Culture Competency: Building Inclusive Cities

Creativity and culture are critical to making our life, work, and play spaces vibrant, distinct, and inclusive. But as cities and towns across the country face rising housing costs and increased development pressures, space to create and experience art is becoming less accessible in some neighborhoods—and vanishing in others.

This displacement is not felt evenly across demographics; communities that lack financial and social capital, including BIPOC groups, are disproportionately affected. For planners, building unique, welcoming cities requires dismantling systems of segregation and inequity that restrict BIPOC communities’ access to and representation within artistic and cultural spaces.

In this presentation, participants test tools developed for Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, Massachusetts, to expand their understanding of where culture happens in order to develop strategies that increase equitable access to cultural infrastructure. Presenters lead participants through analysis of cultural spaces in and around Boston and provide a frameworks for identifying inequitable access. Participants obtain tools to assess planning policies and regulatory conditions in their communities and develop strategies to expand access to cultural spaces, particularly for BIPOC groups.

NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Advanced. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.