How the Arts Drove Pittsburgh's Revitalization
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/how-the-cultural-arts-drove-pittsburghs-revitalization/383627/
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Heinz Hall at night (Tom Nguyen
Pittsburgh is enjoying an urban renaissance, regularly making it into the top ranks of “most livable city” lists. The reasons for this revival are numerous and complicated, including the presence of its world-class universities, vibrant tech sector, sophisticated health-care systems, rejuvenated riverfronts, and much more.
But in looking at Pittsburgh’s impressive revival, it’s important to take note of the key role played over the last 30 years by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, an organization that has managed one of the city’s most vivid transformations, turning a large part of downtown that had been overtaken by porn shops, strip joints, massage parlors, and sleazy bars into a lively, safe, and attractive district for cultural arts and entertainment.
Pittsburgh is not unique, of course, in looking to the arts as an economic catalyst for revitalizing a downtown and improving an urban area’s quality of life. Cities across the country, small and large, realize that a vibrant arts scene can attract people downtown and spur the opening of restaurants and other supportive amenities.
In our own travels for the American Futures series, we’ve come across many such efforts. For example, in tiny Eastport, Maine (population 1,300), the creation of the Tides Institute & Museum of Art a few years ago carried the hopes of the townspeople who looked for it to attract visitors to the economically distressed village. In Columbus, Ohio, officials are hoping the arts can be the catalyst for the revitalization of Franklinton, a historically down-and-out neighborhood immediately adjacent to downtown.
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Cultural venues and spaces are more important than anything else in making a city liveable
It just can't be left up to retail shopping to provide the only entertainment, as the malls have tried to do.
Am reading "The End of the Suburbs" by Leigh Gallagher now.
Also recommend "Happy City"
Also "Walkable City"
--and if they have some momentum & resources such as an active arts & entertainment support network, they can make it happen. Good eateries of all kinds will naturally follow. I don't want to get into the whole gentrification debate--which then makes it hard for artists to survive in urban spaces. But a vision that serves all the necessary players in the revitalization of the city will work best.
We are recreating urban spaces, making them more walkable, allowing for more unique "character" of place to be maintained or developed after the bulldozing and homogenizing mode of the past. People desperately want this.
Bulldozing old buildings is the last thing that needs to be done.
You make another great point about artists in their ability to live in the city. This is happening in Austin, Texas where the property values are going through the roof and its increasingly hard for the artists (who don't make much money) to stay there, which detracts from the cultural element of Austin.
Thats the paradox...how to make your city awesome (like Austin and Pittsburgh) where everyone wants to be there (driving up prices) while at the same time protecting those who give the city its charm. I'm just an Environmental Scientist I don't really have an answer for this one.
