Amy Sanamman
A year ago, New York City voted in its first new mayor in 12 years. The city council election resulted in new members in almost half of the 51 seat council. It was an exciting time for the progressive communities—for all those that have fought for social change through the fields of education, immigration reform, fair wages, affordable housing or, of course, the arts. While the Mayor’s new platform addressed many of these items, it did not include an arts agenda or integrate a strategy to use arts and culture to support a more just and equitable city for all. Over the past few months, I have seen NYC—its new administration and city council—struggle with finding new frameworks. I have been thinking about how the aesthetics of language and framing influence how we understand our communities, their challenges, opportunities, the role of arts, and how policies may be considered. One example of this is how NYC is grappling with the broken windows theory and its legacy.
Originally coined by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in their 1982 article in The Atlantic, “broken windows”linked disorder and crime. Initially, it was meant to address the physical environment—dare I say, the aesthetic environment. The theory asserts that well-maintained urban neighborhoods would prevent vandalism and escalation into more serious crime. Somehow over the past three decades— ‘broken windows’ came to focus not on the environment but on people—justifying, for example unjust stop and frisk tactics. Police tactics focusing on ‘quality of life’ and other low-level crime as well as its current ‘stop and frisk’ can be traced back to this philosophy.
At Groundswell, NYC’s leading community mural nonprofit, many of the youth we work with come from homes and schools whose windows are metaphorically and often literally broken. To “fix” these windows, we need the collective action of the factors that caused the break—from health professionals to educators; from poets to maintenance crews; from teens to elected officials.
The progressive arts community provides an alternative framework. We talk less about broken windows and more about youth inspired by their own potential. About communities creating their own narratives. About youth, residents, local business, community organizations, and government agencies solving complex problems together. About making our neighborhoods more beautiful places to live by revealing their hidden treasures. Our work backs up research that demonstrates a significant correlation between arts activity and the increase in the desirability, commitment, social integration, and quality of life in a community.
This moment of political transition calls for a positive new framework—it is time to replace the broken window with a theory that cultivates creative collaboration across stakeholder groups. The arts offer an effective vehicle for increasing community stewardship and carrying out social change—particularly when considering an alternative to an aesthetic-based social theory such as ‘broken windows.”
Groundswell’s own collective impact model—Scaffold Up! — encompasses both individual and cross-sector social outcomes generated by collaborative participatory projects. Groundswell youth and community partners (such as the Department of Probation or the Department of Transportation) can objectively chart, document, evaluate and measure their own progressive learning and achievements within a project and over several projects. Additionally, Groundswell can aggregate and quantify youth achievement, community partner, and artistic achievement against annual goals and use this data to inform program design and development. Scaffold Up! is our dashboard for success: a single snap-shot that captures our impact across the youth and community partners we work with and the art they create. As we finalize Scaffold Up! we are engaging all our stakeholders in articulating what artistic achievement means, and how, for Groundswell, community partner and youth achievement must root any aesthetic outcomes.
Recently, the de Blasio administration and the New York City Council announced they are investing $240 million dollars in a targeted safety plan for public housing focusing on the 15 developments that account for nearly 20% of all violent crime in public housing. This investment is intended to go to both physical and human transformation, with $15.6 million slated to expand key programs to help build stronger individuals, families, and communities. While this might mark a departure from a dozen years of former Mayor Bloomberg’s use of the arts as primarily s a city strategy for economic development, it doesn’t reframe how arts might be used to invest in both aesthetics and human development.
It is time for a new metaphor. One that offers the inspiration, tools, and capacity needed to unify New York into a more just and equitable city for all, including the arts. One that calls for an investment in both physical space and its people. One that doesn’t focus on broken windows, but one that offers a Scaffold on which we can all stand, from which we can work and build a progressive city together.
