Contextualizing the Artistic Dividend

ABSTRACT:

Artists have been a central theme in recent debates about the causes of urban development. This article shifts attention to the question of context: in what sorts of places are artist concentrations most likely to stimulate the local economy? To tackle this question, we employ a Canadian national database of local amenities. This database includes roughly 1.8 million total amenities in 1,800 distinct categories, across every Canadian locality. By coding these amenity categories on 16 qualitative dimensions (like self-expression, glamour, or neighborliness), we measure the specific cultural “scene” for each Canadian neighborhood. Our main findings are threefold. First, in general there is a strong correlation between artist populations and rising local wages. Second, this correlation is strengthened in more self-expressive, glamorous, and charismatic scenes. Third, in contrast to artists, “creative professionals” are linked with lower local wage growth generally and in such scenes. Finally, synthesizing these results, we conclude with a comment about what it might mean for “bourgeois” and “bohemian” lifestyle preferences to become more tightly integrated in contemporary postindustrial contexts, offering evidence based on the location of artists, graphic designers, and advertising firms that processes of functional differentiation and interchange may provide a more compelling explanation than processes of fusion and conflict.

Notes

We chose FSAs rather than census tracts because (a) FSAs cover the entire country, while census tracts cover only places with an urban core population of 50,000 or more, and (b) FSAs are relatively geographically stable, while census tracts vary more from year to year.

We used PageRaptor software to download the yellow pages categories in 2009–2010 from yellowpages.ca. Our local level CBP data are from 2001, though we have city-level CBP data from 1999 to 2008.

These dimensions come from a variety of sources from the world of culture (like poetry, novels, films, painting, plays) as well as philosophy, social theory, cultural, and aesthetic theory, journalism, ethnographies, surveys, and more. The goal is to get a broad range of dimensions that capture, alone or in combination, the types of experiences that participants themselves, as well as critics and observers, have historically found in scenes.

Our Canadian Census of Population measure indicates the average wages of people who live in an area, not people who work there. However, we do not believe that this substantially alters our main findings, as we have no reason to expect that people’s work or intellectual lives are affected only by the mood or “scene” surrounding their workplaces. An amenity that encourages self-expression, such as a jazz club, can inspire a worker whether he encounters it near his home or near his workplace. And while it seems likely that, especially for members of “the creative class,” the distinction between home and work is not as strong as it once was, there is little academic research on the topic (an example from the policy domain is City of Toronto, 2011). This is a prime area for future research.

The classic source is Marshall: “[Competition] tends not to equalize, but to render unequal the average weekly wages in two districts in which the average standards of efficiency are unequal” (Marshall, , p. 572).

This artist variable comes from a custom data request to Statistics Canada conceived of and commissioned by Hill Strategies Research, and downloaded from their website, http://www.hillstrategies.com/resources_details.php?resUID=1000137. Publicly available occupational data include a variable for “arts, culture, and recreation.” The 1996 version of this variable is correlated 0.9 with the narrow arts measure for 2001 so we feel confident using the narrow measure, which fits more directly into our theoretical discussion.

“Creative professionals” include: senior and specialist managers; managers in retail, food, and accommodation; professionals and administrators in finance; and technical occupations in science and health. We also created a measure of Florida’s “super creative core,” which includes the nonartistic core of the creative class, such as scientists and professors. However, this measure was highly collinear with the simple measure of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher, so we use the latter instead. Clark () and Glaeser () similarly find that some of Florida’s results conflate “creativity” with “education.”

Nonartistic creative professionals still may make important contributions to these types of scenes; there is more to life than rapid wage gains. These places with strong Renoir’s Loge and Grit as Glamour scenes may in fact offer valuable leisure goods to creative professionals, who pay a premium to live in these scenes. That is, for artists, the scene directly feeds into their work as a factor of production, whereas for creative professionals, it has consumption value, after work and on the weekends. This interpretation would be consistent with the economic literature in which amenities are construed as compensation for lower real wages (cf. Glaeser, Kolko, & Saiz ).