Frederick Wherry: I am an Economic Sociologist and much of my work focuses on the role that
identity plays in marketplaces.
And so here we can talk about identity of persons or places, and this last project is
really focused on how the identity of a place has been tagged as both ethnic, and for a
long time that ethnic tag was a negative, but by the strategic use of the arts that
ethnic tag has been transformed into something positive.
This is a natural pathway for thinking about the role of the arts in the economic development
because much of what people are talking about when they talk about economic development
is how do we evaluate the worth of a place, what does that place have to offer.
Philadelphia was interesting to me in part because I was at University of Pennsylvania
for two years.
I had learned about this neighborhood because they had had a festival.
When I ventured there and saw what was going on I became really interested in it in part
because before I laughed I had people in Center City telling me, oh, you don't want to go
there because it's the Badlands, and it had had this moniker from 94-95, we had Ted Koppel
on ABC's 'Nightline' doing a feature story called 'The Badlands: Death of an American
Neighborhood' and yet by 2003 you have it in the papers for winning an award for Best
New Art Event and you have all these other types of presentations of this neighborhood
that would have been unthinkable in the mid 90's.
So part of the question was for me if you have this place it had been an emblem of decay,
and now it is being talked about as a place of promise what happened.
And so one of the things that arts movements sometimes help do is it taps down the sense
that this is a disorderly place, because how could so much good or how could things that
should only be appreciated by the enlighten come out of a place that's fully disorganized
and unworthy of our attention.
So this is one of the challenges that people face when they are talking about revitalizing
neighborhoods in places like Detroit, and other discredited places is that what you
can do if you are a discredited place is really different from what you can do if people are
willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
So you can't just go pretend that there is not crime, you can't just pretend that you
don't have a multitude of troubles.
You have to acknowledge those troubles and get people start thinking about transformation
in the presence of troubles.
When you see the arts working well, they are often working well in tandem with local business-owners.
And what happened in Philadelphia for example is you had a community that had maybe one
or two dedicated art spaces and yet it was mounting all of these artists on a single
night, why because business owners stepped up and said we're going to transform parts
of our storefront into an art exhibition space.
And what the artists were then doing is they have networks that expand well outside of
these communities and some of the artists come from outside of the community, and when
they show up they bring their networks with them.
And so you had this coming together of interest and you had business owners saying, you know
what, this makes it much more pleasant to go to work and rethinking design and doing
upgrades of storefront space.
You had a Community Development Corporation that was pulling in money to redo the sidewalks
and putting more trees and putting palm trees and do particular types of design elements
that would mark the ethnic character of the neighborhood, and that would be also a boon
for businesses.
And so, to the extent that you have these business owners recognizing the role that
the arts can play and being willing to help out in promoting the arts, that's when I think
you start seeing success.