The space of ideas: Public art policy and the concept of urban model spaces

ABSTRACT

The urban policy mobility literature describes the widespread circulation of policy ideas while highlighting their mutations along the way. At the same time, the literature often analyzes the localization of such ideas by examining their adoption in one or several cities. To better understand policy replications and mutations, we develop theoretical and methodological strategies that provide sensitivity to both local distinctiveness and global variability. We build on the Urban Policy Mobility literature and combine it with ecological theories of conceptual spaces to develop the concept of Urban Model Spaces—a matrix of discursive possibilities evolving from the accumulated replications and localizations of a model. We articulate it via three core properties central to Urban Policy Mobility—Temporality, Scale, and Position—and test how they shape the emergence of policy discourses. To demonstrate the concept we analyze public art policy and the funding mechanism of the Percent for Art ordinance from 26 cities combining Structural Topic Modeling and regression analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts and culture policy
• comparative urbanism
• global/transnational fields
• policy translation
• public art
• topic modeling

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Rens Wilderom, Sida Liu and Alicia Eads for their generous and helpful feedback throughout the process, and to Lizzy Markus, Yasmin Koop-Monteiro, Macy Siu, Román Romanov and Jade Lee for excellent support as research assistants. The data collection process began as part of a collaborative approach between the University of Toronto and OCAD U, aiming to redefine the City of Toronto’s public art policy. We would like to thank Sara Diamond, who championed the process, and our various colleagues in that work for their efforts. We would also like to thank our colleagues at The Urban Genome Project and the IMFG, both at the University of Toronto, where this project was later pursued.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Grodach and Loukaitou‐Sideris (2007) define the Creative Class discourse, which is mostly relevant to our analysis, as focused on enhancing economic growth through investments in quality of life and amenities. The approach advocates for arts and entertainment districts at the city center and in historic urban neighborhoods, and targets knowledge-based workers and employees in the creative economy.

2. At first, London (England) was included in our sample. We decided to exclude it for its exceptional institutional setting. No comprehensive program existed for the city as a whole, only independent programs for some of its boroughs.

3. In the first round, which was sampled during the fall of 2016, we gathered all available data we found online in the cities’ public art programs websites. We then categorized the documents, and excluded documents that were less relevant for the analysis, like “calls for artists,” public-art trails and galleries. To avoid noise and artificial conflation, we also omitted irrelevant appendices and identical sections duplicated in the same document, for instance, in the executive summary and one of the chapters. In the second round, sampled during the fall of 2017, we added cultural programs with public art sections and additional documents mentioned in the material we already had to have as complete a dataset as possible. In the third round, sampled in the summer of 2020, we updated the corpus adding documents published between 2017–2020.

4. When dealing with relatively long texts like policy documents, topic modelers often break texts up into smaller units, either into equally sized chunks of words (e.g., 500, 1,000) or at the divisions created by the texts’ authors, such as chapters or section breaks (Sbalchiero & Eder, 2020; Schöch, 2021). The latter is preferrable when these units are roughly similar in length (as in our policy document corpus) since this preserves the divisions present in the texts themselves.

5. The additional two topics in the 14-topic matrix produced discourses around the same issues adding information about the city in which the documents were published. We did not deem this additional specificity worth the added complexity of incorporating more topics.

6. Since 2008, the index ranks cities according to “their comprehensive power to attract people, capital, and enterprises from around the world” (MMF, 2018, p. 1).

7. The six procedural topics also align with the policy dimensions: “Creative Strategy,” which emphasizes the process of strategy making, and “Heritage Planning,” which lists responsibilities to actors taking part in heritage plans – align with the Cultural Identity issues. “Public Art Selection and Siting” aligns with the Spatial dimension; Finally, “Public Art Funding Schemes,” “Function of Actors in Creative Affairs,” and “Administration of Public Art Finances” align with the Socio-Economic dimension.

8. Although the trend-line for “Equitable Access” is relatively flat and its temporal regression coefficient is positive but small, it is strongly influenced by two outliers. If the two are taken out, a steady linear increase appears.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is part of the Urban Genome Project, which was supported by a University of Toronto Connaught Global Challenge Award and School of Cities Urban Challenge grant. This research also received support from the Ontario College of Arts and Design University.

Notes on contributors

Noga Keidar

Noga Keidar is an Azrieli postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Head of Research of the Urban Clinic, both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her PhD from the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto.

Daniel Silver

Daniel Silver is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.