The Detroit Institute of Arts’s Woodward entrance. (Image courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts)

After a two-year battle, a federal ruling to approve Detroit’s bankruptcy plan brought to an end the threat to auction off the Detroit Institute of Arts’s collection. The plan includes the “grand bargain,” an $800 million deal that partly consists of a $366 million investment from the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Knight Foundation, and other heavy-hitters. In the bargain, DIA supporters are providing funding to save Detroit’s public pensions, with the caveat that DIA be administered by an independent charitable trust, and not by the City of Detroit, which has owned the museum since 1919. While all hail these developments as positive, DIA still has a tough road to financial stability ahead. As it looks to shore up its finances and secure its future by raising its endowment to $400 million, DIA faces hefty legal bills incurred during the bankruptcy battle, and the daunting task of fundraising from donors whose pockets may have been emptied into the grand bargain. Regardless of what the future holds, the foundations will be keeping a close eye on their investment–the Knight Foundation’s Dennis Scholl has been appointed as an observer of DIA’s board.

Publisher Hachette Wins the Right to Set E-Book Prices from Amazon: In a multi-year agreement, “Big Five” publisher Hachette won the right to set prices for e-books from Amazon, which had attempted to pressure the company to price all e-books at $9.99. The retail giant suffered in the court of public opinion for its strongarm negotiation tactics, including long shipping delays of Hachette books, disallowing advance sales, and steering customers to similar books by other publishers. Some authors are calling for Amazon to be investigated on anti-trust grounds; at the same time, Amazon has questioned the need for traditional publishing houses in the digital era. While all sides seem to be breathing a sigh of relief over the deal, it seems clear that the fight isn’t over–publishers have long had a difficult relationship with digital retailers, and observers are think the next negotiation may be just as acrimonious.

Mid-Term Elections Offer Mixed Results for the Arts: In case you were living under a rock last month, we had some elections and the Democrats lost their shirts. So what does that mean for the arts? With the Republican-majority Congress, Americans for the Arts forecasts the passage of a comprehensive tax reform bill, which will likely impact charitable giving rules. The chairship of the subcommittee that oversees funding for the Arts in Education will change, while Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) will continue to govern the subcommittee that controls the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Barry Hessenius predicts a possible attack on the NEA’s budget, given its symbolic weight for some in Congress, and recommends that arts leaders work to build stronger relationships with our elected officials. Meanwhile, at the state level, arts-friendly candidates suffered losses in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland. In better news, Rhode Island passed a ballot referendum providing $35 million in bonds to renovate arts facilities in the state, and pro-arts measures passed in Palm Beach County, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale (AZ), and Middlesex County (NJ).

Three Foundations Purchase Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center: The embattled August Wilson Center for African American Culture now rests in the hands of three foundations, which purchased it for $7.9 million from Dollar Bank, its mortgage holder. The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and Richard King Mellon Foundation had attempted to close on an $8.49 million deal by October 31, but the sale was torpedoed when a creditor appealed an earlier $200,000 judgment in the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and the foundations refused to proceed until the debt was settled. Dollar Bank was forced to move ahead with a foreclosure auction on November 3, which cleared the Center of its debt and allowed the foundations to complete their purchase.The Center plans to re-open in 2015 under new nonprofit leadership and will continue its mission as a focal point for African American arts and culture.

Obama Says the Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility: Net neutrality supporters got an unexpected boost from President Obama this November. The White House released a plan recommending that the Federal Communications Commission reclassify Internet broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which proponents argue would give the FCC the increased regulatory power necessary to protect net neutrality. The president seems to agree with this line of thinking — his administration’s plan also rejects the FCC’s proposed rules to allow for paid prioritization of Internet traffic. Just after the President’s announcement, though, FCC Chairman (and Obama appointee) Tom Wheeler stated that he favored a different approach, one friendlier to the concerns of large Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner. The Washington Post speculates that Obama’s announcement may merely represent shrewd political positioning, since if the FCC enacts strong rules, and the Republican Congress votes to overturn them, a presidential veto would put Obama and the Democrats squarely in the camp of millions of voters who have asked the FCC for powerful net neutrality protections.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Indonesia has named the U.S.-educated Anies Baswedan as the new Minister of Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education.
• The NEA’s Director of Folk and Traditional Arts Barry Bergey will retire after 29 years of service.
• Chorus America is seeking a new President and CEO. Posted November 22, closing date December 19.
• Kansas City’s Charlotte Street Foundation is looking for a new Director of Artists’ Programs. Posted October 29, no closing date.
• The Foundation Center is hiring for a Director of Community Foundation Services position. Posted November 4, no closing date.
• The Barr Foundation seeks an Arts and Culture Program Assistant. Posted November 20, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study by the U.S. Trust finds a big bump in charitable giving among wealthy donors in 2014, and projects further growth.
• New research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nonprofit employment rose during the recession.
• The BFAMFAPhD collective published Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, which asserts that “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.”
• The researchers behind the Crystal Bridges field trip experiment that we reported on back in October have released another study, this time focused on high-quality theater productions.
• A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture looks at how well rural areas with a higher proportion of “creative class” workers fared during the recession.
• Suby Raman takes a deep dive into gender representation in America’s top orchestras.
• New research from Italy indicates that those with a need for “cognitive closure” are less likely to appreciate abstract art.

Audience members dock their canoes to watch a scene from a paddling theater production in Granite Falls, Minnesota. Photograph taken by the author.

(Rachel Engh recently received a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She currently lives in Minneapolis and is interested in exploring creative strategies to evaluate the success of community-based arts initiatives.)

Last May, nearly two hundred people paddled down the Minnesota River in large canoes, stopping throughout the three-hour ride to experience scenes depicting the bizarre true story of how Granite Falls (population 2,800) came to be the county seat of Yellow Medicine County in southwestern Minnesota. Audience members watched as local actors and musicians shared stories of Native Americans, French explorers, mussel diggers, and early politicians. Locals paddled next to tourists; kids splashed their oars in the water, and older folks went along for the ride.

The performance, “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine,” sprung out of a partnership among four nonprofit and public organizations: Clean Up River Environment (CURE), a local environmental nonprofit; Wilderness Inquiry, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit; the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and PlaceBase Productions, a theater company out of St. Paul that had previously worked with the community last fall. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Minnesota water trail system, the performance highlighted two of the region’s assets – the Minnesota River and local artists – while bringing new people to experience Granite Falls.

Why artists should be part of the conversation about rural population gain

“With the Future on the Line” is just one example of how rural communities are adopting arts strategies to re-energize towns, spark meaningful conversations, and attract visitors. Patrick Moore, former executive director of CURE and an artist himself, told me he wanted to involve PlaceBase’s founders, Ashley Hanson and Andrew Gaylord, because they are “not only artists with charisma but also community organizers, getting people to think together, act together, helping people find roles to make them feel good and connect them with the larger community.”

This type of connection is what prospective transplants to rural communities are looking for, argues Ben Winchester, a researcher at University of Minnesota Extension who has studied rural population change. Small towns across the county are seeing their cohort of 30-49 year olds grow, a phenomenon Winchester has called “brain gain,” because these folks are in their early or mid-careers and bring with them education, skills, and connections to professionals outside the community. Attracting and keeping people in this age group can be an effective way to create an increased tax base, a more diversified economy, a more vibrant school system (since these people tend to have families), and new ideas and optimism. Only about 35-45% of the brain gain cohort is returning to a place where they once lived, meaning the majority of people who move to rural places have been attracted to somewhere new.

Artists can play an integral role in brain gain, both as part of an incoming cohort and as a means of attracting others. Concerted efforts by a rural area to attract artists can be an especially high-yield strategy because of the nature of artistic work. Researchers Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa argue that artists tend to be “footloose,” meaning they are not tied to a specific place and may work from home; because they often struggle to find affordable space in metropolitan areas, rural areas may be especially attractive to them. Once a rural area hosts a population of artists, they can help the region attract non-artist residents who value the arts as an amenity, and they can engage all residents in relationship-building through cultural activity.

Given this potential virtuous cycle, it is no surprise that rural communities have developed several strategies to attract, deploy, and connect artists as part of broader revitalization efforts. This article explores some of the ways rural places demonstrate their value for artists and the positive results that can follow.

Attracting artists by creating a built environment for the arts

Many small towns suffer from main streets with vacant buildings, schools without students to populate them, and housing stock that overwhelms demand. Some rural communities have adopted arts initiatives that repurpose this infrastructure into assets for artists and the community alike.

Oil City, Pennsylvania (population 10,500) started a successful Artist Relocation Program that offers artists fixed-rate financing, grants, and loans for purchasing and rehabbing property. Since 2006, the program has attracted 28 artists, 21 of whom have bought homes, and has brought an estimated $1.3 million to the local economy. Artist Relocation Coordinator Joann Wheeler notes that newly resident artists have also created gathering places, such as Art on Elm, where both non-artist residents and artists make and experience art. (Oil City’s program is based on the even older Artist Relocation Program in Paducah, Kentucky, which began in 2000.)

The Kaddatz Hotel opened in Fergus Falls, Minnesota (population 13,000), in 1914, closed in the 1970s, and sat empty until 2004, when Artspace converted it to 10 units of artist lofts. Eric Santwire was the second artist to move into the Kaddatz Artist Lofts. Priced out of his neighborhood and having difficulty connecting with the artist community in Minneapolis, Santwire, like the other initial occupants, decided to move to Fergus Falls specifically because of the Lofts. The Kaddatz Galleries occupies the first floor of the building, which means that artists can both live and show their work in one building. “The Kaddatz Galleries feels like more than a gallery,” Michele Anderson, Rural Program Director for Springboard for the Arts told me. “It’s a place where people go to strike up conversations.”

Deploying artists to tackle complex issues facing rural communities

As these examples show, having artists around can generate investment and a sense of place. A rural area can also launch initiatives that make use of artists’ ability to explore creative solutions for complex issues. This kind of innovation can make a community more attractive to artists and non-artists alike.

Starksboro, Vermont (population 2,000) established an innovative artist residency to do just this. Vermont artist Matthew Perry spent nine months in Starksboro as part of the Art & Soul program, a partnership between the town and the Vermont Land Trust that was funded with a grant from the Orton Family Foundation. Perry facilitated citizen involvement in town planning, a process usually left to elected officials, convening “roadside conversations” in which he encouraged community members to envision the future of Starksboro. Then, he and the residents turned the stories into works of art, and the impact is tangible. For example, the town funded new trails and public spaces and commissioned artists to help design them, creating important assets that make Starksboro a more attractive place to live. Although Perry didn’t stay in the community, he left behind community members who became empowered in planning processes through participating in the arts.

Elsewhere, Springboard for the Arts employs “Artist Organizers” (AOs) to infuse non-arts organizations with creative energy and unique problem-solving skills. Currently, four AOs are working in yearlong positions in the Twin Cities, collaborating with such organizations as a public school system; starting this fall, an AO will be working in western Minnesota alongside staff of PartnerSHIP 4 Health. The artist will create her own art to address public health priorities in the region and engage other artists to work on public health issues.

Beyond infrastructure and programs: building networks and strengthening relationships among artists

Housing incentives and programs that engage artists in imaginative problem-solving cannot alone guarantee a thriving arts community. Part of the reason for the success of the Oil City and Fergus Falls projects is that both offer not only physical infrastructure for artists to live and do their work but also places to meet other artists, show work, and cultivate connections with other artists and non-artist residents. It is the relationships fostered in and outside the buildings that make these infrastructure projects such strong models.

Local interactions aren’t the only way artists are building relationships, however: recent initiatives promise to connect rural artists across towns, either regionally or nationally. These associations and online platforms augment the brain gain strategies of individual rural areas by allowing artists to share resources more widely, find support from a larger network of others facing similar challenges, and seize opportunities and inspiration. They can also spread the word to new artists about funding opportunities and ways to showcase their work.

Art of the Rural, a national online platform that collects, organizes, and displays a diverse mix of artists, art projects, and arts organizations in rural places, recently unveiled its interactive Atlas of Rural Arts and Culture. Members can post stories of their own projects, adding to the 500 entries already completed, and many entries links to articles or websites that dive deeper into the stories. The creators note that the map can serve as a way to reduce isolation among rural artists, as artists can find information (including contact information) about people and organizations doing work, giving artists ways to connect with others virtually.

Another online platform, Rural America Contemporary Art (RACA), likewise seeks to connect rural artists to one another. The online magazine, which began as a Facebook group that now boasts over 1,300 members, profiles artists, advertises events, and offers feature editorials. Founder and artist Brian Fink lives in Mankato, Minnesota (population 40,000), and explains that the next “challenge is to take this idea of Rural America Contemporary Art and artists who make it and shift from a virtual community and actually do things out in the world.” Since launching the initial Facebook group, RACA has hosted gatherings for local artists to show their work, including the first ever RACA group exhibition. RACA also recently starting renting commercial space to create Open Space, a community work area for artists.

The promise of the arts for rural America

Towns aspiring to brain gain may consider large scale projects like some of those described or smaller steps to engage artists who already live in the area. In some cases, it may be as simple as setting aside some city funds to make art happen.

That’s what Granite Falls did when it invited PlaceBase Productions back to town in October to produce a third and final project. In the absence of grant support, the town came to the rescue: the city pitched in funds, along with nearly 40% of the local businesses and nonprofits. This type of support demonstrates the value residents place on the mobilization of artists in the community to address local issues and bring people together. “Granite Falls is the envy of the region,” Patrick Moore told me. With the Chamber of Commerce and the city investing in cultural tourism, young people buying property, and new businesses opening on main street, Granite Falls boasts amenities that draw people in. Although Granite Falls still faces many challenges shared by other small towns all over the country, local actors and musicians have witnessed how the town can reenergized because of their mobilization. With the community’s support, there’s a good chance that artists will continue to play an important role in the area’s future.

Awaiting Gentrification in Crown Heights – photo by Jeff Chou

It seems that you can’t read an article about New York City in any news source, whether it’s Gawker or the New York Times, without hearing the buzzword “gentrification.” But what do people mean when they toss this word around and how does it look to the people living in affected areas? Why do people draw a connection between artistic hubs and gentrification? Though gentrification is a catch-all term used to describe a range of interrelated outcomes, it is generally connected to changes in an area’s culture and character, demographics, the real estate market, and land use.  Due to a long history of rampant racial inequity in U.S. housing and public policy, the term is also closely associated with a larger idea of “a miscarriage of social justice, in which wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for ‘improving’ a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”In recent years, two neighborhoods in New York City, Crown Heights and Harlem, have undergone dramatic physical, cultural and demographic changes. Both neighborhoods are attracting new residents along with businesses that cater to their tastes. You only have to walk down the streets of either these two neighborhoods to see that the process of gentrification is well underway, if not almost complete. In recent months, New York Magazine and the New York Times have published articles about the city’s reinvigorated real estate market, especially in areas like Harlem that even ten years ago were still seen as areas that needed civic investment and redevelopment if they were to appeal to mainstream middle- or upper-class tastes.

The massive transitions taking place in Harlem and Crown Heights are just as closely tied to economic status as they are to race. Sociologist Sharon Zukin defines gentrification as a process of spatial and social differentiation that results from the influx of educated, middle-class people into low-income areas. The form of urban gentrification seen over the last half century differs from previous incarnations because of the type of cultural capital these new urban dwellers bring with them. The new agents of gentrification seek out the same characteristics that made previous generations flee urban areas, namely distinctly urban attributes like diversity, walkability and historic significance. While these new urbanites may not always be economically well-off, they are drawn to the aesthetics of what they see as the “authentic” city, but inevitably their surroundings are eventually molded by their own presence.

Watching the process of gentrification unfold in New York City may be an opportunity to learn from arts-based community revitalization efforts in places like Watts, CA; Houston, TX; and Chicago, IL, and give policymakers, practitioners and residents an opportunity to envision an inclusive future for their community. Although both Crown Heights and Harlem have experienced an exodus of many of their black residents, blacks still maintain a tenuous plurality in most parts of these neighborhoods, indicating that while there is a threat of increased displacement, there may also be opportunities for those remaining to take an active part in the reshaping of their communities.  Will Crown Heights and Harlem fall prey to the oft-discussed negative consequences of gentrification? Or is there still opportunity for these neighborhoods to retain a connection to their original inhabitants?

Why Crown Heights and Harlem?

Both Harlem and Crown Heights (and more broadly, Brooklyn) have their own cultural currency tied to a heritage that has dominated much of U.S. popular culture over the past twenty years. These neighborhoods are synonymous with defining artistic movements in black culture like jazz and hip hop, art forms that have had a global impact. The connection these two neighborhoods have to cultural milestones such as the Harlem Renaissance and the early work of Spike Lee attracts new residents eager to build upon the past and contribute to a new phase of development in their own way.

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center 

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

In spite of the fact that more and more young white New Yorkers are moving to the neighborhood of Crown Heights, a majority of residents are distinctly not part of the wealthiest tier of society.  Crown Heights is not the kind of place like Williamsburg or DUMBO that gets highlighted in discussions about the new wave of New York’s vibrant arts scene. There is plenty of existing grassroots arts activity from practicing individual artists, community based organizations, and community-based arts projects, it is still difficult for local cultural organizations based in Crown Heights to garner enough funding and support to work with under-resourced communities, with dueling priorities like crime and education. That said, the changing demographics of the area, as well as its proximity to attractions like the Brooklyn Museum and the Barclays Center and the resulting increase in real estate value, has attracted the attention of traditional and untraditional creative placemakers.

Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

 Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center 

Although Harlem has a more well-established cultural brand and presence than Crown Heights, it too is becoming a hub for creative industry and the creative class, albeit in a different form. Tour buses constantly drive through Harlem, giving visitors a chance to view iconic landmarks like the Apollo Theater or visit the Studio Museum in Harlem. Over the past three years, Harlem has gained two independent multi-use creative arts spaces, MIST and ImageNation, started by long-time Harlem residents or advocates. These organizations are helping to shift the perception that change in previously distressed communities has to come from the top down. Instead, they demonstrate that culturally-based organizations can uplift and strengthen the creativity that already exists in a mutually beneficial way.

For all of the discussion of gentrification and displacement, it seems that many authors and researchers approach the issue from the frame of high-income whites displacing low-income people of color. What happens when high-income people of color become part of the process of redevelopment and reinvestment? The presence of MIST and Imagenation in Harlem highlight the nuanced dimensions of gentrification and confront misconceptions about what the process entails, who the drivers are, and how established residents play a part in the redevelopment of their neighborhood.

What Role Does The City Play?

Entire books have been written about New York City’s public policy, city planning, and their relationships with the arts and gentrification. Today’s New York has a unique relationship with gentrification because the constant hunt for refuge from the city’s high cost of living, paired with the city’s concentration of wealth, makes for some combustive elements.

In September 2008 the New York Times ran a brief update on a redevelopment project, titled Mart 125, which would include 67,000-square-foot space for a cultural and commercial complex across the street from the Apollo Theater.  Mart 125, an urban revitalization plan originally conceived nearly 20 years earlier in 1986, encountered delay after setback after delay until the Bloomberg administration issued an RFP to reinvigorate the project in 2008. As the Times article notes, arts organizations that met a threshold of financial stability and community involvement would get preference in the process of becoming a selected tenant. One of the selected occupants of this space was ImageNation, a small nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to “establis[h] a chain of art-house cinemas, dedicated to progressive media by and about people of color.” As part of executing that mission, the organization sought to create a gathering space for the community that could also serve as an affordable visual and performance arts venue.

Headed by Moikgantsi Kgama, a long-time Harlem resident with roots in the independent filmmaking community, ImageNation had been searching for a permanent home for its frequent events almost since its inception in 1997. The organization and its staff needed the room to expand and live up to its goal of becoming a go-to place for art-house cinema. In a recent interview Kgama noted that Mart 125 seemed to be the perfect opportunity for ImageNation to capitalize on the growing community reinvestment in Harlem. By the turn of the 21^st century the more commercial aims of Mart 125 were coming to fruition, with new outposts of Starbucks, H&M and American Apparel opening up on the strip of 125^th Street between Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X Boulevards.  The city and its various development agencies seemed poised to make good on their commitment to provide space for local cultural organizations. ImageNation and other organizations were strengthened by the rigorous RFP process and collaborative relationships with various city agencies, which asked them to meet tough benchmarks related to fiscal and organizational management to equip them for long-term success. Then the 2008 financial crisis descended upon the nation, the city’s priorities shifted and the community-based arts organization focus of Mart 125 stalled. Kgama and the staff of ImageNation remained determined to develop space in Harlem, along with other organizations like My Image Studio Theater Harlem (MIST). Both organizations opened space in Harlem in 2012, years after Mart 125 had come to a virtual standstill.

Today, MIST and ImageNation join a cohort of creative organizations run by people of color that are contributing to Harlem’s legacy as a creative hub for the city. These organizations are intentional about how they fit into the community and what role they should play in Harlem’s artistic ecosystem. Not surprisingly, they appear to be embraced wholeheartedly by the community’s new and old residents. ImageNation not only screens films and provides gallery space for up and coming artists, they also host engaging community events such as an attempt to create the world’s longest Soul Train Line, in honor of Don Cornelius, and to draw attention to Mental Health Awareness month.

In May of 2012 the New York City Economic Development Corporation issued a request for construction bids to resume redevelopment and attempt to continue on with the Mart 125 project. In spite of the delays with the city-sponsored community redevelopment, it seems that these community based organizations have been able integrate themselves into the neighborhood in ways that respect the integrity of Harlem’s long cultural history while contributing to the neighborhood’s evolution.  Would these organizations have been established in their current forms without the push for gentrification and development from the city? It is hard to tell. What is clear is that ImageNation and other local arts organizations have been able to capitalize on the interest in the “new” Harlem in order to gain access to the space they need to serve their community.

What Role Does the Private Sector Play?

In Crown Heights, the connection between gentrification and creative placemaking has been driven more by private sector dollars than by civic investment. Crown Heights is not connected to a specific cultural moment like the Harlem Renaissance, but it is increasingly being cited in articles about gentrification in New York City. Though there are established organizations in the community that use the arts as part of their programming, Crown Heights has attracted two large-scale creative placemaking projects that have met very different fates. While one has received a large amount of private financing derived from sources outside of the community, another, a brainchild of Crown Heights residents, has floundered.

Brooklyn’s recent resurgence as a cultural destination has been buoyed in part by the various enterprises of Jonathan Butler, creator of the website Brownstoner and co-creator of the very popular Brooklyn Flea. In 2012 it became public that Butler and his business partners were planning a large-scale development project in the heart of Crown Heights. The project being proposed is a mixed-use development that will provide space for artists and food vendors from the Brooklyn Flea to create and sell their wares. Unlike his contemporaries in Harlem, Butler epitomizes what many envision when they think of gentrification: white, wealthy, and attracted to the “potential” of under-resourced neighborhoods. Through his personal connections to Wall Street, Butler was able to raise seed capital from Goldman Sachs to fund his newest venture. This has given Butler and his partners the freedom to “seek input and support” from city agencies and politicians, without being completely dependent upon bureaucratic maneuvering to complete the project.  Instead of the drawn-out process that stalled Mart 125, Butler has been able to close on this $30 million project and is already in talks with potential tenants. Contrast this with the experience of the small arts organizations in Harlem, or the more recent attempts of a group of artists in Crown Heights who have been unsuccessful thus far in their attempts to purchase a building in the area for a similar purpose as Butler and his partners.

Although Butler has been able to breeze past the bureaucratic red tape and ecure space for his tenants, long-term residents of Crown Heights are wary of the project, seeing it as a harbinger of higher rents and changing demographics. Indeed, Crown Heights has had a high influx of white, upper income residents according to the 2010 census. There are also few signs that Butler or his private sector partners are looking at this as an opportunity to engage the diverse communities currently living within Crown Heights. On the day Butler announced the building purchase, Brownstoner posted a publicly available survey of potential tenants asking where interested businesses and business owners were currently located. However, questions about race or income levels, which would directly speak to the economic and social tensions that this project uncovers, remain unasked. In more recent reports it appears that tenants will be handpicked by Butler and his investors, maintaining continuity with the brand his previous ventures have established, regardless of how that affects the current community.

According to Ms. Kgama of ImageNation, it is difficult for small arts organizations that are led by or serve people of color to succeed because they often don’t have the fiscal backing or stability to compete for larger funding opportunities. At the same time, as Kgama points out, in rapidly gentrifying areas “it helps” for the organization to be led and staffed by people of color, so long as it is reflective of the surrounding area. Although there are a diverse range of experiences within every ethnic group, more often than not organizations led by people of color are more responsive to the wants and needs of minority groups, thereby making their host communities more receptive to their presence.

This also suggests that instead of a top-down approach, the needs of the community will be reflected in the programming showcased by the “gentrifying” organization. So far MIST and ImageNation seem to be embraced because their leaders made a conscious decision, reflected in their mission, to be reflective of and responsive to the cultural legacy of their host communities. It remains to be seen if Butler will take an inclusive approach to his new project, or if he is even concerned with avoiding perception as a malignant gentrifier. If he is, there are a few organizations in Harlem that he can ask for tips.

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.

• One artist’s activism on immigration and visa reform (he’s banned from entering the USA for 10 years because of a paperwork snafu).
• The Obama administration has announced three new members of the National Council on the Arts, the body that oversees the NEA. Here are interviews with Maria Rosario Jackson, Emil Kang and Paul Hodes.
• Google’s chief executive is stumping for an unregulated internet in developing nations, but some musicians in Africa aren’t buying what he’s selling. (I wonder, though, if an internet free from censorship must also be an internet without copyright controls.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Wow: after only two years in the driver’s seat at ArtPlace, Carol Coletta is jumping to the Knight Foundation, as Vice President/Community and National Initiatives. She writes a farewell letter via the ArtPlace blog.
  
• Margaret Hunt is the new director of Colorado Creative Industries.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Pew Charitable Trusts has restructured its culture program to emphasize project grants made through the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The Pew Cultural Leadership Program, which provides general operating support to Philadelphia-area organizations, will disappear over the next two years.
• Philadelphia arts philanthropist Gerry Lenfest is stepping down from his foundation, which is entering spend-down mode.
  

IN THE FIELD

• The San Francisco Symphony is on strike; here is a great background on the situation from San Francisco Classical Voice.
• A proposed merger between Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the LA County Museum of Art is off the table (for now).
• Linda Essig reports from the Association of Arts Administrators Conference in New Orleans; Steven Tepper offers his perspective on the 3 Million Stories conference in Nashville hosted by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (for which he is research director) and Vanderbilt’s Curb Center.

BIG IDEAS

• Michael Rushton is the newest ArtsJournal blogger and has 15 posts up in five weeks, including ones on dynamic pricing, free admission at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, faux-expensive admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, price discrimination as seen in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, price discrimination, price discrimination, and more price discrimination. WHY DOES NO ONE TELL ME THESE THINGS. (Side note: Michael asks why people [incorrectly] think price discrimination is a bad thing. Hint: it’s because of the word “discrimination.”)
• Speaking of ArtsJournal, Doug McLennan has designed a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) around the Spring for Music Festival, designed to get people to “listen smarter.” The class lineup looks pretty interesting and manageable (I particularly like the topics “How do you judge an orchestra” and “How does a piece of music become famous”), and the participants all get to sit together if they buy discounted subscription tickets to the festival. Looking forward to hearing how this plays out.
• Not everyone’s psyched about MOOCs though. Steve Lohr warns that the movement toward free online education could mean lots of financial trouble for universities, not to mention the teachers and staff in their employ.
• In fact, we’re getting more and more evidence from all sides that even “successful” cultural products – the likes of Gagnam Style and 50 Shades aside – don’t actually earn creators that much money. Here, Patrick Wensink spills the financial beans on his bestselling novel.
• Kristy Callaway has a helpful cheat sheet for early childhood educators, and Nina Simon considers varying levels of participation and co-design for children.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The McKnight Foundation has some cool visualizations of its research on individual artists; Laura Zabel comments.
• The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University answers the question, “what is it exactly that you DO?”
• Writing for the Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin gleefully makes hay on what he characterizes as an admission of defeat from Richard Florida on the efficacy of his creative class theory, but Florida says not so fast. A lot of it is the usual academic pissing match BS, but the original Florida essay that Kotkin cites is pretty interesting and provides some new fodder for gentrification warriors. The money quote (as it were):
  

  On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits. Its benefits flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers whose higher wages and salaries are more than sufficient to cover more expensive housing in these locations. While less-skilled service and blue-collar workers also earn more money in knowledge-based metros, those gains disappear once their higher housing costs are taken into account.

  In other words, as this article on the region-wide effects of Silicon Valley new money points out, “in a free market, people with money drive demand, which then drives supply.” Among other things, the article tells of a just-out-of-college startup techie paying almost $3000 a month for a studio in San Francisco, “simply because he didn’t know better.”

Since I didn’t write out the speech in advance, I don’t have a transcript for it. However, below is a reconstruction of the new material from my notes, so you can get a taste for it if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing right now. (You’ll notice I make a number of generalizations in the speech about the ways in which arts practitioners interact with research. These are based on observation and personal experience, and are best understood as my working hypotheses.)

*

[starting at 26:55]

Why is this integration between data and strategy important? Because research is only valuable insofar as it influences decisions. This is why logic models are awesome – they are a visual depiction of strategy. And there is no such thing as strategy without cause and effect. Think about that for a second. Our lives can be understood as a set of circumstances and decisions. We make decisions to try to improve our circumstances, and sometimes the circumstances of those around us. Every decision you make is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision. Every decision, therefore, carries with it some degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty can be expressed another way: as an assumption about the way the world works and the context in which your decision is being made. These assumptions are distinguished from known facts.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your assumptions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile. Alas, research and practice in our field are frequently disconnected in problematic ways. Six issues are preventing us from reaching our potential.

Issue #1: Capacity

Supply and demand apply as much to research as it does to artists. There are far more studies out there than a normal arts professional can possibly fully process. I wish I could tell you how many research reports are published in the arts each year, but nobody knows! To establish a lower bound, I went back over last year’s [2011] “around the horn” posts, which report new research studies that I hear about. I counted at least 41 relevant arts-research-related publications – a tiny fraction, I’m sure, of total output. To make matters worse, research reports are long, and arts professionals are busy. For the Createquity Writing Fellowship program, participants are required to analyze a work of arts research for the Createquity Arts Policy Library. I collect data on how long it takes to do this, and consistently, it requires 30-80 hours to research, analyze and write just one piece! Multiply this by the number of new studies each year, and you can start to see the magnitude of the problem.

Issue #2: Dissemination

Which research reports is an arts practitioner likely to even know about? Certainly not all of them, because there is almost no meaningful connection between the academic research infrastructure and the professional arts ecosystem. Lots of research relevant to the arts is published in academic journals each year, but unless the faculty member was commissioned to do their work by a foundation, we never hear about it. Academic papers are typically behind a pay firewall, and most arts organizations don’t have journal subscriptions. To give an example, after I wrote about Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, Florida pointed me to a study in two parts by two Dutch researchers. It’s one of the best resources I’ve come across for creative class theory, but I’ve never heard anyone even mention either study other than him and me.

Issue #3: Interpretation

Research reports inevitably reflect the researcher’s voice and agenda. This is especially true of executive summaries and press releases, which is often all anyone “reads” of research “reports.” Probably the most common agenda, of course, is to convey that the researcher knows what he/she is talking about. Another common agenda is to ensure repeat business from, or at least a continuing relationship with, the client who commissioned the study. The reality, however, is that research varies widely in quality. There’s no certification process; anyone can call themselves a researcher. But even highly respected professionals can make mistakes, pursue questionable methods, or overlook obvious holes in their logic. And, in my experience, the reality of any given research effort is usually nuanced – some aspects of it are much more valuable than others. Unfortunately, many arts professionals lack expertise to properly evaluate research reports, not having had even basic statistics training.

Issue #4: Objectivity

Research is about uncovering the truth, but sometimes people don’t want to know the truth. Advocacy goals often precede research. How many times have you heard somebody say a version of the following: “We need research to back this up”? That statement suggests a kind of research study that we see all too often: one that is conducted to affirm decisions that have already been made. By contrast, when we create a logic model, we start with the end first: we identify what we are trying to achieve and only then determine the activities necessary to achieve it.

Here are a bunch of bad, but common reasons to do a research project:

• To prove your own value.
• To increase your organization’s prestige.
• To advance an ideological agenda.
• To provide political cover for a decision.

There is only one good reason to do research, and that is to try to find out something you didn’t know before.

Issue #5: Fragmentation

The worst part of the problem I just described is that it drives what research gets done – and what doesn’t get done. There is no common research agenda adopted by the entire field, which is a shame, because collective knowledge is pretty much the definition of a public good: if I increase my own knowledge, it’s very easy for me to increase your knowledge too. The practical consequences of this fragmentation are severe. It results in a concentration of research using readily available data sources (ignoring the fact that the creation of new data sources may be more valuable). It results in a concentration of research in geographies and communities that can afford it, because people don’t often pay for research that’s not about them. And it results in a concentration of research serving narrow interests: discipline-specific, organization-specific, methodology-specific. My biggest pet peeve is that research is almost never intentionally replicated – everybody’s reinventing the wheel, studying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. A great example of a research study crying out for replication is the Arts Ripple Effect report, which I talked about earlier. The results of that study are now guiding the distribution of millions of dollars in annual arts funding. Are those results universal, or unique to the Greater Cincinnati region? We have no way to know.

Issue #6: Allocating resources

Everyone knows there’s been a trend in recent years towards more and more data collection at the level of the organization or artist. Organizations, especially small ones, complain all the time about being expected to do audience surveys, submit onerous paperwork, and so forth. And you know what, I agree with them! You might be surprised to hear me say that, but when you’re talking about organizations that have small budgets, no expertise to do this kind of work, and the funder who is requesting the information is not providing any assistance to get it…just take a risk! You make a small grant that goes bad, so what? You’re out a few thousand dollars. The sun will rise tomorrow.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I participated in a grant panel recently. I enjoyed the experience, and am glad I did it, but there’s one aspect of the experience that is relevant here. There were seven panelists, and we were all from out of town. Each of us spent, I’d say, roughly 40 hours reviewing applications in advance of the panel itself. Then we all got together for two full days in person to review these grants some more and talk about them and score them. We did this for 64 applications for up to $5,000 each, and in the end, 92% 94% were funded.

So consider this as a research exercise. The decision is who to give grants to, and how much. The data is the grant applications. The researchers are the review panel. What uncertainty is being reduced by this process? How much worse would the outcome have been if we’d just taken all the organizations, put them into Excel, run a random number generator, and distributed the dollars randomly up to $5,000 per organization? And I’m not saying this to make fun of this particular organization or single them out, because honestly it’s not uncommon to take this kind of approach to small-scale grantmaking. And yet if you compare it to ArtPlace’s first round of grants, theoretically they had thousands of projects to choose from, and they gave grants up to $1 million for creative placemaking projects – but there was no [open] review process; they just chose organizations to give grants to. So there’s a bit of a mismatch in the strategies we use to decide how to allocate resources.

There’s a concept called “expected value of information” described in a wonderful book called How to Measure Anything, by Douglas W. Hubbard. It’s a way of taking into account how much information matters to your decision-making process. In the book, Hubbard shares a couple of specific findings from his work as a consultant. He found that most variables have an information value of zero; in other words, we can study them all we want, but whatever the truth is is not going to change what we do, because they don’t matter enough in the grand scheme of things. And he also found that the things that matter the most, the kinds of things that really would change our decisions, often aren’t studied, because they’re perceived as too difficult to measure. So we need to ask ourselves how new information would actually change the decisions we make.

There is so much untapped potential in arts research. But it remains untapped because of all the issues described above. So what can we do about it?

First, we need a major field-building effort for arts research. Connecting researchers with each other through a virtual network/community of practice would help a lot. So would a centralized clearinghouse where all research can live, even if it’s behind a copyright firewall. The good news is that the National Endowment for the Arts has already been making some moves in this direction. The Endowment published a monograph a couple of months ago called “How Art Works,” the major focus of which was a so-called “system map” for the arts. But the document also had a pretty detailed research agenda for the NEA, not for the entire field, that lays out what the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis is going to do over the next five years, and two of the items mentioned are exactly the two things I just talked about: a virtual research network and a centralized clearinghouse for arts research.

This new field that we’re building should be guided by a national research agenda that is collaboratively generated and directly tied to decisions of consequence. The missing piece from the research agenda in “How Art Works” is the tie to actual decisions. Instead it has categories, like cultural participation, and research projects can be sorted under those buckets. But it’s not enough for research to simply be about something – research should serve some purpose. What do we actually need to know in order to do our jobs better?

We should be asking researchers to spend less time generating new research and more time critically evaluating other people’s research. We need to generate lots more discussion about the research that is already produced. That’s the only way it’s going to enter the public consciousness. Each time we fail to do that, we are missing out on opportunities to increase knowledge. It will also raise our collective standards for research if we are engaging in a healthy debate about it. But realistically, in order for this to happen, field incentives are going to have to change – analyzing existing research will need to be seen as equally prestigious and worthy of funding as creating a new study. Of course, I would prefer if people are not evaluating the work of their direct competitors – but I’ll take what I can get at this point!

Every research effort should take into account the expected value of the information it will produce. Consider the risk involved in various types of grants made. What are you trying to achieve by giving out lots of small grants, if that’s what you’re doing? Maybe measure the effectiveness of the overall strategy instead of the success or failure of each grant. This is getting into hypothesis territory, but based on what I’ve seen so far I would guess that research on grant strategy is woefully underfunded, while research on the effectiveness or potential of specific grants is probably overfunded. We probably worry more than we need to about individual grants, but we don’t worry as much as we should about whether the ways in which we’re making decisions about which grants to support are the right ways to do that.

Finally, we should be open-sourcing research and working as a team. I’m talking about sharing not just finished products and final reports, but plans, data, methodologies as well. I’m talking about seeking multiple uses and potential partners at every point for the work we’re doing. This would make our work more effective by allowing us to leverage each other’s strengths – we’re not all experts at everything, after all! And it would cut down on duplicated effort and free up expensive people’s time to do work that moves the field forward.

I thank everyone for their time, and I’d love to take any questions or comments on these thoughts about the state of our research field.

I’m not sure if Florida expected to get away with re-releasing his book without provoking yet another firestorm, but if that was the plan, it hasn’t exactly worked out. The onslaught started with a piece penned by Frank Bures for a new magazine called Thirty Two based in Minneapolis called “The Fall of the Creative Class.” A one-time Florida acolyte, Bures tells of how he became disenchanted with creative class theory via a bad experience living in Madison, Wisconsin, supposedly a creative hub. His direct attack (which is by no means the first of its ilk) scored a response from Florida, which of course just led to another broadside from Bures. In the meantime, despite some positive press, most of the reaction I’ve seen has ranged from catty to apoplectic. Next American City – ironically, the outlet that published Florida’s first defense piece, “Revenge of the Squelchers,” way back in 2004 – has run two different commentaries from Sean Andrew Chen that are mostly skeptical in tone. And then there’s this festival of bile from The Baffler’s Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which, while mostly sparing Florida by name, attacks the very idea of the arts as an economic engine with ferocity.

In the circles I travel in, it’s become as fashionable to pick on Richard Florida as the oft-derided hipsters with which his “creative class” is sometimes associated. In one sense you can’t blame them: this is a guy who gained an enormous amount of notoriety from scholarship with some obvious flaws. It’s hard to look at the attention his ideas commanded among the mayors and foundations of the country over the past decade, and the cushy lifestyle he now enjoys, and not feel a bit of righteous envy. I get it.

But on the other hand, I sometimes wonder if Florida’s detractors have really read his books – like really read them, front to back. They often accuse him of saying things he didn’t say, or omitting things he talks about at length (like income inequality, which occupied much of a chapter in the original Rise of the Creative Class). Although Bures’s rebuttal to Florida draws more blood, the conceit of his original article seems to be that the author’s own disappointing experience in one “creative class” city and subsequent happiness in another “creative class” city are somehow proof that creative class theory is wrong. Bures also seems to imply, via his invoking of Mel Gray’s study on arts spending in 15 cities, that Florida is explicitly an advocate for public funding of the arts, which he’s never really been (as much as arts advocates have liked to pretend he is).

My view has been that Florida is on to something from a qualitative standpoint, but that his particular way of describing it in research terms – the “3T’s” of Technology, Talent, and Tolerance, as measured at the metropolitan level rather than that of individual neighborhoods – is a limited instrument that prevents him from getting the robust results he’s looking for. As much shadenfreude as we might get from seeing a giant fall back to earth, it’s problematic when the methodological quirks of Florida’s particular approach are used to damn the entire concept of the arts as an economic driver, as we see in Frank’s article. Throughout, Frank seems to spend most of his time arguing against a straw man, the notion that people who are interested in creative class theory or creative placemaking or the economic development potential of the arts believe that these things  are the singular answer to turning around the economy in any community. Frank writes of the “millions” spent on promoting vibrancy in our nation’s cities and suggests that they would be better spent on things like “bridges, railroads, highways,” regulating the financial system, or, my favorite, universal health care. I’m sorry, but I seem to have missed the press release that announced state and local governments were spending more on street festivals and public art than re-routing the interstate or Medicaid. When the “millions” spent on making our cities a little more interesting, attractive, and fun approaches anything like the trillions spent on these other things, we can talk about misallocation of resources, mmkay?

I don’t think many people would argue, not even Richard Florida, that the arts are some kind of silver bullet that can solve all of a community’s problems. But that’s a very different thing than saying that the arts do have the potential to add value economically to communities, that they do form part of the answer to revitalization and shouldn’t be ignored or sidelined like they usually are. I’m still waiting for the conversation to go where it needs to go but hasn’t yet: how can the arts be the irreplaceable catalyst in certain, specific situations in certain kinds of cities? The broad brush with which we insist on painting the picture keeps on covering over its most important details.

(Update: Richard Layman has more.)

I’ll do a close reading of each paper in turn, then offer some concluding thoughts.

I. Marlet and van Woerkens

The first paper, authored by Dutch researchers Gerard Marlet and Clemens van Woerkens, compares creative class theory to human capital theory (human capital means the collective skills of a population, often represented by the percentage of adults with a college degree). This is the same question that was considered by Ed Glaeser in his review of The Rise of the Creative Class. Glaeser found that human capital was a better predictor of population growth in the set of US metropolitan areas mentioned in Florida’s book, though he did not look at employment growth.

Marlet and van Woerkens find that the creative class concentration in 1994 was a significant and reliable predictor of employment growth from 1994-2003 in Dutch cities. Notably, they find that this effect seems concentrated in urban areas; regional creative class share does not impact employment growth within the city. They test two different formulations of the creative class, Florida’s liberal definition which comes out to about 35% of Dutch workers, and a tighter definition leaving out people like secondary school teachers and government administrators. The two definitions perform similarly to each other. The authors also tried to disentangle causality by examining “exogenous” variables such as theater and musical performances, proximity to nature, quality of restaurants and secondary schools, number of students, and so on. I’m not totally convinced by this analysis since, as the authors acknowledge, many of these variables are probably influenced by creative class concentration as well, but it’s interesting to consider.

Marlet and van Woerkens also tested the creative class statistic against the concentration of people with Bachelor’s degrees, and found that the creative class was a better predictor of employment growth than human capital, with both a higher coefficient and stronger statistical significance. These results are replicated with different sets of years and when specific variables in the model are left out.

Finally, the authors looked at the Bohemian index (the concentration of artists in an area) and found that, while it does seem to have some explanatory power for employment growth over and above the creative class, this effect disappears when Amsterdam is removed from the sample. Perhaps Amsterdam’s status as a “world city” enables it to take advantage of artist concentrations in a way that smaller population centers cannot.

Marlet and van Woerkens conclude as follows (emphasis mine):

Members of the creative class are essentially working, but not necessarily highly educated, while highly educated people are not necessarily doing any work at all. Highly educated people might end up without jobs after studies, or choose for easy routine jobs, leaving their human capital largely unused….Levels of human capital can therefore be higher in places with more people working in creative jobs than in places with the same levels of education but less people working in creative jobs – not only because individual levels of skills and knowledge grow, but because everyone is making more and better use of other people’s knowledge. This means that the use of human capital may be more productive in places where more highly educated, creative people are living and working. Equal levels of human capital can, in other words, have different production outcomes due to different ways in which human capital is actually used: ‘working human capital’ is more productive than ‘non-working human capital’.

We suggest that it is not creativity in the sense of painting or making sculptures that makes Florida’s creative class responsible for regional growth differences. In our view creativity is the creative use of skills and knowledge. Defining creativity in this way makes the creative class an indicator for human capital.

Our overall conclusions are that Creative Class is theoretically much the same as Human Capital. To that extent we agree with Glaeser’s comment on Florida’s popular book. At the same time, the Creative Class standard – and this is precisely what Florida said in his ‘Response tot Edward Glaeser’s review’ – is in the Dutch case “a slightly better handle on actual skills, rather than using only an education-based measure – to measure what people do, rather than just what their training may say about them on paper”. By introducing the concept of Creative Class Richard Florida has found better standards for measuring human capital than the often-used education levels, this being his major (perhaps only) contribution to a better understanding of regional growth.

So that answers one question. But what drives the creative class to a particular area versus another? Marlet and van Woerkens followed up with another paper in 2005 entitled Tolerance, aesthetics, amenities or jobs? Dutch city attraction to the creative class. The co-authors understand that of Florida’s “3T’s,” the Tolerance indicator is really the linchpin of the three. (“Talent” is, after all, just human capital, which we’ve demonstrated above to be more or less the same as the creative class; and the idea that people who specialize in technology would gravitate to places with technology firms seems rather tautological.) Marlet and van Woerkens find none of the tolerance subcomponents (gay concentration, artist concentration, or pub closing hours) to be statistically significant in explaining the share of creative class workers in a city, and only one (artists) statistically significant in explaining creative class growth–and that in the wrong direction!

Rather than stop there, however, Marlet and van Woerkens go on to construct their own theory of what attracts creative class workers to the same place. In contrast to the “bohemian index” concept of concentration of artists, the co-authors find instead that the number of live performances per 1,000 residents is highly predictive of creative class concentration. This suggests that it is not self-defined artists but rather artistic activity that drives this growth (though when looking at actual creative class growth, performances lose some significance). Other significant drivers include proximity to nature, proximity to jobs, and the historic nature of buildings in the area. Each of these factors has an independent, positive association with creative class concentration. The co-authors go so far as to create an “amenity index” that has more robust explanatory power for this variable than any other single factor.

These papers are great. They are both quite readable, even if you don’t understand the numbers, and the analysis is, as far as I can tell, thorough and theoretically sound.

II. Florida, Mellander, and Stolarick

The major contribution of this paper, Inside the black box of regional development (purchase only — an earlier, free draft is available here), is to introduce a “stage-based” model that looks at the development process as a multi-step evolution rather than a simple cause and effect. Quoth the authors:

Our modeling approach is designed to address a significant weakness of previous studies of the effects of human capital and the creative class on regional development. Most of these studies use a single equation regression framework to identify the direct effects of human capital and other factors on regional development. The findings of these studies, not surprisingly, indicate that human capital outperforms other variables. But that does not establish that these other variables do not matter. First, something has to affect the initial distribution of human capital. Variables that have not performed well in other studies may exert influence by operating through human capital and thus indirectly affect regional development, or certain variables may operate through different channels. By using a system of equations our model structure allows us to parse the direct and indirect effects of key variables on each other as well as on regional development.

This new “path model” represents a bit of a departure from the theory presented in The Rise of the Creative Class. While the “3T’s” are still in evidence, Florida, Mellander and Stolarick now add universities and service amenities into the mix, as follows (click to enlarge):

As far as the human capital vs. creative class question goes, the co-authors make a useful, if slightly confusing, distinction between income (money received from mostly passive sources like investments and royalties) and wages (money earned from salaries, tips, and the like). They find that human capital is associated more strongly with income, but that the creative class has a stronger relationship with wages. No attempt is made to connect either metric with employment growth.

So what did they find? In a series of structural equation models (SEMs), not surprisingly, the “Talent” factor scored the best in predicting both wages and income. The co-authors used three different measures of talent: human capital, creative class concentration, and the super-creative core. Of these, only human capital performed well in predicting income but all three were reliable inputs into wages. In all cases, the relationship between Technology and income/wages seemed pretty weak, never getting above a correlation of .36. Tolerance varied wildly; in the version with income as the dependent variable and the super-creative core as the talent indicator, the correlation was as high as .46, but in the version with wages as the dependent variable and human capital as the talent indicator, the relationship was totally insignificant.

How about the factors that draw the creative class to a region? Taking the model that shows the strongest case for creative class theory, the creative class/wages version, we see that tolerance and universities seem to have decent, though not extraordinary correlations of .36 and .32 respectively. Service amenities have a statistically significant but low correlation of .16 with creative class concentrations.

Notably, in the above construction the R-squared for the Talent indicator is very weak, at .332 (for the super-creative core it’s even weaker, at .316). That means that only 33% of the variation in Creative Class concentration in a region can be explained by the combination of Tolerance (i.e., gay and bohemian concentrations), university faculty concentration, and service amenities. Human capital is much better explained by these factors, driven by a much stronger correlation between the Tolerance measure and human capital. I suspect, based on other reading I’ve done, that this is simply because artists and openly gay individuals are much more likely than the general populace to have college degrees.

In case the above three paragraphs were gobbledy-gook to you, the plain English version is that while the analysis contained in the paper is a head-and-shoulders improvement over that contained in the book, it still doesn’t really tell us all that much. The major weakness comes down to causality; even the authors admit that

the graphic picture of the structural model (Figure 1) expresses direct and indirect correlations, not actual causalities. Rather, the estimated parameters (path coefficients) provide information on the relation between the set of variables. Moreover, the relative importance of the parameters is expressed by the standardized path coefficients, which allow for interpretation of the direct as well as the indirect effects. We do not assume any causality among university, tolerance and consumer services but rather treat them as correlations.

Though it’s a stretch to say that the Marlet/van Woerkens article establishes causality beyond doubt, at least that paper uses employment growth over a period of time as the dependent variable. In other words, their model asks, “what can the concentration of creative class workers in a city in 1994 tell us about what happens to employment in that city between 1994 and 2003?” By contrast, Florida et al.’s model asks, “what can the concentration of creative class workers in a city in 2000 tell us about wages in that city in 2000?” Set up this way, the model cannot even pretend to be predictive. And as a result, it becomes far less useful.

Furthermore, the theoretical model placing the “3T’s” at the center in this paper struck me as a little forced. The authors seem to bend over backwards to come up with reasons why Tolerance is a signifier for other things that may or may not contribute to prosperity. Witness, for example, this rather vague series of assertions:

Fourth, locations with larger artistic and gay populations signal underlying mechanisms that increase the productivity of entrepreneurial activity. Because of their status as historically marginalized groups, traditional economic institutions have been less open and receptive to bohemian and gay populations thus requiring them to mobilize resources independently and to form new organizations and firms. We thus suggest that regions where these groups have migrated and taken root reflect underlying mechanisms that are more attuned to mobilization of such resources, entrepreneurship and new firm formation.

When I see stuff like this I think, why not just measure the underlying mechanisms directly? If the point is that entrepreneurship and new firm formation is good economically, then why not include self-employment and new firms formed per year in the model? Instead, we have artists and gays as proxies for all of these other things. But here’s an important difference between the two: artists, by the very nature of their work, actually produce things that in themselves make neighborhoods more valuable — like live performances, gathering spaces, aesthetic markers, and so on. Can we make any such generalizations about gays, lovely people though they may be?

Concluding thoughts

The whole kerfuffle around which of human capital or creative class theory better predicts economic development, while providing much fodder for the blog, in the end amounts to little more than an academic pissing match. Both sides agree that the two measures are highly correlated and mostly capture the same people with some variation at the edges. The real question, in my opinion, is what draws these highly talented individuals with much to offer their communities to one place over another? To answer that question, Marlet and van Woerkens offer a simple model that performs markedly better than the 3T’s approach despite hewing closely to concepts embraced in The Rise of the Creative Class: namely, that highly educated, talented people value ready access to jobs, natural beauty, authenticity, and a lively street scene in their local environment. Florida et al.’s paper, on the other hand, still feels to me like a model in search of a justification; there is even a lengthy note on page 13 going into some detail about how many other regression techniques failed before they settled on the one used in the paper. It makes me wonder whether the 3T’s are more of a hindrance than a help in developing useful frameworks for these questions; taking a fresh look at the problem, as Marlet and van Woerkens did, may prove more fruitful in the long run. What I do appreciate about Florida et al.’s contribution is that it takes a step toward breaking out these complex interactions into their component parts; in other words, positioning talent concentrations as the result of numerous inputs with their own causal links, rather than the move-lever-A-get-result-B style of analysis we have seen in the past. Clearly, though, we still have a long way to go before we’ll have a complete understanding of the mechanisms behind regional development in the 21st century.

I came across your post on my stuff: I’m impressed. You really get me on a variety of different levels, strengths and weaknesses.

After some conversation about our shared musician roots (it seems he used to be a guitarist in his pre-academy days), he sent me the following in response to my criticisms of the data and the methodology presented in the book:

I think we have now done most of the analyses you asked for. With Charlotta Mellander, who I’ve copied, we’ve run various indices, creative class, tolerance etc., etc. against various outcome measures of performance, including income, wages, innovation and more. Charlotta who is an economist can explain all of this in great detail, if you like. Point is these measures do extremely well, and it is our belief that much of the critical work, that is that of it that is based on empirics, misses the mark at least partly because of modelling technique or variables that they include or don’t include. We have done this for the US, Canada and Sweden. There is also the important work of Marlet and Van Woerkens which tests the creative class (the occupationally based measure) against educational human capital and finds the creative class to perform better.

In addition to the Marlet and Van Woerkens article, which is called Skills and Creativity in a Cross-section of Dutch Cities, Mellander was kind enough to send me a 2007 publication entitled Inside the Black Box of Regional Development—Human Capital, the Creative Class and Tolerance that seeks to pull apart the distinctions between creative class and human capital theory and their relative relationships to economic development. I’ll be reviewing both articles over the next week and will write a follow-up post incorporating this new information into my earlier comments. [UPDATE: Here it is.]

In the meantime, Florida’s associates Kevin Stolarick and Ian Swain sent me some links to some other work of interest. First, the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto (which Florida leads) is in the midst of a project on music and the entertainment economy. So far, three working papers have been published: Music Clusters: A Preliminary Analysis, Sonic City: The Evolving Economic Geography of the Music Industry, and That’s Entertainment: Scale and Scope Economies in the Location and Clustering of the Creative Economy. Second, it seems that Toronto is embarking on a cultural asset mapping project of its own, called Placing Creativity. So far, the website only has info on a pretty awesome-looking conference on cultural mapping taking place next month, but it will be interesting to see what comes out of this collaborative effort.

*

One of the reasons I sought to pursue an independent study on public policy and the arts this semester was because it would finally gave me an excuse to read The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida’s original treatise on the subject. I highly recommend the book for anyone serious about studying the creative economy and arts-based community revitalization, if for no other reason than the influence it has had on the conversation. Framed by a sprawling narrative covering trends in workplace attire, cultural consumption, professional networking, and more, the book puts forth three main arguments:

• The nature of society and work is changing. Instead of staying with an organization for their entire careers, people now switch jobs frequently. Workers value intellectual challenge and variety in their jobs as much as or more than salary or job security. Our social connections, the ways we relate to each other, are shifting radically as more informal cultural norms and diverse lifestyles take the place of the lockstep conformity seen in previous generations. Increasingly, work is seen as an expression of identity as much as a way of feeding the family, a part of the outfit that an individual wears in life. The people driving these changes in values are part of a huge new class, the Creative Class, that wields tremendous economic power and encompasses some 30% of the United States population.
• Traditional notions of economic development are out of date. The old models assumed that people flock to wherever the jobs are, implying a development strategy of cutting corporate taxes, developing industrial parks, and so on. By contrast, Florida argues that jobs move to, or are created, where the talent is, implying a development strategy focused on attracting people as consumers of place.
• The Creative Class chooses where to live based on a number of factors, most prominent among them a supportive social milieu that includes networks of other Creative Class workers, an openness to ideas and people of all kinds, and opportunities to express creativity not only through their work but outside of work as well.

It’s important to understand that Florida’s definition of the Creative Class is exceptionally broad. Florida’s “Super-Creative Core,” a subset of the Creative Class, includes not just what we normally think of as “creative types,” i.e., artists and media people, but also scientists, engineers, and education professionals. Florida’s vision of the full Creative Class adds on virtually all white-collar workers, including bankers, middle managers, lawyers, doctors, and high-end marketers and salespeople. Essentially, as several have pointed out before me, he is talking about yuppies. Florida argues that this is because all of these professions require some degree of creativity in their execution—some level of strategic analysis and planning. (If I were constructing the definition I would also include chefs, restaurateurs, and bar owners, as many of them are central to the creative ecosystem, along with nonprofit professionals outside of the arts, healthcare, and education.)

*

On the face of it, I find little to quibble with in The Rise of the Creative Class. Certainly, my own experience bears out the notion that highly educated, intelligent networks of people congregate in specific regions and not others, and that because those networks play a major factor in relocation decisions, they are highly self-reinforcing. It also makes sense that a friendly environment for such folks would not only include places for them to work and people for them to hang out with, but also things for them to do – specifically, things like a street scene, cultural activities, recreation, and so forth. One can imagine that the openness and tolerance seen on university campuses creates a demand for that same openness and tolerance later in life, since one would not want to live where one’s friends would not feel comfortable.

Not surprisingly, then, I find most criticism of Florida’s work on philosophical grounds largely unconvincing. Florida’s decision to use the prevalence of gay couples as a proxy for a culture of tolerance predictably made conservatives apoplectic. While making enough noise that Florida felt compelled to publicly deny that he himself was gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that), they rushed to disprove the notion that gays somehow drive economic development on their own (Florida never makes any such claim in the book). In fact, many of Florida’s critics either seem to miss the point of his argument entirely or overlook its nuances. For example, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert, whose work I generally love, imply in their monograph From Creative Economy to Creative Society that Florida had ignored the potential for exacerbation of income inequality due to creative class clustering. Yet the original edition of The Rise of the Creative Class addresses this issue prominently in chapter 17. Ann Daly’s oft-cited essay “Richard Florida’s High-Class Glasses” devotes several paragraphs of its length to a snippet of the book on cultural theory and political content in art that, while interesting, is so tangential to the author’s core thesis as to be virtually irrelevant. Charges, such as Melanie Smith’s, that Florida’s theory is based on circular logic don’t quite hold up either. The theory relies in part on network effects to describe the attraction of Creative Class people to a place, so it’s appropriate to think that (for example) the number of tech workers or artists in a community would be a factor in the migration of more tech workers or artists to that community.

*

Where Florida is more vulnerable to criticism, in my opinion, is in his methodology and use of data. In the first appendix to The Rise of the Creative Class, he writes, “in retrospect, I probably could have written this book using no statistics at all.” Sometimes, while reviewing chapters 13 and 14 and the accompanying appendices, I found myself wishing he had done just that. Florida offers several prescriptions in the book for creative community development. He boils down his recommendations to a three-axis yardstick, the “3T’s,” for Technology, Talent, and Tolerance, and creates measurement indicators for each. For the most part, both the logic and data tying these axes together are vague at best. He relies mostly on lists of rankings of metropolitan areas that look somewhat like each other. Though he documents statistically significant correlations in most cases, we are not told whether they have more explanatory power than other combinations (economist Edward Glaeser explores this very question in his review of the book by testing the impact of the percentage of adults with BAs versus other indices on population growth), nor given much information about the regressions.

A more serious flaw is that the connection between the 3T’s and actual economic growth is quite weak indeed. If Florida and his team ran a regression on each of the 3T’s and job creation or per-capita income, controlling for other factors, we are not shown the results. In fact, the notes to chapter 13 document a correlation between the Creative Class concentration and employment growth that, while statistically significant, is only 0.03!

By venturing into the world of quantitative analysis, Florida considerably raises the bar for his claims and makes it easy for critics like Steven Malanga to assail him with statistics countering his own:

Yet since 1993, cities that score the best on Florida’s analysis have actually grown no faster than the overall U.S. jobs economy, increasing their employment base by only slightly more than 17 percent. Florida’s indexes, in fact, are such poor predictors of economic performance that his top cities haven’t even outperformed his bottom ones. Led by big percentage gains in Las Vegas (the fastest-growing local economy in the nation) as well as in Oklahoma City and Memphis, Florida’s ten least creative cities turn out to be jobs powerhouses, adding more than 19 percent to their job totals since 1993—faster growth even than the national economy.

To be fair, Malanga’s cherry-picking of stats—why take only the top and bottom 10?—shows only that two can play at this game, but the burden of proof here is still on Florida. Malanga’s core point—that Florida barely makes any effort to show how the “3T’s” are related to actual economic growth—is powerful. The author’s subsequent writing, including his essay Revenge of the Squelchers and the follow-up book Cities and the Creative Class, attempts to rectify these omissions, but the problems remain in the original.

The final insult, however, is Florida’s vaunted Creativity Index, the results of which seemed so strange to me when I first laid eyes on them. After some investigation of the methodology, I soon realized why. The Creativity Index in the original edition of the book is based on four equally weighted factors: the concentration of Creative Class workers in the area, a “High Tech” index measuring a region’s share of national tech industry output as well as the concentration of tech industries within the region, the number of patents filed per capita, and the concentration of same-sex domestic partners within the region. No explanation or evidence whatsoever is given to support the idea that these factors should be equally weighted. Instead, each of 268 metropolitan areas is ranked on each of the four factors, and the Creativity Index is calculated simply by subtracting the region’s rank order in each category from 1076, which, oddly, is four times 269. For example, Portland, ME ranks 28th on the Creative Class metric, 89th on the High-Tech Index, 134th on the Innovation (patent) Index, and 12th on the Gay Index. Its Creativity Index is 1076 – (28 + 89 + 134 + 12) = 813. No attention is paid to the distribution of the actual values within those ranks, which is not very useful if the distribution is anything other than linear, or differs between the four factors. Say there’s a giant cluster of cities in the Creative Class index that are almost tied from #140 to #157, but the city at #157 in the patent index is a huge drop from #156; this metric wouldn’t pick such common subtleties up. Rigorous scientific inquiry this is not.

The paperback version of The Rise of the Creative Class contains a slightly improved index that takes into account certain data, such as the Bohemian Index measuring the share of artistically creative people in a region, which did not exist in fresh enough form for inclusion in the original. Nevertheless, the equal weights are still not justified, and the ranking problem remains (though the calculation is different: now each index is computed as a percentage of its distance from the bottom, and the percentages are averaged across the three indices to arrive at the Creativity Index).

*

What frustrates me most about Florida’s mathematical adventures is that the flimsy construction of the Creativity Index saps credibility from what is, in my view, a much stronger qualitative argument about the role of place in determining the futures of young professionals. If I were constructing my own triumvirate of attractors (places to work, people to hang out with, things to do), it would not look so different from Florida’s. I would only add one wrinkle. Arts and culture advocates and their critics tend to look at the relationship between the arts and development as a two-step process: bring in the arts, development happens. I think we have seen in the arts-led gentrification of New York neighborhoods, though, that it’s not quite so simple. First of all, it matters what kind of arts are being promoted—A-list, high culture, institutionalized art, or grassroots, low-barrier, scene-driven art. Secondly, arts-based economic development and community revitalization are both iterative in nature. To be more explicit, it’s not that yuppies who have no arts training in their backgrounds suddenly choose cities based on affinity for the art museum. Rather, it’s that the arts have their own sub-economies that, over time, can help establish neighborhood identity and set in motion the attraction of more mainstream amenities (such as interesting restaurants, music venues, nightlife) that drive further growth. The rest of my independent study will explore these intricacies in greater depth.

Richard Florida gets much right in The Rise of the Creative Class, and it’s just possible that he was most right about the parts that relate most closely to the arts. Drowning amid the swamp of data on the various indices is the following sentence on page 260: “A region’s Bohemian concentration in 1990 predicts both its high-tech industry concentration and its employment and population growth between 1990 and 2000.” There it is: a statistically significant relationship between artists and economic development. That sentence alone does more to make Florida’s case than the many pages of graphs and tables before or after. I hope future criticism and research will do more to shed light on this particular aspect of his argument.

UPDATE: Florida has responded to this post and you can read my follow-up here.

Further reading:

• CreativeClass.com – Richard Florida’s website
• Luke Collins, Talent Scout
• Salon interview with Richard Florida
• Justin Fox, Can Richard Florida’s creativity index explain the trajectory of real estate prices?
• Christopher DeWolf, Creative Class War: The Debate over Richard Florida’s Ideas
• Karrie Jacobs, Why I Don’t Love Richard Florida
• Steven Malanga review of Who’s Your City?, Florida’s latest book
• Terry Nichols Clark, Urban Amenities: Lakes, Opera, and Juice Bars – Do They Drive Development?
• Michele Hoyman and Christopher Faricy, It Takes a Village: A Test of the Creative Class, Social Capital, and Human Capital Theories (finds no relationship between Creative Class concentration and economic development from 1990-2004)
• Gerard Marlet and Clemens Van Woerkens, Skills and Creativity in a Cross-section of Dutch Cities
• Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, Kevin Stolarick, Inside the black box of regional development—human capital, the creative class and tolerance