PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS

200 Pages·2012·3.87 MB·English

PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS:
DOES UPTOWN CULTURE STIMULATE DOWNTOWN VITALITY?

Jane Chu

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of Philanthropic Studies,
Indiana University

December 2012
Accepted by the Faculty of Indiana University, in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Patricia A. Wittberg, Ph.D., Chairperson

Doctoral Committee

Wolfgang H. Bielefeld, Ph.D.

Michael Rushton, Ph.D.
September 12, 2012

Todd Saxton, Ph.D.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation represents a synthesis of perspectives on urban sociology, downtown
revitalization, the experience economy, organizational sociology, the nonprofit
performing arts, and philanthropic studies. I want to thank the members of my
dissertation committee for their insights, which helped me to assemble and incorporate
their diverse perspectives into a single research project. My appreciation goes to my
advisor, Patricia Wittberg, for her dedication and commitment to guiding me through this
learning process. Finally, I am grateful to the Board of Directors of the Kauffman Center
for the Performing Arts in Kansas City for giving me the opportunity to serve in my
professional capacity, thus allowing me to live and breathe my research in real time.
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ABSTRACT

Jane Chu

PERFORMING ARTS CENTERS:
DOES UPTOWN CULTURE STIMULATE DOWNTOWN VITALITY?
Performing arts centers have been touted as a strategy for revitalizing downtowns by
increasing activities that bring in residents with higher incomes, tourists, arts employees,
educated workers, and housing. Despite their popularity, civic leaders have encountered
complexity in these projects, from financial challenges, to delayed openings and
operating deficits. Previous downtown studies examine public facilities, such as stadiums
and cultural institutions, through essays, surveys, case studies, or by quantifying
transactions exchanged between the public and the facility. This dissertation focuses
solely on performing arts centers , excluding all other forms of public facilities and
cultural venues, by examining self-collected data on literature-based characteristics of
218 downtowns with and without performing arts centers, and on the health of 129
additional performing arts centers, all over a seven-year period of time. It was
hypothesized that the presence of a performing arts center would contribute to increases
in the values of all downtown revitalization characteristics, and community
characteristics, as well as organizational attributes of the performing arts center itself
(age, size, and revenue types) would in turn, increase the values of the overall health of
the performing arts center. Through the use of multiple linear regressions, this research
shows that performing arts centers can play a role in revitalizing downtowns. This
research also shows that a single characteristic is not solely responsible for revitalizing
downtowns; rather, the increased vitality results from a confluence of the characteristics.
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Endogeneity tests show that a performing arts center is less likely to enter a deserted
downtown bereft of vitality. Instead, performing arts centers serve as harbingers of
revitalization, confirming the presence of downtown vitality, before they proceed to
activate vitality further. Finally, through the use of binary logistic regressions,
community characteristics are identified in order to determine the conditions of
downtowns that would be most equipped to open a performing arts center, as compared
with downtowns that could not.

Patricia A. Wittberg, Ph.D., Chairperson
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables .................................................................................................................... vii
List of Figures ......................................................................................................................x
Chapter One
Introduction ..............................................................................................................1
Chapter Two
Literature Review...................................................................................................15
Chapter Three
Methodology of the current study ..........................................................................62
Chapter Four
Analysis..................................................................................................................82
Chapter Five
Discussion ..............................................................................................................90
Chapter Six
Conclusions and Implications ..............................................................................113
Appendices
Appendix A – Downtown Revitalization .............................................................121
Appendix B – Overall PAC Health ......................................................................151
Appendix C – Downtown and performing arts centers studied ...........................158
Appendix D – Literature Review Summary Table ..............................................165
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................177
Curriculum Vitae
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LIST OF TABLES
Table A. Downtown Revitalization variables ...................................................................72
Table B. Overall PAC Health Variables ...........................................................................81
Table C. Downtown Revitalization Regressions ..............................................................83
Table Da. Downtown Revitalization Compare means – actual values in 2000 and
2007........................................................................................................................87
Table Db. Downtown Revitalization Compare means – percentage change
2000-2007 ..............................................................................................................87
Table E. Overall PAC Health Regression .........................................................................89

Appendix A – Downtown Revitalization
Table 1. Descriptive statistics of independent and dependent variables for
downtown revitalization.............................................................................................121
Table 2a. Correlations with 2000 variables .....................................................................125
Table 2b. Correlations of the dependent variables ...........................................................126
Table 3. Multicollinearity tests .......................................................................................130
Table 4a. Compare Means actual values in 1990, 2000, and 2007 ..................................132
Table 4b. Compare Means percentage change between 1990-2000, 2000-2007,
and 1990-2007 ...........................................................................................................134
Table 5. Independent Samples t-tests..............................................................................137
Table 6. Compare Means of coastal vs. non-coastal downtowns ...................................139
Table 7. Stepwise Regressions of the Downtown Revitalization Variables, adding
PAC/No PAC on the second step...............................................................................140
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Table 8. Correlations of independent and dependent variables in downtowns
with a new PAC vs. downtowns with a historic PAC ...............................................142
Table 9. Compare Means of Downtowns with a new PAC vs. Downtowns with
a historic PAC in percent change of growth over time ....................................................143
Table 10. Correlations with downtown square miles in downtowns with vs. without
a PAC .........................................................................................................................144
Table 11. Correlations with the number of arts organizations in downtowns
with vs. without a PAC ..............................................................................................145
Table 12. Binary Logistic Regression Results for PAC Readiness .................................146
Table 13. Binary Logistic Regression Results for Historic PAC downtowns
vs. new PAC downtowns ...........................................................................................148
Table 14. Means and medians of characteristics in downtowns with a PAC ..................149

Appendix B – Overall PAC Health
Table 15. Descriptive statistics ........................................................................................151
Table 16. Correlations with 2000 variables .....................................................................153
Table 17. Multicollinearity ..............................................................................................155
Table 18. Regression comparisons ..................................................................................157

Appendix C – Downtowns and performing arts centers studied
Table 19. Downtowns with PACs that opened 2000-2006 ..............................................158
Table 20. Downtowns without a PAC between 2000-2007 .............................................161
Table 21. PACs that opened before 2000 ........................................................................162
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Appendix D – Literature Review Summary Table
Table 22. Downtown Revitalization ................................................................................165
Table 23. Overall PAC Health .........................................................................................173
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Path Diagram – Downtown Revitalization ........................................................64
Figure 2. Path Diagram – Overall PAC Health.................................................................64
Figure 3. Regression Equation – Downtown Revitalization .............................................73
Figure 4. Regression Equation – Overall PAC Health .....................................................81
Figure 5. Histograms of independent and dependent variables ......................................123
Figure 6. Scatterplots ......................................................................................................127
Figure 7. Compare means of downtowns with vs. without a PAC .................................136
Figure 8. Compare means of dependent variable measures in downtowns
with new PACs, historic PACs, and no PACs ...........................................................147
Figure 9. Histograms of variables ...................................................................................152
Figure 10. Scatterplots .....................................................................................................154
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