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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
  • Publication
    Is All the World Philadelphia?: A Multi-city Study of Arts and Cultural Organizations, Diversity, and Urban Revitalization
    (1999-05-01) Stern, Mark J
    This paper takes on the question—to what extent to are the relationships between diversity, social capital, and revitalization that SIAP has documented in Philadelphia present in other cities? This paper uses available data to give a first approximation of the relationship between these variables in other U.S. cities. For this first multi-city investigation, SIAP chose four cities—Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco—that share similarities but exhibit contrasts as well. They all have sizable ethnic minorities, although their ethnic composition varies greatly. They represent the four basic regions of the United States defined by the Census Bureau. Two represent established cities that have had to accommodate the restructuring of the world and national economies over the past several decades, while two represent the “Sunbelt.” Finally, two of the cities have a classic nineteenth-century core with concentric circles of later settlement, while the other two represent the urban form of the automobile age with multiple “centers” and a more dispersed pattern of development. As a “first-cut” on a multi-city study, the results of the analysis are striking. Each of the three major patterns found in Philadelphia are also present in the other cities. Each city had a substantial set of economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. In each city these neighborhoods were home to a large number of cultural organizations. Finally, in each city diverse neighborhoods with many cultural organizations were those most likely to experience revitalization during the 1980s. This paper therefore lays an important foundation in demonstrating that SIAP findings from Philadelphia are not idiosyncratic. In at least this respect, all the world really is like Philadelphia.
  • Publication
    Urban Vitality, Diversity, and Culture: Population Growth and Ethnic Change in Philadelphia: 1990-2000
    (2001-03-01) Stern, Mark J
    This paper uses the early release of 2000 census data to get a glimpse of demographic changes in the city of Philadelphia during the 1990s. Unlike New York and Chicago, Philadelphia continued to lose population during the 1990s, a four percent decline. However, without an influx of immigrants—the city’s Hispanic population grew by 45,000 and its Asian population by 25,000—the decline would have been more than twice as large. The paper focuses on the city and diversity. It first examines the changing ethnic character of Philadelphia during the 1990s and identifies where change was most apparent. It then examines the relationship of population growth to diversity. Finally, it looks at other variables—including poverty status and cultural participation rate—in order to account for the variations in population change found in the city. The paper concludes that, although early findings await further analysis, the data suggest that diversity and culture will be an important part of the story of urban vitality in the coming years.
  • Publication
    Social Citizenship and Urban Poverty
    (1997-02-01) Stern, Mark J
    The increased visibility of concentrated urban poverty has posed a variety of intellectual and policy challenges in the past decade. The spread of joblessness and economic disinvestment has left many urban neighborhoods in ruins. Fears about the culture and family life of the poor have motivated a variety of responses, including the recent “welfare reform” effort that ended the federal government’s guarantee of financial assistance to dependent children. The author has argued in previous papers that the underclass thesis--which draws a sharp distinction between the underclass and the mainstream--has served an ideological role with respect to social changes in two spheres: work and family. In this paper, Stern extends the argument to another sphere of social life: the public sphere. The underclass thesis is explicit in its predictions of what we should expect to find with respect to public participation. That is, underclass neighborhoods should be characterized by low levels of public participation, few social institutions, and profound neglect of public places. Moreover, we should find a discontinuity between levels in areas of concentrated poverty and the rest of the city. This paper examines public participation and the underclass from an empirical perspective. Stern uses three SIAP data sources to examine the role of arts and cultural institutions in the social life of Philadelphia. The first is a survey of public participation, conducted in five Philadelphia neighborhoods during the summer and fall of 1997, which examines the relationship of participation in neighborhood institutions, cultural participation, and evaluations of quality-of-life. The second is an assessment of physical traces of attention and neglect in these five neighborhoods and one additional community. The third is a compilation of social and community institutions for the entire Philadelphia region. These data sources provide three distinct perspectives on the concept of participation--the individual structure of participation, the physical residue of public engagement and disengagement, and the institutional structure of participation.
  • Publication
    Culture Builds Community Research Brief: The Power of Arts and Culture in Community Building
    (2002-02-01) Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP)
    This research brief was designed as a hand-out for broad circulation among community arts practitioners as well as advocates and funders of community-based cultural programs. SIAP research in Philadelphia demonstrates that community arts activity can be a driving force behind the revitalization of neighborhoods. Culture Builds Community, an initiative of the William Penn Foundation, supported community arts programs in Greater Philadelphia from 1997â 2001. Evaluation of this initiative, led by the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), focused on the ability of these organizations to build their own capacity while strengthening their community.
  • Publication
    Art and Social Change: AIDS Activism in Philadelphia
    (1997-02-01) Petty, Mary Stuart
    This study examines the social and political aspects of the AIDS epidemic through the lens of local arts and culture in the city of Philadelphia, asking these questions: What are the social roles of arts production and cultural activities arising in response to the AIDS epidemic? Are the categories of AIDS politics, such as treatment activism and prevention activism, or distinctions among infected populations reflected in cultural production? Is the concept of a “day without art” relevant only to those who count as artists and to their affluent patrons? How have the changing demographics of the epidemic affected AIDS related arts and culture? Does art work to communicate to the public information about the AIDS epidemic? Can art mobilize people and institutions for social change? As the study site, Philadelphia provides an opportunity to extend a social and cultural analysis of the AIDS epidemic to an urban area other than New York or San Francisco. And, while Philadelphia’s proximity to New York City affects all aspects of its relation to the AIDS epidemic (and to its entire arts and cultural scene), AIDS-related activism and culture are embedded in the city’s own history and politics and are certainly worthy of study on their own terms.
  • Publication
    Community Revitalization and the Arts in Philadelphia
    (1998) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    This paper explores the contours of community revitalization and its relationship to arts activity. The authors found that in Philadelphia, neighborhoods in which the arts were a visible presence were more likely to have fared better—as measured by changes in poverty and population—than the rest of the city. The paper begins with an examination of trends in revitalization in the city of Philadelphia during the 1980s. The team found little relationship between declines in poverty and changes in the racial composition of the city’s neighborhoods—a classic indicator of gentrification--during this decade. When they examined the relationship of the arts to revitalization, they found that sections of the city that consistently emerged as “high participation” neighborhoods—whether looking at presence of cultural organizations or levels of local involvement--were precisely the places likely to have higher than average growth of income and population during the 1980s. The authors then turn to patterns of participation in community arts activities. What they found was extraordinarily high levels of participation from across the region in community cultural activities. And, consistent with previous SIAP studies, they found that the diverse neighborhoods of the city account for the lion’s share of this regional participation in community arts.
  • Publication
    The Geography of Cultural Production in Metropolitan Philadelphia
    (2000-02-01) Stern, Mark J
    In previous work on Philadelphia, SIAP found that nonprofit arts and cultural organizations tended to concentrate in economically and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. This paper uses data on for-profit cultural firms to document whether they too cluster in diverse neighborhoods or if they have a different logic of agglomeration. The paper uses two data sets for the five-county Philadelphia region: the nonprofit inventory of over 1,200 cultural providers—including incorporated and “informal” programs—compiled by SIAP in 1997; and a for-profit database of approximately 1,300 cultural firms derived in 1999 from a yellow-pages compilation of selected industries. The paper concludes with a description of five “natural” cultural districts in metropolitan Philadelphia with a focus on the mix of firms in each. It calls for further analysis of the synergies between the for-profit and nonprofit cultural sectors to understand how they share resources—especially audiences and artists—and what sustains these “natural” cultural districts. The implication is that cultural district planning could expand from tourist destinations to arts and cultural production districts.
  • Publication
    Housing Markets and Social Capital: The Role of Participation, Institutions, and Diversity in Neighborhood Transformation
    (2001-06-01) Stern, Mark J
    This paper examines the housing markets described in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), launched by Mayor John Street in April 2001, through the lens of social capital indicators. In SIAP’s view, the lack of hard data on the city's social and human assets made it difficult for NTI or other urban revitalization efforts to evaluate urban assets with the same rigor as urban deficits. The paper uses SIAP data on three categories of assets to examine their potential implications for the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative: social institutions, individual participation, and economic and ethnic diversity. The paper argues that each of the three dimensions measures a different temporal aspect of social capital. Using economic parlance, institutions was proposed as a lagging indicator, participation as a concurrent indicator, and diversity as a leading indicator of social capital. Specifically, the paper sought to assess whether differences in social capital reinforce or cut across housing markets, and whether a social capital perspective could help identify neighborhoods with a better than average chance of succeeding in transforming themselves.
  • Publication
    Cultural Organizations in the Network Society
    (1999-10-01) Seifert, Susan C; Stern, Mark J
    Community arts programs are embedded in a variety of social networks, including those with institutions, artists, and participants. This paper uses data on the institutional networks for four community arts programs to understand how these programs use social networks. The database for this paper was compiled from organizational reports on their institutional contacts as well as a review of documents and observation. The data were then geocoded and linked to the SIAP’s other organizational databases, including data on the presence of other types of social organizations in their neighborhood. Community arts organizations are under two—often contradictory—pressures. Efforts to “rationalize” their organizational structure often come in conflict with their commitment to serving and engaging communities and neighborhoods. As a result, organizations are forced to be strategic in their choices of contacts, pursuing those that further their interests while reducing those that might sap their resources.
  • Publication
    Cultural Participation and Civic Engagement In Five Philadelphia Neighborhoods
    (1998) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C
    One of SIAP's goals has been to examine the links that connect arts participation to other form of civic engagement. In previous papers, the team used a variety of perspectives--the location of organizations, levels of community participation, observation of behavior and physical traces, and levels of regional cultural participation--to examine this process. This paper uses a community participation survey conducted in five Philadelphia case study neighborhoods to examine links between community participation, community arts participation, and regional arts participation. This paper and other SIAP studies have found that the socio-economic status of a neighborhood is a consistent predictor of residents' level of participation. Yet, the paper also suggests that cultural participation is more complex than either the economic model or the cultural capital theory would predict. A neighborhood’s cultural infrastructure is a stronger predictor of participation than either income or education. Moreover, decisions about cultural participation are closely related to engagement in other types of community activities, such as schools, community groups, and social clubs. Thus neighborhood residents effectively function as connectors between arts and non-arts institutions. The paper documents a strong relationship between neighborhood cultural participation and other forms of community engagement. The fact that residents make connections that remain elusive for organizational leaders suggests an avenue for strengthening institutional networks.