Amanda Johnson Ashley

Beyond the Aesthetic The Historical Pursuit of Local Arts Economic Development

This study debunks the myth that arts economic development (AED) is a recent phenomenon. Although marked by piecemeal policies, different motivations, and scattered implementation, AED has played a strategic role in modern city planning over the past hundred years. This research unveils AED’s trajectory through seven forms: (1) aesthetics, (2) cultural agglomeration, (3) workforce investments, (4) city building, (5) amenities and livability, (6) creative regions, and (7) community development. The article outlines central motivations, program character and proponents, accomplishments, shortcomings, and planning legacy for each approach. The examination shows how modern AED, with roots in the City Beautiful era, adapted over time to address changes in urban problems. This century-long quest has resulted in variations on a general strategy to refocus attention and resources on forgotten or challenged places. A cacophony of interventions emerged while a comprehensive narrative came up short, creating confusion about AED’s purpose and use. This article provides the first historical treatment of local AED and explains how and why art is used today as an instrument in urban life.

Reconceiving Military Base Redevelopment: Land Use on Mothballed U.S. Bases

The U.S. Department of Defense has closed 128 domestic bases over the last 30 years through the Base Realignment and Closure Process. Current scholarship describes this process and provides snapshots of transition, yet there is very little systematic knowledge of what follows base closure. We introduce an original data set chronicling military base redevelopment and present evidence suggesting that the variation in the built environment on former military bases stems from considerations somewhat unique to military redevelopment, particularly the presence of federal funding, contamination of redevelopment parcels, and economic output in the surrounding county. Our arguments offer new directions for redevelopment scholarship and a first step for developing best practices to help cities redevelop mothballed bases.

The Department as a Third Sector Planner Implementing Civic Capacity through the Planning Core Curriculum

Community-university partnerships are an established concept but are not typically central to the core planning curriculum. This study highlights a model of teaching innovation, Integrated Community Planning Core, where the core directly supports the departmental mission by bridging research and practice. The article explains the curriculum development process and assesses its ability to serve community, student, and faculty needs. Data collected from focus groups, student reflection papers, and practicing planner debriefings demonstrate the model is modestly successful, but adaptations are needed to communicate the value to students, the planning academy, and the university.

Examining an Alternative Take on Urban Development The Alignment of Public Art and Conservation to Build Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park

Civic boosters advocate physical arts development as a path for urban revitalization. Current research examines these specialized bricks and mortar efforts through snapshot outcome evaluations, broad policy analyses, and critiques of predatory activity. Project development is overlooked as is whether such efforts mirror general urban development patterns and behavior. This case study explores a successful dual-nonprofit partnership between the Seattle Art Museum and the Trust for Public Land to build the Olympic Sculpture Park. This recent history explains institutional motivations and political strategies and identifies organizational assets employed to overcome intense market pressures and past failures. It adds richness to conventional development wisdom and its intense focus on public–private partnerships as the prevalent model for urban development. This alignment between a local arts institution and a national conservation organization may unveil an alternative model or shed light on a less visible structure for developing urban civic amenities. This study further reinforces the connection between contemporary urban improvement and early beautification agendas via municipal art, open space, and civic leadership.

Entertainment Centers and the Quest for Transformation in the Periphery

Abstract The core of the entertainment industry in almost every urban area across the globe is by historical evolution or deliberate public policy lodged in the city center. Times Square in New York and the West End of London are the most iconic of these centers, but entertainment has evolved into new sports arena formats such as Amsterdam ArenA and L.A. Live. Some of these centers develop in the core of cities, yet others evolve on the periphery of a center city. In this quest for transformation, we ask, can contemporary entertainment-oriented transformative projects create “place” and are some locations better suited for such projects? In this paper, we explain how concentrated entertainment centers develop in the United States through the interplay of public policy and market economics, we present a typology for organizing different entertainment clusters, and through a case study of L.A. Live! we demonstrate how Los Angeles created an entertainment district from scratch on the downtown periphery. We argue that these projects can deliver on the promise of transformation with the right conditions and resources nurtured by local planning cultures and favorable markets. We further suggest that the downtown periphery in central cities is well suited for such entertinament-driven intiatives. The dispersal or concentration of entertainment brings nuance to the “urban periphery” conversation where the periphery is not distinct or separate from the urban; rather, the idea of “urban peripheries” encapsulates those places that fall “within” and “outside” traditional conceptions of the urban boundary.

The Micropolitics of Performance: Pop-up Art as a Complementary Method for Civic Engagement and Public Participation:

Scholars typically categorize pop-ups as part of insurgent do-it-yourself (DIY) movements or simple creative placemaking events. It is unclear if these dominant narratives are accurate representations or how these acts of temporary urbanism are connected to planning. This study serves two connected purposes: to identify how pop-ups are organized and explore how pop-ups combine political art and urbanism to create opportunities for civic engagement and public participation. Drawing on a national sample of principal cities and a comparative study of exemplar art pop-ups in Austin, Baltimore, and Boise, this research addresses how pop-up organizers influence urban planning and urban policy from outside traditional channels. Findings suggest that these events are undertaken by diverse sets of organizations and partnerships to increase civic dialogue and educate citizens. The prevalence of pop-ups in public space and their focus on urban issues suggests the need to integrate these complementary strategies into...

Western Regional Identity and Urban Development Policy: The View from Professional Planners

Abstract Boise and Calgary share many similar attributes despite their distinctive national origins and cultural heritages. They represent the “western metropolis” prototype that academics and journalists have cultivated over decades through spellbinding narratives about the isolated west, ethics of individualism, anti-federal/provincial sentiment, urban/rural divide, and contradictory environmental ethos. Yet, no one has considered how this western identity influences contemporary urban development policy. This comparative study surveys planners in Boise and Calgary to uncover their expert-driven perspectives. Research shows that these cross-border planners believe that western regional identity influences urban development policy in powerful ways. While they share some similar opinions in what matters most, they also possess significantly different insights when it comes to the importance of individualism, population homogeneity, natural resource economies, anti-tax attitudes, and western alienation. Overall, our survey results show that “place” does matter for policymaking in the thoughts and ideas of city planners in Boise and Calgary.

Book Review: Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America

Washington, DC, with more attached housing and higher densities lost fewer houses, while Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where detached single-family housing and low densities were prevalent, lost between 20 and 30 percent of their housing stock between 1950 and 2000. In the next chapters, Ryan sheds light on these two different types of cities by examining two typical cases of each category, Philadelphia and Detroit, in a historic comparison of urban development projects. The third and fourth chapters (“‘People Want These Houses’: The Suburbanization of Detroit” and “‘Another Tradition in Planning’: The Suburbanization of North Philadelphia”) present a description of the development that has led to the current situation. In these chapters, Ryan presents the various development strategies in Detroit and Philadelphia and shows the outcomes of these strategies, focusing on urban design. On the basis of several neighborhood developments like Jefferson Chalmers, Victoria Park, Clairpointe, and Jefferson Village, Ryan demonstrates, sometimes in extreme detail, the strategies and policies in Detroit that he characterizes as marked by “insider deals, nepotism, monopolistic development, forced relocations, and lack of planning” (119). In conclusion, Ryan characterizes the postrenewal development in Detroit as dedensification in a shrinking city by unplanned and uncoordinated low-quality urban design developments, concentrated in strong market areas of the city. In the case of Philadelphia (chapter 4), the author describes the development of North Philadelphia, a distressed neighborhood, from the 1930s until 2010. In this area, public housing in the form of row houses had been built for decades with decreasing densities and an increase in suburban design elements over time. The examples Ryan presents in detail are Poplar Nehemiah, Moore, and Ludlow Homes, developed between 1999 and 2009. Moreover, Ryan describes the social housing project Yorktown, built in the 1960s. The newer developments since 1999 were based on new policy guidelines, developed in a scientific manner rather than motivated by politics as in Detroit. Ryan stresses the success of these developments by pointing out the increase in property values in these neighborhoods, although other neighborhoods adjacent to the city center are going through similar developments. This phenomenon might just be the effect of a new trend toward urbanism and downtown revitalization, which favors high-density development, such as row houses in Philadelphia. At the beginning of chapter 4 the author admits that Detroit and Philadelphia had different starting points: Philadelphia was part of the Northeast Megalopolis with major cities such as New York and Washington, DC, close by, while Detroit was located far from other, healthier cities. Indeed, Ryan attributes the successful redevelopment of North Philadelphia also to a large extent to the city’s development policies. Because of these internal and external factors, Philadelphia’s redevelopment projects were more successful in terms of the local real estate market compared to those in Detroit. But it remains unclear which of these factors are the main drivers for this redevelopment or how they influence each other. The question remains if Philadelphia’s policy approach would have also worked in Detroit with its specific local conditions. In his last chapter, chapter 5 (“Toward Social Urbanism for Shrinking Cities”), Ryan outlines the main aspects of urban (re)development paths in Detroit and Philadelphia and explains why small-scale developments or demolition strategies had limited success. Ryan starts his concluding thoughts by presenting an unusual example of urban redevelopment in Medellín, Colombia, framed by the term “social urbanism.” Here, Ryan links the introductory discussion about modernism and its innovative design solutions to urban development trends in shrinking cities, which he marks as part of an era of “non-experimentation” after urban renewal. He pleads for a new form of modernism that aligns the aspirations for highquality design with the need for self-determination and empowerment of citizens to alleviate the negative changes in shrinking cities. This new design principle builds on incremental development and comprehensive planning in order to achieve a better quality of life for a fragmented urban fabric. Despite the insight into urban development histories, this approach presents a contribution to the knowledge of urban development in shrinking cities. Design after Decline describes the interplay (or lack thereof) of federal policies, cities’ ambitions in shaping their footprints, and the roles of individual urban developers or architects. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine if the different redevelopment outcomes in Detroit and Philadelphia are caused by their general preexisting urban structures, by their locations within the metropolitan context, or by their development approaches. Overall, the book is a motivation for planners, architects, and policymakers not to abandon shrinking cities, but to learn from the past failures in shaping a shrinking city’s future.