This report presents the current findings of a study of culture and social wellbeing in New York City conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) in collaboration with Reinvestment Fund. The project began in the fall of 2014 when SIAP accepted an invitation from Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City, to conduct a study of the social value of the arts.

The study builds on SIAP’s over twenty years of research and writing on the non—economic impact of the arts on urban communities. During that time, SIAP has formulated a perspective on culture’s role in urban neighborhoods based on the idea of neighborhood cultural ecology or “natural” cultural districts. We’ve completed a variety of studies—typically combining quantitative data analysis and qualitative evidence from interviews and observation—in a number of cities, including Philadelphia, Seattle, and Baltimore.

In 2011 SIAP, The Reinvestment Fund and the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy were funded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town program and by ArtPlace America to complete what became the CultureBlocks project. Much of that project focused on the creation of an online cultural and community asset mapping application. However, the research element of the project focused on integrating a new concept—social wellbeing—into our conceptualization of the social role of the arts. Based on preliminary work undertaken by Mark Stern and Ira Goldstein with the students in their Urban Studies course at Penn, the goal was to develop a multidimensional model of social wellbeing, which drew on the work of a group of international scholars including Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Martha Nussbaum.

Our research differed from earlier international work on wellbeing, known as the capability approach, in three ways. First, we conceptualized culture as a core dimension of wellbeing, specifically as one dimension of social connection. Second, we wanted to explore culture as a potential contributor to other dimensions of wellbeing. Third, our goal was to estimate social wellbeing at the neighborhood level, rather than at a larger geography (typically nation-­‐state). Our previous work on neighborhood ecology (and, of course, the large body of theoretical and empirical work on the ecological approach) had convinced us that only a focus on small geographies provides a full understanding of social wellbeing as experienced by urban residents. The original analysis of Philadelphia’s social wellbeing index and the relationship between culture and other dimensions was completed in December 2013.

In the meantime, the Surdna Foundation approached SIAP about continuing the investigation of culture and social wellbeing in other American cities. In early 2014 SIAP began the Surdna—funded work, which included updating of the work in Philadelphia and preliminary investigation of the feasibility of similar studies in Austin, Baltimore, and several other cities. [Introduction, p. i]

This report presents the current findings of a study of culture and social wellbeing in New York City conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) in collaboration with Reinvestment Fund. The project began in the fall of 2014 when SIAP accepted an invitation from Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City, to conduct a study of the social value of the arts. The study builds on SIAP’s over twenty years of research and writing on the non-­‐ economic impact of the arts on urban communities. During that time, SIAP has formulated a perspective on culture’s role in urban neighborhoods based on the idea of neighborhood cultural ecology or “natural” cultural districts. We’ve completed a variety of studies—typically combining quantitative data analysis and qualitative evidence from interviews and observation—in a number of cities, including Philadelphia, Seattle, and Baltimore.