Social Impact of the Arts Project
Working Papers
Working Paper #1: Individual Participation and Community Arts Groups: A Quantitative Analysis of Philadelphia
This paper uses data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts to examine the connection between frequency of cultural participation and the number of arts organizations in a respondent's zipcode. It finds that this "neighborhood effect" of community arts programs is a stronger predictor of cultural participation than demographic factors like age, race, or socio-economic status. This paper, written by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert in 1994, raised a set of questions to which we returned in Working Papers 6 and 7.
Working Paper #2: The Embeddedness of Community Cultural Institutions: Wall Art in Social Context
During the summer of 1994, three SIAP research assistants-- Laura Amrofel, Gina Abrevaya Dyer, and Alison Wolk--hung out in the neighborhoods around two wall murals (one in South Philadelphia, one in West Philadelphia), talked to residents, and observed the way the spaces around the murals were used. They found that the impact of the murals on their neighborhoods was connected to the demography and ecology of the community, but not in a simple way.
Working Paper #3: Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia
This paper uses our arts and cultural organization data base and our inventory of other social organizations in metropolitan Philadelphia to examine the geography of these institutions. It finds that diverse neighborhoods are more frequently the home of these organizations than other parts of the city.
Working Paper #4: Civic Engagement and Urban Poverty in Philadelphia
One of the assumptions of contemporary discussions of urban poverty is that the poor are social isolated and that poor neighborhoods are socially disorganized. Mark Stern and Susan Seifert challenge these assumption in this paper. They use data from the survey of community participation and from the mapping of traces of attention and neglect in our case study neighborhoods to examine levels of civic engagement in poor.
Working Paper #5: Art and Social Change: AIDS Activism in Philadelphia
In this paper, Mary Petty outlines her study of the role of arts and culture in social movements around AIDS/HIV. She finds that arts and culture provides a means of representing the diversity of people with AIDS and the rapidly changing demography of the epidemic.
Working Paper #6: Dimensions of Regional Arts and Cultural Participation
This paper uses data on over 600,000 arts and cultural participants in metropolitan Philadelphia to explore patterns of regional cultural participation. The analysis suggests that there are several distinct dimensions to cultural participation, and that each of these patterns is correlated with a different set of demographic characteristics.
Working Paper #7: Cultural Participation and Civic Engagement in Five Philadelphia Neighborhoods
This paper uses data from our Community Participation Survey to examine the relationship patterns of arts and cultural participation and communinity involvement in our five case study neighborhoods. In addition to documenting the strong relationship of arts and community engagement, the paper finds that participation is strongly related to the diversity of an individual's neighborhood and the percent of respondents who see their neighborhood's quality of life as excellent.
Working Paper #8: Community Revitalization and the Arts in Philadelphia
This paper uses data on changes in poverty and population in Philadelphia neighborhoods to examine the process of community revitalization. It finds that the level of cultural participation and the historical presence of arts and cultural organizations in a neighborhood are predictors of community revitalization.
Working
Paper #9: Is All the World Philadelphia?:A Multi-city Study of
Arts and Cultural Organizations,Diversity, and Urban Revitalization
We know. For most people this is a scary question to ask. This paper explores if our findings from Working Papers #3 and #8 concerning diversity, the concentration of arts and cultural groups, and economic revitalization are applicable to three other cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Working
Paper #10: The Geography of Arts Production
This paper examines a new data base on for-profit arts and cultural firms in metropolitan Philadelphia to document how the for-profit and nonprofit sectors relate to one another. We find that the for-profit sector is divided into two parts: an “established” sector which is strongly connected with nonprofit arts and cultural organizations and a “populist” sector that is connected to more participatory cultural forms—like dance schools and music stores—and less connected with patterns in the nonprofit sector. The paper concludes with the examination of a set of cultural districts in Philadelphia to see if there are any lessons to be drawn from these “natural” cultural districts for those developing planned cultural districts like Philadelphia’s ”Avenue of the Arts.”
Working
Paper #11: Cultural Organizations in the Network Society
Based on our work on the William Penn Foundation's Culture Builds Community initiative, we have gained a new respect for the challenges that cultural providers face in keeping their organizations going and making a contribution to their communities. This paper uses data on the institutional networks created by several cultural organizations to examine how these networks develop and the dilemmas that organizations must face. This is a preliminary summary of this paper. A final version of the paper will be available when all of the data is analyzed.
Working Paper #12:“Irrational” Organizations:
Why Community-based Organizations are Really Social Movements
This paper was prepared for the Planners Network conference on “Insurgent Planning, Globalization, and Local Democracy” held in Toronto, Ontario in June 2000. The paper proposes that we re-conceptualize community-based organizations using a social movements model instead of that of a classic nonprofit institution. Our observations are based on an intensive evaluation of about 40 community-based arts organizations in Philadelphia that are part of the Culture Builds Community initiative of the William Penn Foundation. We argue that these small organizations are often encouraged to act and look like more established nonprofits. In our view, these organizations are better conceptualized as 'social movements' rather than— potentially —rational organizations. Changing the conceptual framework in this manner changes the definition of terms like 'capacity-building' and 'sustainability.' In addition, it shifts the 'unit of analysis' from individual organizations to the social networks in which they operate.
Working
Paper #13: Cultural Participation and Communities: The Role of Individual and
Neighborhood Effects
This paper explores the ways in which neighborhood effects influence individual cultural participation. Using the 1997 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA97), the paper discovers that the social context in which respondents lived was as important as their individual attributes in predicting whether they were involved in cultural activities. Two characteristics of the social environment—economic, ethnic, and household diversity and the concentration of cultural providers—were particularly important predictors of participation.
Working
Paper #14: Urban Vitality, Diversity, and Culture:Population Growth and Ethnic
Change in Philadelphia:1990-2000
The release of the first detailed tabulations of the 2000 U.S. census provides SIAP with a chance to examine the changing role of diversity in Philadelphia. This paper documents the rapid expansion of ethnically diverse neighborhoods during the 1990s and to examine the connection of cultural participation to neighborhood population growth.
Working Paper #15: Housing Markets and Social
Capital:The Role of Participation, Institutions, and Diversity in Neighborhood
Transformation
In April 2001, the City of Philadelphia released its plan for neighborhood transformation. This working paper uses the plan's analytical framework to compare SIAP's data on community assets with the City's assessment of housing markets. The results suggest that civic engagement and other measures of urban vitality can complement data on the economic and housing status of neighborhoods.
Working Paper #16: Cultural Participation and Distributive Justice
This paper was commissioned by the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP) to examine SIAP’s data through the lens of social justice. ACIP and its director, Maria Rosario Jackson, have made the case that historically disenfranchised populations need a more prominent place in the cultural sector. This paper gives this insight a harder edge, by suggesting that some forms of cultural participation tend to reinforce social inequality, while others tend to mitigate it.
Working Paper #17: Culture and the Changing Urban Landscape:Philadelphia 1997-2002
This
paper is the first product of SIAP’s Dynamics of Culture project, funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation. The
project seeks to replicate many of SIAP’s original databases and use them to
examine how Philadelphia’s cultural sector and its neighborhoods changed during
the early 21st century, and how those changes influenced each other.