Making Space for Art: Securing Cultural Infrastructure in Boston, Cambridge & Somerville
Project Overview
Making Space for Art is an innovative anti-displacement project led by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) in partnership with the cities of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. It focuses on protecting, preserving, and expanding creative workspaces, performance venues, and a wide range of other spaces that support arts and culture activity across Metro Boston. This project represents the first regional effort to address the rapid loss of creative spaces in the face of development pressure. From 2022 to 2024, the MAPC Arts and Culture Department engaged with over 100 individuals in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, including cultural space stakeholders and municipal staff, to shape this work.
The project aims to inform municipal policies in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville and to propose regional policies that support long-term cultural stability and promote more equitable access to space for artists and creative organizations. As the three cities lead implementation of the work locally, implementation of the regional agenda is a core element of Arts Forward Metro Boston, MAPC’s programmatic area that advances arts and culture as a strategic priority for MAPC and supports implementation of the MetroCommon 2050 regional plan.
In 2022, in partnership with MASSCreative, MAPC’s Arts and Culture Department informed an advocacy effort to advance statewide cultural space policies, resulting in the drafting and 2024 revision of the Creative Space Act (Bill H.3587/S.2334). This proposed legislation, reported favorably out of committee in the 2025–2026 Legislative Session, would provide municipalities with a definition of creative spaces, allow regulatory restrictions to preserve creative and cultural uses, and enable municipalities to establish trusts to aggregate funding and hold real property as a tool for subsidizing and preserving creative space. For more information see the Creative Space Act fact sheet.
The project is supported through an MAPC Technical Assistance Grant, which includes funding from the Barr Foundation to advance the Arts and Culture Department’s efforts.
Attend Our Launch Event!
March 2, 2026 6 pm – 8 pm
Warehouse XI
11 Sanborn Court,
Somerville, MA
Register here:
Making Space for Art | Securing Cultural Infrastructure in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville
Questions?
Contact the Arts and Culture Team!
[email protected]
Deliverables
Regional Policy Agenda
The Regional Policy Agenda calls on municipalities in Metro Boston to inventory and map arts and culture activities and spaces, helping visualize the creative sector as an economic driver while identifyinggaps and opportunities. It also emphasizes the need to define arts and culture within policies and to define arts and culture ecosystems and how they contribute to economic prosperity.
To help the creative sector thrive, the agenda calls for the region to allow arts and culture to happen using allowance-based approaches to permitting, licensing, and policies that currentlylimit creative practices.
Finally the agenda calls on the region to expand cultural infrastructure through developer education, innovative funding tools, cultural preservation efforts, and affordable housing for artists. These efforts are essential to protecting, preserving, and growing creative spaces across the metro area.
Briefing Papers on Priority Topics
Digital Planning Platform
A prototype developed by MAPC’s Data Services team offers proof of concept that the ability to map and track creative spaces digital has the potential to inform policies and decision-making. With a more complete dataset and commitment to data maintenance, it is possible to aggregate and track regional creative space data starting with this initial subset of creative spaces across Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.
Creative Space Map – Based on data collected through the digital planning prototype, a tool that maps and tracks creative spaces in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville to inform policy and decision-making.
Municipal Action Plans
These action plans, developed in 2024 and refined in 2025 have guided implementation efforts led by the cities of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. They are a blueprint for the application of the regional policy agenda at the local level.