Mark Stern presents findings on cultural inequality and civic clusters
Stern describes a 'new geography of exclusion,' shows a steep relationship between economic well-being and cultural assets, and defines market, market-adjacent, and civic clusters like Brownsville and Flushing.
The social impact of culture is embedded, however, in existing social structures.
The explosion of economic inequality over the past generation
has coalesced into what we call a new geography of exclusion that has tilted the playing field toward higher income residents in neighborhoods.
The graph on page one of the handout that we circulated gives a concise look at the structure of cultural inequality.
The line shows the overall relationship between economic well-being and cultural assets.
As you can see, the line has a steep rise as you move from poorer to well-off neighborhoods.
The dots on that diagram represent particular neighborhoods that are members of one of the three
cultural clusters that we identified in our study.
Market and market clusters are affluent neighborhoods with at least an average number of cultural assets.
Civic clusters represent lower and moderate income neighborhoods like Brownsville or Flushing with more cultural assets than their economic status would predict.
Civic clusters represent what we'd like
every lower income neighborhood to have a vibrant cultural life, adequate cultural assets, and better health education and community engagement.
Most researchers and funders tend to focus on cultural organizations in isolation.
SIAP uses the idea of a neighborhood cultural ecology
to shift our attention from individual cultural providers to the density of cultural assets in the neighborhood because that density multiplies collective impact.
We found a lot of geographic change in cities' cultural ecology over the past decade, but little change in its overall economic structure.
In fact, overall, cultural assets are less equally distributed today than they were a decade ago.
Between 2016 and 2025, although Manhattan remained the dominant location of cultural assets in the city, many neighborhoods closed the gap.
The shift of resident artists from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens over the past decade was the most dramatic of these changes.
As a number of artists living in Brooklyn and Queens, including neighborhoods like Spatz, Bed-Stuy, and Ridgewood,
the number living in many Manhattan neighborhoods, and what you might think of as iconic arts neighborhoods, like Chelsea, the Upper West Side, and West Village declined.
Yet, although its geography changed, the unequal distribution of cultural assets across New York's neighborhoods remained largely unchanged.