Dynamics of Culture—2003-2005
For an overview of the Dynamics of Culture collection, compiled for the Rockefeller Foundation in October 2005, see the "Culture vs. Policy” introduction and chapter outline below.
Culture vs. Policy:
- Culture vs. Policy: Introduction and Summary of the Research
Changing Ecology of Culture:
- The Dynamics of Cultural Participation: Metropolitan Philadelphia, 1996-2004 (Oct 2005)
- “Natural” Cultural Districts: Arts Agglomerations in Metropolitan Philadelphia and Implications for Cultural District Planning (Oct 2005)
- Truly Disadvantaged? An Exploratory Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations in Urban Neighborhoods (2004)
- Culture and the Changing Urban Landscape: Philadelphia 1997-2002 (March 2003)
- Cultural Participation and Distributive Justice (July 2002)
Artists, Networks, and the New Urban Reality:
- Artists in the Winner-Take-All Economy: Artists’ Inequality in Six U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1980-2000 (Oct 2005)
- Gauging the Informal Arts Sector: Metropolitan Philadelphia, 2004 (Oct 2005)
- Artists and their Social Networks, Metropolitan Philadelphia, 2004 (Oct 2005)
- Institutional Networks Serving Artists: A Look at Philadelphia (June 2003)
New Civil Society and the Arts:
- Arts in Place: Philadelphia’s Cultural Landscape, 2003-04 (May 2005)
Appendix:
- Culture’s Role in Community Revitalization in Philadelphia (March 2003 presentation)
Search results
Publication Culture’s Role in Community Revitalization in Philadelphia(2003-03-01) Stern, Mark JSIAP grew out of the belief that a better understanding of how the arts fit into urban social processes could provide a stronger foundation for policy making beyond a narrow focus on economic development. Its research to date can inform urban policy and community development strategies in several ways: highlight upcoming trends beyond “urban crisis”; measure the impacts of cultural engagement on urban neighborhoods; and document the mechanisms through which cultural sector works in urban communities. Thus the arts and culture are not marginal but rather are at the center of the new urban reality—characterized by a mix of decline and revitalization. Looking forward, SIAP wants to document how cultural engagement—along with other forms of community involvement—fit into an evolving “new civil society.”Publication Institutional Networks Serving Artists: A Look at Philadelphia(2003-06-01) Seifert, Susan C; Fairbanks, Robert P.This paper is a preliminary sketch of institutional networks serving artists in metropolitan Philadelphia based on interviews with 13 organizations from June to August 2002. The approach was to develop a “cognitive map” of the network of institutions that support artists based in the region. That is, what are the nodes and functions in an artist-centered network? What types of links connect these nodes or functions? What nodes and links are the most important? The study found that Philadelphia’s institutional network appears to operate, by and large, on a market model with artists functioning as individual “buyers” in an environment of limited resources and imperfect information. Some parts of the network, however, operate more on a service model for categories of artists—including many low-income groups— who because of race, immigration status, or location are cut off from the mainstream cultural system.Publication Artists and Their Social Networks, Metropolitan Philadelphia, 2004(2005-10-01) Seifert, Susan C; Stern, Mark J; Zaman, MehreenThis paper reports the rationale, methodology, and findings of SIAP's Philadelphia Area Artists Survey 2004. SIAP undertook the survey as a first step toward the documentation and understanding of the region’s artists and their social networks. The study had four objectives: to address a gap in the literature by doing an empirical study of the social networks of artists; to document the informal dimensions of artists’ networking in metropolitan Philadelphia; to test methodologies to identify the universe of artists in the region and analyze their network strategies; and, finally, to advance SIAP’s understanding of the role of the artist in the contemporary city. The report documents two types of networking activity: networks that are part of everyday professional life, including nuts and bolts as well as inspiration for the creative process; and networks to get work, that is, projects or positions (over a 12-month period) that tap their capacity as an artist. The picture of social networks presented in this paper differs from the image based on the organization-centered perspective that has dominated policy research. An artist-centered view redraws boundaries of the cultural sector and recasts definitions of informal vs. formal and internal vs. external networks. The findings begin to address the empirical shortfall in research and offer new perspectives on the nature and function of artists’ social networks.Publication Arts In Place: Philadelphia's Cultural Landscape(2005-05-01) Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP)To inform the debate over costs vs benefits of arts-based development to neighborhood revitalization, Penn Urban Studies Program chose "arts in place" as the theme of its Third Annual Public Conversation Series 2003-04. This document is a synthesis of the narratives and insights gleaned from the series--eight events with 23 speakers over five months--to share with a wider audience. The report describes the models and theories about how the arts influence development raised in six site-based discussions. Lastly, the report presents themes and issues that cut across Philadelphia's cultural landscape aired during the culminating session and throughout the series.Publication Artists in the Winner-Take-All Economy: Artists' Inequality in Six U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1980 – 2000(2005-10-01) Stern, Mark JThis paper addresses the implications of the winner-take-all economy for income inequality among artists. Using the U.S. census public-use samples, as refined by the Minnesota Population Center, it employs the standard measure of income inequality—the Gini coefficient—to examine income inequality among artists in six major metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000. The paper compares income inequality among artists with that of other professional workers and among individual categories of artists. Finally, it examines inequality through the lens of ethnicity and gender. The paper concludes that artists are an ‘old’ winner-take-all occupation. In 1980 artists displayed an unusually high degree of within-occupation inequality. However, artists’ inequality did not increase as quickly between 1980 and 2000 as that within the rest of the labor force. By contrast, in the general labor force, African American and female workers had a less unequal income distribution than the general population. Among artists, however, income was distributed more unequally among blacks and women. Finally, the analysis finds significant variation in artists’ income inequality across metropolitan areas. The winner-take-all hypothesis would lead us to expect that metropolitan areas that are ‘global cities’ in the arts world—notably New York and Los Angeles—would have greater inequality than other cities. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, Los Angeles displayed the highest level of income equality among cultural workers. On the other hand, New York— where income inequality among all workers was generally higher than elsewhere—had among the lowest levels of artist income inequality.Publication Truly Disadvantaged? An Exploratory Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations in Urban Neighborhoods(2004-01-01) Rutherford, Lindsay TaggartThis paper uses unique data on Philadelphia’s nonprofit organizations compiled from IRS listings, city cultural fund grant applications, telephone directories and newspaper listings in 1997 and 2003 to test Wilson’s (1987) hypothesis that inner-city neighborhoods suffer from a dearth of social institutions. The author integrates these data with demographic information from the 2000 census to explore the size and spatial patterns of Philadelphia’s neighborhood nonprofit sectors. Results indicate that neighborhoods have suffered a net loss of organizations over the past six years, although most neighborhoods still had over 100 institutions per 1000 residents in 2003. Ethnically diverse neighborhoods and neighborhoods with over 40% of residents living in poverty had the largest nonprofit sectors. Finally, neighborhoods with the most institutions were concentrated in the central city. The author confirms an earlier SIAP finding—that poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia are not necessarily institutionally ‘deprived’—and suggests that the literature on concentrated poverty find a way of understanding this pattern.Publication Gauging the Informal Arts Sector Metropolitan Philadelphia, 2004(2005-10-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan C; Zaman, MehreenThe uncertain state of the traditional nonprofit has sparked interest in unincorporated cultural associations to maintain the vitality of the cultural sector. Despite increasing interest in and qualitative study of the role of the unincorporated groups and individuals in cultural production and participation, there are no data that allow assessment of their importance to the overall cultural sector. In this paper, SIAP takes an alternative strategy for estimating the informal arts sector. The authors use a representative sample of artists to ask what proportion of artists’ professional activities takes place in the for-profit, nonprofit, and informal sectors. The analysis is based on a sample of 270 artists in the Philadelphia metropolitan area interviewed during 2004. The team found that a large share of the sample’s professional activities did indeed occur in what might be called the informal cultural sector; and that the importance of this sector varied by discipline, age, and ethnicity of the artist. The informal arts sector is likely to be a major agenda item for cultural research in the years to come. If nothing else, this paper demonstrates that researchers can use quantitative methods to expand our understanding of the informal sector. It also holds out the promise that the research would contribute to a more complex and variegated portrait of informal cultural engagement and its place in the ecology of urban culture.Publication ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts: Arts Agglomerations in Metropolitan Philadelphia and Implications for Cultural District Planning(2005-10-01) Seifert, Susan C; Stern, Mark JAs older cities and towns retooled to accommodate post-industrialism, cultural districts have become popular strategies to promote tourism, revive downtowns, revitalize neighborhoods, and generally boost the local economy. While entertainment centers are hardly new to urban life, the cultural district as economic stimulus has become increasingly standard equipment in the planners’ toolbox. The typical district is “a well-recognized, labeled, mixed-use area of a city in which a high concentration of cultural facilities serves as the anchor or attraction.” Thus the cultural district is a strategy for simulating arts “consumption” and “event-related spending”, but planning largely ignores the production needs of artists and cultural providers. Generally, local government takes the initiative to define and create a cultural district through planning, legislation, and fiscal policy. Over 100 communities across the U.S. have planned cultural districts. The widespread practice of using of older, top-down models of urban policy, however, does not recognize the need to link cultural strategies with new urban realities and new models of social policy. This paper draws on SIAP's research on metropolitan Philadelphia to look at an alternative approach—that is, the dynamics of arts agglomeration or what the authors call "natural" cultural districts.Publication Culture and the Changing Urban Landscape: Philadelphia 1997-2002(2003-03-01) Stern, Mark JThis paper was an early product of the Dynamics of Culture project, undertaken to bring time into SIAP’s analysis of the role of culture in urban communities. The author uses data on Philadelphia’s changing urban context from 1990 - 2000 and changes in its cultural sector from 1997 – 2002 to assess the impact of culture on neighborhood wellbeing. The research found that Philadelphia, unlike “world cities,” cannot rely on the market alone to generate the cataclysmic churning of its land market. By the same token, the city cannot count on a massive inflow of capital to support its cultural sector. Thus these processes in Philadelphia are unlikely to stimulate displacement or gentrification but rather tend to be more gradual and firmly embedded in the existing social structure, which allows a different set of social forces to take root in neighborhoods. On the one hand, culture stimulates a kind of “collective efficacy” (see Sampson and Earls) that encourages residents to address community conditions. At the same time, culture’s association with diversity allows it to breach barriers of social class and ethnicity that other forms of civic engagement often leave in place. With the rise of the global city, flashy displays of the power of culture—the construction of fancy facilities, the creation of cultural districts, and the quest for the “creative class”—have attracted far more attention. Yet, for the majority of Americans who live in second- or third-tier cities, the modest benefits of cultural engagement--often in a church basement, recreation center, or converted loft space--are more likely to have an enduring impact on the quality of urban life.Publication Cultural Participation and Distributive Justice(2002-07-01) Stern, Mark J; Seifert, Susan CExpanding cultural participation has been an important goal of cultural policy, among both public and private policymakers, over the past half century. In its work with the Urban Institute from 1996 to 2006, the Arts and Culture Indicator Project (ACIP) took a unique approach to the issue in its emphasis on overcoming historically-based exclusion and giving voice to cultural expression by ethnic minorities and poor communities. This paper builds on ACIP’s approach, first, by making explicit the policy question--that is, what are the consequences of cultural expression for distributive justice? The authors then draw on SIAP research in Philadelphia to examine the ways in which different forms of cultural participation connect with indicators of social inequality. They found that much of mainstream cultural expression actually reinforces social inequality. However, two parts of the cultural sector—the “alternative” regional cultural sector and the community cultural sector—show more promise in providing resources for historically disenfranchised groups and marginal neighborhoods. The paper concludes that, if public support of cultural expression is justified on its promotion of social justice, these sectors would likely provide the best opportunities for addressing this goal.