggest using this information in various other ways, such as classifying areas strong in cultural assets as cultural districts; targeting workforce development efforts towards low-income, culturally rich areas; and targeting social inclusion interventions towards low-income, culture-poor neighborhoods.

There is a natural tension between the creative economy and community-oriented ideas of cultural revitalization: whereas the latter seeks to lift up currently marginalized elements of the population, the economic approach tends to concentrate resources on “the most visible and profitable aspects of the creative sector.” Unfortunately, the bulk of the discussion and research on the value of culture to society seeks to justify investment solely through an economic lens and valorizes “creative” workers at the expense of everyone else, potentially exacerbating economic inequality. Due to the substantial support labor required by creative occupations, Stern and Seifert encourage policymakers to explore untapped workforce development opportunities that may be lurking within the creative economy.

Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization. They do argue forcefully that in a rational world, policymakers would limit their investments in large-scale cultural projects whose primary purpose is to serve tourists, given the lack of evidence to suggest how low- and moderate-income individuals can benefit from such initiatives. Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge that a number of factors play into policymaking decisions regarding culture and revitalization, and admit that even the promising evidence of social benefits SIAP documented likely isn’t compelling enough or on a large enough scale to garner the support to push through substantive policy changes. 

Policy Briefs and Community Prospectus

While the literature review forms the center of the Culture and Community Revitalization project, SIAP bolsters it with a set of policy briefs to highlight practical applications of its findings. The first policy brief, “From Creative Economy to Creative Society: A social policy paradigm for the creative sector has the potential to address urban poverty as well as urban vitality,” synthesizes much of the literature review and makes a full-throated case for a neighborhood-based approach to cultural development focused on social inclusion rather than economic prosperity. Stern and Seifert advocate for a revitalization strategy that is “both place- and people-based—that is, it should be grounded in a given locale but have active connections with other neighborhoods and economies throughout the city and region.”

The policy brief recommends that policymakers move away from the centralized planned cultural district model that has been in vogue for some time and instead “identify grassroots nodes as leverage points for public, private, and philanthropic investment” to create sustainable, multi-faceted forms of culturally based redevelopment opportunities.  Focusing on smaller-scale cultural clusters and resources would better address the concerns of “winner-take-all markets,” the relegation of much creative activity to the informal economy, and displacement as a result of gentrification.

In their second policy brief “Migrants, Communities and Cultures,” coauthored by Domenic Vitello, Stern and Seifert use immigrant communities in Philadelphia as a case study for the ways in which the informal arts sector can help build important community ties.  Philadelphia’s rapidly growing, ethnically and economically diverse immigrant populations are also home to diverse forms of cultural expression, but they don’t tend to generate relationships with established cultural organizations. In spite of this, the arts can serve as a connective force that can help immigrants adapt to their new surroundings and form social connections in their new communities.  Due to a stronger immigrant presence in the informal arts sector, cities will need to better research how these newer forms of cultural expression can be better utilized to improve the lives of immigrant communities.

“Cultivating ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts,” the  third and final policy brief, introduces the concept of “natural” cultural districts, which are neighborhoods or areas in a city that have “spawned a density of assets— organizations, businesses, participants, and artists— that sets [them] apart from other neighborhoods.” Because these hubs are naturally occurring and build on pre-existing assets, they  offer advantages over cultural districts planned entirely by the city. Stern and Seifert write that the latter “only occasionally are economic successes; most require high, on-going subsidies and effectively feed contemporary cities’ growth of economic inequality.” Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space; pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Finally, the community investment prospectus provides a framework for the for-profit and nonprofit sectors to consider modes of investment in arts and culture to facilitate the establishment of vibrant communities. Authored by The Reinvestment Fund’s CEO Jeremy Nowak, “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Investment” calls for broadening  “the notion of who…should be part of planning, policy, decision-making and financing related to this field” as well as “top-down and bottom-up strategies that will expand the resources available.” The investment prospectus is accompanied by a case study detailing how a mixture of private and public investment transformed the Crane Arts Plumbing Company’ building in Old Kensington Philadelphia from an industrial space to a true arts hub in the neighborhood. The building now houses “37 studios for different artistic mediums, rooms for three arts organizations, and space for community events.”

ANALYSIS                                                                   

Overall, Stern and Seifert present a comprehensive scan of the current state of the work on urban revitalization and the creative economy. Unlike many other studies on the subject, Stern and Seifert have created a quantitative methodology that allows users to quantify cultural activity in specific locations. Their research highlights some areas that need further study and emphasizes some theories that have the potential to truly change the way policymakers and practitioners view the relationship between culture and economy and even how the cultural sector can be organized and operationalized.

That said, there are some weaker points of the study that need more clarification or further research to drive home the ideas Stern and Seifert really want to promote. One of the main themes of SIAP’s work is the positive social impact of cultural activity, but Stern and Seifert seem to waver between emphatically making this point and stressing the need for further study. In addition, the authors don’t fully weigh the meaning of gentrification and related negative impacts of culture-based revitalization, and neglect to make constructive suggestions for further inquiry.

Does culture truly contribute to local economies?

One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is the Cultural Asset Index. Most research on the arts’ economic and social effects hasn’t attempted nearly as much depth or specificity in showing the relationship between cultural density and other indicators. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. SIAP’s methods to identify rich concentrations of cultural assets in unexpected places could potentially be really empowering for neighborhoods and residents. By uplifting the cultural value in diverse areas, the Cultural Asset Index and its associated correlations can help people within and outside these areas to understand how culture shapes their communities for the better. However, it is unclear exactly how SIAP calculates the index, which could hamper efforts for those unfamiliar with the concepts to understand how it works.

Stern and Seifert conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks. Through its work in Philadelphia and beyond, SIAP is attempting to create empirical methods that show how community arts and the informal arts contribute to the social and economic landscape of cities. A significant weakness of the community-building research cited in the literature review is that the studies take practitioners’ subjective impressions of neighborhood impacts at their word without trying to measure them quantitatively. An example of a more quantitative approach is SIAP’s earlier work establishing a connection between community culture and child welfare in Philadelphia—low-income block groups with high cultural participation were more than twice as likely as comparable block groups to have low truancy and delinquency. More importantly, in original research completed for the Culture and Community Revitalization project, Stern and Seifert found that block groups with high participation rates were twice as likely to undergo economic revitalization, defined as “above average poverty decline and population gain,” a finding supported by further analysis using real estate market classifications from The Reinvestment Fund.  SIAP posits that the correlation between cultural engagement and poverty decline is connected to the cross-geographical/class/ethnic pollination that occurs in cultural hubs. However, Stern and Seifert have not yet been able to clearly attribute these changes to cultural engagement or identify the specific mechanism that causes that change. One possible explanation, supported by the research in the literature review, is the increase of a neighborhood’s “collective efficacy” – its residents’ ability to imagine and work towards positive change.

The authors also postulate that cultural engagement leads to broader civic engagement, but admit that there is little data that can provide linkage between the two.  Part of the “social role” of cultural engagement is defined as the ability of formal and informal arts organizations to attract attendees from outside the local community, helping urban residents experience different parts of their city. Unfortunately, a “lack of comparable data on other forms of community engagement”  to back up the claim that the arts serve as a connective tissue for the social improvement of communities  weakens the case that the benefits of cultural clusters can be seen in social outcomes as opposed to economic outcomes. In spite of this, the original research SIAP has done thus far has uncovered some promising indicators that deserve further exploration.

Much of the data collected is specifically tied to place—namely Philadelphia—making it hard to extrapolate the findings to the nation as a whole. In their analysis of cultural clusters, Stern and Seifert speak to the way that neighborhood-based cultural ecosystems localize the production and consumption of their products and how that contributes to economic stabilization and revitalization. Since much of their reporting focuses on Philadelphia at the turn of the millennium, it is difficult to know whether there were conditions specific to the Philadelphia economy that contributed to their findings or if these were more universal trends. That said, since Culture and Community Revitalization was completed in 2008 SIAP has undertaken studies of other cities, namely Baltimore and Seattle.

Does the idea of “natural cultural districts” resonate with grassroots arts organizations?

Stern and Seifert do a great job of cataloguing the benefits of “informal” cultural participation. For example, they dedicate one of the policy briefs entirely to exploring how the informal arts help connect immigrant communities to services and networks in their new environments. Depending on the intended audience is for this set of research, Seifert and Stern could be providing a great amount of assistance not only for interested researchers who are not specialists in the field, but for advocates and staff of community-based organizations as well. However, the way the report is organized makes it difficult for me to envision the same community-based organizations they uplift in the reports being able to effectively use the research in their work. However, if this is not their intended audience, who are they trying to influence? Do they see this report as a way to help practitioners advocate for the importance of their contributions to their local landscapes?

What role does gentrification play?

Although rising real estate values are a positive outcome on the surface, especially in economically depressed or distressed areas, they do not necessarily bring rising income levels or job prospects to neighborhood residents. While these changes can benefit longtime residents of a developing creative cluster, it is only a benefit to those who actually own property and can manage the subsequent rise in property taxes. Many times, the smartest option for these types of residents is to sell their property (if they even own it in the first place), which could disrupt the neighborhood’s population dynamics and character—low-income residents are not going to sell property with an increased value to other low-income individuals who simply cannot afford the rising price of their real estate. If SIAP’s “natural” cultural districts do not create jobs that are widely accessible to existing residents of the area but eventually drive up the cost of real estate, the question emerges: how truly beneficial are these creative clusters to the average person? Moreover, how do the economic and demographic shifts in these clusters change the nature of the cultural assets that are produced?

Overall, the authors were largely dismissive of the effects of gentrification and its relationship to the arts in their literature review. However, Stern and Seifert do not provide a clear understanding of how they are defining gentrification for the purposes of that assessment, or specific examples of research that failed to show a displacement effect. Instead, they assert that there is not enough clear information about gentrification for them to truly consider it as a factor in their research. This struck me as an odd claim, especially given Stern’s background in U.S. social history and his research on racial inequality. This is a disconnect that continues throughout their body of work.

Stern and Seifert draw a connection between cultural clusters and both economic inequality and rising real estate costs, yet they treat these shifts as wholly separate from the broader issue of gentrification. My personal understanding is that economic inequality and expensive real estate are considered prime contributing factors to gentrification. Since Stern and Seifert do not acknowledge the relationship between these phenomena, it would have been helpful for them to provide the reader with a clearer understanding of what they mean using terms like gentrification or neighborhood stabilization instead of assuming universal understanding of these terms.

IMPLICATIONS

Regardless of whether or not the strategies SIAP promotes are the best ones to employ, they are definitely some of the most influential theories out there. Joan Shigekawa, the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Jeremy Nowak, the Interim Director of ArtPlace, were both involved with the organizational entities that funded and collaborated in the Culture and Community Revitalization project. Prior to her term at the NEA, Shigekawa was the Associate Director for Foundation Initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the study. Nowak is the co-founder and former CEO of The Reinvestment Fund, one of the lead partners in this work. As a result, they’ve begun to explore some of the ideas SIAP has developed about the creative economy into the institutions they now run.

How has work on culture and urban revitalization progressed since the study was published?

In my research, it has been difficult to find models of community revitalization using cultural clusters that do not tie into some, if not all of the theories that are covered in this series of research studies.  Stern and Seifert’s research on local production and consumption, as well as their emphasis on the social benefits of creative placemaking, are deserving of policymakers and advocates’ attentions.   Curiously, at the end of Culture and Community Revitalization’s literature review the authors seem to downplay the role of natural cultural clusters in enhancing urban revitalization, stating that in spite of the correlations between culture, social engagement, and economic improvement, these correlations “do not produce direct-enough benefits to generate enthusiasm among those who actually determine the fate of cities.”

Yet, as previously mentioned, two large philanthropic entities are in the midst of executing their own round of funding based on the idea that cultural assets can improve communities socially and economically. Nowak’s ArtPlace is a collaboration between foundations to put “art at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities.” Prior to heading up ArtPlace, Nowak helped it get off the ground as president of one of its original funding partners, the William Penn Foundation.  ArtPlace makes grants in all 50 states and has awarded over $42 million to different organizations thus far. The NEA’s Our Town program, begun under Shigekawa’s tenure as Senior Deputy Chairman of the agency, explains its grantmaking objective as providing funding for “creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.” Notably, both funding entities have supported SIAP and TRF’s latest collaboration in partnership with the City of Philadelphia, an interactive data portal called CultureBlocks, specifically designed to bridge the gap between cultural assets and City Hall in the name of community revitalization.

All of this philanthropic activity does beg the question: if natural cultural clusters already exist and are improving their communities, is it really necessary for the public and private sector to get involved? Observing the trajectory of the ArtPlace and Our Town initiatives will help bear this question out.

Are there better models out there?

As pointed out in a previous Createquity piece on the arts and gentrification, there are some really innovative artist and community-driven projects focused on neighborhood revitalization and stabilization across the country. These projects include Project Row Houses in Houston, the work of Theaster Gates Rebuild Foundation on the South Side of Chicago, and the Watts House Project in Watts, CA. Though these projects have been subject to their own criticisms, they do seem to provide an alternative to both completely “natural” cultural cluster development and the completely government-initiated cultural district approach. That said, the aforementioned projects have all been implemented within the past decade—it is still too early to truly determine how deep of an impact they will make, both locally and nationally. Will another innovator be able to combine the work of the artist/community developers and the theories promoted by Stern and Seifert? Is that even the path that should be taken or is it best to leave “natural” cultural clusters alone to develop according to their own ethos?

Additional Reading:

• For more information on the concept of “natural” cultural clusters
• CultureBlocks website
• Local NBC news affiliate on the launch of CultureBlocks

Gentrification – photo by Michael Daines

Impetus

“Artists as the ‘shock troops of gentrification’.”

That’s a quote by art historian/critic Rosalyn Deutsche included by Creative Time in a recent email invitation to its upcoming summit on the “contributions and complicity of culture in the development of 21st century urban space.”

And here’s an excerpt from Project for Public Spaces’ article, “All Placemaking is Creative” published last month (emphasis mine):

Placemaking…is a vital part of economic development. And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is largely due to confusion over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If placemaking is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community outcomes.

Project for Public Spaces is a NYC-based nonprofit that advances placemaking (without the creative modifier). Its article makes a few good points, most importantly that placemaking should be an inclusive process and that there is not a singular “community,” but rather, pluralistic communities. But I winced when I read its damaging mischaracterizations of artists’ roles in placemaking, which ironically undermine its call for inclusivity. It implies that artists’ place at the community development table comes at the expense of other voices being heard. I got the sense that it dismissed artists as privileged others, as opposed to the “regular people” who should be shaping placemaking processes. It seemed to lump artists with developers and planners in terms of power and clout. All are harmful mischaracterizations.

The PPS article and shock troop quote propelled me to coalesce some of the thoughts that have been swirling around my head about why we perceive artists as gentrifiers, where those bleed into misperceptions, and how to learn from both.

The Bigger Picture

It’s a new phenomenon for artists to have a place at the table of community development. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and ArtPlace have, collectively, invested $41.6 million in creative placemaking projects in just two years. This is an impressive amount of resources and the momentum is exciting. However, it’s still a drop in the bucket when one considers all of the dollars for community and economic development in this country. By way of comparison, in 2010 and 2011 the federal government invested $240 million in just one grant program (HUD Sustainable Communities). Happily, in 2011 HUD took the unprecedented step of including arts and culture in Sustainable Communities grants, one result of the creative placemaking frame. But consistently considering arts and culture within community development efforts is still far from common practice.

The scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal still shape what neighborhoods look like, who lives where, residents’ access to good education and employment, and what homes are worth. The fates of swaths of neighborhoods are out of residents’ hands; banks have foreclosed on large percentages of properties. Sketchy lending and a demand for mortgage backed securities means ownership is not vested with the people living there, but rather with countless remote and untraceable investors who own “toxic assets.” Cozy sweetheart deals between politicians and developers, forged in the name of economic development, are still common. When land-use decisions do include public participation, middle-class homeowners and whites are more apt to show up and speak up at meetings than low-income renters and people of color. Non-English speakers are often forced to rely on impromptu translators or aren’t even in the room because the announcement flyer wasn’t in their native tongue. These are the kinds of placemaking inequities we should challenge and change, instead of turning artists into scapegoats.

When we talk about issues of power, social inequities, or “the politics of belonging and (dis)belonging,” as Roberto Bedoya so eloquently frames, I want us to remember that artists, on average, have low incomes, and that they are not all white. The NEA’s Artists and Arts Workers in the United States (2011) reveals that musicians, dancers and choreographers, photographers, and other entertainers’ median salary is under $28,000. Despite artists’ high levels of educational attainment, the average salary for all artist occupations (including architects) is just over $43,000. Over twenty percent of artists are racial/ethnic minorities. And these statistics are only for people for whom being an artist is their “primary” job.

We have an unfortunate tendency in the U.S. to view artists as special/different/other. Larry Gross likens it to artists being on a reservation or special island in his On the Margins of Art Worlds. As early as elementary school, teachers single out a few students with god-given talent from the apparently uncreative masses. This is a cultural construct. In Native American cultures, art is an integral part of life, not a separate vocation/occupation. In their Native Artists: Livelihoods, Resources, Space, Gifts (2009), Markusen and Rendon point out that there is no word for art in Ojibwe or in many tribal languages.

One wonderful role that artists play in dominant U.S. culture is that of the provocateur, and for that, yes, they do need a bit of distance to see things and make critical commentary. But that certainly does not mean they are by default elitist, snobs or more creative than thou. They are of the community. They are some of the regular people that proponents of inclusive placemaking, like PPS, should wish to involve. They happen to have unique skill sets and when they’re game to apply them for the common good via placemaking, we should embrace and nurture their efforts.

The Antitheticals

Hennepin Avenue Re: Model led by visual artist Ta-coumba Aiken as part of Plan-It Hennepin’s Creating Urban Visions workshop. Photo by Mark Vancleave, 2012.

Recently in Minneapolis, I witnessed how a team of artists from Tom Borrup’s Creative Community Builders used movement, song, writing exercises, and sculpting to draw out participants’ visions for Hennepin Avenue. The “regular” people at the meeting both seemed to have more fun and contribute richer and more nuanced ideas than I have witnessed in typical community planning meetings. The planning process for the cultural district also harnessed teenagers’ creativity. It empowered them to canvas the avenue to suss out public space (and its absence), interview people, and document through video.

As executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, Roberto Bedoya puts his money where his mouth is—supporting projects consistent with his public call for more emphasis on issues of social inequities within the creative placemaking policy rhetoric. In the Finding Voice program, for example, refugee youth generate stories and images through print publications and art projects at the mall and bus stops. These forms of expression help make their lives visible and affirm their place in Tucson’s civic fabric. In another example, artist/architect Bill Mackey worked with dozens of collaborators on Worker Transit Authority. In an exhibition of mock planning projects created by a mock planning authority, Tucson residents engaged in three weeks of dialogue on issues of land use, infrastructure, and transportation.

In the Dorchester neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side and increasingly in cities across the country, Theaster Gates asks impertinent questions about the way things are and invents alternatives—he calls it art, and gatekeeper establishments like MOCA (Los Angeles), the Whitney Biennial, and Armory Show (New York) agree. He turned an abandoned two-story house into a library, in part to thumb his nose at city officials who claimed there weren’t enough resources to expand that level of services into the neighborhood. He looks for and exploits all the tie-ins and synergies he can find. Black Cinema House, for instance, converts a small abandoned Dorchester home into a neighborhood space for screenings and conversation. Master builders and educators employed local residents in the deconstruction of the old space, providing job skills. Black Cinema House will also ultimately provide live/work space for film-and media-based artists of color.

The artists involved in these kinds of initiatives are deeply motivated by concerns for social justice and equity. They often come from the neighborhood they seek to benefit or other strong ties may fuel their commitment.

Dorchester Projects Library by artist Theaster Gates. Photo by Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, 2012.

The Agnostics

Other artists have no interest in placemaking at all, and that’s also a completely valid choice. They may be traditional object makers or present works of theater, dance, or music in conventional venues. Those works of art also bring society joy and beauty; they inspire us or make us question f***ed up stuff.

Some artists might rehab a building as a studio or residence, because they just need an affordable place to live and work. They spruce it up and add value. They may be good neighbors, but have no interest in opening up their homes and workspace for frequent community events.

Untangling Culpability

But the role of artists as gentrifiers is, unfortunately, deeply entrenched in our collective popular imagination. People intuitively feel artists are attracted to down and out neighborhoods and can invest sweat equity, money, and artist juju into properties. They’ve heard about the SoHo effect and how artists are often victims of processes they set into motion; they get priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped to turn around.

Through my work, I’ve learned that it’s not so simple. Since the 1970s, thousands of American and European urban neighborhoods have been gentrified without artists involved, often by developers, often with public funding, chiefly to young professionals and to suburban retirees wishing to live in the city. Ann Markusen points out that gentrification is a function of generalized pressure on urban land markets—i.e. in NYC, every rich person in the world has to have an apartment—and that it does not occur in most small towns and in urban neighborhoods in vast portions of many cites.

Here are some of the ways the story varies in cities with weak real estate markets. In Lowertown, St. Paul, I documented artist space initiatives that spanned a fifteen-year period and were part of an overarching affordable housing strategy. I found few red flags for gentrification-led displacement beyond dislocating vagrants that sheltered in the abandoned buildings themselves. The neighborhood is more racially and ethnically diverse than before the artist spaces, and, for better or worse, still has quite high poverty levels. In Philadelphia, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert have documented fascinating community benefits that occur from “cultural clusters” (or concentrations of cultural participants, nonprofit arts organizations, commercial cultural firms, and resident artists). They find that these neighborhoods have higher levels of civic engagement, increased population and housing values, and decreased poverty rates, with little evidence of ethnic displacement.

Even with the most notorious example, SoHo, the story is more complicated than artists suddenly making the area have cachet and driving up prices all by their lonesome. In her seminal Loft Living, Sharon Zukin maps a system of government officials and real estate and banking interests. She tells the story of how they turned to live/work zoning and marketing of the bohemian lifestyle as a profitable way to deal with under-utilized industrial buildings and attract middle-class individuals to the area.

The Co-opted

As the SoHo example suggests, even though “shock troops” is an overstatement of artists’ roles in gentrification, pawns may not be. The perceived link between artists and gentrification is one reason that mayors, developers, and business improvement districts “buy” creative placemaking’s potential. The policy architects behind creative placemaking have been pretty transparent about their implicit goals of attracting such non-traditional arts stakeholders to invest in arts and culture.

The merits of silo-busting aside, I have serious qualms about artists being co-opted within creative placemaking projects. Particularly as advanced by the NEA (but also by ArtPlace), creative placemaking emphasizes cross-sector partnerships. Within NEA-funded projects, an arts or cultural organization always participates, but they may not be the lead partner. Even within arts organizations, administrators far removed from artistic processes may drive institutional involvement. Unfortunately, I’ve seen the line item for artist fees get cut before other project expenses when projects faced budget constraints. Artists are used to coming to foundations and city officials as supplicants, with outstretched hands, palms up, often unaware of their value. They certainly do not rival developers in terms of political savvy or financial capital. These power imbalances permeate partnerships and collaborations. Though creative placemaking initiatives can and often do empower artists, they also run the risk of paying lip service to artist involvement or worse, even using them for nefarious purposes like the exaggerated “shock troops” of gentrification claim that has caught hold of our collective imagination.

Questions and Crossroads

How do we grapple with these issues of agency, voice, and power? Change hinges on powerbrokers, the elites—sometimes merely in that they can obstruct it. How do we prevent their active involvement from silencing, or co-opting, artists and other vulnerable or marginalized populations? How do we make sure these interests are central to placemaking efforts?

Creative placemaking encompasses a broad array of practices, and as a field we need to drill down and examine initiatives that resulted in expanded opportunities for low-income communities, people of color, and artists against those that had undesired affects of displacement. How do different types of interventions correlate with outcomes? Is displacement just a by-product of generalized pressure and larger macro-forces in the economy?

Within the realm of artist space, is artist-ownership a remedy? Artists’ equity stakes do not safeguard against neighborhood change. Even in the celebrated example of the Paducah Artist Relocation Program (KY), many artists cashed out during the economic downturn, jeopardizing its claim as an artist haven. Are models of nonprofit ownership and stewardship, such as Artspace’s, the benchmark? In those, low-income artist tenants have long-term stability, but no equity. However, the building’s artist character and affordability is retained in the long-term. To ensure that a mix of housing options remain for families with modest incomes, do artist space initiatives need to be combined with non-arts affordable housing strategies? What can we learn from land-trust models? Maria Rosario Jackson’s Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities: Reflections and Implications for the Field offers some wonderful insights that advance thinking and practice.

I repudiate the notion that artists are the shock troops of gentrification. Artists are, however, on a different front line. They are looking hard at issues of their potential complicity in gentrification. They’re some of the most thoughtful voices grappling with questions of social equity in placemaking. Through nuanced practice, they’re “making the road by walking,” to quote Myles Horton. Instead of casting stones, our challenge as a field is to listen deeply and amplify these voices.

Mural in Paducah, KY. Photo by Tom Borrup

(Tom Borrup was kind enough to send this reaction to the recent ArtPlace Creative Placemaking Summit. Tom consults with cities, foundations, and nonprofits integrating the arts, economic development, urban planning, civic engagement, and animation of public space. His book The Creative Community Builders’ Handbook, 2006, profiles communities that have transformed their economic, social, and physical infrastructures through the arts. Hope you enjoy his guest post! -IDM)

Creative placemaking practitioners from across the United States—most of them grantees and funders of ArtPlace—gathered for the first time in late January in Miami Beach. The convening explored an array of topics in a productive quick-paced peer-learning environment.

At various points during the two days, numerous attendees expressed a desire to avoid colonialist practices of the past that resulted in gentrification and the displacement of vulnerable populations.  However, a core component of every placemaking effort, one key to learning how not to repeat mistakes, was largely missing from the conversation: the appreciation of history.

For some, creative placemaking includes historic preservation or reinvigorating 19^th or early 20^th century cultural resources (a jazz scene for instance), but most practitioners set their sights on a vision for the future that is different, but one that often lacks conscious connection with the historical trajectory that shaped the place to begin with.  Attendees at the conference were treated to the Miami Beach Art Deco District, a dynamic example of a world-class arts and tourism destination leveraging both the natural and built assets of place while fostering a welcoming and celebratory culture.  Not every place has a trove of significant period architecture, nor do they have music legends, momentous events, or even important crossroads. But every place has a history.  Those histories include the ways people have used the place over centuries or even millennia, the dynamics and relationships between people in that place, what grew or took place there, economies that have come and perhaps gone, and even the geological formation. Historical assets include the ways people made their livelihood, in the form of centuries of tradition and knowledge of working with wood, stone, leather or metal; or a special significance that explains why places were used for gathering, resting or healing.  A place that is economically, socially, culturally and environmentally sustainable is one that builds on and creatively interprets what has come before. When placemakers (creative or otherwise) ignore the stories, the assets and the meanings embedded in the ground on which they work, their efforts are exposed to the risk of repeating mistakes, offending residents or stakeholders, diminishing existing livelihoods, missing out on key resources under their noses, or simply importing unsustainable visions.  The long arc of history does not suddenly change direction when a group of artists or small arts organizations arrive and take to the streets.  Over several decades, community-based arts practice in the U.S. has absorbed these lessons, but too few of them have bled into creative placemaking.

In the planning profession there’s an adage that goes:  it’s easier to get people to agree on what they would like to see happen than to get them to agree on what actually did happen.  While I have found this true time and again, that doesn’t mean the easy route of ignoring the past produces the best outcomes.  Neither does learning about and showing respect for history mean freezing it in place or hanging on to old values.  If a placemaker is truly creative, he or she will facilitate key stakeholders in their community to unearth and evaluate the history and stories of place, to re-interpret these values and appreciate how to move that arc of history into the future towards a more equitable and sustainable vision.

Among the exceptions at the Creative Placemaking Summit was the representative of the American Indian Community Development Institute, a Minneapolis group leading the American Indian Cultural Corridor.  For this community, the long arc of history remains raw.  He described the area as a centuries-old meeting place of tribes and later a forced encampment area during the white settler occupation of the early 1800s.  A history of inter-tribal connections, together with continuing police brutality in this place, brought about formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) there in 1968.  It remains the site of many other activist, service, and cultural organizations, and sits along a pathway also known as Franklin Avenue, a city street that runs through the Phillips Neighborhood, named for early abolitionist and Native rights advocate Wendell Phillips.

To create sustainable communities, creative placemakers need to identify how their work fits into the history of their place.  If the patterns that created inequity, injustice and disinvestment are not in their grasp, they’ll fall victim to those same patterns. The critical process of exploring history as an open and visible part of creative placemaking also demonstrates a respect for place and for the people who are there, who have been there and who will be there.  In all histories there are surely successes and mistakes, and it may not be possible to get everyone to agree on which were which. Yet if the past is not core to creative placemaking – to any kind of placemaking that purports to respect both place and people – practitioners are doomed to repeat it.

• The Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae recaps current policy on orphan works (i.e., creations under copyright but whose owners no longer exist), and outlines a solution that protects the original author/performer in such cases. Casey’s post has instructions if you want to file supporting or additional comments with the Copyright Office.
  
• With all the headline grabs about cuts to public funding, we don’t hear enough about the politicians that really do support the arts, who often do so behind the scenes. Guy Yedwab shares some observations from a speech by outgoing Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is now running for city Comptroller.
• California is changing some of its rules for fiscal sponsors.
• Kaid Benfield writes on the increasingly unchecked, government-like powers of local homeowners’ associations.
• Rocco Landesman writes a postcard from retirement; Doug Borwick reflects on his tenure at the NEA.
• I realized last week, to my embarrassment, that the NEA’s official Art Works blog had not been showing up in my Google Reader feed since this past August. This happens sometimes when content providers move to a new platform and change their feed URL – there’s no way for subscribers to know unless you put up a notice on the old feed telling them to resubscribe at the new address. We’ve seen this at ArtsJournal as well as the blogs there have slowly migrated from Moveable Type to their new WordPress platform. If you’re subscribed to any of these blogs in Google Reader, check to make sure you’re still getting updates! I keep a list of such feed changes at my blogroll. Anyway, here are some of the fun pieces at Art Works that I missed over the past few months because of this:
  • Steven Shewfelt and Ellen Grantham describe a new pilot initiative to assess the artistic excellence of activities funded by the NEA, after the fact.
  • Elizabeth Miller interviews Rachel Cain and Anthony Radich about WESTAF’s Public Art Archive software.
  • Sunil Iyengar analyzes the new SNAAP report, “Painting with Broader Strokes,” and another report from the National Center for Education Statistics. (Would be nice to have links to those in the post…)
  • An interview with NEA Acting Chair Joan Shigekawa. Here’s a previous interview with Deepa Gupta, who serves on the National Council of the Arts and was formerly an arts program officer with the MacArthur Foundation.
  • Rich Heeman describes the NEA’s recent efforts at improving data collection and transparency practices.
  • Shewfelt reflects on creativity in arts research, the NEA’s arts research grants program, and arts-related changes to the General Social Survey.
  • Julie Heizer shares an update on the federal government’s national tourism and marking strategy, and details how arts organizations can get involved.

IN THE FIELD

• Michael Kaiser announces his planned departure as head of the Kennedy Center. No word on what’s next for him.
• Four dance companies in Chicago are coming together to share marketing and customer service responsibilities. I’m not sure if the model is as unusual as they seem to think it is, but it’s still one to watch for those interested in shared services as a cure for the 501(c)(3) blues.
  

BIG IDEAS

• The perspectives on race and the arts continue to roll in, with responses from Jon Silpayanamant, Linda Essig, Doug Borwick, and this particularly trenchant one from Trevor O’Donnell (I’d love to get him and Borwick in a room together!). Another lens on this whole thing is a geographic one; a lot of the initial discussion came from people on the West Coast, and the rhetoric in the Clayton Lord post that I originally responded to, arguing that institutions had a moral responsibility to have audiences that looked like their local communities, struck me as very California way of looking at the issue. For better or worse, the powers that be in the East have largely not been pressuring arts nonprofits to diversify with the same ferocity, seemingly for worse in this particular case.
• Oh, and in case anyone was under the illusion that this was only an issue in the United States: “Salvador, with a welcoming Atlantic harbor, was the first capital of Brazil. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, until Brazil ended slavery in 1888, it was the largest port in the New World for the slave trade, and 80 percent of the city’s current population is Afro-Brazilian….African-rooted rhythms propel much of Brazilian popular music. Yet the prime-time face of carnaval is almost entirely white.”
• Seth Godin on the NFL vs. the arts (a subject that came up in other forums as well): “The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one. The cultural touchstones we’re building today are…mostly not for everyone. Instead, the process is Tribes -> Connections/communities -> Diverse impact….[W]e build our lives around cultural pockets, not cultural mass. Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass.”
• Chad Bauman on the formula for subscription success: “great artistic product + best seats + best price + outstanding customer service = more subscribers.”
• “What exactly is the dividing line between respecting your audience’s taste and shameless pandering?” Adam Huttler considers by examining the case of Netflix’s new show House of Cards, which represents a $100 million bet on algorithmically-determined original programming.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Some great resources for measuring the impact of advocacy work.
• Peter Pennekamp (former president of the Humboldt Area Foundation) and Anne Focke consider community democracy as a tool for philanthropy in this occasional paper for the Kettering Foundation.
• Over at the Nonprofit Finance Fund blog, Anjali Deshmukh and Rachel Heitler analyze an evaluation of the Violence Against Women Act. Very interesting reading for those interested in understanding how to bring these concepts to arts policy analysis.
• Southern Methodist University is launching a new Center for Arts Research.
• A new electronic journal from Scotland examines creativity and human development. And speaking of journals, issue #2 of Artivate, the journal for entrepreneurship in the arts, is out.
• An entire webinar on data visualization for philanthropy.
• An interesting take on network effects in the fashion industry.