“Taiwanese Performance” by East-West Center

Title: Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

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

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2006

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

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

Methods: literature review, indicator construction using existing data

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

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

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

The indicators they propose are:

Presence of Opportunities for Cultural Participation

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

Participation

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

Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Atto primo ▼ Picnic” by BAAM Milano

Title: Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement

Author(s): Maria Rosario Jackson and Joaquin Herranz

Publisher: The Urban Institute

Year: 2002

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

Topics: Cultural Indicators, Neighborhoods, Community, Cultural Vitality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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