Policy Brief No. 3 of the Culture, Creativity and Communities Program

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Art and Culture in Communities

Arts and cultural activity is an essential dimension of communities and community building processes. It depends heavily on having an effective system of support — a system that is made up of the contributions of many different kinds of stakeholders, both inside and outside the explicit cultural realm. This topic has received little research attention despite the centrality of understanding cultural systems of support to people concerned with neighborhood conditions and dynamics as well as to people concerned with better understanding cultural vitality. This brief summarizes what we have learned so far about the support systems that operate in communities and the characteristics of those systems that are most likely to produce opportunities for cultural engagement. Because systems of support for arts and culture in communities, as we define them, is a new area for research, it is useful to begin with the overall framework ACIP has developed to structure our work and the place of support systems in that framework.¹

The Place of Support Systems in ACIP's Framework for Research and Measurement

The production, dissemination, and validation of arts and culture at the neighborhood level are made possible through collaborations and partnerships among various types of arts and non-arts entities, including community organizations, churches, schools, and businesses. The networks among these entities constitute a system of support that is critical to a community's cultural vitality. Likewise, support systems for other issues — such as neighborhood revitalization, youth development, or crime prevention — are likely to have arts-focused players in them.

ACIP's focus on systems of support derives from the overall framework we have developed for conceptualizing and measuring the role of arts and culture at the community level. This framework has been developed through extensive fieldwork and document review — data gathering that included in-person interviews and focus group discussion with professionals and community residents in nine cities,² document review and telephone interviews with staff from arts and arts-related institutions, and on-site examination of selected community building initiatives around the country. ACIP's framework has since been further refined through an extensive process of idea development and debate in workshops and conferences of researchers, community builders, policymakers, funders, arts administrators, and artists — and through practical application by ACIP affiliates around the country.³

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Notes

1. For a general "systems view" of creativity see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,, "Society, Culture, Person: A Systems View of Creativity," in The Nature of Creativity, edited by R.J. Sternberg. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 325-39).

2. Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Providence, and Washington, D.C.

3. ACIP works with local affiliates in seven places: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington, D.C. ACIP and affiliates work on a variety of projects, with foci ranging from citywide to neighborhood-specific levels. Our aim with the affiliate work is to create tools and methods that can be adopted or adapted by other practitioners in the community arts and community-building related fields.

About this Policy Brief

This brief is a product of the Arts and Culture Indicators in Community Building Project (ACIP) — the flagship initiative of the Urban Institute's Culture, Creativity, and Communities (CCC) program. Launched in 1996 with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, ACIP seeks to integrate arts and culture-related measures into community quality-of-life indicator systems. ACIP is built on the premise that inclusion of arts, culture, and creativity is meaningful when it reflects the values and interests of a wide range of community stakeholders. This is the context in which the connection of arts, culture, and creativity to community building processes and other community dynamics can be fully understood.

The authors of this brief would like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for support of this work. We are indebted to the many community building professionals, arts administrators, artists, community residents and our local ACIP affiliates for their contributions. Also, we would like to thank Felicity Skidmore for her editorial assistance.

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