Upcoming Events
To be notified of events and publications:
Campus parking information:
View the map and look for lots marked "V" for visitor.
Note also that parking along the Midway Plaisance is free, though scarce.
Monday, February 6:
Cultural Mapping: Politics, Poetics, Policy
Daniel Silver, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto
Monday, February 6, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington St.
Garland Room
Cultural policy-makers increasingly use cultural maps. Why? Toronto's recent report, From the Ground Up: Growing Toronto's Cultural Sector, provides an instructive case study in the politics, poetics, and policy outcomes of cultural mapping. Local political controversies about affordable artist housing and intense real estate development generated interest among city officials in developing new ways of visualizing and interpreting where Toronto's cultural activities are located. Cultural mapping emerged as a rhetorically potent policy tool able to build bridges across departments such as Planning and Culture and win support from city councilors to integrate cultural policy into the City's official planning process. Cultural mapping is thus best understood pragmatically, as a practice with an array of uses that appeal to specific actors differently depending on the concrete problems they are facing.
Daniel Silver is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He edited From the Ground Up: Growing Toronto's Cultural Sector, wrote its chapter on "The Economic Importance of Cultural Scenes", and has authored or co-authored a number of papers on the role of culture in urban development, such as "Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency" (2010), "The American Scenescape: Amenities, Scenes, and the Qualities of Local Life" (2011), "Scenes, Innovation, and Urban Development" (2011), "Buzz as an Urban Resource" (forthcoming), "Local Politics in the Creative City: The Case of Toronto" (forthcoming), and "Chicago from the Political Machine to the Entertainment Machine" (forthcoming). He is also the editor (with Carl Grodach) of the forthcoming The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives. Silver earned his PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and was a graduate student researcher at the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, where he contributed to Chicago: Music City, A Report on the Music Industry in Chicago.
Wednesday, February 15:
Teaching Artists and the Future of Education — panel & community forum
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2012
6:15 PM - 9:00 PM
FILM ROW, COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO
1104 S. WABASH, 8th floor
Teaching Artists, hybrid professionals who link the arts to education and community life, are redefining the roles that the arts can play in public education. Who are teaching artists? Where and how do they work? What new strategies might they offer to help ailing public schools? And how can schools become generative sites of creative growth for artists, teachers and students?
A new national study of teaching artists shows that their work in schools is already providing answers to these questions. Join us for the first Chicago presentation of the Teaching Artist Research Project, a study of teaching artists and their work in a dozen cities, including Chicago.
PRESENTER:
Nick Rabkin is a research affiliate of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, and the principal investigator of the Teaching Artist Research Project at NORC at the University of Chicago. He teaches cultural policy at Columbia College Chicago.
RESPONDENTS:
Jessica Hudson, Independent Performance Artist/Teaching Artist
Cecil McDonald, Jr., Photographer/Teaching Artist, Columbia College Chicago
Mario Rossero, Director of the Office of Arts Education, Chicago Public Schools
Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer, The Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education, University of Chicago
Reception will follow program. Click here to register.
This forum is presented by the Teaching Artist Development (TAD) Studio at CCAP. For more information about TAD Studio, go to colum.edu/tadstudio. Funding for this colloquium was made possible by support from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Cultural Policy Center, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and NORC at the University of Chicago.
Sponsored by: Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP) at Columbia College Chicago; the Cultural Policy Center, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and NORC at the University of Chicago; and Ingenuity, Inc.
Tuesday, February 21:
Cultural Planning in Madison, Wisconsin: Toward Authentic Participation Using GIS
Eleonora Redaelli is Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Tuesday, February 21, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
In the United States, an important objective of cultural planning is creating a sense-of-place based on public involvement. However, the processes used to involve the community need more attention. The objective is to go beyond a one-way communication, where community members merely provide their input, and pursue a dialog among residents and the local government. Using Madison, Wisconsin as an example, I will illustrate how a geographical information system (GIS) could be used by a local government to create the foundation for a planning process based on a dialogical exchange.
Eleonora Redaelli is Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP). After working in the cultural sector in Italy, she moved to the United States where she got her PhD at The Ohio State University. At UWSP she is the coordinator of the Arts Management Program.
Thursday, February 23:
Creative Placemaking: How, Why, Outcomes
Ann Markusen, Arts Economy Initiative, University of Minnesota
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, Principal, Metris Arts Consulting
Thursday, February 23, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington St.
Fifth Floor Millennium Park Room
Markusen and Nicodemus present the results of a national scan of successful creative placemaking efforts, defined as the revitalization of a city, neighborhood or region around arts capacity and offerings. From case studies of fifteen diverse and regionally representative cases, including Chicago's After School Matters, they draw defining features of creative place-making: exceptional initiators, designing around distinctive local traits, building public will, attaining the support both of arts and cultural leaders in the city/region and of private sector developers, and leveraging resources from non-arts sectors.
Markusen and Nicodemus will also address the challenges: forging partnerships, countering community skepticism, assembling financing, clearing regulator hurdles, ensuring maintenance and sustainability, avoiding displacement, and developing metrics of performance. The study, commissioned by the Mayors Institute on City Design and the National Endowment for the Arts, can be accessed at www.nea.gov/pub/CreativePlacemaking-Paper.pdf.
Markusen will also talk briefly about her team's recently completed work on California's arts and cultural ecology, using Cultural Data Project and other secondary data sources to probe the size, missions, and city/regional locations of 11,000 arts and cultural nonprofits.
Ann Markusen is Director of the Arts Economy Initiative and the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and Principal of Markusen Economic Research. Markusen's arts and cultural publications include California's Arts and Cultural Ecology (2011), Nurturing California's Next Generation Arts and Cultural Leaders (2011), Creative Placemaking (2010), Los Angeles: America's Artist Super City (2010), Native Artists: Careers, Resources, Space, Gifts (2009), San José Creative Entrepreneur Project (2008), Leveraging Investments in Creativity Artist Data User Guide (2008), Crossover: How Artists Build Careers across Commercial, Non-profit and Community Work (2006), Artists' Centers (2006), and The Artistic Dividend (2003). Markusen is a frequent public speaker and policy advisor on arts and culture in the US, Brazil, Japan, Korea, and Europe, and recently completed a year at UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Glasgow School of Art (2010-11).
Anne Gadwa Nicodemus is principal of Metris Arts Consulting, which provides research and analysis to help arts and cultural activities strengthen communities – and vice-versa. A choreographer/arts administrator turned urban planner, Nicodemus is a leading voice in arts and community development. With her frequent collaborator, Dr. Ann Markusen, she has authored a number of major reports and journal articles, most notably Creative Placemaking for the Mayors' Institute on City Design (2010), which helped to define the field, and "Arts and Culture in Urban and Regional Planning: A Review and Research Agenda" (Journal of Planning and Education Research, 2010). Through her How Art Spaces Matter reports (for Artspace Projects, 2010 and 2011), Nicodemus integrated a range of research methods and data sources across five spaces and four cities to reveal art spaces' community and arts-related impacts. Nicodemus holds a Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a B.A. from Oberlin College.
Recent Events
Measuring the Cultural Vitality of Scenes: the Music Scene in Chicago
Lawrence Rothfield, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago
Tuesday, January 31, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Even before taking office, mayor-elect Emanuel indicated that one of his priorities in cultural policy would be to develop a music district in Uptown. Emanuel's emphasis on cultural hubs and commercial arts undoubtedly stems in part from fiscal considerations: in an age of austerity, changing zoning regulations is a lot cheaper than building another Millennium Park. But it also reflects a sense that the future of Chicago depends on its ability to compete not just for tourists flying in to attend Lollapalooza but for college graduates and cultural "creatives" looking to move somewhere, for whom quality-of-life means a vibrant local scene — in this case a vibrant local live music scene.
That poses a research problem: how can one measure the cultural vitality of a scene? The usual metrics used by urban planners — basic economic statistics on employment or revenue, and economic impact studies — are not very good at measuring what matters to frequenters of music clubs, gospel performances, or house parties. To get at this, the Cultural Policy Center, in a pathbreaking 2007 study cited by Emanuel, developed a new set of indicators of local musical vitality, and used these indicators to compare the music scenes in 50 different US metropolitan areas. In this workshop, the lead author of the study reviews its main findings and talks about the study's genesis and afterlife.
Lawrence Rothfield is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He co-founded the Cultural Policy Center with Carroll Joynes and served for ten years as its faculty director. He also served as director (and co-founder, with Gerald Graff) of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.
Capital City Cultures: Reconstructing Contemporary Europe in Vienna and Berlin
Monika De Frantz, expert on politics and social space, and University of Chicago Endeavour Visiting Scholar
Tuesday, January 24, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Global market competition and the political responses to globalization transform urban societies and states, and thus the cultures of capital
cities in contemporary Europe. Vienna’s cultural district Museumsquartier and the planned Humboldt Forum on Berlin’s Schlossplatz illustrate two of the most controversial sites of urban reconstruction in Central Eastern Europe
since the 1990s.
Tracing the processes of their political emergence through more than a decade of heated public debates, this workshop narrates the metaphor-rich and engaging stories about these old European capitals facing change. It compares the reconstruction of political legitimacy and its cultural symbols from two different local perspectives of European state transformation.
Monika De Frantz is an ackowledged expert on politics and social space and has published extensively on contemporary urban cultures. Before joining the University of Chicago in 2011-12, she taught and conducted research at the University of New Orleans, the London School of Economics, the University of Vienna, the Bauhaus-University Weimar, the Humboldt University Berlin, and the European University Institute (EUI Florence). She has a PhD from the EUI Florence and studied at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Aix-Marseille, and the University of Vienna.
MetroPulse: How Culture Fits into a Comprehensive Set of Regional Indicators
Drew Williams-Clark, senior planner at Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning
Tuesday, January 17, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
This workshop will be different than those usually hosted by the Cultural Policy Center. Rather than presenting an idea or issue, we will explore a tool called MetroPulse. MetroPulse is a simple but powerful portal into a vast warehouse of data on factors that shape quality of life in our seven-county Chicago region. We will focus on a new set of cultural vitality indicators that were brought into being by the Chicago Community Trust and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), who jointly run the Regional Indicators Project and the MetroPulse website. Drew Williams-Clark, senior planner at CMAP, will be our guide.
This will be an ideal opportunity for students interested in a new data source for a research project. Everyone is encouraged to bring their laptops to follow along in the demonstration.
Fall Workshop Series: City Cultural Planning
Michael C. Dorf on the original Chicago Cultural Plan; Alan Brown on "creative capital"; Alan Freeman on the evidence base for city cultural planning; Robert Bruegmann on patterns in urban growth; Carl Grodach on the cultural policy of Austin, Texas; and Jonathan Vickery on cultural policy in an age of scarcity.
View details and video
Future of the City: The Arts Symposium
June 7, 2011
Chicago Cultural Center
Co-hosted with the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Chicago's Office of Civic Engagement.
The University of Chicago presents Future of the City: The Arts Symposium, a one-day gathering of leaders who are shaping the cultural landscape of Chicago and beyond.
Arts and culture are proving their power as economic and social catalysts for the creative transformation of cities. Strategic collaborations between government, businesses, foundations and academic sectors have helped to rejuvenate neighborhoods, inspire civic and community engagement, and incubate the next generation of creative entrepreneurs. We will explore these themes, related research, and public policies as they apply to Chicago and other urban centers.
David Simon and Wendell Pierce (The Wire and Treme) will hold a special lunch-time conversation during a day full of discussions between internationally recognized researchers, artists, academics, and civic leaders.
John Holden, author of Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government Policy, will provide introductory remarks to expert panelists discussing how cultural policies and arts practices around the world are evolving as individuals, organizations, and cities adjust to social changes, technological advances and economic uncertainty.
Emerging Practice Seminar
April 29, 8:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m.
University of Chicago Gleacher Center
450 N. Cityfront Plaza Dr., Chicago, IL 60611
This event was hosted by CultureLab, a new joint initiative between the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, and a consortium of leading arts consultants from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. CultureLab's Emerging Practice Seminar is a concerted effort to bring forward promising new practices in the cultural sector and transmit them to the field.
Each year, two practice areas are selected that represent important developments for the arts field. This year’s program focused on:
- Uses of technology in audience engagement
- Revenue management and dynamic pricing
The discussion of each topic featured several case studies drawn from arts organizations from Chicago to Sydney.
Also, a lunchtime session will include a live debate on the role of mobile devices in theaters and museums, featuring Martha Lavey, artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and Alan Brown, Principal at WolfBrown.
Click here to see the presentations.
Spring Workshop Series: Intellectual Property and the Arts
Adrian Johns on the history and politics of policing intellectual property; Gordon Quinn on Fair Use and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; David Beeman on constitutional boundaries of intellectual property law; Douglas Noonan on historic preservation policy in Chicago; Julia Rhoads on dance and intellectual property; William Landes and Anthony Hirschel on copyright and appropriation art; and Carole Rosenstein with a national study of outdoor arts festivals.
View details and video