Making Space for Art: Securing Cultural Infrastructure in Boston, Cambridge & Somerville

Project Overview

The Making Space for Art: Securing Cultural Infrastructure in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville project is a joint effort by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) and the cities of Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville to establish policies and strategies that expand and protect the region’s cultural infrastructure—the physical spaces used across creative disciplines for making and experiencing arts and culture. By applying a regional lens to the project, MAPC will create guidance and tools to streamline and strengthen cultural planning and policymaking across city lines to make it easier for the users of arts and culture spaces to thrive within a regional ecosystem. The project will be grounded in the creative sector’s experiences; building on past outreach efforts conducted by the three cities, targeted engagement will seek to better understand the needs, priorities and barriers of culture space stakeholders.

The timeline for this project is August 2022-December 2023.

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Questions?
Contact the Arts and Culture Team!
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What is cultural infrastructure?

Cultural Infrastructure can refer to any physical space where art or culture is produced or presented. This spectrum can include spaces from fine art museums (clearly defined for arts and cultural use) to space that has no designation or definition as cultural use (such as housing—where many artists produce their work), and a gray area in the middle—places like church basements, restaurant back rooms, university practice rooms, community centers, and more.

The engagement efforts in this project aim to dig deeper in the “gray area” of this spectrum—first identifying and cataloging these spaces, and then making policy recommendations to protect them.

Who are cultural space stakeholders?

When is engagement planned?

Resources

Overview

Brief
Making Space for Art Project Overview
MAPC

Meeting Materials

February 2023 Meeting
Meeting Materials

November 2022
Meeting Materials

October 2022
Meeting Materials

September 2022
Kickoff Meeting Materials

In the News

Press Release
Boston, Cambridge and Somerville Launch Regional Effort to Protect and Plan for Arts Spaces
January 30, 2023 | MAPC

Project Partners

Boston
City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture

Cambridge
City of Cambridge Arts and Cultural Planning
Cambridge Arts

Somerville
Somerville Arts Council

Project Goals

Icon is a scale, and both sides are equal. Policy

Streamline policy that relates to cultural infrastructure (from preservation to new development incentives) across three Boston region municipalities.

Icon is gear wheel. Processes

Identify and recommend tools and processes to integrate cultural infrastructure policy into existing municipal policy, such as within development review.
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Icon is a map. Data

Aggregate and share cultural infrastructure and facilities data across all three cities (Boston, Cambridge, Somerville) in an easy to access and maintain format.

Icon is of two people sanding and an arrow pointing at both of them between them. Partnerships

Strengthen partnerships and align priorities across arts and culture and other municipal departments within and among the three cities.
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Deliverables

Regional Policy Recommendations

to maintain and expand access to cultural infrastructure

Built on a synthesis of existing policies and procedures and strengthened by conversations with community stakeholders in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, this package will include a framework for shared regional policy goals, briefing papers on priority policy topics; municipal action plans that identify priority actions to be taken by each municipality; and an implementation plan that identifies roles, responsibilities and the timeline for implementing the recommendations.

Digital Planning Platform

to support cultural infrastructure development and preservation

MAPC’s Digital Services team will prototype a digital platform to support coordination and planning to protect and expand cultural infrastructure. Initial deliverables will include documenting the key problems a platform would help solve as well as developing the prototype and initial data schema, as well as a spec sheet for a minimum viable product (MVP). Municipal partners will have an option to contract with MAPC to build the planning tool as part of project implementation.