Arts Resources for Children and Youth in Philadelphia—1995-1997
From 1995 to 1996, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert collaborated with the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation on a study, commissioned by The Pew Charitable Trusts, of arts resources for children and youth in Philadelphia. The kids' art study was the team's first opportunity to use mapping as a way of examining the character of the city's cultural resources.
While undertaking this study, Stern and Seifert made a discovery that had implications for their later work. In examining the correlations between the density of cultural resources and census variables, they found that census tracts with many arts resources were more likely to have both above-average poverty rates and above-average proportions of professionals and managers in the labor force. They first thought they had made a mistake but finally realized that there were many Philadelphia neighborhoods that had both of these characteristics—neighborhoods they characterized as "pov-prof." "Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia (SIAP Working Paper #3, April 1999)"—explored this form of diversity in greater detail.