Putting Artists on the Map: The Geography of Artists in Cuyahoga County, Ohio

Abstract

Across the country, urban leaders are developing arts-focused urban policy, but much remains unknown about artists' geography-particularly in contracting, rustbelt cities. Using Cuyahoga County, Ohio, this article describes the geography of artists and explores methodologies for predicting artist-concentrated neighborhoods. The research questions if, and how, scholars can predict artist neighborhoods and design policies to support and nurture these locations. It maps and analyzes existing patterns using survey, property, and Census data, and predicts artist-friendly neighborhoods via a regression model. The analysis reveals neighborhoods' residual capacity for artists and directs initial policy recommendations for an artist-focused vacant land reutilization initiative. For scholars, the findings contribute to a rapidly growing body of literature about the relationship between artists, neighborhood revitalization, and urban policy. For practitioners, the research investigates one strategy for shaping land policy in the post-2008 housing market.Across the country, city leaders, urban planners, and others are developing urban policy targeting artists and the arts. In planning practice and scholarship, artists and their role in revitalizing cities is a "hot topic." At the same time, much is still unknown about artists as a unique population group (if they are even a unique group), their residential and workplace geography, their preferences for housing and work space, and the ability to design policies that reinforce and promote artist neighborhoods. Much of the existing literature on the subject emphasizes booming, large cities, while neglecting moderate-sized, contracting, rust belt locations. This is despite the fact that these cities are also energetically turning to the arts and artists as one avenue of hope after decades of disinvestment.

The Importance of Neighborhood Context in Arts-Led Development

“…As is widely recognized, the arts do not necessarily locate based on traditional industry location factors such as transport costs or access to markets. Rather, recent work examines the social milieu required for the arts to flourish (Currid 2007;Markusen and Johnson 2006;Rantisi 2004), the development potential of the arts in different "scenes" and neighborhood contexts Silver and Clark, forthcoming; Silver and Miller 2013), and the neighborhood-level location patterns of arts industries Poon and Lai 2008;Ryberg, Salling, and Soltis 2013;Smit 2011;Stern and Seifert 2010). However, little work has focused comprehensively on the location preferences of nonprofit arts organizations particularly as they relate to the creative city-community development conflict.…”

Walkable Art: An Empirical Investigation of Arts-Related Businesses and Walkable Neighborhoods

“…Future work that examines this relationship from a time series perspective could ascertain the robustness of the present results and locate neighborhoods for which this relationship varies temporally. Another extension would be to look at different types of arts activities beyond arts-related businesses including artists' residential information collected from survey data as in Ryberg, Salling, and Soltis (2013), as well as nonprofit arts entities (Cohen, Schaffer, & Davidson, 2003). A third extension is an examination of the extent that artistic activity clusters and the spatial scale at which this clustering activity takes place.…”

Immersion in Buzz or Withdrawal to Solitude? Artists’ Creative and Social Strategies in Urban Settings

“…While spatially concentrated buzz might indeed be one of the most important urban resources at the disposal of artists, too much focus on spaces associated with it might lead to a rather narrow, one-sided understanding of artists’ presence in cities. Although some artists’ spatial preferences and choices are in line with expectations regarding a bohemian lifestyle and their contribution to the creation of bohemian spaces either throughout their artistic career or at a certain stage of it (Hracs 2009; Ryberg, Salling, and Soltis 2013), one must acknowledge that on the whole, taking into account the diversity of artistic genres and styles, social and economic status, demographic features, and preferred lifestyles, artists are an extremely heterogeneous professional group (Debroux 2013; Gornostaeva and Campbell 2012; Murzyn-Kupisz and Działek 2017; Wilson 1999; Zhong 2016). Bain (2004:420) therefore remarks on the need to pay attention to what is hidden and less visible in artistic practices in urban space:For the most part, artists tend to work in self-imposed isolation, hidden behind closed studio doors, deliberately choosing to remain invisible and anonymous to others, rather than actively fostering interaction and exchange with other practitioners.…”