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Arts and Culture Indicator Project Launches New Website

FEBRUARY 2007 - ACIP recently launched a new website (http://www.urban.org/projects/cultural-vitality-indicators) as a resource for those interested in developing indicators on arts and cultural vitality, including artists, researchers, community leaders, community development practitioners, and arts administrators and funders. Visitors of the site will find extensive information on indicators of cultural vitality, which ACIP defines as the practice of creating, disseminating, validating and supporting the arts and culture as a dimension of everyday community life and conditions.

The Arts and Culture Indicator Project (ACIP) has operated in conjunction with the National Neighborhood Indicator Partnership (NNIP) since the late 1990s. ACIP promotes the idea that having information about the presence and effects of arts and culture in communities can help policymakers and community members make better decisions for neighborhoods and cities. As Maria Rosario Jackson, director of ACIP, notes, "You cannot adequately grasp the experience of race and ethnicity or socio-economic status without some understanding of a community's cultural expression. The demographic figures on communities tell only a limited part of the story. You also have to understand the cultural expression of the community to get at the heart of it". ACIP has shown that information on the presence of arts and culture in communities can help shape many areas of policy, including economic development, education, and transportation.

ACIP collaborates with local affiliates on cultural vitality indicators work in seven cities across the country. Five of the seven affiliates, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., are NNIP partners. Other affiliates include the Great Valley Center, located in Central Valley, CA, and the Active Arts Initiative at the Los Angeles County Music Center. The ACIP Affiliates page highlights the affiliates and the work in their local communities.

Resources
The website provides many resources for individuals and organizations interested in creating, interpreting, and using cultural vitality indicators in their communities and neighborhoods. The web site includes the following sections:

• Cultural Vitality Defined: This section offers a definition of cultural vitality, recommends areas of measurement, and discusses the far-reaching impact these indicators can have on various types of policy, including education, public safety, economic development, health, and civic engagement.
• ACIP Reader: The Reader lists research and publications on arts and culture indicators, covering both the conceptual framework and practical applications. It also documents the national data sources from which one can develop comparable arts and culture indicators.
• Case Examples: Here you can learn about communities in the United States where cultural vitality indicators are being used to inform planning and policymaking in various policy areas. Presently, the case example on the ACIP site highlights California's San Joaquin Valley use of arts and culture indicators for the improvement of the 250-mile stretch of Route 99.

Further additions to the site will be made soon, including updated city rankings based on nationally comparable data and examples of how cultural vitality indicators can be derived from unlikely local data sources, including police, school district, or economic development data.

Neighborhoods Resource Center Releases "The Future of Neighborhoods: A Vision for the Future of Nashville and Davidson County"

APRIL 2007 - With the December 2006 release of "The Future of Neighborhoods: a Vision for the Future of Nashville and Davidson County," the Neighborhoods Resource Center (NRC) culminated a nine-month process of building a grass-roots plan for achieving neighborhood vitality in the Nashville area.

Using input from more than 130 Davidson County neighborhood groups, NRC outlined a comprehensive vision for ensuring the health, safety, prosperity, and livability of communities across the Nashville area. The final report organizes communities’ goals around 14 common issue areas and identifies concrete actions for neighborhood groups to take toward achieving their vision for the future.

The process of gathering ideas from the community spanned a period of seven months, and involved two large-scale community forums and dozens of smaller planning meetings. Working with Nashville Neighborhood Alliance (NNA), NRC first convened community groups at "The Future of Neighborhoods Summit" in August 2006. At this meeting, NRC staff presented community members with an overview of demographic and social trends in Davidson County, using the Neighborhood Change Database to map population growth, changing levels of educational attainment, and racial segregation across the Nashville area. Following this introduction, neighborhood groups identified hundreds of specific issues as critical in their communities, forming the basis from which a Future of Neighborhoods Working Group created draft vision statements.

In October 2006, neighborhood leaders reconvened to edit the draft into 14 coherent vision statements accompanied by recommended actions to assist community organizing. The final 34-page report was issued to the city in December 2006.

The 14 vision areas in "The Future of Neighborhoods" are:

• Accountability: Government, Institutions and Neighborhoods
• Business and Economic Development
• Education: Public and Private
• Environment and Public Health
• Government and Citizen Participation
• Housing: Including Affordable Housing and Preservation
• Human Relations and Diversity
• Neighborhood Condition: Codes, Health Department, Public Works, Beautification, Stormwater, Animal Control
• Neighborhood Interactions and Connections
• Public Parks, Public Spaces, Public Facilities, Private Cultural, Arts and Entertainment Institutions
• Planning, Zoning, and Development
• Public Safety, Criminal Justice System
• Transportation
• Youth and Seniors

As an example of one community vision, the report addressed the issue of Neighborhood Conditions by stating: "We envision Nashville and Davidson County as a community where residents work together to maintain our communities and are proud of the appearance of their city: where their neighborhoods, streets, alleys, businesses, residences, and open space are all well-maintained and attractive."

To achieve these goals, the report recommended that community groups take the following actions, among others:

• Create neighborhood liaisons inside all Metro departments that work directly with organized neighborhoods to expedite the handling of actionable issues / problems / plans.
• Identify a way for the city to begin charging property owners when an inordinate number of government enforcement actions (police, fire, EMS, codes, health, and other calls for govt. service) occur at a single property.
• Create a Code Compliance Overlay for neighborhoods where any new owner has 90 days to fix any nonstructural violations and create a timeline for structural violation compliance. . .
• Create a property rental ownership database that allows for quick consultations and notification.

Currently, NRC and NNA are facilitating the implementation of the report's recommendations by local neighborhood organizations. NNA will focus primarily on the coordination of local groups’ efforts, while NRC will provide technical resources, leadership training, and supportive consulting services. In addition, NRC is planning a set of neighborhood condition indicators that will inform advocacy efforts and assist in the monitoring of progress toward achieving community visions.

The "Future of Neighborhoods" project was initiated by NNA, and no city agencies were directly involved, although two ancillary organizations of the Metropolitan Nashville government provided meeting space at significantly reduced rates. The project was funded through a combination of individual donations and unrestricted NRC funds. A full-text copy of the report is available for download here (PDF).

NNIP Announces New Partners in Minneapolis and New York City

JANUARY 2007 - The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is very pleased to announce that it has accepted exceptionally well-qualified organizations from two new cities as its 28th and 29th partners.

• The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) / Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System (MNIS), at the University of Minnesota.
  
  
• The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York University.

To become an NNIP Partner, an institution must demonstrate that the following are central to its mission: (1) building and operating an advanced information system with integrated and recurrently updated information on neighborhood conditions in its city; (2) facilitating and promoting the direct practical use of data by community and city leaders in community building and local policymaking; and (3) giving emphasis to using information to build the capacities of institutions and residents in distressed neighborhoods. The candidate must either have already built such a system and be operating it in this manner or have made demonstrable progress toward doing so. For more information regarding the Partner selection process, please refer to the Partner Requirements page.

The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota is an applied research and technology center that connects faculty and students with community organizations and public institutions working on local and state policy issues. CURA works across disciplinary lines and professional boundaries, creating new programs and supporting projects using data to help address community needs. Its staff leverages resources by collaborating closely with the constituents that it serves: nonprofit organizations, ethnic and racial minority groups, businesses, rural towns, inner-city neighborhoods, suburban communities, local governments, and state agencies. In a typical year, CURA may work on as many as 125 projects that involve 25 or 30 faculty and 80 or 90 students from institutions of higher education throughout the Twin Cities.

CURA's Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization (NPCR) unit supports neighborhood organizations and community development corporations involved in neighborhood-based revitalization by providing student research assistants and faculty researchers to carry out neighborhood-initiated and neighborhood-guided projects. NPCR provides 200-260 hours of student time to work on a project defined by the community.

CURA's Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System (MNIS) is a collaborative system and capacity-building effort intended to meet the needs of community-based organizations by providing access to a wide range of data that can inform community revitalization efforts and housing intervention and investment strategies. Participating neighborhood groups receive training, project assistance, GIS expertise, and access to property information, as well as opportunities to share ideas about GIS projects and housing strategies with other neighborhoods. Neighborhood organizations are instrumental to the design, development, and implementation of all MNIS projects.

The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a joint center between NYU School of Law and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is the leading academic research center in New York City devoted to the public policy aspects of real estate, land use and housing development. An important part of the mission of the Furman Center is providing local housing organizations, community development groups, and the general public with the data they need to monitor neighborhood conditions, plan programs that will improve their housing and neighborhoods, and secure funding for these programs.

To accomplish this, the Furman Center has developed and operates the New York City Housing and Neighborhood Information System (NYCHANIS). NYCHANIS is an interactive website that allows users to obtain data and information about New York City neighborhoods and create custom-made tables, charts, graphs, and maps. NYCHANIS makes data easily accessible to users through a searchable, web-based database. Up-to-date data includes demographic and housing conditions ranging from housing stock and housing affordability to mortgage originations and foreclosures and crime and education in New York City's neighborhoods. The Center also prepares an annual report: The State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods available for download here.

The Furman Center is also active in promoting and facilitating use of the data for neighborhood change. This involves briefings to nonprofits and neighborhoods groups, training them on the use of the system and working with them on specific projects. The Furman Center has made presentations about NYCHANIS to a variety of nonprofit and community development organizations in New York City. The Furman Center also partners with social justice organizations to provide housing resource trainings and provides free NYCHANIS training sessions throughout the year. Without NYCHANIS and State of the City, many community organizations and nonprofits would not otherwise have access to this information either because the source data requires substantial processing to create useful indicators or because the source data is difficult or costly to obtain.

A new feature of the Furman Center's neighborhood information services is PlanNYC, a complete urban planning web portal, with news summaries and links to development-related articles, official documents such as plans and environmental impact statements, and a citywide calendar of upcoming planning events that includes local community board meetings and public hearings. PlanNYC brings together information from all sides of controversies and debates - from advocacy organizations, government agencies, academic institutions, neighborhood groups, and media organizations, all in one location. We have added this portal so that users may learn about any planning project, land use debate or public policy issue in New York City at no cost.

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For additional information, e-mail NNIP at nnip@ui.urban.org.