Arts in the city: Debates in the Journal of Urban Affairs

ABSTRACT

There has been growing interest in the urban affairs literature in investigating the role of the arts in the city because of its multifaceted potential to impact a place. To document central elements of the emerging debates on the arts and the city over the last 20 years, we examined key articles on the subject published in the Journal of Urban Affairs and highlighted their links with several special issues of other journals. The debates canvased over this time can be organized as (1) defining artists as human capital, (2) studying cultural amenities, and (3) examining the role of art around the city. This analysis uncovers some of the themes, methods, and places articulating these academic debates and identifies pivotal overarching economic, symbolic, and social issues. The paper suggests that key directions for future research include widening the journals to be analyzed; developing bibliometric analyses; broadening the geographic selection of case studies, including research in languages other than English; and encouraging more special journal issues focused on art and the city to facilitate multidisciplinary conversations.

Introduction

The role of the arts in the city is a topic that has gained traction in urban affairs debates around the world (Grodach & Silver, 2012; Landry, 2020; Stevenson, 2017). Important outcomes have been insights into such diverse phenomena as the ways in which the arts are used in city imaging, alongside a consideration of the contributions cultural activities make to urban economies and local quality of life (Scott, 2000). The arts have asked for a seat at the table of urban governance, and urban policy has looked to the arts to tackle economic and social issues (Redaelli, 2011). To better understand the terms of these academic debates within urban affairs, there is a need for a literature review that organizes key themes of the debates and identifies new perspectives of research.

Literature review articles can be of different types, and the literature has underscored their heterogeneity (Wee & Banister, 2015). They range from works claiming the potential of bibliometric analysis (Kamalski & Kirby, 2012; Kanai et al., 2017) to thematic studies bridging academic articles with practitioners’ perceptions (da Cruz et al., 2018) or uncovering the intellectual foundations of current pressing issues (Logan & Oakley, 2017). Several review articles about the arts in the city have been thematic, focusing on cultural and creative industries (O’Connor, 2010), strategies for creative industries (Foord, 2008), critical cultural economy (Gibson & Kong, 2005), personal network theory and the arts (Jackson & Oliver, 2003), and cultural ecosystem services (Milcu, 2013).

The aim of this article is not to conduct a comprehensive overview of the debates about the arts in the city, but to provide a reflective summary of influential elements of these debates. To this end, we adopt a thematic approach that adds to previous foundational work, such as Markusen’s (2014) key article and two of our own most recent monographs (Redaelli, 2019; Stevenson, 2017). Markusen (2014) laid out a research agenda connecting the arts and urban planning, whereas we consider the broader field of urban affairs. Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective by Stevenson (2017) draws on examples from around the world to examine the complex ways in which municipal governments have used the arts and culture to build and rebuild localities and societies. Traversing related terrain but with a focus on U.S. examples, Connecting Arts and Place: Cultural Policy and American Cities by Redaelli (2019) undertakes an examination of how policy discourse has connected arts and place. This review provides a perspective that is complementary to these two monographs, focusing mainly on the academic debates in urban affairs.

We delineate the scope of this investigation by focusing on the Journal of Urban Affairs (JUA) because it has published key articles that shaped the conversations and continues to be a foundational reference (Clark et al., 2002; Markusen, 2014; Scott, 2006). The articles considered in this analysis were selected following a search on the journal’s website for articles published in the last 20 years with the keywords art, creative, and cultural in their titles and abstracts. From this selection, the task was then to identify links with articles published in special issues of other urban affairs journals. Special journal issues are an important source for understanding the development of debates and so situating the debates emerging in the JUA in the larger field of urban affairs, was important to providing context and highlighting significance. Special issues demonstrate an emerging interest in specific topics, create a dialogue among scholars engaged in a research field, and connect the debates from different disciplines. The special issues included in this article were selected among those identified over many years of research in the field because they resonated with the themes of JUA’s articles.

We organize the emerging debates around three main units of analysis: people, organizations, and public space. In qualitative research design, the selection of the unit of analysis is a fundamental step that provides “a bucket” for collecting debates and themes in order to find common threads (Roller & Lavrakas, 2015). Rather than conduct a quantitative analysis by counting the utterance of terms, we aim to untangle the essential research elements of these debates in ways that uncover the themes, data and sources used, and the cities investigated. The primary goal is to highlight the overarching issues tackled by the literature to disclose how the arts have been included in the urban affairs discourse and from this consideration, to suggest opportunities for future research.

People: Defining artistic human capital in the city

The aim of understanding how people, such as artists and cultural workers, contribute to the well-being of a city is a central element of many of the articles reviewed, a concern which can be broadly framed as “human capital.” The notion of human capital has its roots in economic theory, where it was coined to position the capacities and skills of human beings as forms of economically productive capital (Becker, 1984; Schultz, 1961). It also underpinned arguments such as those in favor of investing in education (including arts education) as a strategy for improving productivity at both individual and societal levels (Throsby, 2010). The limitations of the term are in its linking of the human condition to economic gain and growth, reducing conceptions of cultural value to economics (Stevenson & Magee, 2017). There is fuzziness in the literature defining artistic human capital in the city; however, we were able to identify four concepts emerging in the JUA that go some way toward capturing its essence and boundaries: neo-bohemia (Lloyd, 2002); creative cultural capital (Moldavanova et al., 2017); artists (Colomb, 2016; Ryberg et al., 2012; Strom, 2010); and perhaps the most popular, creative class (Rausch & Negrey, 2016; Reese et al., 2010). Each of these terms focuses on different ways in which artistic human capital can be defined, measured, and connected to urban life.

The use of the term neo-bohemia is addressed in an article by Lloyd (2002), who explained that, before it entered the lexicon of urban affairs researchers, the term bohemia was associated with artists and others who worked and lived (actually and metaphorically) outside mainstream society and the economy—including often living on the fringes or in the liminal zones of the city. Over time, this term came to refer to levels of artistic innovation in the city that once would have been described as a lifestyle (Graña, 1964). Writing in the early years of the 21st century and building on the concept of bohemia, Lloyd coined the term neo-bohemia in order to shine a light on what had emerged to be an interlocking between artists, urban space, and the urban economy. As Lloyd (2002) puts it, “The new in neo-bohemia is the intersection between these spatialized social practices and the post-Fordist economy in which they are embedded” (p. 518). This embedding, he goes on to argue, emerged within a restructured urban economy that included the displacement of core economic functions such as manufacturing, the increased importance of culture as a commodity, and the changing occupational structure associated with being a global city.

Another term that falls within the broad theme of artistic human capital is creative cultural capital. Moldavanova et al. (2017) defined this term as the workforce of libraries, museums, and the visual and performing arts sectors. They also measure it using the Creative Vitality Index (CVI) developed by the Western States Arts Federation. For their study, the authors also identified four independent variables at the community level to correlate with creative cultural capital: social capital, political culture, religious affiliation, and demography. After measuring the correlations, the authors established that predictors for the development of creative cultural capital are dependent on the particular geographic setting being considered. At the same time, they identified formal educational attainment as a positive predictor, and the level of access the population has to broadband technology, and racial and ethnic diversity, especially in metropolitan areas, as two major negative predictors.

The term artist frequently appears in JUA’s articles in connection with artists’ housing. A study in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, observed locational patterns of artists’ housing and explored methodologies for predicting what neighborhood features could attract a concentration of artists (Ryberg et al., 2012). The research provided a descriptive investigation of a survey of artists, artist-occupied properties, and artist-concentrated neighborhoods and suggests a predictive model. In particular, it analyzes how a county-wide land bank program could help cultivate artistic clusters. The findings led the authors to make the following recommendations for successful policies: involve artists in the design of the policy, prioritize reutilization over demolition, focus on artist-desired areas, and partner with arts-focused organizations.

Other studies investigated additional aspects of artist housing. Strom (2010), for instance, argued that the provision of artist housing is an example of how arts and culture have been reframed as an economic development tool. Artist housing is different from a typical housing project but falls also outside the concerns of existing cultural policies. In the study, Strom contacted 137 city officials to determine which cities were building artist housing and why. The findings revealed that programs were being developed to generate positive neighborhood effects. Officials believed that artists have high political capital and can have a transformative impact on a place because they can fix grim buildings and be models for how to live in them. Moreover, although they have social and political capital, they typically also have low incomes, which makes them suited for government subsidies. Colomb (2016) examined this trend in her article on how the use of temporary space was promoted in the German city of Berlin as part of its creative city agenda. She argued, however, that this strategy was largely used as a marketing tool to attract artists but was not accompanied by forms of support for their work. The results included the emergence of local conflicts linked to transformation, displacement, and commodification.

A special issue of the Journal of Urban History entitled “Dancing in the Streets: The Arts in Postwar U.S. Cities” included an article about a specific case study of artist housing that represents a transitional moment of postwar urban development, bringing together funding from urban renewal projects and private real estate development (Trask, 2015). The Westbeth Arts Center in New York’s Greenwich Village was one of the first large institutional projects aimed at revitalizing 19th-century factories by creating lofts to house low-income artists. The project helped private developers see the value of revitalization but did not attain the goal of spreading this model for creating more affordable artist-housing in abandoned industrial spaces: “Today it stands out as a nonprofit housing complex for moderate-income, mostly elderly tenants in the middle of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States” (Trask, 2015, p. 1028).

Finally, the term creative class (defined in the larger category of creative professionals) is perhaps the most controversial. The discourse around the creative class, initially proffered by Richard Florida (2002), argued that attracting the creative class will contribute to the development of thriving urban economies, and thus cities were encouraged to invest in cultural activities and resources in order to attract this group of professionals. There have been a number of empirical studies published in the JUA and elsewhere that have measured the impact on local economies of the presence of the creative class and which do not support Florida’s optimistic view. Reese et al. (2010), for instance, examined the effect of the creative class on mid-sized Canadian cities using four indicators: (1) measures of talent and diversity using census data, (2) data from successful downtowns, (3) the variety of urban amenities, and (4) community site visits. Bringing into question both the conceptual model of the creative class and the supposed impact of this “class” on localities, was the finding that the presence of the creative class did not translate into a better urban or regional economic performance. This negative assessment was reinforced by the findings reported in a subsequent article by Rausch and Negrey (2016), who used gross metropolitan product (GMP) to measure economic performance in regions that had populations with a certain proportion of the creative class. Importantly, the regions analyzed were the 276 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas as ranked by Florida (2002) using the popular creativity index developed in his book The Rise of the Creative Class.

The concept of the creative class may have spread quickly in urban cultural policy and planning, but within urban studies, questioning of it has been widespread and robust. In a 2006 special issue of Environment and Planning A entitled “Placing the Creative Economy: Scale, Politics, and the Material. The Rise of the New Creative Imperative,” an article by Markusen (2006) explained that among the first critiques of the notion of the creative class were those focused on the fuzzy causal logic that is a feature of claims about its relationship to urban growth. Markusen argued that the creative class is defined purely on the basis of educational attainment and with little demonstrable relationship to creativity. She uses a case study of artists to show that the formation, location, urban impact, and politics of this occupational group are much more complex than is suggested by the rhetoric associated with the term creative class.

In a 10-year review of the research agenda of creative cities that was published in the JUA in 2014, Markusen (2014) further warned of the need to better understand the complex nexus between artists and cities. She identified gentrification, equity and diversity, and choices associated with where artists live as themes in need of better investigation. Circulating assumptions about the role of artists as the forerunners to gentrification, for instance, are problematized, and while it is undeniable that artists are vulnerable to the decisions of landlords and shifts in government policy, the human dimension of art and the city remains a frequent area of silence or a blind spot in research agendas. Much of that research is concerned with cultural infrastructure or amenities—space—rather than with the labor and lives of artists.

The critique of the creative class has also been developed by those contesting its neoliberal approach. For instance, the introduction to a 2012 special issue of the JUA entitled “The Creative Underclass: Culture, Subculture, and Urban Renewal,” affirms the idea that creativity is embedded in everyday life and local communities. Using the polemical term creative underclass, Morgan and Ren (2012) sought to frame creative outputs not as economic capital, but as symbolic capital. They used the term creative underclass to refer to people engaged in expressing resistance and challenging unequal social relations. In an article included in the same special issue, Morgan (2012) also used the term creative underclass to analyze the cultural life and legacy of the Aboriginal community living in the inner Sydney suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo. Morgan focused on how Aboriginal culture is circumscribed to touristic representations of traditional arts, arguing that this representation excludes the young people of the area who identify with, and are a central part of, local street culture. Gornostaeva and Campbell (2012) also used the term creative underclass in their article on the production of place in Camden Town, a London neighborhood undergoing both gentrification and controversial redevelopment. The creative underclass, for Gornostaeva and Campbell, is a diverse group united by having low economic, but high cultural capital, who are playing an important role in the development of Camden as a cultural quarter.

Organizations: Studying cultural amenities in the city

Moving the attention from people to organizations, we observed that JUA’s articles engage in debates around the role of urban cultural amenities, which are comprised of the formal and informal organizations where art is produced, created, and consumed. Such spaces can be high profile, even iconic structures, such as galleries, museums, and concert halls, but they can also be those that have their roots in local communities, as well as the clusters and streetscapes that may form accidentally or through the focused intervention of the public and/or private sectors. Since the late 1970s, Partners for Livable Communities has been influential in promoting the idea that cultural amenities help cities become both livable and attractive to businesses and tourists (Stevenson, 2017).

In JUA’s articles, the debate on the role of cultural amenities in cities has developed around themes such as urban growth, investment, and locational patterns. On the one hand, urban growth can be driven by amenities (Clark et al., 2002), and on the other hand, a smart growth coalition can include cultural amenities (Grodach, 2011). The debates have also considered how to assess the impact on investments in cultural amenities (Strom, 1999). Other themes of the debates around cultural amenities are the choice of location, clustering patterns, and the benefits of agglomeration (Foster et al., 2016; Grodach et al., 2014; Kolenda & Yang Liu, 2012; Scott, 2006).

Clark et al. (2002) examined the role of cultural amenities in the city of Chicago, grounding their argument in theories that claim urban growth is driven by amenities. Through oral histories and interviews with urban leaders, they probed how Chicago transformed its policies to focus more directly on entertainment and amenities. The notion of cultural amenities as public goods connected to urban growth took root in the political discourse of major U.S. cities only in the last years of the 20th century. Importantly, however, mayors and city governments focused on aspects of cultural consumption rather than production and implemented policies concentrated on the development of neighborhood facilities. These policies encouraged spending money rather than earning it—focusing on buying rather than making. In Chicago, also stressed were lakefront aesthetics, concerts, restaurants, parks, boulevards, recreation programs, school improvements, and crime reduction. The objective, according to the authors, was to make the city a “livable and pleasant place” (Clark et al., 2002, p. 513). Grodach (2011) was, for his part, concerned with how investment in cultural amenities interacts with smart growth coalitions. From a study in Houston, Texas, he found that the adopted creative city policies were driven by the central city agenda more than they were by an ambition to develop the cultural sector more broadly, and as a result, they were unable to coordinate a very fragmented sector.

Investment in cultural amenities has been scrutinized from a range of angles. In one of the first empirical studies looking at the impact of facilities on a local area, Strom (1999) argued how difficult it is to do a fair assessment. Focusing on the performing arts center in general, and the case of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark in particular, Strom raises several questions about what can be considered successful measures. She concludes that the difficulties in evaluating the impact of this kind of project on a local area are due to the diversity of the goals of supporters and the intangible qualities of the arts. Other scholars have investigated whether investments in cultural amenities were aimed at attracting the creative class. For instance, a study of the motivations of the stakeholders involved in the revitalization of downtown Scranton, a small town in Pennsylvania, revealed that there was strong interest in promoting arts and culture and sustaining a consumer-based area (Rich, 2013). The stakeholders did not aim to attract the creative class by investing in arts and culture, however; rather, they wanted to invest in strategies designed to nurture social ties, including those of local families and communities. Investment in arts and culture, therefore, was made in order to increase the livability of the town and retain residents, not to entice an imagined creative class to relocate there.

A special issue of European Planning Studies titled “Invisible Agents and Hidden Protagonists: Rethinking Creative Cities Policy” engaged in this debate about the impact of investments in cultural amenities. The authors highlighted the need to better understand the complexity of cultural production to create more successful policies for cultural amenities. For instance, in the introduction to the special issue, Watson and Taylor (2014) argued that a failure to understand the complexity of cultural production has led to counterproductive policy design for cultural amenities. One crucial issue is the “hiddenness” in such policies of actors within the cultural milieu. These actors include universities (Comunian et al., 2014), freelancers (Mould et al., 2014), and underground creative activities (Granger, 2014). In the same special issue, Kloosterman (2014) suggested a typology of cultural amenities as a way of orienting the strategies developed in cultural planning. This typology is based on two main dimensions of the business model of cultural amenities: supply (scale of provision) and demand (market—mainstream or niche-oriented). Applying this framework, Kloosterman analyzed the museums of Amsterdam and concluded that small-scale mainstream-oriented amenities will struggle to survive in the urban environment, whereas large-scale mainstream amenities can generate an income that sustains their activities. However, these large-scale facilities do not necessarily generate a new quality of place, while small-scale niche amenities have a greater impact. Therefore, cultural planning should put them at the center to assure their financial support.

JUA’s articles have also scrutinized the choice of location of cultural amenities, considering them both as places of consumption as well as production. In their 2012 article, Kolenda and Yang Liu (2012) compared the central city and suburban locations of creative industries in 40 of the top 101 American metropolitan statistical areas. They studied occupations in three industries (information, professional services, and arts and entertainment) and found that arts and entertainment jobs are less frequently clustered in the central city than overall employment. Moreover, they argued that suburbs were seeing faster growth in the sector than were the downtown locations. Foster et al. (2016) investigated the choice of location for cultural amenities in New York City. In particular, they examined whether newly established arts organizations had chosen neighborhoods on the basis of their diversity. To understand these choices, the authors focused on such characteristics of diversity as race, income, and industry. Using data from the Data Cultural Project, including information about not-for-profit arts organizations that opened in 188 neighborhoods between 2000 and 2010, they found that the connection between the arts and neighborhood features was context-dependent and that specific patterns did not emerge. Arts organizations were not locating in disadvantaged communities but, rather, in neighborhoods with a high mix of industry and household income.

The choice of location for cultural amenities has also been studied by Grodach et al. (2014), who looked at 22 artistic production industries in each of the 336 statistical metropolitan areas in the United States. They found that the arts were most likely to cluster in urbanized metropolitan areas with indicators of economic health, and where the major art centers remained the dominant economic capital, even though the arts industry was quite dispersed. However, they also stated that it is not possible to generalize locational patterns based on large and wealthy metropolitan areas. At a neighborhood level, arts industries tend to cluster near, or with, other knowledge-related industries in areas often referred to as innovation districts. Overall, there is not a definitive locational pattern, but instead, there is place specificity in terms of size, scale, and type of industry cluster.

Focusing on agglomeration and clusters, articles published in the JUA have looked at the role of policy, investigating what scale could be relevant for government intervention (Zhang & Chen, 2018) and what the role of the state has been so far (Zheng, 2010). In developing the idea of networks as cultural clusters, Zhang and Chen (2018) investigated what scale is important for the formulation of policies to support production by the creative sector using a city network perspective. They conducted an empirical study of 252 cultural firms in mainland China, covering four main sectors: radio, television, film, and video recording; cultural services; culture and arts; and press and publications. Their analysis focused on the city-based buyer–supplier relationship of Chinese cultural firms and found that the benefits of clusters were unevenly distributed, which raised issues of competition between cities. However, they also found intensive cooperation between actors across multiple geographic scales. Conversely, the focus of Zheng’s (2010) work was the role played by the state in the Chinese city of Shanghai to develop a cultural cluster policy in order to convert abandoned industrial spaces into accommodation for artists and cultural businesses. She concluded that the policy had been implemented to promote a pro-growth role for the government that effectively exploited cultural clusters as a form of revenue generation. Zheng (2010) classified the role of government as entrepreneurial because, aside from stimulating urban growth, the cultural clusters policy also served the economic interests of specific governmental departments and effectively promoted a private–public coalition between government and art businesses.

Crucial in the debates about the role of cultural amenities in cities is the analysis of the benefits of proximity suggested by Scott in his highly influential article published in the JUA in 2006. Scott (2006) described the creative city as a place of agglomeration of cultural production, where emerging networks of producers, facilitated by proximity, play a key role in promoting collaboration. He cited the Hollywood film industry as emblematic of this trend. While at first, he stressed the importance of the internal structure of urban space, he later highlighted how the fortunes of a creative city are also shaped by globalization and the development of international networks. A consideration that also connects proximity with the dynamic nature of cities.

In their introduction to the 2006 special issue Environment and Planning A entitled “Placing the Creative Economy: Scale, Politics, and the Material,” Rantisi et al. (2006) argued that the benefits of proximity include the face-to-face interactions of all the actors in the supply chain (including creators, producers, and buyers) and the exploitation of localized conventions and ways of doing business. The special issue further developed this argument, emphasizing how the urban location is a privileged locus of interactions and experimentation based on two main aspects. First, Pratt (2006) argued that in London’s advertising industry, “peer regard,” which consists of reputation gained over time, is key to generating industry standards. Peer regard supposedly shapes creativity and style and is finely tuned to changes in community rules and trends. Second, Stolarick and Florida (2006) argued that density and proximity are key to creating connections between a diversity of industries in the cultural sector. These connections emerge from people literally bumping into each other, and creating innovative sparks, metaphorical bridges, and spillovers.

Another influential perspective for understanding the benefits of the agglomeration of arts organizations is offered by Stern and Seifert (2010). They studied the role of cultural assets at a neighborhood level, focusing in particular on their connection with community development. Their article, published in a special issue of the Journal of Planning Education and Research titled “Art and Economic Development: New Directions for the Growth of Cities and Regions,” highlighted the importance of community development for the growth of a region. Focusing on Philadelphia, they used the Cultural Assets Index to track the concentration of cultural providers, artists, and participants at the census block level and compared data from 1997 and 2004. Their findings suggested that cultural agglomeration can reinforce diversity in neighborhoods, and they argued that the “newly discovered” neighborhoods in the northern zones of Philadelphia had benefited from the arrival of artists and the growth of commercial cultural activities. The impact was particularly significant on social processes. They described a phenomenon called cross-participation, whereby people who participate in cultural activities are also more likely to take part in other community activities, and that participation, in turn, fosters community building.

Public space: Examining the role of art around the city

Public space, and specifically urban public space, refers to open areas that are defined by everyday social practices and representations (Pioselli, 2015). In contemporary cities, artwork has increasingly been made available in urban public space, outside the walls of galleries, museums, and private spaces (Kwon, 2002). Artists have employed a wide range of modalities for their art practice in urban space, including community-based art (Dewhurst, 2012), art as social practice (Fletcher et al., 2014; Sholette, 2018), and public art (Kwon, 2002). Public art is the mode most often studied in JUA’s articles, in the forms of both sculpture (Hodder, 2016; Ten Eyck & Dona-Reveco, 2016; Zheng, 2017) and graffiti, or street art (McAuliffe, 2016).

The themes about public art emerging from JUA’s articles, are concerned with issues of city identity, in terms of history or branding, and moral geography—what is legal or illegal in a public space. The presence of sculptures in public space, for instance, is one way for a city to try to engage with its own history, although it often draws attention to the constant rewriting of the past. According to Hodder (2016), the narrative associated with the inclusion of a statue in a historic district of the U.S. city of Richmond, Virginia, raised multiple questions and concerns, foreshadowing episodes that flared up in locations around the world in the summer of 2020 (Morris, 2020). After a controversial community planning process, a statue of the Black tennis player Arthur Ashe was placed in Monument Avenue Historic District among Civil War identities (Hodder, 2016). Analyzing newspaper coverage and public hearings, Hodder discovered that this story is an example of an incremental urban change process, whereby historic resources are protected as “products of local circumstances” (p. 451), while at the same time, place is reinterpreted using contemporary historical constructs.

In part through the discourses of the creative economy, the making and positioning of public art are also increasingly regarded as contributing to city identity and branding. Cities display artwork in public spaces to provide viewers with a history of the city and also a sense of contemporary values. This insight is what emerged from an analysis of the newspaper coverage of public art in the U.S. cities of Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Chicago (Ten Eyck & Dona-Reveco, 2016). Public art is connected with the urban context and is often intended to function as a mediator between history and the contemporary every day, highlighting certain aspects of the social terrain and making them legible while obscuring other versions of history. Moreover, news articles tend to emphasize local artists, and the public art that is covered in the news routinely aligns with the dominant image and style of the city. For instance, in San Francisco, the debate over public art ranged from statues of dogs urinating to symbols of love.

In Shanghai, the official city image is supported by state-promoted art. Zheng (2017) examined the 2004 Master Plan for Urban Sculptures in Shanghai, which commissioned the erection of approximately 5,000 sculptures to be completed by 2020. Zheng explained that urban sculpture in China is all state-sponsored and designed to be installed in public spaces. The people involved in the decision-making for these Shanghai projects, including the Sculpture Planning Authority, are part of a cultural elite that is bonded by a common taste. This shared cultural capital determined the “cultural elite state” that frames institutions, actors, and processes for selecting the statues. According to Zheng, sculpture is used to upgrade the image of the city and advance a particular form of state urban entrepreneurialism.

The JUA’s study of public art also included examinations of graffiti. Analyzing graffiti in Sydney, Australia, McAuliffe (2016) brought attention to initiatives that aimed to determine what is in, and out, of place. To this end, he framed his research in terms of debates concerned with moral geographies, suggesting that graffiti writers and street artists are on the line between right and wrong, legal and illegal. But according to McAuliffe, the separation is sometimes totally arbitrary and, the desire of the community for social order is often interpreted as a clean urban environment. When cultural policy is used to leverage graffiti and street art as part of urban transformation however, it gives artists recognition and legitimacy. The result is a blurring of the moral boundaries that are so often positioned as unambiguous, but which are actually ambivalent because they can be interpreted as both good and bad. In other words, graffiti occupies a space of dual validation.

These themes in JUA’s articles about public art connect with a larger conversation in the urban studies literature that claims that a spatial turn in the arts occurred in European and North American cities in the 1970s. This spatial turn emphasized the reciprocal relationship between the arts and the city (Ardenne, 2002). Molina and Guinard’s (2017) special issue “Arts in Cities—Cities in Arts” Articulo-Journal of Urban Research, highlights the reciprocal relationship that creates a dynamic co-production between arts, cities, and societies. The underpinning premise of this special issue is that the relationship between the arts and the city is framed not only by how art works in the city, but also by how it represents the city. This mutual relationship is investigated in different aspects through the articles published in the special issue. Key concerns included cinematic representations of public spaces that make them available to a wider audience and shape the imaginaries of cities (Guillard & Pleven, 2017) and how art can become visible in the city and also bring visibility to particular areas of the city (Debroux, 2017). Also, the mobility of the arts was highlighted by Balti (2017), who claimed that art should not only be considered as an object but also as a process that can move in different parts of the city.

The special issue of City and Society entitled “Urban Public Art: Geographies of Co-Production,” brought to the forefront the term co-production to underline how public art links arts practice with broader social and cultural discourses, involving members of different publics as full participants. Zebracki and Palmer (2018) described this process as the “transformative experiences of everyday city life” (p. 5) that connect with users of urban spaces and give new meaning to the built environment. The editors further emphasized the participatory aspect of the interrelationship as well as the fluidity of the process, which involves formal agents and challenges normative dualisms such as indoor/outdoor, public/private, and urban/non-urban: “The message is that lived spaces should be approached with ‘fluidity rather than duality’” (p. 10).

Other scholars engaged in the debate regarding the arts in public space during the spatial turn by focusing on the meaning of publicness and the outdoors. Some scholars have considered the publicness of public art rather than its location, highlighting the active relationship that exists between content and audience (Phillips, 1992). Others critiqued public art as limited because many projects have been developed in isolation from the general debate in the city (Miles, 1997). Lacy (1995) argued that in the 1990s, the “new genre public art” emerged, which departed from traditional boundaries of the media and is based on engagement and political activism. As Lacy explained, “This construction of a history of new genre public art is not built on a typology of materials, spaces, or artistic media, but rather on concepts of audience, relationship, communication, and political intention” (Lacy, 1995, p. 28). An examination of public art through the lens of geography has brought further insights into the conceptualization of the arts in urban public space. In the introduction to the special issue of Travaux de l’Institut de Géographie de Reims entitled “Spatialités de l’Art,” Volvey (2007) explained how “outdoors” refers not so much to being in the open air, as to being outside the walls of the museum and the constraints of the art system. The land becomes the source of the art and the condition for the creation of art in situ. It is an approach that claims the intrinsically spatial dimension of the art object that overcomes the duality between things and the space they occupy.

Volvey (2007) promoted a relational conception of place and the art that occupies it by developing a geographic point of view about contemporary art. She critiqued the conceptualization of American land art, mainly referring to the works of Dennis Oppenheim and Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Her conceptualization of art started from a geographical rethinking of place, from which she argued that using a conception of place as topos, whereby the object is placed “in” the land, misses how the object and the place are tied in the artistic practice and its reciprocal concretization. Instead, she proposed the use of the Platonic notion of chôra, which understands space as not having form until it receives the object—as being given meaning through being occupied. The artwork is a generational act that produces both the space and the artwork.

The debates: Themes, data, and places

The examination of these three central debates about arts in the city canvased in the JUA untangled a number of themes, data, and places addressed by the literature (see Table 1). These themes bring to light overarching issues that show the arts have been included in urban affairs discourse in ways that merge economic, symbolic and spatial perspectives. Economic issues emerge in the form of the measurement of the impact of the sector on the overall economy, struggles of coordination associated with a smart growth agenda, challenges of impact assessment, and the fuzziness of concepts that cannot be operationalized and measured. Starting from valuing culture in the post-Fordist era, the literature has struggled adequately to measure the positive and negative impact of the arts on the general urban economy. Nevertheless, organizations for the arts and culture have come to be regarded as amenities that bring urban economic growth, and many scholars have discussed how to assess and promote their positive economic impact. As for the terms that have been used to label the people working in the sector, in addition to artists, several others have had currency, including neo-bohemia, the creative class, and creative cultural capital. We contend that the definitional challenge is connected to the desire to define who is part of the group and to find ways of measuring their economic contributions to cities.

Table 1. JUA debates: Themes, data, and places

Unit of Analysis	Debates	Themes of the Debates	Data/Sources	Places
People	Defining artistic human capital in the city	Neo-bohemia The increased importance of culture in the post-Fordist era Creative cultural capital Workforce of libraries, museums, visual and performing arts Artists Artists-housing policies Creative class Measurement of the impact on the local economies of the presence of the creative class Purpose of cultural investments Fuzziness of the definition and need to better understand connection with gentrification, equity and diversity. Moving the interest toward symbolic capital using the term underclass	Census data Gross metropolitan product (GMP) Creative Vitality Index (CVI) Surveys Interviews Data Cultural Project	Chicago Midsize Canadian cities 276 US metropolitan statistical areas Scranton, Pennsylvania Redfern and Waterloo, Sydney suburbs Camden Town, London Cuyahoga County, Ohio 137 American cities Berlin New York City neighborhoods
Organizations	Studying cultural amenities in the city	Urban growth Consumption Smart growth agenda Investment Impact assessment Goals (attraction, consumption, social ties) Locational patterns Choices of location Government policies to incentivize clusters Different benefits of proximity and agglomeration	Surveys Insurance records Property values Cultural Assets Index Interviews Oral History Data Cultural Project Newspaper Coverage	Scranton, Pennsylvania Chicago Coventry, UK Silicon Valley, California London New Jersey Houston, Texas Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hollywood 336 SMA 40 of top 101 American MSAs Cities in Mainland China Shanghai
Public Space	Examining the role of art around the city	Public art Sculpture and city history, branding and image Graffiti and moral geography Spatial Turn Reciprocal influence art and the city Co-production with broader social and cultural discourses Meaning of publicness and outdoors	Philosophy Newspaper coverage Master plans Public hearings Visual ethnography Interviews with artists Policy documents Interviews	Richmond, Virginia Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago Shanghai Sydney

Symbolic issues arise in the form of symbolic capital, moral geography, and co-production between art and broader social and cultural discourses. Within the debate about defining artistic human capital in the city, several scholars have sought to frame artistic outputs not as economic capital, but as symbolic capital and some have coined new terms to highlight the role of artists in expressing resistance by highlighting and challenging inequalities. The debates about examining the role of art in the spaces of the city have raised issues of city identity and moral geography, particularly in determining what is legal and illegal in public space. City branding, history, and the relationship between the audience and the arts have also been important topics of investigation, along with discussion about the meaning of publicness and the outdoors. Researchers have contextualized these questions as part of the spatial turn of the arts and highlighted the reciprocal relationship between art and place, which drew attention to the idea of co-production and linked the arts to broader social and cultural discourses.

This last consideration led to a focus on how spatial issues emerged in these debates alongside analyses of the choice of location for cultural amenities and their associated patterns of agglomeration. Understanding space as not having form before it receives an object brings attention to urban art as a generational act, or process, that produces space and artwork at the same time. Studies of where cultural amenities are located have been carried out by comparing the downtown and the suburbs and probing the distinctive characteristics of the neighborhoods that are most likely to be chosen. In terms of patterns of location, clustering has been a major theme in the literature, and has been analyzed in terms of both its unregulated dynamics as well as its relationship with government policy. Finally, an important theme that emerged from our review is the analysis of the benefits of agglomeration and the proximity of cultural amenities for both art and the city. These benefits include a familiarity with the conventions of doing business and cross-participation which, together, show how people who participate in cultural activities are also often involved in broader community building.

Considering the research methods used in the articles canvased, we found that data for analysis were collected from a broad range of sources (see Table 1): interviews, census data, historical archives, news articles, participant observations, GMP of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, indexes (CVI, Cultural Assts Index), databases (Data Cultural Project), planning discourses, master plans, government and consultant reports, property values, insurance records, large surveys, laws, and statistical models. What emerged though is that multi-method case study research has been the most common approach. Larger statistical and comparative investigations have been relatively rare for the most part, but where they have been important is in the study of locational choices. Overall, there has been an expansion of the research methods utilized in the study of arts in the city, which flags the need for more opportunities to engage in conversations that bring together, and make connections between, different research concerns and approaches through such outlets as special journal issues. These outlets could be developed at first through the organization of research already underway. Grouping the works of scholars from different disciplines within the same journal, will help to create a more solid and nuanced awareness of the conceptualizations and methods used thus far and support the growth of a more organic academic field. Another purpose of special journal issues could be to encourage empirical researchers to bring new data to the overall debate and build a greater understanding of the complex role of the arts in the city.

Scrutiny of the places that have been studied shows that aside from the big cultural capitals—notably, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London—there have also been a number of very important studies focused on small and mid-sized cities (see Table 1). Moreover, the scale of analysis has varied from a metropolitan perspective to a focus on suburbs, downtowns, and particular neighborhoods. The well-represented countries in studies of the arts and the city, include the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, and Canada. It is hoped that future research will consider cities from a larger group of countries in order to provide a better understanding of the complexity and diversity of the relationship between the arts and the city. There have been some important recent efforts to fill this gap, however, and include the special issue “Cultural Policies in Cities of the ‘Global South’: A Multi-Scalar Approach” published in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, and the case studies of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and South Korea (Crookston, 2020) included in the special issue of Built Environment entitled “Arts and the City.”

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to canvass the academic debates on the arts and the city as they have emerged around three units of analysis—people, organizations, and public space. We focused on an examination of articles published in the JUA but also considered the ways in which these articles resonated with the themes of a number of special issues dedicated to the topic that were published in other urban affairs journals. The analysis showed research has been particularly concerned with defining and understanding urban artists and cultural workers, examining locational patterns of cultural amenities and their role within urban growth agendas, and investigating the use of art in public spaces. We also highlighted a number of overarching economic, symbolic, and spatial issues which linked the themes that emerged in the three debates and observed that they have been studied using a broad array of data and sources. Such variety should be encouraged, but there is also scope for some coordination.

Perhaps a way to continue and improve the coordination of multidisciplinary research, is for journals of urban affairs to organize more special issues dedicated to this topic, such as those that were analyzed in this review article alongside JUA articles. Also, it would be beneficial to the development of a more thorough understanding of the issues connected to art and the city, for a broader geographic range of case studies to be utilized as areas of investigation. This point applies to both the city and the national levels. There is also a need to probe in much more detail the social contexts and consequences of the use of art in the city, including the role of urban art in fostering forms of social cohesion and inclusion.

The articles published in the JUA and the selected special issues considered here, necessarily represent a limited source and so, although offering important insights, do not provide a comprehensive account of the “state of the art” of the debates. Future analysis of the literature could build on these results and expand the insights of our investigation. For instance, research could focus on other urban studies journals as sources of examination and further develop the basis for a comparison of how different journals are shaping the debates. In addition, a variety of sources could be studied using a systematic bibliometric analysis to show the frequencies of the use of a particular term and to track changes in this usage over time. The analysis undertaken in this article also raises important questions about how academic knowledge is produced and exchanged and the role of academic journals in this process, which could be further explored; for instance, does a journal need to provide a comprehensive representation of debates about a topic, or should each journal make its mark in the field by focusing on a specific aspect of a debate?

As a final consideration, it is important to note that only one of the special journal issues we included was in a language other than English. This observation highlights that, not only has research on the arts in the city been heavily focused on the Anglosphere, but it overwhelmingly engages with articles published in English-language journals. Clearly, the result is a lack of diversity in the lines of inquiry and case studies examined, as well as potentially in the discourses and themes that define the field. Therefore, we think there is a real need for future research to engage more effectively with the body of non-English-language literature on the topic. Recognizing the challenges of this recommendation, we nevertheless encourage such an approach in order to facilitate encounters with different intellectual worlds and inform a better understanding of the multiple, intersecting and nuanced roles of the arts in the city.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the four anonymous referees and the managing editor Andrew Kirby for their constructive comments. Special thanks to Igor Vojnovic for his inspiration and encouragement. All claims and omissions remain the authors’ responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ArtPlace America.

Notes on contributors

Eleonora Redaelli

Eleonora Redaelli is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. After working for public and private institutions in the cultural sector in Italy, she earned her PhD at The Ohio State University and taught in the Arts Management program at University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. She studies issues of cultural policy in the United States linked to the arts, humanities, and historic preservation. Her research appears in prestigious journals such as the Journal of American Planning Association, International Journal of the Arts in Society, City, Culture and Society, Urban Affairs Review, Cultural Trends, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Geography, Journal of General Education, and Cities. With Palgrave she has published Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research (2016), coauthored with Jonathan Paquette, and Connecting Arts and Place: Cultural Policy and American Cities (2019).

Deborah Stevenson

Deborah Stevenson is Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research interests are in arts and cultural policy, cities and urban life, and the ways in which gender shapes creative practice and cultural consumption. She has published widely on these topics, including the books: Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective (Routledge); The City (Polity); Cities and Urban Cultures (Open University Press); Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy (University of Queensland Press) and the coauthored Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place, and the Traveller (Sage). She is co-editor of: The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (Routledge); Culture and the City: Creativity, Tourism, Leisure (Routledge); the Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture; and the Routledge Urban Media and Communication Companion. Her monograph Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value, and the Social is to be published in 2022.