Culture as Civic Infrastructure

In 2020, artist Vida Kuang created a mural at the site of San Francisco’s former Sun Sing Theater. I Dream of Chinatown Theaters depicts a grandmother and a child watching a Cantonese opera performer. The Chinese Culture Center brought the work into public view in partnership with Project Artivism and neighborhood organizations.

What interests me about the image is the audience.

The grandmother and child suggest something beyond the performance: a place where an older person’s knowledge matters, where a child can encounter a tradition that did not begin with them. A theater can hold these relationships without announcing them as a public service.

When such a place disappears, we can count the lost seats and record the change of use. The other losses are harder to inventory. Where will those generations meet now? Where will a language be heard outside the home? What happens to a tradition when there is no longer an ordinary place to practice it?

A mural cannot reopen a theater. It can, however, refuse to let its disappearance become invisible.

That is where my argument for culture as civic infrastructure begins: with the recognition that some of what a city needs is difficult to count until it is gone.

More than a better-looking wall

In 2020, speaking with journalist Emily Wilson about Project Artivism’s Restore 49 initiative, I described its work as taking boarded-up storefronts and beautifying them. The program sought to support artists and businesses while bringing something hopeful to San Francisco’s streets during the pandemic.

Beautification was an understandable word. It was also incomplete.

A boarded window serves a practical purpose, but it can become a public message: the life behind this surface is unavailable. An artist changes what that surface communicates. A memory, a political demand, an unfamiliar face or an unexpected moment of humor becomes visible where there had been only a barrier.

The encounter does not have to be profound to matter. Public art offers the possibility of noticing something outside our own routines—without purchasing a ticket or knowing in advance what we are looking for.

But those of us who commission and support this work must acknowledge its limits. A painted storefront is still a closed storefront. The finished image does not establish that a business has recovered, that an artist can pay rent, or that the people represented can remain in the neighborhood.

We should be grateful for beauty without asking it to conceal what remains broken.

The photograph of the finished wall should be a record of the work, not the end of our responsibility.

A place to participate

Calling culture infrastructure should change the obligations around it. Infrastructure requires continuity, access and maintenance. Applied to cultural life, those principles ask whether people have places to gather, opportunities to contribute and the practical means to keep working.

A rehearsal room offers a place to return to, not simply an event to attend. A neighborhood workshop can give someone a role beyond that of customer or spectator. These settings make participation possible; what people build within them cannot be predetermined.

Research offers support for taking that possibility seriously. A 2017 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project, working with Reinvestment Fund, found associations between cultural resources and better health, schooling and public-safety outcomes in lower-income New York City neighborhoods, after statistically accounting for economic standing, race and ethnicity. The researchers cautioned against interpreting those relationships as proof that culture itself caused the improvements.

That distinction matters. The case for art becomes weaker when we burden it with promises it cannot keep. A mural is not a housing policy. A performance does not replace a functioning school.

Nor should artists have to demonstrate a reduction in social problems before their work is considered worthy of support. There must be room for pleasure, difficulty, strangeness and failure. A city that funds only art with an easily stated benefit will get a narrower culture than it deserves.

The more useful question is who gets to participate in making it.

In 2023, Project Artivism’s Artivate program collaborated with the Chinese Historical Society of America and other partners on Market Street Stories. Young artists explored historical collections and developed posters and augmented-reality work connected to the street’s history of civic action. Artists Chris Treggiari, Amy Berk and Mark Hellar led the project.

What matters to me about that approach is the relationship between receiving a history and answering it. An archive can tell a young person what happened before they arrived. Making something from that encounter asks where they stand in relation to it—and what they would add.

An invitation to attend is valuable. An invitation to contribute carries a different possibility.

It also demands more from the institution extending it. Participation means little when every consequential decision has already been made. The test is whether someone’s contribution can change the result.

That result need not be harmonious. No neighborhood has a single voice waiting to be represented. Residents disagree, generations remember differently, and newcomers may see possibilities that longtime neighbors do not. Public culture should make room for those differences rather than smooth them into an agreeable image.

Sometimes, the work worth supporting will make its supporters uncomfortable.

The conditions for culture

For those of us working in both culture and real estate, these questions carry a particular obligation.

A development can celebrate a neighborhood’s artistic identity without making any provision for the people who produce it. A mural in a rendering may suggest cultural vitality. It tells us little about whether an artist can afford a studio nearby or whether a local organization has a secure place to operate.

We should build housing, improve buildings and welcome new arrivals. Cultural preservation must not become a respectable vocabulary for refusing every change. A city cannot reserve belonging for whoever arrived first—or whoever can afford to remain without help.

But change should be judged by more than the quality of its presentation.

When a project invokes local culture, we should ask what relationship exists beyond the imagery. Is there space for cultural work? What does it cost, and how long will it remain available? Do artists and neighborhood organizations have a meaningful role in shaping it?

A room labeled “arts space” on a drawing is a beginning. It still needs an operator, a workable budget and terms that allow a real program to endure.

The Community Arts Stabilization Trust offers a practical approach. Its work helps arts organizations secure space through arrangements that include long-term ownership and affordable leases, with support extending through planning, acquisition and operation. It addresses cultural continuity through the material conditions of real estate.

A place to rehearse next month and a place to rehearse for years permit different kinds of ambition.

Compensation deserves the same seriousness. As Project Artivism coordinator Justin Charles Hoover told Wilson during Restore 49: “They’re professionals, and they need to be paid professional fees.”

Paying artists is not an administrative detail beneath the more inspiring business of supporting art. It is part of that support’s meaning.

So is funding the work between public events: preparation, teaching, repairs, administration and practice. The opening may attract attention, but a cultural organization must also survive the following Tuesday.

If we value only the visible moment, we risk leaving the conditions that made it possible unfunded.

What we choose to keep

Taking culture seriously does not mean exempting it from scrutiny.

We should know who was paid, who participated and which commitments endured. We should listen to people who felt excluded or found a program irrelevant. The word community should not protect weak work from criticism.

But our questions should match the purpose.

Attendance tells us that people came. It does not, by itself, tell us whether they felt welcome, whether they returned or whether they had any influence over what happened. A striking photograph can document a successful event while revealing almost nothing about the conditions under which it was made.

The longer view asks whether the organization can keep opening its doors. Whether the teacher can afford to continue. Whether a young participant has a path toward becoming a practitioner. Whether someone can enter without already knowing the right people or understanding how to behave.

Those are infrastructure questions.

They also require us to think beyond preservation. A living culture cannot ask every generation to reproduce an approved version of the past. There must be room for new traditions, new arrivals and work that has not yet earned anyone’s admiration.

The obligation is not to decide in advance what a city’s culture should become. It is to keep enough room available for its people to make that decision through their lives.

I return to the grandmother and child in Kuang’s mural. To me, the image holds both an achievement and an unfinished obligation. Something has been remembered. The conditions for sharing it still need our care.

We should honor the artist who makes that memory visible. We should also ask where a grandmother and a child might go together now—where they could hear a performance, encounter other people and carry something home that neither would have experienced alone.

A city worthy of its culture must leave them more than a picture of the place where that used to happen.