Imagination Is a City’s Most Vital Resource
If You Want to Know the Health of a City, Count the Permits It Issues for Concerts, Street Fairs, and Festivals
In hard economic times, cities need to decide what industries are essential, and what programs and services can be cut down to save resources. The arts are perennial contenders for the chopping block, including what can more broadly be referred to as the “creative industries”—fields such as film, fashion, music, and publishing. As recent slashes to the budgets of everything from the National Endowment of the Arts to neighborhood school music programs have shown, the value of work based largely on imagination isn’t always clear.
But many experts, from artists to …
