Arts and The City: Policy and Its Implementation

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Ann Markusen ◽  
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus

The United States off ers a decade-long illustration of the implementation of a major policy initiative for art and culture across the nation's cities and towns. In this article, we focus on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and its companion ArtPlace and Our Town initiative around place-making, as they have developed since 2009. We describe the challenges that almost eliminated the NEA in the 1990s, the subsequent advocacy shift towards the economic impact of the arts, and the emergence of the Our Town initiative in 2011. We analyse the policy initiatives, their rationales and implementation. We conclude with lessons and ways to improve practice in relation to the roles of artists and arts organizations covering issues of displacement, gentrification and racism (often unanticipated challenges for communities and funders); the impact of the arts in economic terms; and evaluative challenges for funders and place-makers, especially given cultural diversity and 'place-keeping' priorities.

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.


PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Marie Rhody

The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts' Reading at Risk, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider Distant Reading as participating in the ut pictura poesis tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann

This article examines the impact of transit migration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires on Berlin and Hamburg between 1880 and 1914. Both cities experienced massive growth during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and both served as major points of passage for Eastern Europeans travelling to (and returning from) the United States. The rising migration from Eastern Europe through Central and Western European cities after 1880 coincided with the need to find adequate solutions to accommodate a rapidly growing number of commuters. The article demonstrates that the isolation of transmigrants in Berlin, Hamburg (and New York) during the 1890s was only partly related to containing contagious disease and ‘undesirable’ migrants. Isolating transmigrants was also a pragmatic response to the increasing pressure on the urban traffic infrastructure.


Author(s):  
Ali Al-Ramini ◽  
Mohammad A Takallou ◽  
Daniel P Piatkowski ◽  
Fadi Alsaleem

Most cities in the United States lack comprehensive or connected bicycle infrastructure; therefore, inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions for connecting existing bicycle infrastructure are increasingly being employed. Signage is one of the promising solutions. However, the necessary data for evaluating its effect on cycling ridership is lacking. To overcome this challenge, this study tests the potential of using readily-available crowdsourced data in concert with machine-learning methods to provide insight into signage intervention effectiveness. We do this by assessing a natural experiment to identify the potential effects of adding or replacing signage within existing bicycle infrastructure in 2019 in the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Specifically, we first visually compare cycling traffic changes in 2019 to those from the previous two years (2017–2018) using data extracted from the Strava fitness app. Then, we use a new three-step machine-learning approach to quantify the impact of signage while controlling for weather, demographics, and street characteristics. The steps are as follows: Step 1 (modeling and validation) build and train a model from the available 2017 crowdsourced data (i.e., Strava, Census, and weather) that accurately predicts the cycling traffic data for any street within the study area in 2018; Step 2 (prediction) use the model from Step 1 to predict bicycle traffic in 2019 while assuming new signage was not added; Step 3 (impact evaluation) use the difference in prediction from actual traffic in 2019 as evidence of the likely impact of signage. While our work does not demonstrate causality, it does demonstrate an inexpensive method, using readily-available data, to identify changing trends in bicycling over the same time that new infrastructure investments are being added.


1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 110-110

The National Endowment for the Arts awards grants for projects related to the arts, and makes grants to museums, theatres, dance companies, and educational institutions in the United States to help support and improve their programs. Because of the Endowment's organization it was not possible to compile a list of Africa-related grants.


Author(s):  
Caroline Janssen ◽  
William Barbour ◽  
Erin Hafkenschiel ◽  
Mark Abkowitz ◽  
Craig Philip ◽  
...  

This paper presents a micromobility scooter policy comparison between 10 mid-sized peer cities with respect to 12 policy dimensions. Because of the evolutionary nature of the policy, a temporal analysis of policy dimensions is required, which we conduct and present in this work. The impact of these individual policies reaches across the city itself, the operating company, and the mobility user—all of which are assessed throughout this work. Many of these policy dimensions are acute pain points for cities, such as fleet caps, permitting fees, and equity requirements. In the temporal analysis, some dimensions show not just happenstance variability in attempts to manage forms of micromobility, but appreciable trends. Approximately 1 year after the deployment of dockless electric scooters in cities throughout the United States and the world, cities have made multiple attempts at regulations and legislation to handle the new mobility mode. Throughout this time, cities have agreed from the start in some aspects of policy such as device removal, safety, speed limit, and bonds. In other dimensions, such as fleet expansion plans, equity regulations, and parking requirements, cities see directed movement over time toward a convergence point.


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