CHAPTER
3
The Politics of Urban
Development
L
ocal governments struggle to identify effective economic development strategies in a
competitive environment that constrains their choices of action. Restructuring on a global scale
imposes economic challenges to which cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas must respond. The
selections in this chapter highlight how the imperative for local economic development shapes
local politics and decision making. In Selection 7, Edward Glaeser considers the plight of cities
struggling to reinvent themselves because economic restructuring has left them behind. Glaeser
probes the experience of Detroit, Michigan, in order to examine both the process of urban decline
and the politics of regeneration. “Urban reinvention,” says Glaeser, “is made possible by the
traditional urban virtues that were to be found in nineteenth- century Detroit—educated workers,
small entrepreneurs, and a creative interplay among different industries.” As he notes, twentiethcentury Detroit lost many of these resources. The city became excessively dependent on the auto
industry, and worker and entrepreneurial talents became depleted by poverty and suburban flight
of people and businesses.
Although Glaeser suggests that Detroit’s fall had more to do with economics than politics, he
believes the city’s political responses to decline have been wanting, and therefore made things
even worse. He describes how Detroit was led for decades by a passionate crusader dedicated to
challenging racial inequalities while doing little to make the city more attractive to employers and
residents. At the same time, Detroit’s policies of physical renewal failed to change the city in
productive ways and neglected investments in human capital. In contrast, he says, New York and
other cities avoided Detroit’s fate by pursuing effective development policies. Glaeser concludes
that when urban decline leaves few alternatives, as in the case of Detroit, it might be best for them
to shrink to a more manageable size that affords opportunities for human creativity.
Glaeser’s account raises interesting questions about the importance of local economic and
political circumstances in explaining urban decline. Are the kinds of local resources held by cities
as critical today when so many business and investment decisions are made at a distance from
local communities? Does Glaeser underestimate the role of racial injustice and discrimination in
bringing about Detroit’s decline and frustrating its reinvention?
Tourism/entertainment, culture, and urban amenities have been extremely important for the
revitalization of downtowns and urban economies. Old cities have an advantage in developing
these sectors. Jobs are connected to amenities; the affluent residents who live downtown want to
commute less but also prefer to live in an environment with exciting street life, nightlife, culture,
and entertainment. With their historic architecture, public monuments, redeveloped waterfronts,
and older neighborhoods, cities are uniquely positioned to provide an exciting urban culture. Partly
for this reason, for the first time in a half century, cities seem to be indispensable to their
metropolitan regions. In Selection 8, Elizabeth Strom points out that as the traditional economic
base of cities has weakened, culture and the arts have become very important for urban reinvention.
Whatever other problems they may face, older cities hold a distinct advantage over suburbs in
building a new economy based on culture and arts because of the presence of renovated
waterfronts, historic districts, museums, concert halls, opera galleries, and “high culture” assets.
Strom describes how a close collaboration between the private and public sectors has emerged
to enhance the presence of culture downtown. Promoters of culture and arts seek public funding
for their efforts. At the other end of the bargain, city officials perceive cultural and art institutions
as industries that can help drive urban revitalization. Strom believes that this close collaboration
raises questions: Does the commercialization of culture exclude artistic endeavors that do not draw
big crowds or long lines? Does it bias public support for the arts in favor of events that have quick
audience potential, but diminish sustained support for museums and concert halls after they are
built? Ultimately, is the quality of life in cities improved or degraded by the new culture–
development alliance?
How local communities can use government to shape their economic destinies is the subject
of the last two essays. In Selection 9, Paul Kantor and H. V. Savitch argue that local officials can
sometimes gain considerable control over their own development even though the pressures to
compete are intense. Scholars sometimes depict cities as junior partners to business in the global
development game. In theory, business investors have many cities and regions to choose from;
cities are often desperate to attract their jobs and dollars. In their comparative analysis of cities in
the United States and Western Europe, Kantor and Savitch show that the real world is not always
so one-sided. The authors describe how city bargaining advantages relative to business are not
uniform; sometimes business actually is the junior partner.
Kantor and Savitch explain that the bargaining advantages of cities are quite dependent on
market conditions, local political systems, and national urban policies. For example, some city
governments have the advantage of a very favorable market environment for attracting or keeping
business; not all are desperate to chase every dollar investors offer. Sometimes this is because there
are businesses—entertainment parks, for example—with such large sunk costs that they cannot
easily move elsewhere. Alternatively, some global cities, such as London, Tokyo, and New York,
serve as global anchors for industries like financial services; this limits the economic competition
they face from smaller cities. Still others may have such highly diversified economies that jobs
that are lost are easily replaced. In all these circumstances, economic advantages can favor cities,
not investors. This, in turn, makes it possible for these city governments to act with greater
independence and promote development policies that generate more community benefits than
others can.
The authors show that local bargaining advantages are not always economic in nature. Cities
that have highly developed democratic political systems are better able to resist business demands.
Cities having assistance from national governments that take an active role in urban affairs also
are better able to extract concessions from the private sector and limit business power. Kantor and
Savitch’s comparative research suggests that the role of national governments in supporting their
cities may be pivotal. U.S. cities tend to have fewer bargaining advantages than their counterparts
in Western Europe—largely because of the limited role of the federal government in regulating
local economic development activity.
Finally, in Selection 10, James M. Smith argues that the nature of governmental intervention
in urban development is changing. In his study of Chicago, he points to a number of instances in
which state governments and special-purpose authorities have played a central role in urban
development politics. Special-purpose authorities are appointed independent agencies created by
state governments to help plan, fund, and build large projects, such as sports arenas, convention
centers, and other facilities to boost local economies. Smith believes that the increasing reliance
upon these governmental agencies in Chicago can be described as an intergovernmental triad:
State, local, and private political interests are brought into a close cooperative relationship that is
substantially independent of city governments and voters. Decision making is “… taking place in
state houses, and the corridors of state-created authorities with the necessary powers to bypass
local protests and complications.”
Smith’s observations about the restructuring of politics around city, state, and public authority
triads raises many questions about the changing role of private and public interests in urban
development. Is one leg of the triad stronger than another? Are state governments, especially the
legislatures, causing the power of mayors and other city governmental officials to shrink in favor
of state and private sector players? Do private business interests grow stronger, diminish, or stay
the same as policymaking shifts to intergovernmental triads? The answers are not obvious. For
instance, it remains unclear if triads increase the voice of business in economic development. On
the one hand, business representatives dominated the boards of virtually all of the special-purpose
authorities in the Chicago cases described by Smith. On the other hand, all were appointed by
governors and mayors seeking to protect their own interests in the development game.
The politics of urban development is profoundly influenced by global economic forces
enveloping every local community. Yet the selections show local responses to these new economic
challenges vary from place to place and over time. The struggle among government and private
interests continues to shape the policies that determine the direction of change.
7
Why Do Cities Decline?
EDWARD GLAESER
T
he corner of Elmhurst Street and Rosa Parks Boulevard in Detroit feels as far from New
York’s Fifth Avenue as urban space can get in America. Though this intersection lies in the heart
of Detroit, much of the nearby land is empty. Grass now grows where apartment buildings and
stores once stood. The Bible Community Baptist Church is the only building at the intersection;
its boarded-up windows and nonworking phone number suggest that it doesn’t attract many
worshippers.
If you walk down Elmhurst, you’ll see eleven low-rise homes; four of them are vacant. There
are also two apartment buildings—one is less than a third occupied, the other is empty. There are
also another ten or so vacant lots and a parking lot, blank spaces that once held homes and
apartment buildings. Despite its ruinous condition, the area feels perfectly safe because there isn’t
enough humanity to create a threat. The open spaces give this neighborhood the feel of a ghost
town, where the spirits of Detroit’s past bemoan the plight of what was once America’s fourthlargest city.
Between 1950 and 2008, Detroit lost over a million people—58 percent of its population.
Today one third of its citizens live in poverty. Detroit’s median family income is $33,000, about
half the U.S. average. In 2009, the city’s unemployment rate was 25 percent, which was 9
percentage points more than any other large city and more than 2.5 times the national average. In
2008, Detroit had one of the highest murder rates in America, more than ten times higher than
New York City’s. Many American cities endured a collapse in housing prices between 2006 and
2008. But Detroit was unique in both missing the boom early in the decade and suffering a 25
percent price drop since the bust.
Detroit’s decline is extreme, but it’s hardly unique. Eight of the ten largest U.S. cities in 1950
have lost at least a sixth of their population since then. Six of the sixteen largest cities in 1950—
Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—have lost more than half
their population since that year. In Europe, cities like Liverpool, Glasgow, Rotterdam, Bremen,
and Vilnius are all much smaller than they once were. The age of the industrial city is over, at least
in the West, and it will never return. Some erstwhile manufacturing towns have managed to evolve
from making goods to making ideas, but most continue their slow, inexorable declines.
But we shouldn’t see the exodus from the Rust Belt as an indictment of urban living; the
manufacturing cities fell because they had abandoned the most vital features of city life. The old
commercial towns, like Birmingham and New York, specialized in skills, small enterprises, and
strong connections with the outside world. Those attributes, which also create urban prosperity
today, made cities successful long before a single bolt of cloth left a textile mill in Manchester or
a single car rolled off an assembly line in Detroit. The industrial town was unlike either those old
commercial cities or the modern capitals of the information age. Its vast factories employed
hundreds of thousands of relatively unskilled workers. Those factories were self-sufficient and
isolated from the world outside, except that they were providing the planet with vast quantities of
cheap, identical products.
That model served the West extremely well for about a century. Detroit’s car factories
provided good wages to hundreds of thousands of people, but over the past fifty years, areas with
abundant small firms have grown more quickly than places dominated by enormous enterprises.
Skilled cities have been more successful than less educated places, and only 11 percent of Detroit’s
adults have college degrees. People and firms have moved to warmer areas and away from the
chilly Midwest, whose waterways first nurtured the cities that now comprise the Rust Belt.
Industrial diversity has been more conducive to growth than manufacturing monocultures, and
Detroit practically defined the one-industry town.
While it would be wrong to attribute too much of these places’ problems to politics, political
mismanagement was often a feature of Rust Belt decline. Perhaps the most common error was
thinking that these cities could build their way back to success with housing projects, grandiose
office towers, or fanciful high-tech transit systems. Those mistakes came out of the all-toocommon error of confusing a city, which is really a mass of connected humanity, with its
structures.
Reviving these cities requires shedding the old industrial model completely, like a snake
sloughing off its skin. When a city reinvents itself successfully, the metamorphosis is often so
complete that we forget that the place was once an industrial powerhouse. As late as the 1950s,
New York’s garment industry was the nation’s largest manufacturing cluster. It employed 50
percent more workers than the auto industry did in Detroit. America’s Industrial Revolution
practically began in greater Boston, but now nobody associates smokestacks with that city. These
places have reinvented themselves by returning to their old, preindustrial roots of commerce, skills,
and entrepreneurial innovation.
If Detroit and places like it are ever going to come back, they will do so by embracing the
virtues of the great pre- and postindustrial cities: competition, connection, and human capital. The
Rust Belt will be reborn only if it can break from its recent past, which has left it with a vast
housing stock for which there is little demand, a single major industry that is dominated by a few
major players, and problematic local politics. Beneath these cities’ recent history lies an instructive
older story of connection and creativity, which provide the basis for reinvention. To understand
Detroit’s predicament and its potential, we must compare the city’s great and tragic history with
the story of other cities, like New York, that have successfully weathered industrial decline.
HOW THE RUST BELT ROSE
… The cities that grew up as nodes along America’s nineteenth-century transport network enabled
vast numbers of people to access the wealth of the U.S. hinterland. Then, as now, Iowa’s rich, dark
soil made it a farmer’s dream. In 1889, Iowa corn yields were 50 percent higher than the yields in
older areas such as Kentucky. Corn may have been easier to grow out west, but its low value per
ton made it relatively expensive to ship. Canal boats and railcars played their part in moving
calories westward, but so did cities, which helped make produce easier to ship….
… Like Chicago, Detroit grew as a node of the great rail and water network long before Henry
Ford made his first Model T. Between 1850 and 1890, the city’s population increased tenfold,
from 21,000 to 206,000 people. Detroit’s growth was again intimately tied to its waterway, the
Detroit River, which was part of the path from Iowa’s farmland to New York’s tables. By 1907,
67 million tons of goods were moving along the Detroit River, more than three times as much as
the total amount going through the ports of New York or London….
… In New York and Chicago and Detroit, entrepreneurs came, eager for access to harbors,
other manufacturers, and urban consumers. The money that industries save on transport costs when
they locate near each other and their customers is an example of agglomeration economies—the
benefits that come from clustering in cities. The growing city’s large home market and its waterborne access to other customers also enabled industrialists to take advantage of what economists
call returns to scale, a term for the fact that per unit costs are cheaper in bigger plants that produce
more units, like large sugar refineries or car factories… .
… At the end of the nineteenth century, Detroit looked a lot like Silicon Valley in the 1960s
and 1970s. The Motor City thrived as a hotbed of small innovators, many of whom focused on the
new new thing, the automobile. The basic science of the automobile had been worked out in
Germany in the 1880s, but the German innovators had no patent protection in the United States.
As a result, Americans were competing furiously to figure out how to produce good cars on a mass
scale. In general, there’s strong correlation between the presence of small firms and the later
growth of a region. Competition, the “racing men” phenomenon, seems to create economic
success….
… New York City actually had a larger share of the nation’s automobile producers than
Detroit in 1900, but there was an explosion in automotive entrepreneurship in Detroit in the early
1900s. Detroit seemed to have had a budding automotive genius on every street corner. Ford,
Ransom Olds, the Dodge brothers, David Dunbar Buick, and the Fisher brothers all worked in the
Motor City. Some of these men made cars, but Detroit also had plenty of independent suppliers,
like the Fisher brothers, who could cater to start-ups. Ford was able to open a new company with
backing from the Dodge brothers, who were making engine and chassis components. They
supplied Ford with both financing and parts….
… The irony and ultimately the tragedy of Detroit is that its small, dynamic firms and
independent suppliers gave rise to gigantic, wholly integrated car companies, which then became
synonymous with stagnation. Ford figured out that massive scale could make his cars cheap, but
supersize, self-contained factories were antithetical to the urban virtues of competition and
connection. Ford figured out how to make assembly lines that could use the talents of poorly
educated Americans, but making Detroit less skilled hurt it economically in the long run.
Successful car companies bought up their suppliers, like Fisher Body, and their competitors.
By the 1930s, only the most foolhardy and well-financed businessman would have dared take on
General Motors and Ford. The intellectually fertile world of independent urban entrepreneurs had
been replaced by a few big companies that had everything to lose and little to gain from radical
experimentation.
HENRY FORD AND INDUSTRIAL DETROIT
As the car companies got out of innovation and into mass production, they no longer saw any
advantages to locating in the city. Dense urban centers are ideal places to come up with new ideas,
but not ideal places to make millions of Model T’s. Ford’s desire for massive scale required a
factory too large for any city to accommodate. In 1917, he began building his River Rouge plant
in suburban Dearborn, southwest of Detroit. At River Rouge, he erected a ninety-three-building
complex with 7 million square feet of workspace. River Rouge had its own docks, rail lines, and
power plant. Raw materials could be turned into cars within a single facility.
Ford’s River Rouge plant began the process of suburbanizing manufacturing that would
continue throughout the twentieth century. While the car may have been born in the city, it ended
up being a very rebellious child. Automobiles enabled Americans to live in distant suburbs away
from streetcars or sidewalks. Trucks enabled factories to locate far away from rail lines. The car
and the truck both enabled space-hungry people and firms to leave dense urban areas.
By the 1950s, both New York and Detroit started shrinking as the advantages they once got
from their ports and rail yards became far less important because other areas had also acquired
easy access to world markets. Between 1890 and today, the real cost of moving a ton a mile by rail
dropped from twenty cents to two, so it didn’t matter nearly as much whether or not your factory
was close to a transport hub. Before World War II, companies put up with high labor costs in
Northern cities because the transport network made it so much easier to buy raw materials and ship
final products. As transport costs plummeted, it became cost-effective to locate in cheaper places:
suburban factories, like River Rouge, Southern right-to-work states, and China. At the same time,
the rise of the car made older cities built around trains and elevators seem obsolete….
… The industrialization of the Sunbelt was helped—and Northern cities like Detroit and New
York were hurt—by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which allowed states to pass right-to-work laws
that forbid the formation of closed shops. In right-to-work states, which were often in the South,
unions had much less bargaining power because firms could always turn to nonunion workers.
Unsurprisingly, manufacturers have steadily drifted to right-to-work states, away from America’s
older industrial regions. One classic paper compared the effect of right-to-work laws on factory
jobs in neighboring counties, on either side of a right-to-work border. It found that manufacturing
grew 23.1 percent faster between 1947 and 1992 on the anti-union side of the divide.
High union wages didn’t seem like such a drag on Detroit during the first decades after World
War II. When the UAW whipsawed the Big Three automakers into raising wages, higher costs
were mostly passed along to consumers. The automakers were so profitable that they could
withstand some of the most expensive labor costs on the planet. Of course, the car companies
weren’t above trying to open new plants in states with lower labor costs, which is why Detroit was
losing people even before the car industry began to decline.
Industrial decline ultimately hit every older city. Boston’s maritime industries, which had
grown great on the clipper ships and China trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, became
obsolete with the rise of steam-powered ships. New York’s garment industry imploded in the late
1960s and 1970s, and the city lost more than three hundred thousand manufacturing jobs between
1967 and 1977. The exodus of urban manufacturing was not inherently a bad thing—making goods
in cheap locales made those goods less expensive for ordinary people—but it posed a mortal
challenge for the world’s industrial cities….
WHY RIOT?
Cities suffer from economic downturns directly, because of the loss of jobs and decline in wages,
but negative shocks also have indirect consequences, like social upheaval and falling tax revenues,
that can be just as harmful. The collapse of the industrial city was the backdrop for the crime waves
and riots of the 1960s, and for an increasingly impotent public sector that was just trying to stay
solvent. In the bright, optimistic days of the early 1960s, many American cities turned from oldstyle machine politicians to young, charismatic leaders. In Detroit and New York, an alliance of
liberals and African Americans elected Jerome Cavanagh and John Lindsay respectively. While
his predecessors had been seen as abettors of police brutality, Cavanagh promised fairer law
enforcement. He launched affirmative-action programs and marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
John Lindsay also fought police brutality and supported affirmative action. Lindsay’s finest hour
may have been in the aftermath of King’s shooting, when he walked the streets of Harlem and
cooled tempers with warmth and compassion.
But ultimately neither mayor could control the forces that were convulsing his city. Neither
can be blamed for failing to halt the manufacturing exodus from his city—the economic headwinds
were just too strong. Neither can be blamed for the social unrest that erupted in America’s cities
during the 1960s, in the wake of economic distress, expanding but unmet expectations, and a
breakdown in traditional means of social control. But both mayors made mistakes that contributed
to their cities’ distress.
Lindsay’s besetting sin was his inability to rein in costs, especially when faced with tough
municipal unions and transit strikes. Lindsay, initially a Republican, hoped to limit union pay
raises, but his background as the congressman from Manhattan’s silk-stocking district hardly
prepared him to win a brutal street fight with the transit workers. He ended up preferring pay raises
to strikes, and the increasing costs of city government were then hidden with increasingly creative
bookkeeping, which led straight to New York’s near bankruptcy in 1975. Cavanagh’s fatal flaw
was his penchant for razing slums and building tall structures with the help of federal urbanrenewal dollars. Detroit’s housing market had peaked in the 1950s and was already depressed
when Cavanagh took office. The city was shedding people and had plenty of houses. Why
subsidize more building? Successful cities must build in order to accommodate the rising demand
for space, but that doesn’t mean that building createssuccess.
Urban renewal, in both Detroit and New York, may have replaced unattractive slums with
shiny new buildings, but it did little to address urban decline. Those shiny new buildings were
really Potemkin villages spread throughout America, built to provide politicians with the
appearance of urban success. But Detroit had plenty of buildings; it didn’t need more. What Detroit
needed was human capital: a new generation of entrepreneurs like Ford and Durant and the Dodge
brothers who could create some great new industry, as Shockley and the Fairchildren were doing
in Silicon Valley. Investing in buildings instead of people in places where prices were already low
may have been the biggest mistake of urban policy over the past sixty years.
Both mayors also failed at fighting crime. New York’s murder rate quadrupled between 1960
and 1975, and Detroit experienced a similarly disturbing trend. But racial discrimination and police
brutality in both cities led both mayors to emphasize accountability more than enforcement.
African Americans were no longer willing to take abuse from white thugs, whether in or out of
police uniform. In Detroit, a 93 percent white police force didn’t seem all that integrated in a city
that was close to 50 percent black. While later mayors, like Rudy Giuliani, would reduce crime
with rigorous policing, in the 1960s, it wasn’t obvious that aggressive enforcement could keep the
peace.
Less than a mile down Rosa Parks Boulevard from the Elmhurst Street corner, a dilapidated
park occupies the corner at Clairmount Street. This is the site of an event from which Detroit has
still not recovered almost half a century later. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, July 23, 1967,
a club on that corner was hosting a party for some returning veterans, when Detroit’s police
department staged a raid. The vice squad, which had a robust reputation for brutality toward the
city’s blacks, took a while to cart off the eighty-five par-tygoers. A jeering crowd of two hundred
gathered and began throwing bottles at the cops, who fled. The mob grew and grew, and soon
Detroit was ablaze.
Riots are a classic tipping-point phenomenon. Being one of three rioters is dangerous
business—the cops are likely to get you—but the chances of arrest are far lower if you’re one of
three thousand rioters. In Detroit, over a thousand police officers failed to control the thousands of
rioters who burned and looted. Cavanagh completely lost control of his city. The riot didn’t end
until after Tuesday, when thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions
showed up with armed vehicles. By the time this surge quelled the violence, there had been fortythree deaths, 1,400 burned buildings, 1,700 looted stores, and seven thousand arrests.
It’s easy to see why Detroit’s African-American citizens were moved to riot. They’d been
brutalized by a police force full of whites recruited from the South. They’d been systematically
excluded from white jobs in the auto industry for decades, and the jobs they did get typically either
paid lower wages or offered worse working conditions. Statistics show that Detroit was hardly the
only city that had fomented this sort of black anger, and riots were most common in those cities
with larger numbers of young, unemployed African Americans.
Cities with more cops actually had smaller riots. Unfortunately, draconian enforcement seems
to be the only effective way to stop a riot once it starts. Three of the great experts on civil unrest
summarized their research on the link between dictatorship and rioting with the pithy phrase
“repression works.” Brutal regimes that severely punish rioting have fewer riots, which may
explain why democracies see more rioting than dictatorships, and the more progressive cities of
the North had far more riots than the Jim Crow South.
Riots are one example of the collective action enabled by cities that may seem to be an
unmitigated urban curse, but riots near Steenvoorde began the Dutch Revolt that led to Europe’s
first modern republic, and unruly mob action in Boston was a critical part of America’s road to
revolution and republic. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “I view great cities as pestilential to the
morals, the health and the liberties of man,” but his own liberties owed much to urban agitators
like Sam Adams and John Hancock, who succeeded at creating conflict with England precisely
because the great port of Boston enabled them to conjure up a mob.
Just like King George III, the leaders of America’s cities in the 1960s had two plausible
responses to rioting. One was to beef up law enforcement and make the streets safer by locking
people up. The other response was to empathize with the rioters and to try to create a more just
society. There’s much to be said for the second approach, which attracted both Lindsay and
Cavanagh. In the 1960s and 1970s, many reform-minded leaders strove to bring greater racial and
social equality to their cities. Unfortunately, those leaders only showed how hard it is to right great
social wrongs at the city level.
The awful history of American racism helps explain why so many African Americans felt
like rioting in the 1960s, but that history doesn’t change the fact that those riots did tremendous
harm to America’s cities, especially to their African-American residents. After all, the rioters
weren’t burning the homes of prosperous white suburbanites. Those riots and rising crime rates
helped create the sense that civilization had fled the city. As a result, many of those who could
leave Detroit did.
URBAN REINVENTION: NEW YORK SINCE 1970
As recently as the 1970s, pretty much every older industrial city seemed similarly doomed. Both
New York and Detroit were reeling from the decline of their core industries, and if anything, New
York seemed worse off because the car industry remained more tightly tied to Motown than the
garment sector did to Gotham. In 1977, workers in Wayne County, Michigan, which includes
Detroit, were paid more than workers in Manhattan. New York City’s government didn’t seem
any better than Detroit’s. In 1975, New York State established the Municipal Assistance
Corporation to take over the city’s finances and stop it from falling into bankruptcy, despite having
some of the nation’s highest taxes.
But while Detroit has continued to decline, New York came back.
There’s no shortage of explanations for New York’s rebirth. Some Yankee fans think that
Reggie Jackson’s home runs brought back the city’s mojo. Hipper urbanists look to Andy Warhol
and the arts. Mayor Giuliani credits himself. There is a bit of truth to all of these views, but New
York’s resurrection was primarily tied to an explosion of entrepreneurship, much of which was in
financial services. In 2008, more than $78.6 billion was paid to employees in the sector that the
U.S. Census Bureau quaintly calls Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial
Investments and Related Activities. And that doesn’t even include all the really big payouts to the
people who own financial firms.
Sixty years ago, New York’s resilience was already something of a puzzle, and the economist
Benjamin Chinitz then argued that the city owed its strength to a tradition of entrepreneurship,
which the small firms of the apparel industry had encouraged. Chinitz suggested that the salaried
employees of large steel companies in Pittsburgh taught their children to obey their boss and keep
their noses clean, but the garment manufacturers of New York taught their kids to take risks.
Certainly, financial billionaire Sandy Weill’s father, who started as a dressmaker and then switched
to importing steel, produced a son who was more comfortable running a company than working
for someone else.
Cities have long created intellectual explosions, in which one smart idea generates others.
The artistic renaissance in Florence was one such explosion; the industrial revolution in
Birmingham and Manchester was another. The growth of finance in late-twentieth-century New
York was encouraged by just such an innovation, the ability to quantify the trade-off between risk
and return, which made it easier to sell investors riskier assets, from junk bonds to mortgagebacked securities, which in turn enabled riskier, high-return activities, like leveraged buyouts of
underperforming companies such as RJR/Nabisco. Today’s hedge-fund billionaires are only the
latest links in a long chain of connected innovators.
For the millions worldwide who look askance at all of New York’s financial innovation,
Michael Bloomberg’s story, in which a smart trader became an entrepreneur in another sector,
might be easier to embrace. In the 1970s, Bloomberg had been riding high at Salomon Brothers,
running the firm’s trading floor, until he was exiled into the geeky world of systems development
before being fired in 1981. Bloomberg then got into information technology, and over the next
three decades he grew his company into a behemoth by supplying exactly what increasingly
quantitative Wall Street traders wanted—jargon-free keyboards and a vast stream of information
that was updated constantly.
But while Bloomberg made his fortune moving information electronically, he knows the
value of working face-to-face. He set up his offices in an “open plan,” which followed the pattern
of Wall Street trading floors like the one he’d run at Salomon, and the unimpeded flow of
information within the firm helped his success. In most of the world, rich people surround
themselves with big offices and decorated walls, but on trading floors, some of the world’s
wealthiest people work right on top of each other. Rich traders are forgoing privacy for the
knowledge that comes from proximity to other people. In a sense, trading floors are just the city
writ small. When Bloomberg switched careers yet again in 2002 to become mayor of New York,
he took the open plan with him to City Hall.
While New York was rising as a financial phoenix, Detroit continued its inexorable decline.
The Motor City’s failure was, in many ways, the legacy of Henry Ford’s success. Urban
reinvention is made possible by the traditional urban virtues that were to be found in nineteenthcentury Detroit: educated workers, small entrepreneurs, and a creative interplay among different
industries. Late-twentieth-century Detroit was dominated by a single industry that employed
hundreds of thousands of less-skilled workers in three vast vertically integrated firms. What a toxic
mixture!
Cities like Detroit with big firms have suffered weaker employment growth than cities with
more and smaller employers. In metropolitan areas, a 10 percent increase in the number of firms
per worker in 1977 is associated with 9 percent more employment growth between 1977 and 2000.
This relationship holds, no matter what types of industries are involved, how old the companies
are, or how big the cities are.
Big, vertically integrated firms may be productive in the short run, but they don’t create the
energetic competition and new ideas that are so necessary for long-term urban success. No small
entrepreneur, even with the experience and panache of John DeLorean, could successfully compete
with the Big Three. Detroit had stifled the diversity and competition that encourage growth.
Moreover, the city of the assembly line had never invested in the educational institutions that
enabled more diverse places, like Boston, Milan, and New York, to come back.
Meanwhile, declining transportation costs made it easier for European and Japanese
competitors to sell cars in the U.S. market. While Detroit’s Big Three had long lost their appetite
for radical risk, Soichiro Honda was building fuel-efficient little cars. Detroit’s automobile
industry stayed afloat with occasional innovations like the minivan and the SUV, but its days of
dominance were over. In the 1970s, as high gas prices dampened Americans’ appetites for Cadillac
Eldorados and Chrysler Imperials, Detroit had nowhere else to go. As the car industry declined,
Detroit fell further and further. The age of the industrial city—with its vast factories and powerful
unions—was over.
THE RIGHTEOUS RAGE OF COLEMAN YOUNG
Detroit’s fall has more to do with economics than politics, but the political response to the city’s
decline only made things worse. New York responded to the crisis of the 1970s by giving up the
dream of ending social injustice at the local level and instead electing centrist, workmanlike
mayors—Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg—who were determined to make the city as
attractive as possible to employers and middle-class residents. Detroit was led by a passionate
crusader whose anger was understandable but unhelpful.
Coleman Young’s family had moved from Alabama to Detroit in the 1920s. He got a job
working for Henry Ford but was ultimately blacklisted from the auto industry because of his
involvement with labor and civil rights issues. In World War II, Young joined the Tuskegee
Airmen as a bombardier. This all-black unit gave African Americans their first opportunity to fly
for their country. In 1943, Detroit’s simmering racial antipathies exploded in a massive riot, which
seems to have started when white youths began attacking blacks in the parks of Belle Isle. White
police officers responded by shooting and killing seventeen blacks and no whites. The federal
government thought it wise to move Young’s all-black bombing outfit, which had been outside
Detroit, first to Kentucky and then to Freeman Field in Indiana.
Freeman Field had two officers’ clubs, separate but not equal, for the white instructors and
the black trainees. Young put his skills as a labor organizer, learned on the streets of Detroit, to
work integrating these clubs. En masse, the black officers entered the white club and were arrested.
Eventually, after pressure from African-American groups, they were released and transferred back
to Kentucky, where the officers’ club was open to all but where the white officers could also use
another club at Fort Knox.
For eighteen years after the war, Young worked his way up Detroit’s political ladder. In 1951
he founded the National Negro Labor Council, whose radicalism attracted the scrutiny of the
House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. When questioned about his
associates, Young refused to answer, explaining that “I am not here as a stool pigeon.” Finally in
1963, the times had begun to catch up with his radicalism, and he was elected to the state senate.
Three years later, he became the senate minority leader. He pushed through open-housing laws
that limited segregation, and he also helped pass Detroit’s first income tax.
Local income taxes illustrate the problem of trying to create a just society city by city. The
direct effect of Young’s income tax was to take money from the rich to fund services that helped
the poor. The indirect effect of a local income tax is to encourage richer citizens and businesses to
leave. Research by four economists found that in three out of four large cities, higher tax rates
barely increase tax revenues because economic activity dissipates so quickly in response to higher
tax rates. In a declining place like Detroit, well-meaning attempts at local redistribution can easily
backfire by speeding the exodus of wealthier businesses and people, which only further isolates
the poor.
After the riot destroyed Jerome Cavanagh’s career, he retired, and finally, in 1973, as the
black share of Detroit’s population continued to rise, Young was elected mayor. His outspoken
views gave voice to the long frustrated hopes of Detroit’s black community, and he went on to win
his next four mayoral elections easily, as Detroit changed from a city that was 55.5 percent white
in 1970 to a city that was 11.1 percent white in 2008.
Young’s brash style dominated headlines during his twenty years in office. He thought
profanity was useful: “You can express yourself much more directly, much more exactly, much
more succinctly, with properly used curse words.” He argued that whites didn’t even know the
extent of their racism: “The victim of racism is in a much better position to tell you whether or not
you’re a racist than you are.” Some people thought that Young was urging criminals to suburbanize when he invited them “to leave Detroit” and “hit the eight-mile road,” the highway that
separates Detroit from its northern suburbs. The mayor certainly had no time for his enemies and
was happy to see them leave the city.
Young’s bellicosity gave his many supporters the sense that they had a fearless champion
fighting for them in City Hall. After years of being treated as second-class citizens, Detroit’s
African Americans could hold their heads up. Young’s bitter experience with racial injustice made
him unwilling to whisper sweetly to the city’s white population. Moreover, his political interests
were only helped by the continuing exodus of Detroit’s whites.
THE CURLEY EFFECT
Economists have long argued that the ability of citizens to “vote with their feet” creates
competition among local governments that provides some of the same benefits as competition
among companies. But there are real limits to that rosy picture. Sometimes, as the story of Coleman
Young and Detroit shows, the possible flight of voters can create perverse political incentives that
make government worse. I’ve named this phenomenon the Curley Effect, after Boston’s colorful
mayor James Michael Curley.
Curley had much in common with Young, and if anything, he was even more argumentative.
Curley cast himself as the champion of a poor ethnic minority (the Irish) and rode to victory
promising to right old wrongs. Curley frequently made pronouncements that infuriated Boston
Brahmins, like calling Anglo-Saxons “a strange and stupid race.” He was elected mayor of Boston
four times, not quite Young’s five terms, but Curley also won a term as governor. Also unlike
Young, Curley spent two terms in jail, serving sentences for mail fraud and for taking a Civil
Service exam for someone else.
One day in 1916, during Curley’s first term as mayor, a British recruiting officer had asked
the mayor whether he could invite Bostonians of British extraction to fight on Britain’s side during
the Great War. Curley replied: “Go ahead, Colonel. Take every damn one of them.” After all,
Protestant Bostonians of English descent overwhelmingly opposed Curley. The more Boston
became a city of poor Irishmen, the more likely it was to reelect James Michael Curley.
The Curley Effect illustrates the danger of ethnic politics, especially in cities where exit is
easy. Boston’s economy would have benefited if wealthier Yankees had stayed in the city, but
Curley did all he could to get rid of them. Likewise, Detroit’s economy was hurt by the vast exodus
of wealthier whites. Young may never have explicitly told them to leave, but he did little that
encouraged them to stay. It’s hard not to empathize with the mayor’s anger, given the injustices
he’d suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.
The mobility of the prosperous limits the ability of any city government to play Robin Hood.
The well-off can, with relative ease, walk away from a depressed and declining city. Detroit’s
middle class escaped Coleman Young by moving to the suburbs.
THE EDIFICE COMPLEX
Young did have an economic strategy for Detroit, but it pursued the wrong objective. Instead of
trying to attract smart, wealthy entrepreneurial people, he built structures—making the same error
as Jerome Cavanagh, mistaking the built city for the real city. For centuries, leaders have used new
buildings to present an image of urban success. The Emperor Vespasian, who ruled Rome in the
first century, created an aura of legitimacy with vast construction projects like the Colosseum.
Seventeen hundred years later, according to legend, General Grigory Potemkin created a
prosperous-looking fake village to impress Empress Catherine the Great. Today urban leaders love
to pose at the opening of big buildings that seem to prove that their municipality has either arrived
or come back. For decades, the federal government has only exacerbated this tendency by offering
billions for structures and transportation and far less for schools or safety.
The tendency to think that a city can build itself out of decline is an example of the edifice
error, the tendency to think that abundant new building leads to urban success. Successful cities
typically do build, because economic vitality makes people willing to pay for space and builders
are happy to accommodate. But building is the result, not the cause, of success. Overbuilding a
declining city that already has more structures than it needs is nothing but folly.
In the 1970s, the Detroit Red Wings hockey team threatened to leave for the suburbs. Young
responded by building the Joe Louis Arena for $57 million ($205 million in 2010 dollars) and
renting it to the Red Wings at bargain rates. The city kept its sports team—but at an enormous
cost. In 1987, Detroit opened a monorail system, the People Mover, at a cost of over $200 million
(more than $425 million in 2010 dollars). The three-mile system carries about 6,500 people each
day and requires about $8.5 million a year in subsidies to operate. It is perhaps the single most
absurd public transit project in the country. While it was sold to the public with wildly optimistic
ridership projections, it fills only a tiny fraction of its seats. Detroit never needed a new public
transit system. The streets below the People Mover are generally empty and could accommodate
fleets of buses.
The great hope of the 1970s was the Renaissance Center. The center did receive tax breaks,
as well as the enthusiastic support of both Cavanagh and Young, but it was really an example of
private rather than public folly. Henry Ford II somehow thought that Detroit could be saved by a
vast structure with millions of square feet of new office space. Unfortunately, new space was not
what Detroit needed in those years. The Center cost $350 million to build but was sold to General
Motors for less than $100 million in 1996. General Motors now occupies Henry Ford II’s giant
white elephant.
In 1981, Coleman Young and General Motors teamed up for yet another construction project.
Young used eminent domain to destroy 1,400 homes in the ethnic neighborhood of Poletown.
Activists protested and took the case to the Michigan Supreme Court, but Young still got the land
and gave it to General Motors to build a new, high-tech factory inside the city limits. The plant
still functions, employing about 1,300 people on its 465 acres, but it’s hard to see the benefit of
moving more than 4,000 people to create such a land-intensive enterprise within city borders.
Detroit’s construction projects certainly changed the look of the city. The Renaissance Center
dominates the skyline. Riding on the People Mover feels like a trip to Disney World, if Disney
World were in the middle of a desperate city. But as in other declining places, billions were spent
on infrastructure that the city didn’t need. Unsurprisingly, providing more real estate in a place
that was already full of unused real estate was no help at all. The failures of urban renewal reflect
a failure at all levels of government to realize that people, not structures, really determine a city’s
success.
Could an alternative public policy have saved Detroit? By the time Young was elected,
Detroit was far gone, and I suspect that even the best policies could only have eased the city’s
suffering. But it is possible to imagine a different path, if it was taken during earlier decades, when
the city was far richer. Perhaps if the city had used its wealth and political muscle, starting in the
1920s, to invest in education at all levels, it could have developed the human capital that has been
the source of survival for postindustrial cities.
REMAINING IN THE RUST BELT
That harsh reality of industrial decline and political failures meant that by 2008 Detroit’s per capita
income was $14,976, only 54.3 percent of the U.S. average. Even before the recession hit, in 2006,
Detroit’s unemployment rate was 13.7 percent, which was far higher than that of the next largest
city. The city’s winters are cruel—January temperatures average 24.7 degrees—and Americans do
seem to love warm weather. Over the last century, no variable has been a better predictor of urban
growth than temperate winters. Given these fundamentals of cold and poverty, perhaps we
shouldn’t be asking why Detroit declined. Perhaps we should be asking why 777,000 people
remain as of 2008.
There are as many different answers to that question as there are people left in Detroit, and
each one of them could tell you something that they value about the place. But there is one force
that helps explain why most of them stay—cheap, durable housing. Any area’s population is linked
closely to the number of homes in that area, and homes don’t disappear overnight. They are also
too valuable to abandon, at least immediately. Their prices drop precipitously, but they remain
occupied, often for many decades. According to the Census Bureau, 86 percent of central-city
Detroit’s housing stock was built before 1960. The average house in the city is valued at $82,000,
which is far below the cost of new construction.
When cities are doing well, they can grow very quickly as long as homes can be speedily
constructed to house new residents. When cities decline, they decline very slowly, because people
are loath to abandon something as valuable as a home. In a sense, the durability of housing is a
blessing, because it provides cheap space to people with few resources. The downside of cities
kept alive through cheap housing is that they overwhelmingly attract the poor, creating centers of
extreme deprivation that cry out for social justice.
SHRINKING TO GREATNESS
Many cities around the world have experienced some version of Detroit’s fate, and politicians have
implemented many approaches to urban decline. U.S. cities have mainly tried to build their way
out of decline. Spain has turned to transportation, spending tens of billions of dollars on high-speed
rail, partly as a way to boost economic growth in poorer areas. Other places, like Italy, have used
large tax subsidies to encourage enterprise in poorer regions. Many European cities have tried
cultural strategies like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 2008, Liverpool had a flurry of new
construction to celebrate its one-year stint as Europe’s capital of culture. Which of these strategies
can actually reverse urban decline? Which strategies generate benefits that cover their costs?
In the nineteenth century, when moving goods was enormously expensive, places with good
transportation links, like New York or Liverpool, enjoyed a huge edge. Today, moving goods and
people is pretty cheap almost everywhere, so further improvements in transportation provide far
less of an edge.
Transportation investments are most effective when they radically increase the speed at which
a poor area can access a booming, space-starved metropolis. In Spain, a spate of investment in
high-speed rail has radically reduced travel times between Madrid and other cities, such as
Barcelona and Ciudad Real. The high-speed rail connection shortened the 140-mile trip between
Madrid and Ciudad Real to fifty minutes, and presto, people can live in Ciudad Real and work in
Spain’s largest city. The population of Ciudad Real does seem to have increased since getting the
rail connection. In compact England, cities like Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool could
also grow significantly as a result of extremely fast rail connections to London.
Yet the very things that have helped Ciudad Real benefit from high-speed rail are absent in
much of America’s Rust Belt. Flying to New York from Buffalo or Cleveland or Detroit will
always be faster than taking a train. There’s a lot of empty space between New York and these
cities, so why would those relatively distant places be natural spots for back-office overflow?
Faster links to New York can certainly benefit nearby places like Philadelphia or New Haven, but
America’s wide-open spaces are just too big for faster ground transportation to revitalize more
distant areas.
Another way to bring places back is to give businesses tax cuts when they locate in a
disadvantaged area. Research has found that tax breaks significantly increased employment in
troubled areas, but it took $100,000 in tax breaks to generate just one job. But regardless of cost,
should the national government even be using the tax code to shuffle economic activity around?
Would it have made sense to tax nineteenth-century Chicago or Detroit to keep the population of
Salem, Massachusetts, growing? Why should national policy encourage firms to locate in
unproductive places?
National policy should strive to enrich and empower everybody, not to push people to live in
any particular spot. The federal government has no business trying to encourage economic
development in the foothills of the Rockies, and it is hard to see the case for spending billions to
encourage people to move to politically favored cities. Expensive efforts to renew cities often do
more for well-connected businesses than for the poor people living in those declining areas. Even
if building a museum in a depressed neighborhood raises property values and brings in a stream
of artsy visitors, that won’t help the renter who doesn’t care for art and now has to pay more for
her apartment.
The success of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum has lent credence to the view that cultural
institutions can be successful urban renewal strategies. Frank Gehry’s iconic structure has certainly
spurred tourism, which rose from 1.4 million visitors in 1994 to 3.8 million in 2005; the museum
alone attracts a million visitors annually. There are certainly Bilbao skeptics, however. One study
attributed only about nine hundred new jobs to the museum, a project that cost the Basque treasury
$240 million. But the bigger problem with drawing lessons from Bilbao is that its experience is far
from standard. For every Guggenheim, there are dozens of expensive failures, like the National
Centre for Popular Music, built in Sheffield, England, with the hope of four hundred thousand new
visitors each year. It attracted a quarter of that number when it opened in 1999 and closed the same
year. Leipzig also has a beautiful art museum, with splendid soaring rooms that unfortunately
emphasize the museum’s paucity of visitors.
Leipzig is worthy of emulation less for its cultural strategy than for its hardheaded policy of
accepting decline and reducing the empty housing stock. In 2000, one fifth of the city’s homes
stock was vacant, a total of 62,500 units. After refusing to accept the reality of decline for decades,
the city government finally recognized that those units would never again house anybody and that
it made more sense to demolish them and replace them with green space. Bulldozing vacant homes
reduces the costs of city services, eliminates safety hazards, and turns decaying eyesores into
usable space. Leipzig set a target of destroying 20,000 vacant units.
In the United States, Youngstown, Ohio, which has lost more than half of its 1970 population,
has also embraced this vision of shrinking to greatness. In 2005, the city’s newly elected mayor
immediately earmarked funds for demolishing abandoned homes. Many of these homes are being
destroyed. Parks, open space, and large lots will replace once-dense neighborhoods. This strategy
won’t bring Youngstown’s population back, but it will make the city more attractive, less
dangerous, and cheaper to maintain. And finally Detroit has itself found a mayor, David Bing, who
understands that the people aren’t coming back and that empty homes should be replaced with
some more reasonable use of space. Mayor Bing is not short on compassion, but he also
understands the edifice error. He knows Detroit can be a great city if it cares for its people well
even if it has far fewer structures.
Museums and transportation and the arts do have an important role in place-making. Yet
planners must be realistic and expect moderate successes, not blockbusters. Realism pushes toward
small, sensible projects, not betting a city’s future on a vast, expensive roll of the dice. The real
payoff of these investments in amenities lies not in tourism but in attracting the skilled residents
who can really make a city rebound, especially if those residents can connect with the world
economy.
The path back for declining industrial towns is long and hard. Over decades, they must undo
the cursed legacy of big factories and heavy industry. They must return to their roots as places of
small-scale entrepreneurship and commerce. Apart from investing in education and maintaining
core public services with moderate taxes and regulations, governments can do little to speed this
process. Not every city will come back, but human creativity is strong, especially when reinforced
by urban density.
8
Culture, Art, and Downtown Development
ELIZABETH STROM
A
merican cities have rediscovered their cultural resources. During the past two decades, city
officials have learned to value the historic communities that their predecessors have been eager to
raze; have dubbed desolate, derelict warehouses “arts districts”; and have committed local tax
dollars to their museums and performing arts complexes, many newly built or recently expanded.
A survey of 65 U.S. cities (those with populations of 250,000 and above) finds that 71 major
performing arts centers and museums have been either built or substantially expanded since
1985.1 From Charlotte’s Blumenthal Hall, to Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, to Seattle’s Benaroya
Hall, a cultural building boom is clearly under way.
Of course, cultural facilities have always concentrated in urban areas. What is new and
interesting, first, is that so many new facilities have been built in a relatively short time span, and
so many have been built outside traditional cultural centers such as New York, Boston, Chicago,
and San Francisco.2 Second, whereas once the arts were considered a luxury, supported by
philanthropy and enjoyed by an elite group of connoisseurs, today’s cultural institutions are
constructed as an explicit part of a city’s economic revitalization program. This shift reflects
changes both in the political economy of cities and in the organization and mission of highbrow
cultural institutions. This article examines these changes and shows how they have led to an
increasingly close and mutually beneficial relationship between urban political, economic, and
cultural entrepreneurs.
The urban cultural building boom, this article maintains, represents a confluence of three
related trends. First, cities seeking to attract businesses with quality-of-life amenities are eager to
support the development of cultural institutions, especially in their once moribund centers. They
believe that these institutions will increase the city’s symbolic capital and catalyze other, unsubsidized commercial activities. Second, cultural institutions are drawn by their own economic needs
and by the imperatives of their funding sources to seek broader audiences and exploit more
commercial, income-generating strategies. They are able to achieve these goals without completely
sacrificing their aesthetic legitimacy because, third, the boundaries between high culture—once
their dominant domain—and popular culture have blurred. Cultural institutions today are thus
better positioned than those of 100 years ago to become active stakeholders in urban growth
politics.
CULTURE IN THE GROWTH COALITION:
WHY BUSINESS AND POLITICAL
LEADERS NEED THE ARTS
Business elites have long recognized that the prestige of high arts institutions could bring economic
benefit to their hometowns, but policies explicitly drawing on the arts to achieve economic
development goals have only recently become common. The urban renewal projects of the 1950s
and 1960s occasionally included cultural institutions—landmarks such as New York’s Lincoln
Center and Washington’s Arena Stage were built on sites cleared of tenement housing with the
support of city development officials, business elites, and the cultural institutions that would
inhabit them (Toffler 1964, 1973). However, during this period, most city planners and businesspeople still saw investments in culture as incidental to the main city development goals of
industrial retention and office and housing development.
By the 1980s, the dominant urban development policy paradigm had shifted away from
“smokestack chasing” in which cities competed for investment by offering lower costs (Bailey
1989). Competing for corporate headquarters and producer service firms, economic development
practitioners realized, required more than just abating taxes and improving infrastructure. Clark
(2000) maintains that today’s educated workers are more likely to choose appealing locations,
most notably those with attractive natural and cultural resources, and then consider their
employment options. In this model, firms that rely on highly skilled labor have greater incentive
than ever to either choose amenity-rich locations or to strive to improve the quality of life in their
headquarters city. As cities compete for mobile, skilled workers and the firms that employ them,
low taxes may be less important than riverfront parks, sports arenas, and historic districts.
Moreover, city officials have become ever more aware of the economic importance of tourism and
have put a great deal of energy into building and enlarging convention centers (Sanders 1998),
subsidizing new hotels, and attracting major retailers (Friedan and Sagalyn 1989; Hannigan 1998;
Judd 1999).
Cultural institutions represent an important element of the recreational infrastructure thought
to make a city more appealing to tourists and investors (Eisinger 2000; Hannigan 1998).
Corporations have come to see the presence of local arts institutions as a business asset, and their
support for such organizations represents good business sense as much as philanthropy. Ford
Motor’s marketing director, who was asked why his company has nearly single-handedly kept
Detroit’s opera company solvent, noted that the presence of such an institution made it easier to
recruit white-collar employees (Bradsher 1999). Donors to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center
made this point as well (Strom 1999).
City governments and place-based business elites have become more intent on marketing
their cities. Local boosterism, of course, is hardly new, but today professionals with large budgets
have replaced the well-intentioned amateurs of an earlier era (Ward 1998; Holcomb 1993).
Moreover, as is true throughout the business world, city promoters have moved from a model
of selling, where one tries to persuade the buyer to purchase what one has, to marketing, where
one tries to have what the buyer wants (Holcomb 1993). Marketers do not merely come up with a
catchy jingle; they seek to remake the city, or at least the most visible part of the city, to conform
to the expectations of the affluent consumers they want to attract. Cultural institutions, associated
with beauty, good taste, and higher purpose, become singularly important symbolic assets for
image-conscious marketers.
At the same time, development practitioners and scholars began to appreciate that the arts
comprise a wealth-generating economic sector, one in which urban areas retain a competitive
advantage. Since the 1980s, the economic impact of the arts has received considerable attention.
In major cultural capitals like New York, the “culture industry,” as the production and
consumption of the arts is called, comprises an important economic sector (National Endowment
for the Arts 1981; The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey 1993). Even in less obvious
places, the culture industry plays a measurable economic role (Perryman 2000).
Cultural projects are valued for more than their direct economic impact. They are built in
locations well situated to transform waning downtowns, obsolete factory districts, and disregarded
waterfronts. New museums and performing arts centers now feature architectural designs that
embrace and enhance their surroundings, rather than isolate their audiences from the city around
them, as had been the case in an earlier generation (Russell 1999). And the new projects have been
seen as a means of bringing life—and economic impulse—to central cities that are too often
deserted after business hours. Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, it is hoped,
will anchor new economic activity in Center City, where until recently check-cashing businesses
and nude dance halls were as common as restaurants and theaters. During the past decade, Seattle
has built two major arts facilities downtown: a new home for the Seattle Art Museum, opened in
1991, and Benaroya Hall, a performing arts complex built primarily for the Seattle Symphony,
which opened in 1998. Seattle business leaders credit these cultural institutions with a downtown
revival that includes the development of several major retail complexes and a 40% increase in the
number of people living downtown since 1990 (Byrd 1997).
The arts can also lend greater legitimacy to other urban development efforts. One hundred
years ago, urban arts patrons were quite clear about their hope that cultural institutions would serve
to placate a growing immigrant working class (Horowitz 1976). As Boston entrepreneur Henry
Lee Higginson wrote in 1886, “Educate and save ourselves and our families and our money from
mobs!” (Quoted in Levine 1988, 205). The social control function of urban arts institutions today
is far subtler. To David Harvey (1989), the contemporary urban spectacle—which includes
ephemera like street fairs and festivals, as well as more institutionalized cultural facilities and
entertainment districts—has become a way of co-opting the oppositional politics of the 1960s. To
others, the presence of culture, especially serious, nonprofit culture, can serve to legitimize urban
redevelopment among those who would not normally see themselves as its beneficiaries. Largescale urban renewal projects can be made more palatable to voters and opinion shapers (if not
always to those displaced in their wake) when they are packaged as new cultural centers or filled
with public art (Miles 1998). In the words of a National Endowment for the Arts official,
The arts … are like Mom and apple pie; they’re consensus-makers, common ground. People can
easily focus on the arts activities in a new project, instead of dwelling on the complicated costs and
benefits public support for private development activity usually entails. (Quoted in Clack 1983, 13)
Arts organizations therefore represent a significant and unique component of the amalgam of
downtown consumption palaces Judd (1999) has labeled the “tourist bubble.” Urban scholars have
analyzed the actors in the urban tourism and entertainment infrastructure, including retail mall
developers, convention center operators, and major-league sports franchises, to understand why
they are drawn to participate in downtown real estate projects (Friedan and Sagalyn 1989;
Rosentraub 1997; Danielson 1997; Sanders 1998). Cultural institutions, however, have not
received similar attention from urban political economists, even though their incorporation into
urban growth politics begs explanation. Urban scholars have not asked why an elite cultural
institution, whose legitimacy has long been based on its ability to showcase the most serious,
academically sanctioned art, might join with those seeking to develop and market the city to the
widest possible audience. Today’s cultural institutions, however, have been affected by some of
the same pressures as city governments. Living in a more competitive environment in which
entrepreneurship and marketing are held to be the key to their survival, arts organizations have
themselves been transformed.
CULTURE, CONSUMPTION, AND REVITALIZATION:
WHY ARTS INSTITUTIONS NEED
URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Cultural institutions are not just the objects of urban development schemes: They have themselves
become active promoters of revitalization and place marketing activities, and they have done so to
realize their own institutional goals. Cultural facilities, especially art museums, must expand to
remain “competitive” in the art world, and their expansion needs often place them at the center of
local development plans. They have at least five important reasons for wanting to be part of the
area’s revitalization.
First, some of their concerns about the city’s economic health may derive from the interests
of their trustees (Logan and Molotch 1987). In nearly every city, there is considerable overlap
between those who are prominent in the city’s highest business circles and those who are active
on cultural boards. One study found that 70% of the members of Louisville’s most prestigious
development organizations also served on the boards of cultural organizations. (In contrast, those
active in peak economic development groups were far less likely to be found on human service
agency boards, suggesting the unique importance of arts organizations to those most concerned
with the city’s development) (Whitt and Lammers 1991). It would be a mistake, however, to
assume that major cultural organizations are mere extensions of profit-seeking trustees. Cultural
board members usually grant the arts professionals a great deal of autonomy in running the
institution’s operations. Nominations to the most prestigious nonprofit institution boards are
coveted; those invited to join are unlikely to jeopardize the hard-earned esteem of their peers by
asserting a self-serving agenda (Ostrower 1998).3 The business interests of board members provide
a context for institutional decision making, but they are unlikely to be the primary imperative
pushing cultural organizations toward a development agenda.
Second, cultural institutions need to bring their customers—the cultural audiences—to them.
People are unlikely to visit a place if the surrounding community is thought to be dangerous. Many
cultural consumers are not arts aficionados willing to go anywhere to see, say, a particular
Rembrandt, but rather those for whom arts events are part of an entertainment experience. Not
only will high crime and extensive physical deterioration put a cultural institution at a
disadvantage, but so also will a dearth of amenities like good restaurants.
Third, numerous studies indicate the extent to which cultural institutions depend on tourist
visits (the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey 1993; McDowell 1997). New York’s
Museum of Modern Art estimates that two-thirds of its visits are from out-of-towners, and half of
those come from overseas.4 Of those who visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Van
Gogh exhibition in 1999, 56% came from outside Los Angeles (Morey and Associates 1999).
Cultural institutions therefore have a strong interest in the city’s overall appeal to tourists.
Fourth, cultural institutions are heavily dependent on the availability of local volunteers (there
are 2.5 volunteers for every paid museum staff member, according to the American Association
of Museums). Location in an impoverished city or in a declining neighborhood may make it more
difficult to recruit volunteers. Fifth, wealthy individuals and corporations, which provide the
program funds for many cultural organizations, usually focus their giving in their hometowns.
When a corporation fails or relocates, local arts organizations lose an important source of support.
In sum, arts organizations in thriving areas will have more visitors, more volunteers, and
greater fund-raising success than those in depressed areas.
It is clear that arts organizations benefit when their cities are economically healthy. Moreover,
cultural groups are learning that they can benefit when they are perceived as one of the sources of
that economic health. Today, preparing a study of one’s economic impact seems to be a staple of
large arts organizations and local arts councils. Such studies are of questionable economic merit
(Cwi and Lyall 1977)—as Eisinger (2000, 327) notes, “Consultants hired by project proponents
often seem to pull their multipliers out of thin air.” But their purpose is not rigorous cost-benefit
analysis; rather, they are tools used by arts groups in their efforts to gain funding and political
support. The claim that flourishing arts institutions are important to the urban economy has given
arts advocates a rationale to appeal for government support even when tight budgets and political
controversies might make public arts funding difficult to obtain (Wyszomirski 1995).
By emphasizing their importance to local revitalization, arts administrators have also been
able to gain access to new funding sources. The construction of the New Jersey Performing Arts
Center (NJPAC) was supported by $106 million in state contributions, mostly from funds
earmarked for economic development activities. Such a large sum would not have been made
available for a cultural project had it not been able to claim an important regional economic
impact—New Jersey’s entire annual cultural budget has never been higher than $20 million (Strom
1999). Arts projects in Louisville, Seattle, and Philadelphia all received generous capital grants
from state governments, grants that were clearly tied to the economic mission of these institutions.
Similarly, major arts institutions are receiving support from private sources that are more interested
in urban revitalization than in art. New Jersey financier Ray Chambers, a man who had never
shown much interest in cultural activities but who was deeply committed to the future of Newark,
spearheaded the development of NJPAC. Clothing manufacturer Sidney Kimmel made clear in
remarks broadcast on local radio that his $15 million donation to Philadelphia’s new performing
arts center was in support of the center’s urban revitalization promises. Arts institutions can show
funders that their contributions are not mere charity but rather serve as investments in the city’s
economic future.
NEW AUDIENCES, NEW PATRONS: WHY TODAY’S
CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS ARE WELL POSITIONED
TO PARTICIPATE IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Funding and Organizing High Culture
Cultural institutions may have long had a clear interest in the city’s economic health, but only
recently have they emerged as ideal partners for the sorts of growth-oriented coalitions described
in Mollenkopf (1983), Logan and Molotch (1987), and Stone (1989). The participation of cultural
institutions in urban development coalitions has been facilitated by far-reaching changes in arts
patronage and arts management ongoing at least since the 1960s. If nineteenth-century institutions
looked to wealthy families for financial support, since that time the private collector/patron has
been largely eclipsed by more institutionalized forms of funding.5 Many wealthy families now
route their donations through foundations, the largest of which have professional staffs. Since the
mid-1960s, the single most important patron of high culture has been the government. The
National Endowment of the Arts will have a budget of about $115 million in 2001–2002, and the
50 state governments have allocated $447.5 million for arts and cultural programs in fiscal year
2001 (National Association of State Arts Agencies 2001). During the 1970s, corporate funding
became an increasingly significant source of support. According to the Business Committee for
the Arts, corporate support for culture increased from $22 million in 1967 to $1.16 billion in
1997,6 and corporate arts funding tripled during the 1975–1985 period (DiMaggio 1986).
Changes in arts funding affect arts programming in ways that have implications for economic
development policies. More so than private patrons, government agencies and corporate donors
seek programs with broad audience appeal (Zolberg 1983; Alexander 1996). The National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the state arts councils are eager to associate with programs
whose popularity can translate into political support for their efforts. For businesses, cultural
donations are a “highbrow form of advertising” (Alexander 1996, 2), as corporations seek to attach
their names to programs that are highly visible and prestigious. A well-placed, $200,000 cultural
donation, according to one corporate foundation official, can have the same impact as $50 million
in paid advertising.7 Government and corporate funding influence the form of cultural offerings as
well as the content. Few corporations want to fund a museum’s operations; they prefer to attach
their name to special, traveling exhibitions that attract large crowds in a number of cities.
Alexander (1996) correlates the growth of government and corporate funding with the increasing
number of special, “blockbuster” exhibits mounted by museums (and there may well be similar
parallels in other kinds of arts institutions). Museum managers see such events as opportunities to
attract large, paying audiences (many museums charge for such special exhibits) and generate new
members who will continue to support the museum once the special exhibit has moved on.8
If such big-ticket events bring benefits for museum managers, they also fit well into the
marketing strategies of urban development and tourism officials. Indeed, arts advocates, economic
development officials, and the tourism industry have, since the mid-1990s, consciously sought to
promote “cultural tourism.” An estimated 50 cultural tourism programs have been founded in state,
county, and local convention and visitors bureaus, and two national networks, Partners in Tourism
(which is sponsored by American Express) and the Cultural Tourism Alliance, hold conferences
and publish newsletters on cultural tourism. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Van Gogh
exhibition that drew so many out-of-town visitors had been promoted heavily by the Los Angeles
Convention and Visitors Bureau, which advertised “Van Gogh weekend packages” in such upscale
publications as The New Yorker. The convergence of interests is clear: City marketing officials,
arts funders, and ultimately publicity-conscious cultural administrators all find benefit in mounting
large, well-publicized exhibits or performances that attract big audiences.9
The Shifting Brows
Highbrow arts institutions would have limited value as economic development catalysts, however,
if they were catering to a narrow stratum of social elites and art connoisseurs. But a dramatic shift
in the way culture is framed and classified has made an expansion of art audiences possible.
Boundaries between serious and popular art, and between the audiences who enjoy them, have
become increasingly blurred. Of course, even the high—low distinctions that seemed so secure at
midcentury were hardly inevitable; rather, scholars have shown them to be largely a product of the
mid- to late-nineteenth century (DiMaggio 1982; Levine 1988). In the earlier part of the nineteenth
century, concerts might include pieces by Bach or Haydn as well as popular fare; an evening of
Shakespeare might be interspersed with acrobatic performances; and fledgling museums displayed
works of established, serious artists next to curios (DiMaggio 1982). Even in the late nineteenth
century, museums such as Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Museum unapologetically celebrated
industrial design alongside European painting (Conn 1998). Such catholic sensibilities soon
vanished in favor of more rigid classification schemes that made some cultural artifacts the
exclusive terrain of those with education and money. Cultural objects that had once been
universally enjoyed, including Shakespearean plays and Italian operas, were reinterpreted so that
their more accessible elements were abandoned, and they became the property of the possessors
of cultural capital (Levine 1988). That this reclassification took place in the decades surrounding
the turn of the century was not accidental: It represented a response on the part of the upper classes
to the growing presence and political strength of an increasingly vocal and politically mobilized
working class. Defining an elite culture created a safe haven for the upper classes, who could rely
on their association with high cultural goods to legitimize their class position (Horowitz 1976;
Bourdieu 1984).
High art and popular culture also became institutionally segregated. Earlier in the nineteenth
century, high culture had been marketed through the same commercial mechanisms as popular
fare. The Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind made a wildly popular American tour in the 1850s
under the sponsorship of P. T. Barnum, and European ballerina Fanny Ellsler, who toured the
United States from 1840 to 1842, managed to become the darling of economic and cultural elites
while still acquiring a mass following and making good profits selling Fanny Ellsler brand garters,
stockings, corsets, and shaving soap (Levine 1988).
By the late nineteenth century, however, high and low art forms each had their own
institutional home. Profit-driven entrepreneurs disseminated popular culture. The newly created
nonprofit corporation, on the other hand, become the vehicle for disseminating high culture.
Museums and orchestras so organized had a mix of public and private purposes that suited their
patrons. As private corporations, they remained under the control of their appointed trustees.
Because they relied on charitable donations, and not on popular political support, they could
maintain high standards of elite culture. And because they were nonprofit, they could make claims
to have a broader public purpose than a fully private, profit-seeking operation, thus justifying
appeals for public support (DiMaggio 1982). Disseminated through the nonprofit corporation, the
artifacts of serious culture could maintain their distance from the marketplace.
Today, however, the distinctions so carefully honed in the nineteenth century have become
blurred. Rigid classifications fell under attack from several fronts. Gans (1974, 1999) notes a
convergence of tastes dating back to the 1920s. The emergence of the middlebrow provided middle
classes with more accessible versions of elite art, and today you do not need highbrow credentials
to visit a blockbuster event at an art museum or enjoy a foreign film. At the same time, there was
a “gentrification” of lowbrow arts, as elite artists and musicians explored jazz and folk art (Peterson
1997). Today, more modern and accessible art forms like jazz, modern dance, film, and
photography can be created and consumed in many different venues and at many different levels,
challenging the sorts of hierarchies described by Bourdieu (1984). Moreover, theoretical and
empirical evidence suggests that the typical upper-class cultural consumer is no longer the snob,
whose consumption of elite culture was linked to his or her rejection of other cultural forms, but
the “omnivore,” who consumes traditional high culture but also partakes of a variety of popular
genres (Peterson and Kern 1996). The possibilities for mixing audiences of different classes and
art of different genres are far greater today than they were at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The boundaries separating the organization of elite and popular culture have shifted as well.
High culture remains the domain of elite, nonprofit institutions, but it is increasingly marketed
with reference to the symbols and presentations of popular culture and supported by commercial
market mechanisms. Museum shops no longer merely sell postcards and art books. They now
feature a whole range of merchandise, some replicas of objects in their collections, some using
motifs from objects in their collection (e.g., famous paintings printed on scarves and umbrellas),
and some having little to do with their collections but presumably gaining value just by their
association with great art. Museums and performing arts centers boast full-scale, four-star
restaurants that become part of a city’s lure to tourists, and their staffs include people with the
business skills needed to help such enterprises run profitably (Alexander 1996).
The obscuring of cultural boundaries has important implications for the value of culture as an
element of urban revitalization. Not only can cultural institutions take advantage of the market for
arts-associated products. They can also broaden their programmatic offerings without losing their
core constituencies. Today’s arts organization trustees, apparently mindful of the need to appeal to
broader audiences, are able to accept the use of popularizing techniques and commercial marketing
without feeling that their elite status is compromised (Ostrower 1998). The Metropolitan Museum
features Hollywood costumes; the Guggenheim showcases motorcycles and the work of fashion
designer Armani. They do this while displaying their collections of European paintings and Greek
sculpture, retaining their base of upscale donors and remaining highly desirable conveyers of status
for those fortunate enough to be named to their boards.
Performing arts institutions have exhibited an even greater eclecticism than museums.
Because performances are very time limited, a theater’s programming can simultaneously appeal
to diverse audiences. Indeed, many of today’s performing arts centers, built with the goal of having
maximum economic impact, contain multiple performance spaces, so that radically different types
of performances can take place on the same evening (Rothstein 1998). One need only peruse the
calendars of America’s leading performing arts centers to find intriguing juxtapositions, as
Broadway shows share the theater complex with symphony orchestras, country fiddlers, and travel
lectures. In November 2000, just to offer one example, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center’s
calendar included the Broadway musical Showboat, Brahms Oratorio music, the Moscow String
Quartet, the U.S. Marine Band, and a pops concert of Frank Sinatra hits. On one very busy Saturday
in February 1998, West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center for the Performing Arts hosted singers Steve
Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, the Gospel Gala, and the Emerson String Quartet. This is exactly the
mix we might expect given the new relationship between the brows. On one hand, distinctions are
maintained—these performances all took place in different halls, most likely attracting different
audiences who probably conducted themselves according to different codes of behavior. On the
other hand, these audiences apparently did not feel that their enjoyment of their brand of art was
compromised by their proximity to others enjoying a different kind of performance. A few may
have even come back another night to attend one of the other shows.
As long as cultural institutions could not easily cut across genres, their usefulness as vehicles
of economic development was limited. They could function as elite establishments, bringing
prestige to their city and perhaps attracting a few well-heeled tourists and an occasional amenityoriented business. However, they would seldom draw large enough crowds or identify with broad
enough consumption opportunities to be considered commercial catalysts. On the other hand,
organizations offering popular fare might bring in the crowds but would be less likely to earn the
support of political and social elites or serve to improve a city’s symbolic capital. But this has
changed, as we can see when we observe those performing arts center calendars. The Broadway
musicals pay the bills. The ethnically diverse programming assures broader political legitimacy.
The European art, the symphonic music, the elegant galas affirm an institution’s highbrow bona
fides to social and economic elites. Institutions of high culture fulfill their unique role within
today’s urban growth coalitions precisely because they can catalyze profit-generating activities,
while bringing their nonprofit, noncommercial credentials with them.
DiMaggio and Powell have theorized that organizations working together in the same
“organizational field” come to share structural characteristics to facilitate their relations in a
process that is shaped by resource dependencies as well as shared professional norms (DiMaggio
and Powell 1983). Peterson has applied this theory to the study of cultural institutions and arts
patrons, noting that arts organizations have become more professionalized (there are now 40
graduate programs in arts administration) and specialized as arts funding has shifted from private
patronage to bureaucratic support (Peterson 1986). The organizational field of cultural production
and consumption can perhaps today be expanded to include not just arts organizations and their
funders but also the local officials who are involved in developing and marketing the city’s cultural
offerings. The marriage of culture and development is thus facilitated by the shared goals and
norms of their advocates, and increasingly it is institutionalized through cultural tourism offices,
arts district promotional agencies, or national collaboratives like the Institute for Community
Development and the Arts, a project uniting the advocacy group Americans for the Arts with the
United States Conference of Mayors. All are involved in selling an image of an urbane place of
cultural sophistication, in which the museum or performance hall lends its panache to the city
around it, which reciprocates by creating an atmosphere that promotes the consumption of culture.
Art and the Economy: A Changing Relationship
The cultural life of American cities has always had a complex relationship to the local political
economy. Local cultural landscapes were shaped by social rivalries and boosterist regional
competition. Such revered institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Opera, for example, were
created to display the wealth of newly rich industrialists (Burrows and Wallace 1999); the patrons
of Chicago’s now renowned art museum and symphony sought to assert their cultural parity with
Boston and New York (Horowitz 1976). If late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century patrons
could appreciate the potential benefits that accrued to those who built cultural centers, however,
for those founding nineteenth-century museums and concert halls—in contrast to today’s cultural
entrepreneurs—economic gain remained subtext. Cultural institutions of their era were built to
show off wealth, not to generate it. Reporting on the opening of the (at that time very modestly
housed) Newark Museum in 1909, the local press proclaimed, “The city is rich! A part of the
wealth of its citizens should be invested in paintings, sculpture and other art objects” (Newark
Museum 1959, 7). Businessman and arts patron Joseph Choate, speaking at the Metropolitan
Museum’s opening, stressed the museum’s function as an uplifting source of beauty and urged
men of wealth to “convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude
ores of commerce into sculpted marble, and railroad shares and mining stocks … into the glorified
canvas of the world’s masters” (Tomkins 1970, 23). Today, the relationship between the city’s
economy and its cultural institutions is understood very differently. Kicking off a fund-raising
drive for the expansion of the Newark Museum—the same museum celebrated as a symbol of local
prosperity in 1909—New Jersey Governor Tom Kean touted the museum and other urban cultural
assets as “catalysts of rebirth,” “creating the kind of public image needed for growth and new jobs”
(Courtney 1984). Countless public officials and donors have similarly proclaimed their support for
culture as a means of spurring an economic revival (Byrd 1997; Davies 1998).
The association of economic development and culture has by now become commonplace, and
commentary on this new relationship is largely laudatory. There have been a few cautionary
voices: Some urban scholars have expressed concern that an urban development strategy whose
primary goal is to attract outsiders to privatized entertainment spaces can be undemocratic and
exclusionary (Eisinger 2000; Judd 1999), diverting public funds from projects of more direct
benefit to most urban residents (Strom 1999). Even those cultural facilities deemed successful will
never generate the tax revenue and employment to make them appear to be good investments in a
cost-benefit analysis (National Endowment for the Arts 1981),10 giving rise to the same critiques
that have been leveled against subsidized sports and convention venues (Sanders 1998; Rosentraub
1997). Of course, unlike convention center and sport stadium proponents, cultural advocates have
never argued that they could justify public subsidy purely through their production of direct
economic benefits. Rather, the arts are said to increase the value of other products and deliver
noneconomic benefits as well. Many museums and performing arts centers have effective outreach
and education programs that make them genuinely accessible. Surely no other “tourist bubble”
institution can make such a claim.
Cultural institutions themselves may face conflicts when they adapt their mission to that of
the city’s economic development strategists. Hoping for the biggest possible impact on their
central city areas, economic development proponents are eager to build new museums and concert
halls, and less concerned with sustaining these institutions once they are built. Individual and
corporate donors also like to contribute to capital campaigns, where their largesse can be rewarded
with wall plaques and naming opportunities. As a result, bricks and mortar investments may be
favored over support for cultural programs; smaller arts organizations may be overlooked in favor
of the larger groups better able to document their economic clout.
The need to prove their economic mettle to political allies and funders becomes yet one more
pressure on cultural institutions already hard-pressed to disseminate great art while paying their
bills. The fine arts can certainly be “popular,” drawing large audiences. There is also art that is
unlikely to play to full houses or attract long lines because it is difficult or challenging or cuttingedge. If arts institutions are primarily seen as mechanisms for urban revitalization and are valued
for their ability to draw large numbers of people to city hotels and restaurants, they may be less
willing or able to realize the scholarly or educational aspects of their work. To be sure, urban
development stakeholders are hardly the only ones pushing arts institutions toward a more
commercial, less scholarly mission. And museum curators have often been clever at mounting the
kinds of shows that will draw the crowds and pay the bills to gain resources to support more
esoteric or challenging programs (Alexander 1996). However, too much focus on the arts
institutions’ economic role may obscure the fact that making money for the city can never be their
primary purpose.
REFERENCES
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Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Bradsher, K. 1999. A horn of plenty for opera in Detroit. New York Times, 28 October, E1, 10.
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———. 1986. Can ...
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