The Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) is a research group at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice in Philadelphia. We began in 1994 to ask questions about and develop methods to examine the impact of the arts and culture on community life. Our research focuses on the relationship of the arts to community change, with a particular interest in strategies for arts-based neighborhood revitalization and social inclusion.
SIAP believes that if the arts and culture do, in fact, have an important role in improving the lives of ordinary people, we should be able to measure it. We use the tools of social research to examine the intersections among social structure, community development, public policy, and cultural engagement.
The arts and culture represent an important dimension of social inclusion. They provide a resource that people can use to make sense of the world as it is and to imagine the future. In addition, communities that have a vital cultural life enjoy a variety of “spillover effects” of cultural participation, including economic revitalization, improvements in public health, and stronger civic engagement. SIAP’s purpose is to understand and document these connections and the role that public policy can play in encouraging them.
The Social Impact of the Arts Project uses statistical analysis and qualitative investigation to identify social impacts at the neighborhood level. SIAP is a recognized innovator in the development of empirical methods to study links between cultural engagement, community well-being, and neighborhood revitalization. In 1995 SIAP pioneered the use of geographic information systems (GIS) as a strategy for integrating data on the arts with other socio-economic data. The team has developed methods for collecting and integrating data on different forms of cultural involvement, which led to the cultural asset mapping methods that have gained wide emulation.
In recent years SIAP has collaborated with The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution also based in Philadelphia, to develop a variety of measures of economic and non-economic impacts on urban neighborhoods. The TRF collaboration has enabled SIAP to use a variety of data—for example, on public health, ethnic and racial harassment, and housing markets—to examine the relationship of cultural resources to the well-being of urban communities.
One Man Dancing
14 months in the making, 42 countries,
and a cast of thousands.
Cities and Their Citizens:
Fostering Civic Engagement through the Arts
University of Chicago