A National Symposium Probes How Culture Can Improve City Life
BALTIMORE—Arts and urban renewal, seemingly strange bedfellows, were comparing notes in a big way in Baltimore this week.
Under the umbrella of the annual Main Street Conference, held for three decades by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, more than 150 art activists and entrepreneurs from nine states gathered to share stories about the newest thing in urban renewal: the state designated “art district.”
The first National Symposium on Arts/Cultural/Entertainment Districts was also a barometer of how the National Endowment for the Arts is thinking these days. Last year, the NEA issued its first “Our Town” grants to art projects aimed a civic renewal. Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District not only won a grant, but was tapped to host the national symposium as well.
The “art district” movement is just a decade old. Rhode Island was the first state to create such districts, which are parts of a city or town that receive an “art district” designation, tax breaks, and other financial incentives. Nationwide, art districts are typically found a bit over from downtown. Their key to success is having four “cultural assets.” These are culture-related businesses, practicing artists, non-profit groups, and cultural customers. According to studies, 80 percent of those culture customers come from elsewhere, making an art district a potential economic engine, especially in the usually poorer city sections where the art clusters often grow.
In 2001, Maryland was the second state to designate art districts, of which there are now 19 (each with a ten-year limit to prove durability). The Station North Arts District, for example, has long had the natural cultural resources of an art college, a city university, train station hub, and symphony hall. But in reality, the district is mostly poor neighborhoods blighted after the 1968 riots. Such an art district has plenty of room for economic, environmental, and cultural development.
Every once in a while the hands-on art district worker needs a bigger picture of the trend. At the symposium, that was provided by the leading art district researcher, Mark J. Stern of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.
Stern and his colleagues have been mapping “natural cultural districts” since the 1990s, mainly in Philadelphia, but now Baltimore and Seattle as well. “Natural cultural districts are initiated from the bottom,” Stern said in a keynote address. They emerge from a unique or historic local chemistry, typified by resident artists, mixed incomes, reasonable housing costs, ethnic diversity, and what Stern called a dominance of “non-family households.” Arts and entertainment, however, is what seems to glue these communities together and make them attractive to culture customers.
Once these art hubs are discovered, cities and real estate developers are often eager to come in and try to “improve” the situation—either as a strictly profit-making proposition, or to alleviate the poverty and social stress of a poorer neighborhood. From a strictly social point of view, these art enclaves are worth preserving because their diversity breeds ethnic tolerance. Also, properties are better cared for. Crime can lessen. Children do better. Rents stay reasonable.
For most art districts, Stern said, the diversity and stability is more important to the local economics than the “selling of tickets” to big art events. But when one of these vital art districts is suddenly “discovered,” somebody will inevitably start thinking about how to draw large crowds to sell loads of tickets (or drinks, or artworks, or boutique items). It is at that point that art district policy becomes complex and demands wisdom. Once an art district becomes a commercial success, the economic and racial diversity may decline. This is typically known as gentrification. The rents in such a “cool” artsy neighborhood rise. Only the prosperous can live there.
For most of the art district advocates who came to Baltimore, the idea of a generous financial “intervention” is hard to turn down. What art district would not want better transportation to bring cultural customers, or the opening of an impressive new art or entertainment facility? But many of the local art workers would probably agree with Stern—an urban theoretician only—that the wisest way to develop an art district is gradually. “It’s a very complex urban ecology, and we need to be careful,” Stern said. “Successful cultural districts tend to destroy [ethnic and economic] diversity.”
He sees two solutions. Both of them have benefits and down-sides. The first is to welcome the infusion of “cataclysmic money.” This can upgrade an art district overnight. It also tends to produce a “winner-take-all” art neighborhood. A few artists and establishments get rich. The majority get stuck. Stern prefers the second solution, which is the gradual building up of networks of support and business. This approach also loves to receive money from the city, philanthropists, and businesses, but only to “compensate” for economic rough spots, not as cash to accelerate a sudden boom.
The data that Stern and his team are generating is perhaps the best in the field. Not only are local art district workers interested in the findings, but the NEA is designing grant programs—such as Our Town—around the data. Urban renewal remains a challenge. The arts are only one weapon. So Stern left his audience with more of a dilemma than a solution, but as laborers in the arts vineyard, they clearly understand that. “How do we build those districts without undermining their diversity?” he asked in closing.
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