Mark J Stern

Cultural Clusters: The Implications of Cultural Assets Agglomeration for Neighborhood Revitalization

Cultural districts have attracted increased attention as an urban economic development strategy. Yet for the most part, cities have focused on the agglomeration of cultural assets to increase tourism or lure wary suburbanites downtown. This article examines an alternative use of the arts for community development: cultivating neighborhood cultural clusters with modest concentrations of cultural providers (both nonprofit and commercial), resident artists, and cultural participants. The article presents innovative methods for integrating data on these indicators into a geographic information system to produce a Cultural Asset Index that can be used to identify census block groups with the highest density of these assets. The article then demonstrates the association between the concentration of cultural assets in Philadelphia in 1997 with improved housing market conditions between 2001 and 2006. The article concludes by exploring the implications of a neighborhood-based creative economy for urban policy, planning, and research.

Migration and the social order in Erie County New York: 1855.

Mass transiency remains the most striking and consistent finding to emerge from quantitative studies of Victorian North America. In almost every place where historians have looked at least half, often two thirds, of the adults present at one end of a decade had left ten years later, and rates based on shorter periods reveal a stream of people constantly flowing through nineteenth-century cities. Although 363,000 people lived in Boston in 1880 and 448,000 in 1890, during the decade about one and one-half million people actually had dwelled within the city. When Victorians sought a symbol of progress, they often chose the steam engine; had they wanted a metaphor for their cities, they could have found none more apt than the railroad station. In this paper we confront the question of transiency. Using the New York State Census of 1855 for the entire city of Buffalo and a 10 percent sample of household heads in rural Erie County, we attempt a method of estimating persistence (the proportion of the population remaining in a given place) that is different from that used by most historians. Given the richness of the census, we are able to inquire with great detail into the factors that determined length of residence in a nineteenth-century city and its surrounding countryside. Comments Reprinted from Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 8, Issue 4, Spring 1978, pages 669-701. At the time of publication, the author Mark J. Stern was affiliated with York University. Currently, April 2007, he is a faculty member with the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/spp_papers/57 Migration and the Social Order in Erie County, New York: 1855 Michael B. Katz; Michael J. Doucet; Mark J. Stern Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 8, No. 4. (Spring, 1978), pp. 669-701.

The Mexican Immigration Debate: The View from History

This article uses census microdata to address key issues in the Mexican immigration debate. First, we find striking parallels in the experiences of older and newer immigrant groups with substantial progress among second- and subsequent-generation immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Mexican Americans. Second, we contradict a view of immigrant history that contends that early-twentieth-century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe found well-paying jobs in manufacturing that facilitated their ascent into the middle class. Both first and second generations remained predominantly working class until after World War II. Third, the erosion of the institutions that advanced earlier immigrant generations is harming the prospects of Mexican Americans. Fourth, the mobility experience of earlier immigrants and of Mexicans and Mexican Americans differed by gender, with a gender gap opening among Mexican Americans as women pioneered the path to white-collar and professional work. Fifth, public-sector and publicly funded employment has proved crucial to upward mobility, especially among women. The reliance on public employment, as contrasted to entrepreneurship, has been one factor setting the Mexican and African American experience apart from the economic history of most southern and eastern European groups as well as from the experiences of some other immigrant groups today.

Women and the Paradox of Economic Inequality in the Twentieth-Century

This article uses the history of women in twentieth-century United States to explore the paradox of inequality in American history: the coexistence of durable inequality with immense individual and group mobility. Using census data, the article traces inequality along four dimensions: participation, distribution, rewards, and differentiation. Differentiation, the article argues, resolves the paradox of inequality by showing how mobility reinforces rather than challenges existing social structures. The analysis highlights differences in womens experiences by cohort and race and emphasizes the role of education, technological change, and, especially, governments impact on labor markets. The article concludes by evaluating and extending Charles Tillys theory of durable inequality in light of the trends in womens experience.

Beyond Discrimination: Understanding African American Inequality in the Twenty-First Century

In November 2007, two reports by distinguished research centers turned African American inequality into national news. Their startling and discomfiting data highlighted both the fragility of African American success and the widening fault lines that divide African Americans from each other. Impressive and authoritative as the reports are, they nonetheless remain incomplete because they do not explain how and why African American inequality has changed during the last several decades or the place of gender and publicly supported work in the new black inequality. These omissions matter because adequate and realistic responses to the issues raised by the reports require grasping the sources of the revolutionary changes that have left blacks at once more and less equal. Black inequality no longer results from powerful and interlocking forms of public and private discrimination and oppression. Rather, it is the product of processes beginning with childhood that sort African Americans into more or less favored statuses, differentiating them by class and gender.

History and the limits of population policy.

A detailed case study of the fertility decline in the United States between 1855 and 1915 is summarized. Included in the data base are about 30000 families 1 of the largest data bases ever compiled for the historical study of fertility. Focus in this discussion is on the major trends in the data and what they convey regarding the interconnections between fertility social history research strategy and public policy. Between 1855 and 1915 the annual birthrate among native whites in the United States declined from 42.8 to 26.2/1000 a decline of almost 40%. The decline in fertility can be adequately understood only as a response to the development of industrial capitalism mediated by class and family. Better data are necessary to make this case. Sources for this study of Erie County New York were the New York State Census of 1855 the United States Federal Census of 1900 and the New York State Census of 1915 supplemented by city directories. The same 2 forces influencing the fertility of business class groups--the expense of educating children and a rising level of consumption--shaped the behavior of working class groups later in the century. In 1855 the new business class had already begun to limit its fertility. Within the working class few differences existed between the skilled and unskilled workers. By 1900 the fertility ratio of 3 of the 4 groups had declined. Working-class people controlled their fertility throughout the period guaging the relation of family size to their own interests. There is some evidence that when couples wanted to limit family size they found the means. Historical experience casts doubt on the usefulness of policymakers focusing on fertility limitation as a strategy for alleviating other problems notably poverty and inequality. Fertility is not a manipulable variable; fertility limitation is not susceptible to very much direct control.

A new “culture war”?

1. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/nea-quick-facts.pdf. 2. http://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/images/2016/research/public_op_poll/ POP_FullReport_July11.pdf. 3. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-feb2015.pdf. 4. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/how-the-us-funds-the-arts.pdf. 5. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/msar.pdf. 6. http://www.artsindexusa.org/2016-national-arts-index. 7. http://www.cacgrants.org/about-us.

Understanding the value of arts & culture: the AHRC cultural value project (2016) by Geoffrey Crossick and Patrycja Kaszynska

Published online at http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/documents/publications/cultural-value-project-final-report/The social value of the arts and culture has been a fraught topic for many years. During the 199...

Community culture and social welfare

The rise and transformation of community cultural engagement provides one lens through which to view the changing definition of social welfare in contemporary society. The history of community culture is tied to two reactions to the crisis of the welfare state: the rise of marketization and the challenges of social transformation.

Becoming Mainstream: From the Underclass to the Entrepreneurial Poor

In 2006, concerns about an emerging “underclass” became a central point of debate in German welfare circles. Some commentators tried to explain this new social phenomenon in the context of a broader set of social realities — the diminishing prospects for advancement faced by a large share of the German labor force. For others, including the leader of the Social Democratic Party, the underclass represented a smaller but more deviant social element that had “come to terms” with its poverty and lacked ambition to improve its circumstances. The new debate posed a profound challenge to welfare policy analysts: should the “underclass” be seen as one part of a broader structural reality or as a smaller “deviant” part of the social order, isolated from broader social processes.