January 3, 2013
by Rahm Emanuel, Mayor, City of Chicago
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (right) with musician (and President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities member) Yo-Yo Ma at the unveiling of Chicago’s new cultural plan in fall 2012. Photo by Brooke E. Collins, City of Chicago.
Chicago radiates culture, from our art to our architecture, our food to our festivals, our music to our museums. That vibrancy of culture is Chicago’s great inheritance as a city, and it is the key to our future. That is why I was proud to unveil the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan this past October, the first new plan for strengthening the city’s arts and cultural sector in more than 25 years. The product of more than eight months of work, dozens of town hall meetings, and the input of thousands of residents, the plan contains a set of 10 initiatives with 36 recommendations and more than 200 ideas for enriching and ensuring a vibrant cultural future for Chicago.
Most importantly, it is a plan that puts our children first by improving access to arts education. The Chicago Public Schools’ Arts Education Plan, part of the larger Chicago Cultural Plan, will elevate the arts to a core subject in our children’s’ curriculum. By requiring 120 minutes of arts education per week, Chicago Public School (CPS) students will receive a comprehensive and sequential study of the four art forms—visual art, music, dance and drama—from preschool through high school graduation. This increased time for arts education will be matched by an increased number of teachers trained in the arts. While other cities across the country are cutting their school enrichment programs, here in Chicago we are increasing them for the betterment of our children’s futures. We could not have done it, however, without the 30 percent increase in educational time that CPS instituted this year, which will ultimately give our kindergartners two-and-a-half more years of educational time by the date they graduate from high school. Our teachers no longer have to choose between teaching either music or math due to an artificially short day, as they did in the past. Now, they have a full day and a full year so they can provide our kids the fully well-rounded education they deserve.
The cultural plan extends beyond our classrooms and into our communities, with a robust vision of the economic benefits that will result from a comprehensive and concerted focus on culture and the arts.
We will revitalize our neighborhoods by re-examining zoning, permitting, and licensing rules that most affect those individuals and groups in the city who produce art.
We will create a comprehensive citywide inventory of spaces that can be used for public cultural uses. There are hundreds of locations, such as bridges and side walls of public buildings, that could potentially accommodate either changing artistic exhibitions or permanent installations, becoming aesthetic treasures instead of eyesores.
Cultural grants will help implement new artistic projects, educational programs and festivals in our neighborhoods. Zoning, permitting, and licensing rules that most affect those who make art can be reformed in order to transform neighborhoods into dedicated arts districts.
I have seen firsthand how even a single cultural resource can transform the character and quality of life of a neighborhood for the better.
As a former dancer, I appreciate the revitalization of the downtown theatre district that took place the 1990s.
As a Congressman, I saw how the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago completely turned around when the Old Town School of Folk Music moved in nearby, bringing the community to life both economically and culturally—just as it brings to life the creativity and potential of so many talented Chicagoans. By attracting more than one thousand people into the area every day for performances and classes, the school benefits the entire community.
And, as mayor, I have seen how our culture and quality of life continues to attract the best workforce and companies to the city.
In this regard, I view our ambitious cultural plan as complementary to the city’s 10-year strategic plan for economic growth, which identified the key growth sectors of Chicago’s economy and the steps we need to take in order to realize our potential. From healthcare IT to advanced manufacturing, the cultural life of our city is just as important to Chicago’s future growth and competitiveness as any other sector of our economy. 53,603 jobs and 4.31 percent of businesses in Chicago are arts-related. This cultural plan can make Chicago not just the most exciting place in the country to make art, but to enjoy it as well.
For example, if we were to move up just one slot in the international rankings for tourism, it would mean 25,000 more jobs in the city of Chicago. My long-range goal is to reach 50 million visitors a year by 2020 and to move into the top five U.S. cities for international tourism.
While I believe our cultural vision is unique; Chicago is not alone in the opportunities that can come from a large-scale focus on culture and the arts. I hope that other cities will look to the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan as a model.
Interested in learning more about the arts in Chicago? Check out these NEA Art Talks with creative placemaker and artist Theaster Gates and with husband-and-wife poets Srikanth Reddy and Suzanne Buffam, and tune in to our NEA Arts interview with Old Town School of Folk Music director Bau Graves.
Tags: 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan, Chicago arts, Chicago culture, Chicago mayor, Old Town School of Folk Music, Rahm Emanuel
Kudos to Mayor Rahm Emanuel! As head of Arts Alliance Illinois, a statewide arts advocacy organization, I have seen firsthand Mayor Emanuel’s commitment to the arts, culture, and arts education.
The nonprofit arts in Chicago are a $2.2 billion dollar industry. Mayor Emanuel has used his office and his position of authority to shine a spotlight on the role the arts play in creating jobs, and attracting talent, tourists, and investment to the city.
The ambitious new Chicago Cultural Plan 2012 represents a giant step forward in advancing Chicago as a global capital for the arts. While Mayor Emanuel’s personal background and experience as a dancer have been well documented, he is now gaining international recognition for bringing extraordinary energy and vision to the arts policy arena.
The following article helps keep a healthy balance on this topic:
From the Chicago Reader, October 24, 2012
Your vision, your plan, your pop-up
The final version of the Chicago Cultural Plan 2012 arrives as a photo op
By Deanna Isaacs @deannaisaacs
So, wow. We have our cultural plan. After months of hoopla it arrived in near secret last week from Canada (where it was crafted) as a Monday-morning pop-up event at an elementary school.
You might have missed it. Not to say there wasn’t any flash. The mayor was there, in the atrium of the Manuel Perez Jr. elementary school in Pilsen. And so were Chicago’s dazzling high-culture hired guns, Yo-Yo Ma and Renee Fleming, jetting in from the east coast. Also—though the mayor himself, or anyone from Joffrey or Hubbard Street could fill this slot—former New York City Ballet principal dancer Damian Woetzel was on hand.
They sang and played for the few folk who’d been passed the word to get there, along with some Perez school kids, for whom it’ll no doubt be a memorable if somewhat mystifying event, a star-studded launch for a plan that’s literally out of sight.
Tucked away online at chicagoculturalplan2012.com and too unwieldy to grasp from a screen, the plan and its supplements total 92 pages of bureaucratese and unprioritized suggestions, all padded out with familiar-looking photographs of the city. To print it out and read it, you’ll need a supply of ink and a good stiff drink—or whatever fortitude builder you’d employ if you were aiming to digest your entire computer manual in a single sitting.
But in fact the finished product is barely changed from the bloated draft version we saw in “ground-truthing sessions” conducted by Lord Cultural Resources, the consulting firm in charge, back in July. There are still ten “equally paramount” priorities and 36 recommendations, each with its own list of four to eight initiatives—or enough to make your head explode. And there’s still no real clue about how this incalculably expensive wish list could be financed.
Among the hundreds of ideas still in place are a “globally renowned accelerator center” for the arts and creative industries, a “large-scale major cultural festival that attracts global attention,” and a “dedicated festival site.”
The mayor announced that he’s including $1 million for plan initiatives in his 2013 city budget proposal, and that half of this would go to Chicago Public Schools, which is developing its own new arts-education plan, aiming to “elevate the arts to a core subject.” That’s enough to pay for a half dozen or so new arts teachers in a system of 681 schools. The remaining $500,000 would go into the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events budget, to be spent on cultural plan initiatives as DCASE deems fit.
And what among the mind-boggling list of possibilities might those be? The end of the report provides a hint under the heading “Immediate Opportunities”:
Implement a strategic plan for DCASE.
Retool DCASE grant programs.
Partner with sister agencies.
Launch a creative industries unit within DCASE.
Connect implementation efforts.
Form an association of neighborhood festival organizers.
It looks like most of the initial impact will be on DCASE itself. A timetable in the plan’s supplemental materials makes it clear that we shouldn’t expect the more expensive suggestions to be implemented any time soon. Most of them would take up to 20 years to achieve, which could mean never.
But one of those superexpensive initiatives has been classified as doable in the next 18 months. That’s the “Mayor’s newly formed Infrastructure Trust to place focus on cultural projects.”
So one thing the Chicago Cultural Plan 2012 (promoted as “Your city, your vision, your plan”) will do right away is provide the appearance of a grassroots mandate for a mechanism that’ll allow the private sector to profit from—and perhaps control—the brick-and-mortar assets that anchor our cultural heritage.
The final words of the plan encourage “Citizen Cultural Planners” to read the plan and actively support it; suggestions for “regular citizens” include joining a neighborhood cultural council, starting your own Awesome Foundation, and trying “something creative you have never done before: singing, dancing, painting, knitting, cooking, etc.”