Creative City

Some years ago, when noted urbanist Richard Florida visited Roanoke, it was a city of just under 100,000, only notable to many of us simply because it had (as it still has) the only commercial airport in the area. Florida was already on a publishing and consulting roll. He had just published a widely influential book entitled The Rise of the Creative Class in which he argued that the most successful cities—those which generated high and growing numbers of well-paid, often high-tech jobs were themselves very diverse, open and tolerant. For its part, Roanoke was not on a roll. It had lost population over the past three decades, especially its young people, and numerous commissioned studies indicated that its traditional employment bases were in serious decline.

photography by Wiki Commons

Cities looking for answers keep the inbox full for guys like Florida. His book had struck nerves nationwide, particularly among planning staffs of smaller cities like Roanoke looking for new paths to prosperity. Florida's conclusions were provocative and simple: modern economies were creative economies, requiring a creative class of professionals and entrepreneurs. This talent pool is highly mobile and selective in its choice of residence. Cities reputed for their creative milieu and cultural diversity generally attract a disproportionate amount of investment, particularly in high-tech industries. Florida's uniqueness lies in his finding that economic development was not a simple "input-output-market" equation. Prosperity is also crucially a matter of local culture.

Development economists do not trust sources without data. Florida fortunately is no mystic. He has a true talent for cutting up the reams of demographic digits which count us in a startling variety of ways. For an impressive sample of cities, he created several indices of openness, diversity and creativity including a Bohemian Index and even a Gay Index to gauge the extent of an area's social tolerance. Each of these measures correlated with the expanded, robust and lucrative employment base Roanoke and many other cities were looking for.

The Bohemian and Gay index factors led to Florida being vilified by a number of conservative groups who took great umbrage against the idea that losing their so-called culture war somehow made cities economically healthier, wealthier and more dynamic. Yet even the most conservative economic developer will strike a Faustian bargain to attract 200 new jobs to a jurisdiction. In placing culture and creativity into the planner's lexicon, Florida's work hearkened back to classic urbanists such as Robert Park and Jane Jacobs, who stressed that cities were historically always the defining nexus of creativity, art and culture throughout the world. Cities attempting to discover new ways of keeping their citizens employed had to recoup and rediscover these functions in an age of mass-marketing, mass-media, corporately canned "cultural" forms, and cheapened simulacra. Florida codified a vision of cities drawing on the interrelated and mutually reinforcing spheres of technological, mercantile, cultural and artistic creativity. Development planners had focused most of their time, training and expertise on the first two spheres. Increasingly, they felt compelled to take action on the latter two.

Arts advocates had for decades made the case for greater investment in the arts and art institutions, but had only managed to get action on specific, high-profile projects, particularly in intermediate-size cities. Their efforts typically had translated into large-venue museums and galleries oriented primarily to attracting tourists and new residents. While "art for art's sake" is a noble sentiment, large investments of public money are most frequently justified in terms of projected returns on investment. Art advocates realized they were not operating in the days of Renaissance patronage. If modern corporations were to finance modern artists as bankers like the Medici and the Fuggers backed Michelangelo and Duerer, contemporary lobbying for the arts would require conjuring economic impact statements and budget projections.

By the turn of the past century, the nonprofit arts industry was generating nearly 40 billion dollars of revenue per year and was recognized as a potentially powerful economic driver. Robert Lynch, president of the non-profit advocacy organization Americans for the Arts declared, "The arts mean business," and provided a 371- page report detailing massive economic returns from arts investment. (americanartsalliance.org). In 2001, Virginians for the Arts estimated $849 million in revenue for Virginia businesses, over 18,000 jobs and a total of $307 million of value-added revenue (vaforarts.org/pdfs/Wessex.pdf). The art advocate now has no problem picking from hundreds of impact studies detailing art patronage expenditures and tourism multipliers.

As mentioned, these investments were typically for "big-ticket" arts facilities— substantial bricks and mortar projects designed to showcase "validated" artworks which had been pre-packaged into exhibit and performance tours winding their way throughout the country. Most were centered in downtown areas to direct the visitor's dollar. Case in point: Roanoke installed the Center in the Square facility in a refurbished furniture warehouse directly adjacent to its farmer's market. This year, the new Art Museum of Western Virginia, a new-build ultra-modern installation which, it is hoped, will attract not only visitors, but also investments in new downtown business and residential ventures. Such projects aim to improve a city's visibility, drawing national media attention and tourism potential. Roanoke is no exception. Its Public Arts Plan states that with the opening of AMWV, "all of Roanoke can expect to be 'on-view.'"

Such facilities are certainly desirable, and yet the value of arts in any city should not simply be conflated to their internal rate of return. One of the ironic outcomes of arts advocacy has been to foster a milieu where any expenditure requires a dollar-valued justification! The corporatization of our aesthetic experiences has produced trenchant criticism from thinking people for the past hundred years. The involvement of public money brings with it new questions for urbanist scholarship about the dynamic between economy and culture. From a planner's coldest point of view, a pristine new arts facility is really the economic equivalent of a hockey rink - an amenity, part of the spectacle and entertainment value a city attempts to accumulate as it markets itself. It is a nexus of cash-flow, a creator of jobs. It either balances its expenditures with its dividends or it does not. The big-ticket arts facility cannot blithely set up shop on Main Street.

These are risky projects. Many fail to generate enough internal revenue to operate without subsidy and yet there has always been a "build it and they will come" mentality behind their development. Successful venues often threaten to bring rafts of pale imitators in their wake. Also lurking behind many of these projects is the notion that the sublime worlds of art and culture must be brought into a community from the outside. The big-ticket arts complex was conceived first and foremost as a forum to expose otherwise lacking citizens to real art for the first time (now, with the obligatory cafe and gift shop conveniently located on the lower level.) Whatever its advantages, this is a mass consumption model of aesthetic appreciation and presentation; and until recently, it has been the hegemonic model of the culture industry.

When masterworks and cutting-edge arts from around the world are exhibited as widely as possible, certainly communities can benefit. Locally, however, this model privileges the viewing city over the creative city, the art-consuming city over the art-producing city, the passive city over the active city. Its standards are weighted by the aesthetic and status aspirations of the urban upper class. Large facilities for art consumption receive funding largely because they are supported by well-organized local elites with significant marketing savvy and political connections.

The cultural vibrancy which Parks, Jacobs and Florida celebrate, remember, is not so much an effect of bringing art into the city as it is of creating, nurturing, and bringing into view the arts of the city. The headlong rush to land new cultural facilities in America's smaller cities tended to ignore the artists who were already there. While cities and philanthropic groups paid consulting firms top dollar to prepare facility plans, little research was done on the needs and aspirations of local artists. The common complaint amongst those artists was that to be exhibited in their hometown art museum they would have to move to New York or L.A., become famous, and then die.

Developing linkages through which local artists can exhibit in established museums is one obvious strategy promoting local arts, but if a city is to truly look inward for its own arts and cultural identity it must actively invest in its own artistic production. For its part, the City of Roanoke in 2005 outlined a plan which brings Medician leverage to the support of its local artistic community: one percent of the city's capital improvement budget is earmarked for the purchase of local art to be installed in public spaces. Though Roanoke's population has stagnated, the city is attracting artists.

One key finding from nascent research on local artists' communities is that once they attain stability, respect and reputation, they tend to grow. Roanoke's public arts program has been designed to help solidify its local arts community. But while public patronage may serve as a catalyst to community art production, programs to help local artists get their products to wider markets are critical. When local art was seen as only a local good, many disregarded its earning potential. Established artistic markets in larger cities like New York are thick with formal and informal networks of buyers, brokers, agents and promoters. Smaller cities lack these skillsets and must create their own support networks to expand opportunities for their artists. Notably, the Internet has provided a nexus through which local artists can obtain inexpensive web services and create their own virtual space to display and sell arts and craftwork.

Some cities have successfully experimented with re-creating the kind of institutions and arrangements which emerged organically over decades in older and more established metropolitan arts districts. One example is the community arts center. Another such shared-facility notion takes its cue from the unplanned development of artists' colonies in abandoned warehouse districts in cities like New York and London: i.e., the loft. Artists —especially younger ones—tend to make less money and have more professionally related expenses than most other skilled workers. Finding affordable space is crucial to their endeavors. Converting underutilized building space into "live and work" spaces can anchor a productive art community quickly while providing a thicker residential fabric downtown and arresting blight.

Every artist must become an entrepreneur, and the needs of artists are often similar to entrepreneurs starting new businesses. Many cities have developed local "business incubators" which provide shared legal, financial and other support services to fledgling local companies. Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center is based on a similar model. It takes no great leap of imagination to envision a "local artists' incubation facility" through which those who have chosen to make a go at an artistic career can find a set of services designed specifically to help them along. A critical part of such a facility might be a micro-lending program. Artists often have trouble securing even modest loans from traditional lenders even if they have established commissions. Micro-loan facilities can be cooperatively funded. Models for these facilities have been very successful in many developing countries where they are extended to artisans and small-scale traders.

Little research has been done to determine key elements of the support systems local artists need at the neighborhood level. Development agencies will need at the very least to develop rudimentary relationships with local artists to develop and encourage the formation of local artists' groups. Policy makers and planners must look beyond the amenity and tourism aspects of arts and understand that artists generate vital goods and services as well as a varied and vibrant set of activities. Artists are, too, consumers—they require supplies and support services. Thus artists provide opportunities to other local businesses. The more successful they are, the greater their cumulative impact.

Roanoke's planners were wise enough to realize that signature museum facilities were only part of the city's potential arts scene. In fact, very few produce any significant linkage with local arts groups whatsoever, although there are signs of change. Tech's new arts facility on Henderson Lawn could open new doors for the university to develop deeper connections with the local arts community. The Virginia Tech School for the Arts already sponsors Artsfusion, an annual event showcasing local art; this is a good start, but a community arts development plan would require ongoing and embedded support networks to make it easier for local artists to make a living in their fields.

Building an ensconced local arts presence remains a reasonable, if challenging, objective for smaller cities and towns—one that with active community participation can in its turn strengthen social bonds throughout a city. Traditional folk-artists, for example, share attachments to long-held and historically valuable materials, styles and techniques which connect us with earlier generations and help bond us to a sense of place. The arts also of course provide an important nexus of communication and sharing between different places and cultural traditions. This kind of art is no black-tie affair.