Maria-Rosario Jackson, Ph.D.

Joaquín Herranz, Jr.

Florence Kabwasa-Green

2003

Policy Brief No.1 of the Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program

The Urban Institute, Washington DC

A R T A N D C U L T U R E I N C O M M U N I T I E S :

A F R A M E W O R K F O R M E A S U R E M E N T

A B O U T T H I S P O L I C Y B R I E F

This brief is a product of the Arts and Culture Indicators in Community Building Project (ACIP) – theflagship 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 andculture-related measures into community quality-of-life indicator systems. ACIP is built on thepremise that inclusion of arts, culture, and creativity is meaningful when it reflects the values andinterests of a wide range of community stakeholders. This is the context in which the connection ofarts, culture, and creativity to community building processes and other community dynamics can befully 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 tothank Felicity Skidmore for her editorial assistance.

C U L T U R E , C R E A T I V I T Y , A N D C O M M U N I T I E S P R O G R A M

The Culture, Creativity, and Communities (CCC) Program at the Urban Institute is a research anddissemination initiative that investigates the role of arts, culture, and creative expression incommunities. It explores the intersections of arts, culture, and creative expression with variouspolicy areas.

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The Urban Institute is a nonprofit nonpartisan policy research and educational organizationestablished to examine the social, economic, and governance problems facing the nation. Itprovides information and analysis to public and private decision makers to help them address thesechallenges and strives to raise citizen understanding of these issues and tradeoffs in policy making.

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about various issues such as employment,health, housing, and land use as part ofneighborhood indicator initiatives. With fewexceptions, however, these efforts haveignored the presence and roles of arts,culture, and creativity – essential factors incommunity building processes.1

In working to help fill this gap, ACIP has hadto confront basic questions about arts,culture, and creativity at the local level (seebox). This brief summarizes the researchand measurement framework we havedeveloped to help answer such questions.

The field work and document review2 onwhich this framework is based, along withour emerging conclusions, has been sharedin workshops with ACIP affiliates3 and alsovetted in many professional conferences andmeetings in various fields of research andpolicy. This process of idea development,debate, and application has helped us refineour initial thoughts about the theories,language, and methods needed to addressthe research and data deficiencies we haveidentified.

Neighborhoods and metropolitan regionsacross the country are seeking innovativestrategies to address the promises,problems, and uneven prosperity associatedwith an increasingly technological economycombined with far-reaching demographicshifts. American identity has been enrichedby the maturing of diverse racial and ethnicgroups and by the arrival of newimmigrants. But it has been complicated bythe same processes. Furthermore, federaland state responses to urban issuescontinue devolving to the local level at thevery moment when our ability to createsocial capital – the bonds that enablecollective action – is being called intoquestion.

In this context, more than ever, a widerange of stakeholders including residents,community and business leaders, andpolicymakers working to improve the qualityof life in America's neighborhoods needappropriate, consistently and reliablycollected information to do their best work.Local leaders and researchers have madegreat strides in collecting and using data

A R T A N D C U L T U R E I N C O M M U N I T I E S

Quest ions Guiding Development of the ACIP Framework

* How are arts, culture, and creativity defined, presented, and valued at the neighborhood level?

* What should be measured and why?

* What neighborhood-level data are already available for this purpose?

* What kinds of information need to be collected?

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Development of our research andmeasurement framework for capturing thevalue of arts and culture in communitybuilding is informed by four guidingprinciples developed from insights gained inthe early stages of our field work. Theseprinciples help us capture the assets relatedto creativity or artistic endeavor that peoplefind valuable in their own communities andneighborhoods.

* Definitions of art, culture, andcreativity depend on the cultural values, preferences, and realities of residentsand other stakeholders in a given community. Art, culture, and creativity atthe neighborhood level include the culturalexpressions of ethnic, racial, age, andspecial interest groups that may not bevalidated or adequately represented inmainstream cultural institutions. Thisprinciple opens the way to capturing thewhole continuum of activities – amateur andprofessional, formal and informal, happeningin arts-specific and non-arts-specific places– valued by community residents.

* The concept of participation includes awide array of ways in which peopleengage in arts, culture, and creativeexpression. Participation is not justattendance, observation, consumption, oreven audience participation. It includesmany other categories of action-making,doing, teaching, learning, presenting,promoting, judging, supporting-and spansthe whole range of artistic disciplines.

* Arts, culture, and creative expressionare infused with multiple meanings andpurposes simultaneously. At theneighborhood level, arts, cultural practices,and creativity are frequently valued foraesthetic and technical qualities. But theyare also often embedded in or tied to othercommunity processes.

* Opportunities for participation in arts,culture, and creative endeavor often relyon both arts-specific and non-arts-specific resources. At the neighborhoodlevel, arts, culture, and creativity have manystakeholders. Not surprisingly, given thatsuch activities intersect with othercommunity processes and priorities, manyarts and artistic activities at theneighborhood level are made possiblethrough the collective efforts of both arts-specific and other entities.

These guiding principles provide a way ofidentifying the multiple facets of aneighborhood's arts, culture, and creativity.But they need to be supplemented by asystematic process for description:qualitative description for conceptualizationand theory building, and quantitativedescription for comparable measurementand indicator development. ACIP used itsguiding principles in interpreting its fieldresearch to develop a framework for thispurpose.

P R I N C I P L E S G U I D I N G O U R W O R K

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Combining the guiding principles presentedin the previous section with findings fromour field research yields a framework that isuseful for both theory building and practicalmeasurement. This framework includes fourparameters that serve as domains ofconceptual inquiry – for theory building andinformation classification. These fourparameters also serve as dimensions ofquantitative measurement – fordocumentation, data gathering, and eventualindicator development.

1. Presence – the existence of whatevercreative expressions a given communityvalues as community assets.

Since a cultural inventory is the usual formof chronicling a community's cultural assets,ACIP began its work in this domain with areview of such inventories. We found thatthey typically over-emphasize structures-mainstream cultural venues – and overlookthe context in which these structures exist.They tend to ignore cultural activity thathappens outside of these venues in placesranging from parks and churches tobusinesses and community centers. Weterm such locations indigenous venues ofvalidation, because the fact that the culturalactivity happens there indicates it is valuedby the stewards of those places. As a result,typical cultural inventories tend to miss theindigenous venues of validation, as well asany reference to the context in which theresource currently exists or its possiblehistorical significance.

2. Participation – the many ways inwhich people participate in creativeexpression (as creators, teachers,consumers, supporters, and so on).

Unlike the other domains in our framework,cultural participation has been the subject oflong debate, often cast in elitist-populistsets of dichotomies: formal-informal, high-low, professional-amateur, and the like. ACIPresearch supports the criticism of suchdichotomies as overly simplifying the broadarray of participation forms. Our researchalso confirms other evidence thatbroadening the definition of culturalengagement increases participation ratessubstantially – with many people from awide range of social and economicbackgrounds participating at bothcommunity and regional levels.

3. Impacts – the contribution of thesecreative expressions and participation inthem to community building outcomes(e.g., community development,stewardship of place, neighborhood pride,improved public safety, etc.).

The impacts of arts, culture, and creativeexpression on communities are not welldocumented or understood in the arts andcommunity building related fields, asattested to by ACIP's literature review andfield research. Our field work in cities aroundthe country did reveal a long tradition ofcommunity arts practice, with manypractitioners operating their programs withwell-developed assumptions about theimpacts of their efforts. But these effortsoften go unarticulated and are omitted fromthe type of theory that can guide systematicresearch and data collection efforts.

The fundamental challenge here is that thevery broadness of ACIP's arts definition –combined with the fact that arts, culture,and creativity are operating in an

F R A M E W O R K F O R A R T S / C U L T U R E R E S E A R C H A N DM E A S U R E M E N T P R I N C I P L E S G U I D I N G O U R W O R K

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environment in which many other factorsare operating simultaneously – vastlycomplicates the task of pinpointing thecontribution of arts-related activities to theoverall impacts observed. ACIP's impactdomain addresses these challenges byproposing a middle-range approach. Itacknowledges the complexity andinterrelationships of arts, culture, andcreativity in neighborhoods, but offers abounded conception based on strongsuggestive evidence of the relationship ofarts, culture, and creativity to neighborhoodquality of life characteristics.

4. Systems of support – the resources(financial, in-kind, organizational, andhuman) required to bring opportunities forparticipation in these creativeexpressions to fruition.

The production, dissemination, andvalidation of arts and culture at theneighborhood level are made possiblethrough the contributions of many differentkinds of stakeholders – both arts and non-arts entities. The networks of relationshipsamong these entities constitute a system ofsupport that is critical to a community'scultural vitality. Likewise, support systems

ACIP ’s Framework for Arts/Culture Research and Measurement

Guiding Pr incip les

1. Definitions depend on the values and realities of the community.

2. Participation spans a wide range of actions, disciplines, and levels of expertise.

3. Creative expression is infused with multiple meanings and purpose.

4. Opportunities for participation rely on arts-specific and other resources.

Domains of Inquiry andDimensions of Measurement

* Presence

* Participation

* Impacts

* Systems of support

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for other issues, such as neighborhoodrevitalization or crime prevention, are likelyto have arts-focused players in them.

The best collaborations among arts and non-arts entities encountered by ACIP havespecific purposes and involve relationshipsthat enable individual as well as collectivegoals to be achieved. They come into being

The guiding principles and conceptualframework presented here are usefulstepping stones toward the groundedinclusion of arts, culture, and creativity asimportant dimensions in measuringneighborhood well-being. Truly adhering tothem, however, poses not only opportunitiesbut also challenges.

* Analysts and Researchers mustrecognize that community actors need to bepartners in the creation and implementationof studies and data collection efforts on theground.

* Practitioners must recognize thatharvesting their knowledge and experiencesin a systematic way is key to the creation ofsolid grounded theory that can guideresearch and policy that will further theirefforts.

* Policymakers and funders mustfacilitate the methodological component of apractitioner's job by incorporating into grantsand program guidelines the resourcesnecessary to support theory developmentand systematic data collection. Fundersmust also expand their thinking aboutstrategic points of investment in thisimportant dimension of a community's socialfabric.

and evolve based on mutually recognizedstrengths and needs, taking the form andintensity that best facilitates the work.Successful collaboration of this sort requiresorganizational flexibility, time, and patience.It can even involve mediation in situationswhere the participating organizations havedifferent cultures of work and are beholdento different standards of excellence.

O P P O R T U N I T E S A N D C H A L L E N G E S

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N O T E S

1. The definition of neighborhood indicators, as developed by Thomas Kingsley (“Democratizing Information,” Washington DC, The Urban Institute, 1996), is as follows: recurrently updated measures that allow one to describe societal conditions, track societal trends, and assess desired outcomes over time at the neighborhood level.

2. Data gathering included in-person interviews and focus group discussions with arts and community building professionals as well as community residents in nine cities, document review and telephone interviews with staff from arts and arts-related institutions, and on-site examination of community building initiatives at selected sites around the country.

3. ACIP works with local affiliates in seven places: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, Providence, and Washington DC. ACIP and affiliates work on a variety of projects, with foci ranging from city-wide 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.

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