Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Maria Rosario Jackson on Arts and Culture

New research on arts and culture points to a range of impacts in US communities. Arts and culture - including informal activities such as gatherings in parks and community centers where group traditions are maintained and/or invented, church-based artistic activity, and through the convergence of professional working artists in neighborhoods - shape communities in a variety of ways ranging from community health to community development and the creation of social capital. Planners and policymakers would do well to incorporate new research findings about arts and culture into their work on the design and revitalization of communities

The development of affordable spaces for artists to live and/or work is certainly an important matter for artists, but it can also be an important issue for people concerned with a range of social issues, including economic development, civic engagement, community collective action and community quality of life. This report considers how artist space developments have been positioned and the arguments made to garner support for them, the advocacy strategies used, and the impacts claimed or anticipated.

Maria Rosario Jackson, senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center and director of the Urban Institute's Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, discusses cultural vitality and its importance to communities.

This report introduces a definition of cultural vitality that includes the range of cultural activity people around the country find significant. We use this definition as a lens to clarify our understanding of data necessary, as well as the more limited data currently available, to document arts and culture in communities in a consistent, recurrent and reliable manner. We develop and recommend an initial set of arts and culture indicators derived from nationally available data, and compare selected metropolitan areas based on these measures. Policy and planning implications for use of the cultural vitality definition and related measures are discussed.

The report presents the overall findings of Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for U.S. Artists. A major contribution of the study is a new comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the U.S. as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works. This builds on previous and ongoing Urban Institute work to measure characteristics of place that make a culturally vibrant community. The study provides information on the status of various dimensions of the artists' support structure--both nationally and in specific sites.

New Orleans has been called the soul of America. Its art and culture are intrinsically valuable as expressions of a people. But they are also part of everyday living and essential elements of the city's social capital and economic development. Many cultural bastions are the poor of New Orleans--mostly African American residents from communities that were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. This essay discusses prospects for rebuilding New Orleans' culture, with an emphasis on root cultural practices, and offers recommendations for resurrecting and strengthening the continuum of opportunities for cultural expression--formal and informal, amateur and professional--that made New Orleans what it was.

Based on several years of field research in communities around the U.S., this brief presents a framework for better capturing and measuring arts, culture, and creative expression at the neighborhood level. Specifically, the brief discusses four domains essential to understanding community cultural conditions and dynamics: presence of opportunities for cultural engagement, cultural participation, impacts of participation, and systems of support for cultural expression.

Cultural participation is an important element of community life and an essential component of community building. But delineating the full role such participation plays in the community is dependent on capturing the range of ways in which people actually participate in creative expression. This brief presents our findings on a range of arts and cultural participation within the context of various community-building processes.

Robust cultural participation in any community depends heavily on having an effective system of support--a system that is made up of the contributions and relationships of many different kinds of stakeholders both inside and outside the cultural realm. Despite the centrality of understanding systems of support to people concerned with neighborhood conditions and dynamics as well as cultural vitality, this topic has received little research attention. This brief summarizes what we have learned so far about support systems that operate in communities and the characteristics of those systems most likely to produce opportunities for cultural engagement.

Traditional artists and economic development agencies have much to offer one another, but they need to get past the mismatch of needs, resources, and cultures in order to make productive partnerships work. This report shows how artists and agencies have partnered with one another to further the economic development of the areas in which they live and work. It points out where their assets complement one another, as well as where their liabilities pose special challenges. It also highlights the considerable value of intermediation, in which relationships between these unlike parties can be brokered effectively.