Urban Alchemy: In Search of a Formula for the City of Tomorrow

A report on the Bruner/Loeb Symposium on Transforming Communities through the Arts, Chicago Cultural Center, November 14, 2003

At least since medieval times, theorists, practitioners and leaders have been looking for a magic formula to create riches from ordinary materials. Recent history demonstrates some outstanding examples of those who have succeeded. John D. Rockefeller discovered how to turn oil into gold. Bill Gates amassed the world's largest fortune by smartly assembling strings of zeroes and ones. And Walt Disney built a global image empire from celluloid and simple drawings of mice. While each of these stories is profoundly complex, the results are measurable and unquestioned.

What might happen if you mixed together architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, journalists, artists, philanthropists and community developers? Could these people in the right combinations be the formula for the City of Tomorrow? The Cambridge-based Bruner Foundation, together with Harvard's Loeb Fellowship Program, did just that in trying to uncover some answers.

The third of an ongoing series of such gatherings brought about 60 professionals from the above fields to Chicago on November 14, 2003. They heard from and exchanged ideas with leaders and innovators such as Michelle Boone of Chicago's Gallery 37, Joe Thompson of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA), Lily Yeh of Philadelphia's Village of Arts and Humanities and Barnaby Evans of Providence's WaterFire.

The inspiring and provocative day brought forth many important questions and stunning examples of artist- and arts-led revitalization efforts presented by the four speakers — all of whom are winners of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, the lead project of the co-sponsoring Bruner Foundation.

Where's the Magic in the City of Tomorrow?

In addition to its global image empire, Disney also created pseudo-urban places that may yield some lessons — and warnings — for those seeking to re-form "real" urban places, especially those shaped by artists and visionaries whose value systems are not always clear or on the table.

In her book "The Cultures of Cities," urban sociologist and critic Sharon Zukin, points to numerous examples where, she contends, "culture was used to legitimize the unequal benefits of economic growth." Zukin cites contemporary urban "success" stories that she calls, "pacification by cappuccino":

Disney World is not only important because it confirms and consolidates the significance of cultural power — the power to impose a vision — for social control. It is important because it offers a model of privatization and globalization; it manages social diversity; it imposes a frame of meaning on the city, a frame that earlier in history came from other forms of public culture.

What was missing from the Chicago discussion was the definition or criteria for success, or a vision of what that City of Tomorrow looks like behind the architecturally significant façade. If we found the magic formula for "transforming communities through the arts," how would we know that it "worked?"

While some of the complications such as gentrification, dislocation of the poor (including artists) and other side effects of urban "renewal" were touched upon, the central question — what result are we seeking? — was not directly addressed. Award-winning design, a profitable economy, appreciation of the arts, perhaps even racial tolerance were implicit goals, although none were made explicit. More fundamental elements, however, such as the distribution of wealth and power and the control over culture, weren't broached.

Referring again to the instructive creation of Disney's city of tomorrow, Zukin writes, "The asymmetries of power so evident in real landscapes are hidden behind a façade that reproduces a unidimensional nature and history."

When examining community development or redevelopment that involves the arts, historic preservation, tourism or other symbolic or culturally based strategies, the questions of what is success and who benefits from it are particularly important. There is no art for art's sake. Ultimately someone benefits or suffers — although admittedly it's sometimes hard to tell which is which, or if short-term and long-term consequences are the same.

No urban design plan, no building architecture, no public-space design is value free. There are always issues of power, economics or cultural hegemony that both influence the design and are served by it. Even New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, often wowed by "pure" aesthetics, wrote in a review of design scenarios for Lower Manhattan, in the November 8, 2003, Times, "… no building can be properly analyzed without taking the social and ideological structures of power into account."

The work of the four key presenters at this symposium, and work represented by many of the attendees, deserve such a deeper analysis. I, for one, like to know in whose interests I am working — while appreciating that things are not always black and white, and we can't always predict the extended impact or side effects of our efforts.

Gallery 37: Preaching Outside the Church

"Bring Back the Blues to Bronzville" (detail), a mural painted by Gallery 37 apprentice artists at Chicago's 47th Street train station.

Michelle Boone, executive director of Chicago's widely well-regarded Gallery 37, opened the symposium with a description of the growth and current programs of the youth-centered visual-arts training, employment, exhibition and sales organization. Boone's presentation focused on the 40,000 youth "served" since Gallery 37's founding in 1991, and on the current challenges they face as their budget has plummeted from more than $5 million to $2.6 million. This remarkable number of youth from all corners of Chicago converged downtown, learning from artists, each other and the urban environment. The strength of the resulting works of art, as well as the inevitable social connections that were made, will accrue benefit to the city for decades to come.

Boone's PowerPoint presentation dwelled on the institutional challenges of the arts organization. It was all too familiar, and perhaps better designed as a nonprofit management case study. For a mixed audience of community developers, urban planners, architects and the like, it may have perpetuated the unflattering "whining-for-dollars" image that artists and arts organizations have earned.

Political and economic structures have for too long pitted the arts in competition with social services, housing, education, job training and the like. Only recently have artists and cultural organizations begun to master the language of collaboration and multiple outcomes. Boone didn't have command of that language? Or was she under the impression that she was speaking to an audience that had sympathy for her plight?

Some Chicagoans praised Boone for naming the elephant in the room. Maggie Daley, the wife of Mayor Richard Daley, was a founder and served as Gallery 37's board chair and chief fundraiser since its inception. While she retains the title, her interests have turned elsewhere, leaving the once favored child to fend for itself. Unfortunately, in McDonald's hamburger fashion, Boone named 40,000 as the number served, but didn't enlighten the audience about the nourishment provided or its implications.

In a subsequent breakout session, founding Gallery 37 director Cheryl Hughes, now on the mayor's staff, discussed some of the more profound impacts of the organization's work. She spoke of the city-wide change in perception of teenagers — as well as the teenagers' perceptions of themselves and their enhanced ability to cross race and class boundaries.

MassMoCA: The Second "Massachusetts Miracle?"

MASS MoCA, making a difference in North Adams, Mass.

Boone was followed by Joe Thompson, founding director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), whose efforts and analysis were focused on the economy surrounding the museum. He backed up his claims of propelling the physical and economic revitalization of North Adams with more science than participants generally see in arts presentations. A somewhat isolated and once thriving mill town in the rolling Berkshire Hills of northwestern Massachusetts, North Adams hit an economic low in the 1980s when the last big manufacturer closed. The electric capacitor plant had once employed 5,000 people in this "city" of 15,000. It left behind a sprawling 700,000 square-foot 19th century industrial campus, originally designed for fabric printing, located at the confluence of rivers in the center of town.

The economic boom of the 1980s, touted by Governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, as the "Massachusetts Miracle," boasted a low 2.8 percent unemployment rate, while North Adams suffered with nearly 19 percent unemployment. Negative self-image, youth flight, deterioration and the usual panoply of ills plagued the scenic valley.

Thompson told the story of MassMoCA in projected newspaper headlines. A grand vision to create the world's largest contemporary art museum secured $35 million in state funding, then lost state funding. Several false starts, promises made, promises withdrawn peppered a ten-year start-up phase. Finally, a mix of private money and state funding resulted in the museum's opening in 1999.

The silver lining, according to Thompson, was a repeated reconceptualization of the museum. "If you want to see what MassMoCA first set out to be," said Thompson, "go to the new Dia Museum in Beacon, New York." Thompson is pleased that his museum is more tied to the community than had it been an outpost of the Guggenheim, as once proposed, or than if it relied solely on summer tourist traffic.

While MassMoCA fits Thompson's description as "an open platform where some of the best artists alive today come and work across platforms, making, showing and teaching," it integrally engages with local schools, audiences and businesses, all of whom have a stake and have made commitments to it. Its exhibition themes often draw on regional history or are created from indigenous materials. The property and buildings of MassMoCA are owned by the City of North Adams.

In addition to the 200,000 square feet of exhibition space that has thus far been renovated, and 50,000 feet of performing-arts space, 60,000 feet are leased to businesses, with another 70,000 feet soon to go on the market. Leasing income is a significant part of the institution's income stream, and the closest thing it has to an endowment. MassMoCA currently has nine tenants employing 300 people in intellectual-property-based businesses, including a computer animation studio and book publisher. They generate almost $1 million in lease income. Besides the burgeoning caf�s, restaurants, gift shops and hotels that typically accompany cultural and tourism developments, North Adams has seen other former mill sites turn into artist live/work studios, and a population turn-around beginning with young people.

Since the opening of MassMoCA, Thompson cites 850 new jobs in North Adams, $29 million in annual new business spending, over $11 million in capital investments in hotel properties, and an unemployment rate that has dropped to five percent Downtown retail vacancies have gone from 70 percent before the opening of the museum to 30 percent today. Thompson referred to North Adams as an ideal "goldfish bowl" where such change — including a sense of civic self-esteem — are more easily measured.

These statistics and methods of assessing economic impact, said Thompson, are among the standard measures, and he proceeded to present early findings of a deeper analysis underway in partnership with nearby Williams College economist, Stephen Sheppard. Some of the statistics included neighborhood stability and the ethnic and class make up of "catalyzed communities," a term to describe temporary communities of experience that assemble at the museum. In fact, Thompson and Sheppard are attempting to launch The Center for Creative Community Development to devise and test methodologies for assessing the impact of the arts on neighborhoods, along with a training and conference center. This center would be yet another business incubated from the old mill site. Thompson sees the museum and its spin-off enterprises following the region's historic pattern of "manufacturing" contemporary goods — which happen to be a bit less tangible than fabric prints or capacitors, but are no less important in today's economy.

Later in the day, several people remarked that they heard more discussion about statistics and data than is typical at arts symposia, in contrast to the usual stories of the joy of art and the personal testimonies that pull at the heartstrings. It was observed that the "comfort level" with data was high in this "mixed" group. Not to abandon the power of stories, but adding fluency with data to the vocabulary of arts professionals is an important "transformation" necessary for meaningful conversations with people in professions that routinely traffic in data.

Village of Arts & Humanities: Urban Alchemy at Work

The Grassroots Task Force of Philadelphia's Village Arts and Humanities helps neighbors organize their own arts and garden projects.

To balance the day, the afternoon session began with an artist/alchemist who traffics in some of the most moving stories and metaphors I have ever heard. The remarkable "architect" of North Philadelphia's Village of Arts and Humanities, Lily Yeh, introduced the phrase "Urban Alchemy" in her presentation. If anyone has performed miracles in community transformation, it's Yeh. She spoke eloquently of turning deficits into resources, turning despair into hope, and making the invisible visible.

The Village, now a complex nonprofit organization, is an organic conglomerate of arts, social service, community development, gardening and other programs that have grown out of Yeh's efforts. The Village has directly impacted more than 100 square blocks and thousands of residents in some of the most devastated urban landscape in the U.S., and served as inspiration to countless artists and communities who have seen her work.

Primarily populated by African Americans, North Philadelphia has suffered decades of discrimination, disinvestment, decay, crime and outright abandonment. In her humble and sincere recounting, Yeh spoke of escaping the "quicksand of negativity" and discovering the power of aesthetics in community transformation. She showed slides of people working together on some of the hundreds of murals and mosaic sculptures, as she told remarkable stories of individuals overcoming addictions and despair through involvement in art projects — what she called the "broken pieces" of community that have turned into beauty and joy. Even newly laid sidewalks include colorful mosaic pieces imbedded in the cement.

Yeh referred to "sculpting" the urban landscape and developing the 17 parks and community gardens from vacant lots. "Aesthetics are of utmost importance," she said. Kids from the area, including a large public housing project in the midst of the Village, see a unique, colorful world shaped by many hands, including their own. "We help kids see the world from their strengths, not their weakness," she said. Among other programs, the Village operates after-school arts programs, a dance studio, annual harvest celebration and a tree farm with 2,000 trees and shrubs that are ultimately planted and nurtured in the neighborhood by the youth.

Residents of the Village have adopted the Swahili term "Kujenga Pamoja," meaning "Together We Build." In this North Philadelphia area, Yeh has been the catalyst to bring together the unique skills and experiences of residents with an aesthetic vision to build a better life and a more just community.

Referring to the Chicago-bred godfather of community organizing, someone later dubbed Yeh and other community-based artists "Saul Alinsky with a paint brush." Accepting artists among their ranks can be a significant hurdle to overcome for community organizers and developers. This simple comparison could be a breakthrough concept for some.

WaterFire: An Unlikely Combination of Elements Heats Up Providence

WaterFire on the Providence River. Photo by Barnaby Evans

WaterFire, a public art piece by artist Barnaby Evans, is credited with transforming the public realm of downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Evans spoke during the afternoon session, showing before and after images of this 350-year-old New England transportation and manufacturing center. The city endured a century of gradual decline, resulting in abandonment, deterioration of business and physical infrastructure, and a sharp drop in civic self-esteem. It was widely known as the "armpit" of New England. Consensus is widespread that decline has been reversed by a combination of public and private investment in a redesign of its infrastructure, historic-preservation efforts, the emergence of a downtown artist community, and this popular public art event.

Built at the convergence of two rivers, Providence covered the waterways in favor of roads, rail yards and expanded sites for commercial property development. "Daylighting" the rivers, and lining them with public promenades was a central strategy of the recent redesign and reconstruction, along with highlighting colonial-era architecture.

Evans displayed images of the "new" but pre-WaterFire Providence in which public spaces were devoid of people. Designers and developers often consider their job done when construction is complete. "Development doesn't happen until you activate the space," Evans said, pointing out that even the best public space design doesn't "work" unless there are reasons for people to inhabit the spaces.

WaterFire is both ritual and spectacle in which 100 fire "baskets" placed at intervals in the waterway are filled with firewood and set on fire at dusk. The fires are fed by "fire tenders" in canoes and boats late into the night. Auxiliary events have also grown up in areas surrounding the two-thirds of a mile of riverside promenades, according to Evans, partly to disperse the crowd, which he says is sometimes too large.

WaterFire is repeated 20 to 24 times during an eight-to-nine-month season, supported by hundreds of volunteers, coordinated through a nonprofit organization set up to carry on the event. Partnerships with social-service, education and civic groups promote other causes and provide a steady stream of volunteers, integrating WaterFire further into the fabric of the community.

In 1994, Evans first set the newly opened central waterways literally ablaze. In 1997, WaterFire was institutionalized as a community ritual more important to Providence than say the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center or Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is to New York. It has become integral to the city's image and self-image. In post-Disney America, events based on a religious holiday or in celebration of a forgotten war no longer resonate and bring citizens together, or "catalyze communities," in the MassMoCA term.

Evans serves as executive director of WaterFire, and said he first created the public art piece as a one-time event. Downtown businesses and promoters recognized the power of the dynamic elements of fire and water to attract people. The event has propelled retail, restaurant and other commercial development and has created a sense of safety in the once decayed and dreaded downtown. The symbolic tension between fire and water and their meanings, the well-designed public space, and the presence of others, attracts as many as 100,000 people for each lighting. Providence's emerging global identity has been led by this pagan-style event.

Beyond the economic impact of WaterFire, Evans points to its effect on the community's self-esteem as its most important contribution.

The Artist as Catalyst

Both Yeh and Evans asked ethical questions about their private visions becoming so entwined with their communities' identity, and both predicted the end of their image reign. They felt the heavy burden of serving as catalyst, and, sensed their own mortality, wishing to see control of community identity passed on to the next generation. In the chemical reaction, the catalyst essentially disappears after completing its function of bringing together the other ingredients into something entirely new. At different times in the evolution of their projects both Yeh and Evans suggested they withdraw or discontinue key activities. For Yeh it was the Harvest Festival, for Evans the entire WaterFire event. Both were told by their communities that the events were too central to civic or community identity and "tradition" and must go on.

One might ask who has benefited from these art projects. Evans' WaterFire has clearly been beneficial to business and real-estate interests in Providence. At the same time, like the Village of Arts and Humanities, it has brought about a new or renewed sense of community pride and can be held at least partly responsible for a reinvigoration of community life. In one of the conference breakout groups, Evans recounted the recent turnabout in attitude towards Providence's public schools that serve mostly students of color, in a still predominantly white state. After decades of erosion, the suburban and rural Rhode Island legislative majority directed massive new funding to Providence schools — a turn around in political support and perception for which Evans feels WaterFire is partly responsible.

Yeh's Village is on a slower trajectory in a community that, unlike Providence, has no major business interests or vested "old money." She works lot by lot, person by person where most every other social institutions had given up. In the longer run, however, will real-estate speculators surreptitiously buy up and profit from redevelopment projects that will oust today's inhabitants — inhabitants whose blood, sweat and tears brought the neighborhood back from ruin? Imagine the year 2100 and the core blocks of the Village are preserved like a museum while upscale housing and shops surround it and feed off its cultural and symbolic history. This may not be a bad thing. But the more important question is how that transformation came about. Did a few profit while most were expelled from the community and left in poverty?

Some questions were posed in breakout sessions about strategies for mitigating some of the negative effects of what was seen as the inevitable cycles neighborhoods and cities experience. Laura Weathered of Chicago's Near North Arts Council and developer of artist live/work projects there, wondered if artists accelerate their own "demise." She observed that artists in her community had been priced out of their real estate partly because of the imminent opening of an artist loft space. "Were we better off staying underground and living in illegal spaces?" she asked. Time did not permit a full exploration of some of the mitigating strategies.

Seeking the Magic: Changing Perception and/or Reality

At the day's wrap-up session, New York-based consultant Caron Atlas urged people in the arts not to try to position themselves as community saviors. "I'm interested in the synergies. What does art bring to the table, and what else is at the table, and how can they work together?" she asked.

There was a subtle division in the group that I think is indicative of the different people and different professions engaged in the work of community transformation. While the language and practice of asset-based community building was widely in use, it was clear that some practitioners were focused on the physical assets (built or natural environment) and others were focused on the human and creative assets of a community. All were engaged in changing perceptions, either of self, of community, or both. It may, in fact, be in this changing of perceptions that some of the true magic lies, as it is a harder change to measure and has proven, as in the case of Disney, to have enormous influence over human behavior.

Rebecca Severson, creator with Alaka Wali and Mario Longoni of the important 2002 Chicago Center for Arts Policy ethnographic study "Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and Other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places," spoke of their findings of almost universal involvement in some kind of creative activity. She called for a further change in language and perception, urging her colleagues to open their definitions of art to "all creative expression by humans," and to "see all people in neighborhoods as creative people."

It's not about being an artist or not, Severson said, "it's a continuum, not an either/or." Such a change in thinking brings the urban alchemist lots of new ingredients. Severson spoke of the added significance of art in the community development or transformation process because of the capacity of cultural practices to stimulate civic engagement. "There are things that happen when people create together," she said.

While no formula was arrived at during this one-day conversation, more holistic approaches that advance both the people and the physical environment surfaced held out more promise of "success." Endeavors that simply seek to revitalize the built environment, such as historic preservation or bulldoze-and-rebuild "urban renewal" strategies, tend to dislocate and leave people behind, disintegrate social fabric, and damage civic infrastructure.

Historic districts have benefited the few. Urban "renewal" has left decades of residual and compounding problems in its wake. Fabulous New Urban town centers are lovely. These approaches may be expedient to improving property in the short term, but have left out the human factor. And aren't people what communities are about? On the other hand, projects that address only the people, including many art programs, may achieve great success at saving individual lives, but are rarely sustainable because they don't leave behind convincing and visible "evidence" that they affected change.

This may be partly due to the fact that we haven't arrived at the criteria for success other than the easy calculations of dollars earned, spent or accrued in real-estate value. Even if we had such criteria, however, we don't have all the necessary tools for measuring or recognizing success when we see it.

Participants in the Bruner/Loeb Chicago symposium celebrated a series of truly unique and "successful" projects, but failed to delve into the criteria on which their successes were judged. As Disney or The Wizard of Oz have shown us, we can have delightful, human-scale urban landscapes inhabited by racially-mixed, happy consumers in which difference, democratic control and ideology are cleverly camouflaged or hidden behind a curtain.

Four Formulas, Multiple Interpretations

One thing all the presenters agreed upon was that their projects turned into things that are different from what they first expected. MassMoCA has a fundamentally different meaning for its community than the one in its original plan. Gallery 37 began with no real plan, a group of enterprising arts and youth advocates pasting together collective resources in response to an assortment of community needs. The Village of Arts and Humanities has been the most organic and shape-shifting of the batch, discovering the human and physical assets of the community and building around each one. And, WaterFire, started as a dramatic visual-art installation, has been "adopted" by civic boosters and taking off in directions unimagined by its creator. Each presenter acknowledged the necessity to be nimble yet rooted in a commitment to community. Whether each will stand the test of time is yet to be seen.

One might argue that Gallery 37 focused so exclusively on individual transformation that it was left with limited, if any, ability to demonstrate change in a language that others, outside those already "converted" to the arts, could appreciate. Gallery 37 appeared verging on crisis, possibly eclipsed by a stale vision and the proliferation of neighborhood-based youth arts programs. WaterFire, on the other hand, can easily point to the economic boom in downtown Providence and take its share of credit. As long as it's drawing crowds, the powers that be in that city won't let its fires go out.

MassMoCA and the Village of Arts & Humanities, on the other hand, appear to consciously address both the human and the physical conditions of their communities. While radically different from one another in size, shape, style, and almost every other observable characteristic, they have a similar formula that may work in their communities — assuming we know what "work" means. They may be engaged in a more sustainable urban alchemy, the short and long-term outcomes we can only continue to observe.

The Bruner/Loeb Forum is an important coming together of minds from fields that are concerned about the larger idea of aesthetically-based community building yet generally revolve only within their own narrow orbits. The Forum needs to go deeper and ask more questions about who is benefiting from urban revitalization, and who is not. The Forum needs to continue to expand the range of participants to mix and balance the voices and the professions represented, and to seek out common "languages" that are spoken so the conversations across professions have true meaning and so the practitioners can add value to each others' work.

In the wrap-up session, the Loeb Program's Jim Stockard, speaking metaphorically while referring to Evans' WaterFire project, observed that "artists can bring people to new places." Another participant wondered out loud if the current federal administration might be convinced to put some of its "faith-based initiative" money into the programs that were presented that day. "All these groups did work that was mostly based on faith," she said.

Most certainly all these exceptional arts-driven efforts arrived at a formula that propelled people and their communities to new places.

Tom Borrup is a consultant to arts organizations and to foundations and cities in the Twin Cities and around the U.S He has been a community activist and nonprofit arts administrator for over 25 years. He lives in Minneapolis where he was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2003 and a trustee and chair of the Jerome Foundation from 1994 to 2003.

The Loeb Fellowship Program, established in 1970 at the Harvard Design School, offers mid-career fellowships each year to 10 to 12 outstanding professionals working to improve the built and natural environment. Loeb fellows are drawn from fields including architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, design journalism, the arts and community development. The Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence, created in 1986 by Simeon Bruner in honor of his late father, strives to foster a better understanding of the role of architecture in the urban environment. The program has become a leading forum for the discussion of issues related to urban architecture, planning and revitalization.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2003