Vibrancy and Social Media: A New Way to Evaluate Creative Placemaking (2016)

Undergraduate: Meera Chakravarthy

Faculty Advisor: Emil Kang
Department: Music

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The arts play a large role in the world around us. From communicating new ideas to simply making people happy, the arts have often been called universal and accessible to all people, and furthermore, all sectors of the economy. Recently, there has been a trend in arts funding called creative placemaking, which funds projects that physically put arts and culture in the center of communities. It attempts to get actual community stakeholders¿¿¿citizens, organizations, and artists¿¿¿to help plan and execute changes in the places they live.

Funding agencies, however, have tended to use economic measures to gauge the impact of creative placemaking and the arts. Analysts saw economic change as a form of well-being: the more financially well off an arts organization is, the better

it is doing. My research focuses on understanding a new way to measure the well-being of a place, vibrancy, which has little or nothing to do with counting dollars. Indeed the arts ecosystem, the producers and consumers within arts communities, has become more complex to include people communicating and engaging with the arts on digital platforms¿¿¿a space to share attitudes/behaviors on arts projects. One effective medium to evaluate vibrancy of a place, I propose, is through the data we can collect on social media. In this paper, I outline the need for a new way of thinking about the impact of creative placemaking projects and make a case to measure vibrancy, the well-being of a space, through social media.