More on (DC's) Cultural Infrastructure

Because I am not a scholar on the provision of culture, other than consideration of a much longer historical and cultural tradition, I can't figure out why exactly it is that cultural planning efforts in other countries, including Canada, which isn't much older than the U.S., are significantly advanced by comparison to the U.S.

Canada has the very impressive Creative City Network / Réseau des villes créatives, which publishes a regular e-newsletter, organizes conferences for Canadian municipalities, and assists networking on cultural, heritage, arts and planning issues across the country, focused on creating great (a/k/a "best") practices.

One of the things they have done over the years is publish special handouts on the foundational concepts of cultural planning:

The newest one, the fifth edition, Cultural Infrastructure: An integral component of Canadian Communities, has just come out.

But also check out the other four:

-- Creating Economic and Social Benefits for Communities
-- Nurturing Culture and Creativity to Build Community
-- Culture: Transforming Lives, Sustaining Communities
-- Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Sustainability.

I write about "cultural infrastructure" from time to time, and the dilemma within DC over its place in the world as the ur point for explaining the national/federal story of the U.S. as a country and as a place to record and interpret national history and myth, versus a place where real people live and work and play and create art separately from and complementary to and within the narrative of the national/federal story.

What that has meant for "cultural infrastructure" is great for major institutions, but terrible, for the most part for individual artists in the city.

Cultural policy for what it is (see this past blog entry on the topic, Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king) focuses mostly on big institutions in the city, especially the Smithsonian museums, and then maybe smaller institutions, but not on artists.

It's more about supporting the kinds of institutions where people come to "consume" arts rather than to produce art/be artists. Even many of the neighborhood-based arts institutions in the city (Lincoln Theatre, Atlas Performing Arts Center) tend to be about "viewing" rather than "doing." Although THEARC (Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus) in Southeast DC appears to be an exception. (See the description from the architects website.)

Still there is a difference between "doing" as creative expression and self-affirmation being a working artist "doer."

And this dialectic hasn't been resolved.

In a pesonal communication, Mike Licht of the NotionsCapital blog, summarized the issue of how do we support and develop artists in the city quite succinctly, and it's worthy of being reprinted here:

In every other jurisdiction, artists and organizations can compete for public funds on the local, county, and state level. DC artists have only DC Commission on Arts and the Humanities, a DC government agency. When that agency stops pursuing its own mission and duplicates the efforts of publicly-supported tourism nonprofits like Cultural Tourism DC and Destination DC, there are no other cultural funding agencies to pick up the slack.

Cultural Tourism DC and Destination DC do not fund local arts organizations. DCCAH is supposed to -- by law -- but currently diverts public funds to other purposes, often using these public funds to produce its own dubious events in competition with those of the very organizations it is charged with supporting.

The big tourist draws -- Kennedy Center, Corcoran, Arena Stage -- get direct federal subsidies for programs through the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Arts organizations with annual budgets under a million dollars -- those with local audiences -- are not eligible, no matter how high their artistic merit.

DCCAH needs to clean house at the commission (governing board) and management level even more than it needs to maintain budget.

Sadly, even though I was one of the advocates who pushed for a Cultural element in the DC Comprehensive Plan, the final product is so lackluster that I try to deny any responsibility for the creation of that element. In any case, the city needs a robust cultural plan and a robust tourism development and management plan.

Until we do so, and within that context, differentiate between arts as a product to consume versus arts as a "mode of production," the state of cultural infrastructure that supports the development of artists will continue to degrade.

We have discussed arts districts in the past. Examples of such districts where arts are produced as well as being consumed include the Station North Arts and Entertainment District in Baltimore and the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative in Pittsburgh, and the role of the Creative Alliance at the (old) Patterson Theater in Highlandtown, Baltimore.

The Penn Avenue District is particularly impressive, because they have worked to develop anchoring institutions (i.e., Pittsburgh Glassworks, Dance Alloy, a dance group, and Garfield Artworks) which serve as building blocks for artists and for the positioning of the arts within the commercial district as a whole. From their website:

The key objectives of the PAAI program include the following:

• Increase the number of artists who own live and work spaces in the area;
• Support the purchase and renovation of property to make them more accessible to artists;
• Market the area to artists and arts-related activities;
• Empower local youth by having artists engage them in meaningful art projects.

The Creative Alliance in Baltimore does this too. The Patterson is no longer a place to just see movies. It's a place to view and do, and networking and support organizations for artists such as are also housed there. As one example:

Creative Alliance MovieMakers (CAmm), our media resource group, offers workshops, screenings, equipment, and networking to folks who work in (and/or love) film, video and digital media. Created by artists working in film, video, and digital media, Creative Alliance MovieMakers’ mission is to establish Baltimore as a national center for distinctive and significant film and new media-making. Building on Baltimore’s heritage of original voices, CAmm cultivates a community that supports the creation and promotion of innovative work in film, video and new media.

Baltimore Clayworks is another example of creating an anchoring institution for ceramics. Both of these organizations receive some funding from the City of Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, which has some of the functions of both DC's Commission on the Arts and Humanities and CulturalTourismDC. This agency actually runs major events such as Artscape and the Baltimore Farmers Market, a massive market that I find to be a lot more fun than any farmers markets in the DC area. (See "Shop. Eat. Save. Eat! Bounties and Bargains at the Baltimore Farmers' Market" and "Top 10 Things to Like About the Baltimore Farmers' Market ..." from the Post.)

Baltimore's Heritage Area has just received designation as a National Heritage Area, but had been designated by the state as a state heritage area more than 10 years ago. It is a much more coordinated heritage development, management, and promotion effort than what we have going on in DC.

The Cultural Infrastructure: An integral component of Canadian Communities report is short -- eight 11x17 pages -- but it is packed full of solid thinking and concepts. The page on "Six cultural-creative space models" discusses the support of arts disciplines and artists in a focused fashion and the provision of different types of spaces:

1. Multi-use hubs
2. Incubators
3. Multi-sector convergence projects
4. Artist Live/Work complexes
5. Creative production habitats
6. Integrated community projects: Social • Cultural • Economic • Environmental • Community.

We need this level of detail and focus, around robust frameworks, to move the cultural planning agenda forward in DC.

Currently, it remains ad-hoc, and it doesn't serve the city very well, even if the city purports to be concerned about creativity and innovation.

In that cultural planning memo I wrote a couple years ago (cited above) I made six recommendations:

1. That DC develop a comprehensive cultural development, management, and funding plan, setting priorities for the development, harvesting, and funding of cultural resources assets;

2. And consider the development of an allied tourism management and development plan, either separately or within the same framework;

3. create a comprehensive Cultural Resources Management office, likely merging a variety of programs and assets currently spread around various agencies

4. Provide funding, both for capital improvements and operations, that that also considers providing significant ongoing funding to cultural resources deemed important.

5. Develop an open and transparent grant process.

In another entry, I discussed the idea of combining certain visitor and local history functions. See "Central Library Planning efforts and the City Museum, how about some learning from Augusta, Maine ... and Baltimore?" But these entries are relevant too:

-- Who ♥ DC? -- More about DC tourism
-- Tourism Marketing and DC
-- You (Don't) really like me--DC and its suburbs
-- More About DC Tourism Marketing.

Until the city addresses the concept of "cultural infrastructure" in a comprehensive fashion, we are going to continue to sputter forward, waste resources, and dissipate the locational advantages that the city possesses.

And we need to address the issue of arts, culture, and history as a tool for community building vs. a tool for revitalization, vs. their being disciplines with mores, ethics, methodologies, standards, etc. and beware of their being "dumbed down" in the pursuit of other objectives.

Also see my entry "You Gotta Have Community Building" from January 2007 and this one, from 2005, on "Civic Tourism."