CULTURAL POLICY & PLANNING
Arts communities and the public sector have a lot to offer each other. By integrating the arts into public sector structures and activities, cities enhance existing relationships and outcomes. Likewise, the arts sector thrives through strategic public sector support.
Residents record stories about their parks to facilitate the Austin Parks and Recreation Department’s Long Range Plan.
Many local governments and community development groups are exploring the idea that the arts can be a powerful tool for improving their systems, relationships, and service to communities, a sort of “arts integration” model for the public sector and community organizations. The arts help open the door to more perspectives and different ways of knowing in civic conversations and activity.
Additionally, local governments support the arts through sharing information and providing regulatory and financial opportunity. With this support, art, artists, and culture bearers push vibrancy in communities, improve quality of life, and provide crucial ways for people to come together. Art is good for cities. The process of coordinating and structuring all of this good stuff is often referred to as “arts planning” or “arts and cultural planning.”
key concepts
An arts and culture master plan is a long-range (usually 10-year) city plan that outlines the vision, goals, and strategies that a city will pursue in order to support arts and culture. Topics addressed by an arts and culture master plan might include supporting the local arts economy, equitable access to arts and cultural opportunities, public art, tourism, and much more. Arts and culture master plans are often - but not always - associated with a city’s arts and culture department or division.
Recent findings suggest that arts and culture master plans are trending toward providing access to the arts for all community members, in support of broader, non-arts-specific city goals such as community health, economic development, safety, and social cohesion.
Municipal arts and culture departments aren’t the only ones who can get in on the fun. Arts policy and arts-based activities are pursued by many different types of municipal departments, for many different reasons.
In any municipal planning and policy activity, it is critical to thoughtfully address racial, ethnic, and cultural equity. The same historical inequities that effect many aspects of American life can be present in arts and cultural activities, but on the other hand arts and culture can be powerful tools for breaking down barriers and amplifying historically marginalized voices.
Creative practitioners often struggle to find affordable living and working space in cities, and some cities are working to develop policies to address the deficit in affordable creative space. This can be a challenging conversation: Artists are often accused of contributing to gentrification-related displacement, and how true this is depends greatly on how “artist” is defined and what their relationship is to the communities they live and work in.
key resources
Cultural Planning at 40: A Look at the Practice and Its Progress
Tom Borrup
2018
Cultural planning is an effective tool for strategizing and consolidating cultural policy, and also builds up capacity, leadership, and connections within arts communities. In this article, Borrup updates a 1994 study by Craig Dreeszen by assessing the purpose, process, and outcomes of 50 municipal cultural arts plans. Borrup identifies changes, consistencies, and emergent trends in the field. He finds that many cultural plans have expanded focus from an arts sector-specific lens toward amplifying the value of the arts for all residents. He notes that cultural planning still struggles to integration with other city plans and prioritize equity and inclusion.
Building A Cultural Equity Plan
PolicyLink
This online tool developed by PolicyLink gathers resources and strategies for centering racial, ethnic, and cultural equity in arts and cultural planning. The tool provides direction for how to use policy and planning to address historical marginalization and injustice, to build up economic opportunity, enhance social connections, and amplify and celebrate existing community cultural assets. The tool outlines the elements and steps for developing a cultural equity plan, and clarifies resources and strategies for cultural asset mapping, equity-centered data analysis, developing strategic partnerships, and policy development.
The CAP Report: 30 Ideas for Creation, Activation, & Preservation of Cultural Space
2017, The City of Seattle
Rents are rising in cities across the U.S., causing affordability pressure and the threat of displacement for many vulnerable communities, including people of color, low-income community members, and others. Artists and arts organizations overlap with many of these vulnerable groups, and struggle to keep up with rising rents, despite their clear contributions to vibrant neighborhoods and communities. In the “CAP (Creation, Activation and Preservation) Report,” the City of Seattle identifies 30 policy ideas that can help cities better support their cultural spaces. Suggestions cover cultural space certification, building code, permitting, technical assistance, and financial assistance.
Creative Placemaking: Knowledgebase Collection
American Planning Association
This “Knowledgebase Collection” from the American Planning Association collects a wide-ranging set of creative placemaking introductory resources, from reports and research to blog posts, case studies, trainings cultural plans, and sample statutes and regulations to support the practice. The city planning-focused collection highlights important topics at the intersection of creative placemaking and planning, such as measuring outcomes, prioritizing equity, and aligning creative placemaking projects with community goals.
Defining the Creative Economy: Industry and Occupational Approaches
Ann Markusen, et. al.
2008, Economic Development Quarterly
Markusen et. al. address inconsistencies in how the creative sector and economy are measured and conceptualized. Results vary greatly depending on whether creative sector data are gathered through industry employment, firm-level data, or occupational data, and which industries, firms, and occupations are considered a part of the sector. Markusen et. al argue that rather than except any one blanket definition of the creative sector, researchers and policymakers should consider blended, targeted approaches to measuring the sector that are thoughtfully aligned with goals and intended results.
more GREAT resources
Arts and Planning Toolkit
Metropolitan Area Planning Council
The Massachusetts Metropolitan Area Planning Council consulted state and national advisors to develop this “Arts and Planning Toolkit” to guide planners and other government staff through impactful integration of arts and culture into their work. The toolkit provides background and best practices on a wide variety of topics from cultural planning and space activation to socially engaged art practice and arts district development. The resource provides policy specifics on topics such as zoning and permitting, public sector arts funding, and artist residencies. National best practice case studies illustrate the impact of these activities.
A Cultural Planning Manifesto
Julie Burros
2019, Metris Arts Consulting
Burros draws on her extensive experience developing cultural plans to consider the state of the field. She notes that few plans are meaningfully implemented. To produce better, more effective plans, she proposes shortening the plan time-period from ten years to five, better addressing and centering cultural equity, and including specific evaluation metrics to allow for clear implementation measurement.
Creative Policymaking: Taking the Lessons of Creative Placemaking to Scale
2017, Artivate
Arroyo argues that while creative placemaking funders and practitioners have achieved some success in integrating creative placemaking into organizational and practitioner community development practices, the potential of creative placemaking to contribute to policy change at a systems level is less developed. She argues that creative placemaking can be an impactful tool for making policymaking more democratic by providing opportunities for more equitable and effective participation from a wider range of community members. Arroyo sees creative policymaking as a arena ripe with opportunity, and provides suggestions for the development of the field.
From Creative Economy to Creative Society
Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert
2008, Culture and Community Revitalization: A Collaboration
Fuzzy Vibrancy: Creative Placemaking as Ascendant U.S. Cultural Policy
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus
2013, Cultural Trends
Other Resources We’re Excited About
Shelterforce: Art & Gentrification archive
The relationship between arts activity and urban gentrification and displacement is perhaps one of the most visible and most deliberated topics in cultural planning, due in no small part to how nuanced and complicated the relationship can be. The community development journal Shelterforce has been a hub for this conversation, having published many articles that address this nuanced topic. Keli A. Tianga’s 2017 article “Art in the Face of Gentrification” illustrates how certain art and cultural activities or activities by practitioners without ties to the community can be perceived as aligning with or accelerating displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods, and also how – seemingly paradoxically – artistic and cultural visibility and strength may be one of the most powerful tools for low-income communities of color fighting to stay in place.
Animating Democracy: Artists Working In and Within Municipal Governments
Animating Democracy’s emerging resource on artists working within local government structures explores the ways that artists embedded within government processes can contribute to more successful governance. For example, artist-facilitated engagement can lower barriers to participation in planning processes. In another example, Artist in Residence (AIR) programs embed artists directly into municipal agencies to work with and through staff to develop innovative strategies and programs.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Arroyo, Kiley K. “Creative Policymaking: Taking the Lessons of Creative Placemaking to Scale.” Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts 6, no. 2 (2017): 58–72.
Arts Now. “Cultural Planning Toolkit,” 2010.
Delconte, John, Carol S. Kline, and Carmine Scavo. “The Impacts of Local Arts Agencies on Community Placemaking and Heritage Tourism.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 11, no. 4 (October 2016): 324–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2015.1088019.
Housing Assistance Council. “Rural Placemaking: Making the Most of Creativity in Your Community.” Rural Voices 2, no. 2 (Summer 2017).
Metris Arts Consulting, and Gadwa, Anne. “How Artist Space Matters,” March 2010.
Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) Arts and Culture Team. “Arts and Planning Toolkit.” Arts and Planning Toolkit, n.d. http://artsandplanning.mapc.org/.
Nicodemus, Anne Gadwa, Rachel Engh, and Christopher Walker. “Not Just Murals: Insights into Artists’ Leadership in Community Development.” LISC, 2017.
Nowak, Jeremy. “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Development.” TRF, December 2007.
Psilos, Phil, and Kathleen Rapp. “The Role of the Arts in Economic Development,” n.d., 9.
Rose, Kalima, Milly Hawk Daniel, and Jeremy Liu. “Creating Change through Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development: A Policy and Practice Primer.” PolicyLink, 2017.
Tom Borrup. “Just Planning: What Has Kept the Arts and Urban Planning Apart?” Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts 6, no. 2 (2017): 46–57.
Wali, Alaka, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, Rebecca Severson M.A., Ethnographer, and Mario Longonir M.A., Ethnographer. “Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places.” The Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, June 2002.