ArtPlace believes that art, culture and creativity expressed powerfully through place can create vibrant communities, thus increasing the desire and the economic opportunity for people to thrive in place.
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culture & the contemporary city
ArtPlace believes that art, culture and creativity expressed powerfully through place can create vibrant communities, thus increasing the desire and the economic opportunity for people to thrive in place.
“About” - ArtPlace
There were some intriguing surprises as well. Most welcome are signs of revival from New Orleans-Metarie, La., which moved up a stunning 46 places to capture the No. 2 slot among our large metros. The region lost 11% of its population and nearly 16% of its jobs during the last decade. But now the Big Easy seems to be finding its place again among America’s great cities. Jobs, up 3.5% since 2006, have been created by rebuilding, a resurgence of tourism and a growing immigrant population – the region’s Hispanic population grew by 35,000 over the past decade.
From Forbes Best Cities for Jobs
This weekend is Prospect 1.5 openings for the St. Claude Arts District. While I’m excited to go see innovative art, personal artist studios, strange performance and go to all the good parties, I’m most excited about the research I’m going to do afterward. I’m going to go around to a sampling of businesses in the neighborhood and survey them on their sales volume comparing this weekend and other, non-event weekends. I’m still trying to formulate a scientific methodology but if that doesn’t develop, at the very least I can have some raw data that will indicate the economic impact of what the art events this weekend had on the local economy.
While more traditional economic development strategies are succeeding and failing at a regular rate, arts as economic development is a relatively recent trend. Ann Markusen is the foremost scholar on the subject and next week, in addition to my survey, I’ll be doing a study on ways that visual artists and musicians in New Orleans can leverage their assets to assure a stable and living wage. Basically, I’m going to attempt to lay out the foundation for a working class artist that isn’t dependent on the service industry for rent.
There are many avenues to explore with this research and many galleries to see this weekend. I hope the two end up intersecting quite a bit. Also, a quick plug for the event that I’ve been organizing:
New Orleans Open Studios - 21 artists are opening their private space for public, self-guided tours. Saturday, November 13th and Sunday November 14th, noon-6pm. The kickoff party is tomorrow night, November 12th at 7pm, 1940 St. Claude Ave. There will be outdoor installations, a cadre of artists, and what ever else you might expect from a 21st century art happening.
Urban farming is a great way to feed city folk healthy, local food. It teaches people how to work with the land and reap the benefits of its fruits. It’s a way for community bond and to have a shared stake in what often would be an abandoned lot. Despite these very positive results, urban farming should not be thought as a substitute to actual, sustainable economic development.
Recently I’ve been having discussions with people about this subject as well as having read an article in the Times-Picayune about urban farming in New Orleans. My issue is not with the practice, which I think is, as I said above, very positive. My contention is that urban farming is not the end product of economic development; it’s an alternative for food security when none exists. While money should go into urban farming so as to build capacity in communities, more money should be funneled towards more traditional economic development: job training and placement programs, technology training, business incentives and investment, etc.
Many urban farms are popping up in the cities that have been critically divested from. Resources and thought should be put into how to bring business back to the city and how that city can leverage its own resources rather than simply throwing hands in the air and saying “we have no grocery store, we have no healthy food, lets start a garden.” A garden is a great stop-gap measure and a small piece of the economic development matrix, not an endpoint.
