Policy by the Numbers: Urban planning and artistic culture

Urban planning and artistic culture

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Roughly 600 cities account for 60% of global GDP, according to McKinsey, and while continuing urbanization creates its own set of challenges, it also brings with it significant opportunities to improve the wealth and well-being of people, including artists. It’s important that we start viewing urban planning—including issues like housing policy and zoning ordinances—as part of what will drive a thriving, diverse artistic culture.

Cities are important for artists of all stripes. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts a fine point on this in his book The Triumph of the CIty. Big cities mean bigger markets—these large audiences help cover the significant fixed costs of New York’s Broadway, London’s theater district, as well as other acclaimed and costly cultural centers. At the same time, “city size also enables smaller, more experimental live theater to survive. The Second City [comedy troupe] began in 1959 in cheap Chicago space that had once been a Chinese laundry." Second City went on to act as a farm league for shows like Saturday Night Live; more generally, “live performance is connected to the spread of innovation in cities because the first stirrings of a new artistic phenomenon are almost always performed live long before they are distributed electronically.”

Today, the Internet is creating more economic opportunities for artists, including those who can’t make it to the big city. The suburbanization of America in the late 20th century was paralleled by the rise of mass artistic products—think popstars and blockbuster movies that served a very broad audience. For artists that have niche audiences (say, ukelele players), the costs of producing, distributing, and marketing one’s work could have been prohibitively expensive to reach a broad set of potential fans, and, without a large local audience, that art may have simply gone unproduced. Now, artists and fans can connect online in new ways that were never before possible.

If we want to create a thriving, diverse artistic culture, that means more than focusing on copyright and media policy. It also means focusing on how we design cities and create incentives for how and where people live. In other words, if the rent is indeed too damn high, then that has consequences for culture as well.
posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager

Policy by the Numbers

Urban planning and artistic culture

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