“Vista Paradiso against the blue sky” by flickr user See-ming Lee

Title: Culture Urban Future: Global Report on Culture for Sustainable Urban Development

Author(s): UNESCO and many others

Publisher: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Year: 2016

URL: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002459/245999e.pdf

Topics: urban planning, cities, economic development, community revitalization, social cohesion, community identity, cultural heritage, sustainability, resilience

Methods: survey of regional and global trends, case studies

What it says: The report aims to provide a global overview of the role played by culture – including cultural heritage, creative economies, and diverse forms of cultural expression – in developing thriving cities that are people-centered, inclusive, and sustainable; in the process, the authors hope to make the case for culture as a force “at the heart of urban renewal and innovation.” Their proximate purpose is to influence the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 – “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” – to ensure that culture is incorporated robustly as a lever of change. That’s a big ambition with fuzzy borders, and the report accordingly adopts a strategy of profusion, combining across its three hundred pages:

• Part I: Eight regional analyses covering every part of the world, authored by local experts. (The versions in this report are condensed; full versions are available separately online.) Each lays out for its region the history of urban development, trends within cities (e.g., suburbanization), challenges to continued development with a special eye to the role of culture, and high-level policy recommendations.
• Part II: Twelve thematic reflections on the role of culture for sustainable cities grouped into the categories of People, Environment, and Policies. Each of these consists of an essay by an expert on a different general idea, such as “humanizing cities through culture” and “enabling access to public spaces to advance economic, environmental, and social benefits.” These meditations draw on the literature in a general way and with relatively few citations (though more are available online) to point to possible ways to use culture in urban development, sometimes drawing on successful examples from the field.
• One-hundred-eleven case studies: Throughout the first two parts, short examples of specific interventions are summarized in inset boxes (e.g., an app developed to map the informal public transit network of vans in Nairobi; the gradual development of the historic city in Coimbra, Portugal). These are typically a paragraph or two long and seem designed to illustrate the breadth of ways culture and urban development intersect.
• Forty-four “perspectives”: Also throughout the first two parts, mini-essays from luminaries such as architect Renzo Piano and the head of the Library of Alexandria offer first-person takes on a range of issues, from “creative placemaking as urban policy” to “people-centered heritage conservation in Beijing.”
• Conclusions and recommendations: See below.
• Eight “dossiers” on UNESCO programs relevant to culture and urban development. These brief primers, gathered in an appendix to the report, describe things like the role of cities in the World Heritage program (one-third of the sites on the list are historical urban areas) and the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities.

The report’s short “conclusions and recommendations” section acknowledges the difficulty of summarizing the state of global urban culture in a few crisp proposals, but the authors do offer 12 recommendations with a few sentences of description for each. These draw out ideas that recur throughout the other sections of the report, and they are grouped into three themes:

1. People-centered cities are culture-centered spaces: enhance the livability of cities and safeguard their identities, ensure social inclusion in cities through culture, promote creativity and innovation in urban development through culture, and build on culture for dialogue and peace-building initiatives.
2. Quality urban environments are shaped by culture: foster human-scale and mixed-use cities by drawing on lessons learned from urban conservation practices, promote a livable built and natural environment, enhance the quality of public spaces through culture, and improve urban resilience through culture-based solutions.
3. Sustainable cities need integrated policy-making that builds on culture: regenerate cities and rural-urban linkages by integrating culture at the core of urban planning, build on culture as a sustainable resource for inclusive economic and social development, promote participatory processes through culture and enhance the role of communities in local governance, and develop innovative and sustainable financial models for culture.

What I think about it: While far-reaching and well-intentioned, “Culture Urban Future” suffers from key limitations. First, the report’s purpose is not really to assess or synthesize the most up-to-the-minute academic research, and the paucity of citations or even explicit connections to the literature limits its usefulness as a guide for in-depth inquiry. Second, as a general primer encompassing (at least in theory) all cultural aspects of cities everywhere, it skims vast expanses, summarizing trends to raise awareness in a general way without engaging with any particular topic in great depth or contributing significant new insights that would merit further evaluation as independent evidence-based claims.

What it all means: The report may be useful to students of urban development or urban culture as a primer to some of “the current policies and practices of urban regeneration and sustainable development that have put culture at their core,” in the words of the report’s mission statement. This especially pertains to those with a specific regional interest who can focus on the relevant section for a partial overview of trends and practices. The topic itself certainly merits further study: the report notes that although it was only in 2007 that the majority of human beings lived in cities, urbanization is accelerating dramatically: 67% of the world’s people are expected to be urbanites by 2050. Increasingly, human culture will be city culture, so we would do well to get our “culture urban future” right.

“Europe” by flickr user Charles Clegg

Title: Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe

Author(s): from Culture Action Europe: Katherine Heid, Mehdi Arfaoiu, Luca Bergamo, Natalie Giorgadze; from Agenda 21 for Culture – UCLG: Carina Lopes, Jordi Balta Portoles, Jordi Pascual; Simon Mundy

Publisher: European Economic and Social Committee

Year: 2016

URL: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/resources/docs/qe-01-16-463-en-n.pdf

Topics: urban planning, creative placemaking, cities, Europe, economic development, community revitalization, social cohesion, community identity

Methods: narrative literature review, case studies

What it says: The report aims to assess what is known about the relationship between culture (defined as “cultural industries, visual and performing arts, heritage and the creative industries”) and cities along four dimensions, as follows:

• Culture as a vehicle for economic growth: exploring traditional economic impact and value-added studies on the cultural and creative industries, heritage, cultural events, communications technologies, and “cultural routes,” the study concludes that “the benefits of culture for the economy follow a multidimensional path, having first a direct impact by creating jobs to support cultural production, then attracting tourists and amateurs as culture is being exhibited and promoted, and lastly sustaining regional investments and growth as the cultural value and knowledge of the region is recognised and exploited.”
• Culture as an instrument for reconverting cities: exploring literature on culture and urban regeneration, spillover effects of cultural activities, and the European Capitals of Culture program, the study stresses the importance of citizen participation in planning initiatives and an integrated approach, and recommends the adoption of culture/heritage impact studies.
• Culture as a tool for integration and inclusiveness: exploring literature on intercultural dialogue and migration, gender, and special needs (i.e, disability), the report emphasizes the importance of diversifying organizational management, programming, and audience development strategies.
• Culture as a pillar of European identity within Europe and beyond: examining the literature on the contribution of cities and regions to European identity, the role of non-European cities in maintaining cultural relations with Europe, cross-border cooperation and mobility, city networks, and cultural rights, the study discusses at length the notion of “global cultural citizenship.”

Within each section, the authors offer several case studies of “good practices” representing on-the-ground approaches toward achieving the goals in question.

This main part of the report is preceded by a brief review of data on cultural participation in Europe, the role that culture plays in society as perceived by citizens, and economic data on the creative industries. The report concludes with a set of 17 recommendations to the European Economic and Social Committee for its future work in cultural policy. These recommendations encompass five themes:

1. Recognize cultural rights as fundamental to human development: Envision culture as an enabler of dialogue and exchange, promote cultural diversity in the framework of human rights, and deepen exploration of the relationship between culture and human rights.
2. Acknowledge culture as necessary for sustainable development: Make culture a separate category of concern in sustainable development conversations, recognize the impact of culture on public and private initiatives, and incorporate culture into social cohesion strategies.
3. Include new players in the democratic governance of culture: Bring civil society organizations into dialogue around policymaking, and recognize the importance of grassroots cultural initiatives.
4. Support exchange between cultures to foster social and economic development: Emphasize cross-border cooperation and mobility, encourage collaboration among cities in and beyond Europe, allow migration to be part of the solution, and support the role of cities in international sustainable development.
5. Empower cities’ decisions on culture to shape our future: Use cultural spaces to shape participation, engage communities on the periphery of cities, use culture to active public spaces for increased security, fund cultural processes, and reinvest cultural benefits in cultural ecosystems.

What I think about it: Despite the relevance and importance of its subject matter, “Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe” is a prime example of the limitations of narrative-style literature review. Because it makes little effort to distinguish between the studies it cites or synthesize across them, the central portion of the report reads mainly as a series of disconnected (and lengthy) quotes from other authors. To its credit, the report does attempt to offer takeaways in the set of policy recommendations advanced at the end of the document. Some of the ideas offered are worth exploring – in particular, the idea of integrating dialogue and communities of practice around culture and human rights – and the holistic/integrationist stance of the authors very much matches Createquity’s. However, the language of the recommendations is often so vague and general as to significantly undermine their usefulness.

What it all means: Though it doesn’t offer much in the way of striking insights on its subject matter, “Culture, Cities, and Identity in Europe” will be useful to someone looking for a bibliography on the topics covered, particularly from a European perspective. It’s also worthwhile to compare this pan-European take on culture and urban policy to American approaches; of particular interest from a US perspective is the bid to redefine European identity as tied to an inclusive, globally conscious notion of cultural citizenship rather than any particular set of ethnicities or national origins.

The Office–by flickr user Rum Bucolic Ape

Income inequality, slow economic growth and wage stagnation have been hot button issues in recent years. Last month, the Obama administration did something significant about the latter, announcing an updated overtime rule that would make millions more eligible for overtime pay. Effective December 1, 2016, the new rule doubles the salary threshold—from $23,660 to $47,476 per year—under which most salaried workers are guaranteed overtime. The rule is expected to affect some 4.2 million workers, though whether it will benefit these workers (through increased wages) or possibly harm some of them (through lower base salaries and reduced benefits) remains to be seen. The implications for industry, however, are likely to be dramatic no matter what, especially for firms like publishing, fashion, media, consulting and yes, nonprofit arts organizations that have long relied on the willingness of young, ambitious employees to work long hours for little pay in exchange for a shot at the big time down the line. The shift might not be such a bad thing for the arts more generally, however. If nonprofits and businesses have less incentive to overwork low-paid employees, those employees will likely have more time for leisure activities, which could lead to a (further) boom in amateur arts participation and entrepreneurial arts ventures once this rule goes into effect.

Brazil Dumps, Then Reinstates its Cultural Ministry. Brazil has become a familiar character in the twenty-four hour news cycle in recent months, what with the impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff and a faltering economy, along with concerns about the zika virus in light of the upcoming Olympics (which is plagued with its own corruption and other scandals). The cultural sector had its fair share of drama this month after interim president Michel Temer, who replaced Rousseff in what many are calling a coup, announced a plan to subsume the Brazilian cultural ministry into the education ministry on May 12 as part of a broader effort to streamline the government. The plan immediately met with fierce opposition from Brazil’s cultural community. Artists staged occupations of government buildings across 11 cities and even music legends Erasmo Carlos and Caetano Veloso lent their support, giving a concert at a Rio de Janeiro protest on May 20. The pressure clearly worked; many credit artists with Temer’s reversal.

LISC Tries a New Model to Fight Gentrification. Adaptive reuse of abandoned spaces has long been a tried-and-true move in creative placemaking playbook, but concern has been growing about the gentrification effects of such policies in an era of increasing income inequality. The Local Initiatives Support Corp., a national nonprofit organization that has been investing in neighborhoods since 1982, has decided to try something different, committing $50 million to help prevent the gentrification many fear will be a byproduct of the redevelopment of Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. The new park development along the Anacostia River–which has been likened to New York City’s High Line–is expected to increase adjacent property values, pricing out poorer residents who have long called the area home. LISC funding will support groups providing affordable housing, early childhood education, medical care, food support, arts education and other services near park site, in an attempt to preemptively ensure that poorer residents are able to remain in their communities. The park is slated to open in mid-2019, but LISC says it is committed to the project and to the price tag no matter the timeline.

Big Shifts in British Public Broadcasting. Last August, we reported on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC’s) financial struggles–compounded by a trend towards internet media consumption–and noted that the government had appointed a committee to review the BBC’s Royal Charter. That charter expires at the end of 2017, and all agree the 94-year old company finds itself at a critical juncture. Much has changed in the decade since its charter was last renewed, and the BBC–which receives an outsize £5 billion in licensing fees, commercial and other income–is under close scrutiny. This month, culture secretary John Whittingdal unveiled the government’s plans for the BBC in a white paper. The main takeaways? An emphasis on greater transparency and fiscal responsibility, and a new board with government appointees (which some critics worry compromises the BBC’s journalistic independence from the government). The white paper also notes that it “welcomes the BBC’s commitment to develop and test some form of additional subscription services,” giving the corporation the green light to launch a Netflix-like paid subscription service. The uncertainty facing the BBC comes as the UK’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster Channel 4 held off a threat to sell off the government’s stake to the highest bidder, which was called off after outcry from channel representatives and the wider public. In many ways the BBC and Channel 4 will serve as a harbinger of other government-sponsored news organizations’ fates in the digital economy.

Kresge Pairs Health and Art & Culture Programs for Neighborhood Revitalization. Food and culture have always been closely aligned; this month, the Kresge Foundation took that relationship a few daring steps further by pairing up its Arts & Culture and Health Programs to launch Fresh, Local & Equitable: Food as a Creative Platform for Neighborhood Revitalization, or, FreshLo. This unprecedented program, which aims to strengthen economic vitality, cultural expression and health in low-income communities, will distribute nearly $2 million in grant funding in support of neighborhood-scale projects demonstrating creative, cross-sector visions of food-oriented development. The foundation seems to be onto something with the food+art thing: more than 500 organizations applied for FreshLo funding, and Kresge ultimately decided to fund six more grants than initially planned. Though the Kresge Foundation has a long history of tackling food deserts, this is the first time a national funder has intentionally integrated food, art and community to drive neighborhood revitalization at this scale.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Melanca Clark has been named president and CEO of the Hudson-Webber Foundation.
• Loren Harris has been appointed Vice President of Programs at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
• Susan Delvalle has been named president and executive director of Creative Capital.
• Shannon Daut is the new Cultural Affairs Manager of the City of Santa Monica Community and Cultural Services Department.
• The Field Foundation of Illinois has appointed former Joyce Foundation culture director Angelique Power its new President.
• After a decade working with the Future of Music Coalition, CEO Casey Rae leaving to become SiriusXM’s director of music licensing.
• After seventeen years with The Association of Independent Music, Alison Denham is taking on a new, global role at Worldwide Independent Network.
• Artstor President James Schulman has joined the Mellon Foundation as a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Mellon Foundation.
• Acclaimed music and culture writer Sasha Frere-Jones has abruptly exited the L.A. Times after less than a year at the paper due to “ethical issues.”
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation seeks a Program Officer. Posted May 6; no closing date.
• Slover Linett Audience Research seeks a Vice President. Posted May 12; no closing date.
• Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks an Associate Vice President. Posted May 26; no closing date.
• Nina Simon’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is hiring a Director of Development and Community Relations. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Out west, a survey commissioned by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission provides a snapshot of the state of arts education in Oregon. In Boston, the Boston Public Schools Arts Expansion released a case study on the successes of its work. And across the pond, a UK study reveals deep concerns about the future of arts education among those in the theater industry.
• A report from Lifetime Arts looks at arts education for the aging in America’s libraries.
• Diversity continues to dominate conversation the field. The Americans for Arts and National Endowment for the Arts (following up on the former’s cultural equity statement) released the results of their 2015 Local Arts Agency Census, revealing that taken a whole, the field could do a much better job of diversifying board and staffs. The website CNTRST calculated the total percentage of ‘whiteness’ in mainstream films, and found that white men take up twice as much space on the silver screen than they do in real life. A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK shows that women make up just 13.6% of film directors in the UK; a percentage that has barely changed in the past decade. In more encouraging news, a study released by Asian American Performers Action Coalition show gains for minority actors in New York City: in the 2014-15 season, 30% of theater roles in NYC went to black, Latino and Asian-Americans. Related, Richard Florida shared the results of his research on the racial divide within the already-advantaged creative class.
• A new evaluation assesses the successes and impact of the New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship over 25 years.
• Two interesting papers from Bridgespan this month. The first finds that funders’ reluctance to fully fund overhead costs prevents many nonprofits from maximizing their impact. The second argues that billion-dollar philanthropic investments in key areas could improve social mobility and revive “the American dream” for low-income families.
• A report on the first three years of the Taking Part survey’s longitudinal study (which has been conducting annual interviews about arts engagement with a group of 4,600 adults in England) reveals statistics on who attends the arts most often and why people stop engaging.
• A study commissioned by Intermedia Arts assesses the demand and availability of arts-based community development training and investigate how the benefits of Intermedia Arts’ Creative Community Leadership Institute could be made accessible for a broader range of communities.
• A report from the February 2016 Salzburg Global Seminar looks the role of the arts in advancing environmental sustainability.
• A study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that creative individuals share more personality traits with psychopaths than their less creative peers do.
• A report from the UK calls for stricter rules for primary ticket selling sites, rather than harsher punishments for secondary sites. And it turns out, according to a survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries, that Shakespeare is far more popular in Brazil, India, China, Mexico and Turkey than he is in the UK.

• The National Endowment for the Arts has shared a draft of its strategic plan for FY14-18, and in what I believe may be a first, is inviting public comment on it via SurveyMonkey. Ah, these modern times we live in. Now let’s just hope House Republicans don’t succeed in slashing its budget by 49%.
• A new report from the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and the Center for an Urban Future details 15 policy innovations for cities that are “novel, proven and scalable.” While no arts-specific innovations made the list, one of the ideas is a type of “digital badging” program found in Philadelphia, Providence and Chicago that “allow[s] students both inside the K-12 system and outside to earn credentials for skills they learn in a wide variety of educational settings, from digital tools workshops at public libraries to art classes at museums.”
• The City of Buffalo is at risk of losing over $1 million worth of donated musical instruments if it follows through with cuts to music programs in its schools.
• The City of New York has taken over management of the financially troubled South Street Seaport Museum.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The McKnight Foundation has hired Arleta Little as arts program officer, replacing Laura Zimmermann. If she’s looking for advice on how to settle into her new role, she can check out this completely awesome video Laura made as a goodbye kiss to her old employer.
• After 25 years in various positions at the Ford Foundation, philanthropy data nut and friend of the blog Kyle Reis is now Senior Director of Global Data Services at TechSoup. Here he is writing about the Foundation Center’s Reporting Commitment.

IN THE FIELD

• Doug Borwick offers a range of thoughts from the Americans for the Arts Convention.
• So long Codaex, a European classical music distributor.
• A new national network of Latino theater companies has formed in Southern California. Service organizations will note with interest that a Theatre Communications Group conference was the forum that provided the initial push.
• In very sad news, Rick Lester, founding CEO of arts marketing consultancy TRG Arts, passed away suddenly last weekend while participating in a bike ride for charity. TRG, which is notable for its management of nearly two dozen community arts patron databases across the country, has a memorial page up with a myriad of touching tributes from colleagues past and present.

BIG IDEAS

• The NEA’s Jason Schupbach reflects on the Our Town program now that its third round of grants has been announced.
• The Internet is democratizing all sorts of things, not just the arts. Here, the Atlantic reports on the rise of citizen cartography.
• Rather than trying (or refusing) to do more with less, why not use the challenge as an opportunity to explore constructive partnerships?
• Two more than worthwhile perspectives on the past and future of online marketing, from Seth Godin and Adam Thurman.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Attention study-at-home MBA candidates: the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan points us to a motherlode of Stanford philanthropy case studies made available for free recently via Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s ProjectU. CEP also has some tips for communicating with grantees.
• Rick Noguchi of the Irvine Foundation offers an inside look into grant deliberations and explains how the foundation made some of its decisions in the most recent round of the Exploring Engagement Fund.
• Streaming music services in general, and Spotify in particular, have come under increasing criticism from musicians for their ultra-low royalty payout rates. Most recently, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and several associates decided to pull their music from the site in protest. But is Spotify actually undercutting music piracy rather than album sales? As usual, the folks at Future of Music Coalition have turned in the most thoughtful analysis we’ve yet seen on this issue.
• Thinking about starting a crowdfunding project and not sure how to figure out the budgeting? You might want to try Taylor Davidson’s financial modeling template in Excel.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A new report from Americans for the Arts details the mostly modest salaries of local arts agency employees. But who says you can’t get rich being an arts administrator? Indeed, the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a long post on income inequality in the arts, and the idea that it may be portending changes in the economy as a whole. And Diane Ragsdale considers the interesting question of whether being paid too much “crowds out” one’s existing intrinsic motivation to work.
• Can we make a dent in poverty just by teaching parents how to parent better? A long-term study from Jamaica suggests maybe so. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between rich kids and poor kids is now twice as large as that between black children and white children. The cause of poor performance by poor students? No one’s quite figured it out yet, but it’s not bad teachers, nor is it moms on crack. (Seriously – a 23-year longitudinal study in Philadelphia has revealed that being born to poverty affects kids’ cognitive development far more than whether or not their mothers were on crack while pregnant. Think about that one for a bit.) Here’s a map of poverty and race in America.
• Boston’s Charles River is finally swimmable again – a concrete example of a data-driven policy success. (And it took nearly two decades to make it happen.)

ETC.

• Congratulations to Andrew Taylor on a full decade of his blog, the Artful Manager. That is quite a milestone in this space! Andrew had it going on pretty much light years before any of us.
• Ben Huh, the head of I Can Has Cheezburger (better known as the home of LOLcats), on “bad art”:
  

  [W]e are entering an age where there is very little in the way between an idea and an expression online, and that means more and more people are participating in ways of expressing themselves. What we do is encourage that artistic expression even if we don’t recognize their creations as “fine art.”

  Human beings have this incredible desire to connect and express themselves and that is what is filling up our time on the Internet, and I don’t think that is bad. It is actually a wonderful thing.

Gentrification – photo by Michael Daines

Impetus

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bigger Picture

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

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

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

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

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

The Antitheticals

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Agnostics

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

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

Untangling Culpability

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

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

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

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

The Co-opted

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

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

Questions and Crossroads

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

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

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

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

Mural in Paducah, KY. Photo by Tom Borrup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Really scary stuff about political meddling in editorial content at the Alabama public television network. Seems like one of the underreported stories of the year.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Randy Engstrom on his appointment as interim director of the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, replacing Vincent Kitch who left abruptly in August. Engstrom won the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Award a few years back for his pioneering work with the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Seattle.

IN THE FIELD

• Victor Kuo offers a good overview of FSG Social Impact Advisors’ work in Cincinnati to develop shared outcomes across a range of funders and help build “backbone organizations” in the region.  Kuo will be presenting with ArtsWave’s Mary McCullough-Hudson and me at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference later this month.
• Is crowdfunding a good fit for museums? The recent experience of the Hirshhorn and Contemporary Art Museum Houston suggest not. On the other hand, with the help of superstar web cartoonist The Oatmeal, a campaign to build a museum honoring the inventor Nikola Tesla has raised over $1.35 million on Indiegogo.
• What it’s like to (not) make a living as a poet.

THE MYSTIQUE OF CITIES

• Diana Lind on the revitalization of Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood: “It becomes harder to complain about gentrification when investment returns to the community the benefits of street lights, restored facades, new trees and eyes on the street.”
• Burning Man is not just an inspiration for artists – according to this article by burner Jessica Reeder in Utne Reader, it also could be a model for city planners. A well-written, thought-provoking piece.

THE (NOT SO?) DISMAL SCIENCE

• Interesting list of economists who support, or are practitioners of, the arts. Be sure to read the comments too.
• Check out this super fascinating interview with young economists about the future of their field. Some quotes of note:
  

  Although we have accumulated considerable evidence showing that people do not always behave rationally, we do not have as good a sense of how they actually do behave and what this means for policy.

  [W]e are far from a unified, versatile, believable alternative to the rational-actor model.  I am hopeful, though, that this might be overcome—in part because of progress in the sister disciplines (psychology and neuroscience) and basic modeling, and also because empirical anomalies are forcing the economic profession to be more open-minded.  Contributions by computer scientists and physicists will help inject new perspectives into economics.

  In his famous 1945 article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” F. A. Hayek argued that despite their inequity and inefficiency, free markets were necessary in order to allow the incorporation of information held by dispersed individuals into social decisions.  No central planner could hope to collect and process all the information necessary for social decisions; only markets allowed and provided the incentives for disaggregated information processing.  Yet, increasingly, information technology is leading individuals to delegate their most “private” decisions to automated processing systems.

  Economics is in the midst of a massive and radical change.  It used to be that we had little data, and no computing power, so the role of economic theory was to “fill in” for where facts were missing.  Today, every interaction we have in our lives leaves behind a trail of data….The tools of economics will continue to evolve and become more empirical.  Economic theory will become a tool we use to structure our investigation of the data.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Cool visualization of the top-selling artworks from the past four years. I recommend checking out the “men / women” view.
• Lots of people are talking about Walk Score, but some users (including me) find its ratings a bit unreliable in practice. Urbanist Steve Mouzon thinks it’s because Walk Score misses the crucial point that some places are simply much more pleasant to look at than others, and that affects how far people are willing to walk. Two adjacent suburban strip malls might have lots of amenities clustered in one place, but no one wants to walk from one to the other, because walking through parking lots is soul-destroying. So Mouzon has developed the interesting concept of Walk Appeal as a potential next-generation index of walkability/livability.
• Amazon releases its book sales data in the context of an interesting political “heat map,” which suggests that GOP voters buy more politically tinged books, proportionally speaking, than their Democratic counterparts do.
• Michael Hickey is examining the details of nonprofit arts organization budgets in New York City in a multipart series for his new blog, Man About Town. In his first post, he finds that four institutions (which he doesn’t name, but I’m guessing are the Met Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall) received nearly half of all the dollars granted by the city to arts organizations in 2010. His next entry discusses the mysterious “Other Earned Revenue” budget category that accounts for more than 20% of earned income across all organizations. A third includes testimony to the NY City Council on the impact of the arts on small businesses and community vitality. And finally, Hickey makes a passionate argument for data aggregation tools for New York City (hmm, that sounds familiar). The Municipal Arts Society of New York (which absorbed the research functions of the Alliance for the Arts after the latter organization dissolved last year, and for which Hickey has done some consulting) has a new report out exploring some of these topics in more depth.

ETC.

• Cool story from Michael Kaiser about getting fathers involved in their kids’ ballet dancing.
• Great, hilarious taxonomy of jazz musician career archetypes. One of the categories is simply called “The Industry,” which includes this definition of the “arts administrator”: “This well-fed, parasitic middleman—typically a jealous amateur musician formally trained in non-profit business administration—may work either directly for the government or for a government-funded non- profit presenting agency. Either way, he or she enjoys a salary and accompanying benefits unthinkable for a working jazz artist.”

The original PARK(ing) Day parklet. Credit: Rebar

In the last year, parklets have taken San Francisco by storm. At the start of 2011, San Francisco had four of these sidewalk-adjacent, itty-bitty public spaces created by repurposing parking spots. Now there are more than 20, with dozens of others in various stages of review. Other cities, including New York, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Vancouver have taken notice of this phenomenon as a cheap, flexible way to enliven their streets with small seating areas and green spaces. Their importance for even non-design-oriented arts organizations is twofold: 1) their evolution from guerilla art action to policy success can serve as a blueprint in other arenas; and 2) parklet programs in development present opportunities for local arts organizations to shape these urban interventions to serve their communities.

While urban planners laud parklets as revolutionary uses of public space, their short evolution from the original PARK(ing) Day in 2005 to a celebrated piece of city policy in 2011 is perhaps just as astonishing.  PARK(ing) Day began in San Francisco, when the design collective Rebar paid a parking meter, set up some sod, a tree, and a bench, and used the space as a park until the two hours on the meter ran out.  Then, they rolled up the sod, and the space went back to its original car-oriented purpose.  By 2011, it had turned into a decentralized worldwide event, in which thousands of individuals and groups created 975 informal parks for a day across six continents.  In San Francisco, the Pavement to Parks program now officially supports the development of more permanent parklets with a permitting process and guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines stipulate that all parklets are sponsored and managed by a private partner, all seating must remain available for public use, and at least some of the seating must be permanent.

The first official parklet in San Francisco, at Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero. Credit: Jeremy A. Shaw

Although there has been a great deal of support for parklets, thus far, most in San Francisco don’t quite fulfill their promise. Arts organizations have a fantastic opportunity to improve upon their current form. The requirement for a local business steward means that parklets often end up serving as little more than well-designed outdoor seating areas for cafes or restaurants, albeit technically open to the public. In a review of 19 parklets, John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s architecture critic, found that fifteen are managed by a cafe or restaurant, two are managed by other businesses, and one is adjacent to a private home. The 19th? An example to us all: the art gallery Fabric 8 is managing its own parklet, which will host art installations that rotate each year. The current installation, by Erik Otto, is available for purchase and can be moved to another location at the close of its exhibition at Fabric 8.

Fabric 8's first parklet, by Eric Otto. Credit: Fabric 8

Arts organizations in San Francisco and elsewhere should follow Fabric 8’s example and push for parklets that support public programs rather than supplement local businesses. A California Planning and Development Report already contains the kernel of a great idea–the creation of a sponsorship program to cover the $5,000-$10,000 in parklet start-up costs for worthy organizations that can’t afford it. Other possibilities include the coordination of parklet design to enhance (or generate!) arts districts, the development of a single permit to utilize all of a neighborhood’s parklets for a mobile arts event, the formation of new arts-business partnerships for parklet stewardship, or the creation of parklets specifically for performance. Parklets represent a version of place-based community development that even small arts organizations can deploy to achieve great impact.