This project is about public access to government-sponsored culture. The first step then is to identify what the local government in Albuquerque NM sponsors, and what counts as culture. Primary utilities such as electricity, gas, water/sewage, and solid waste removal (while essential to the first world) don’t raise the local culture above the baseline of being a clean and comfortable city. Services like parks and landscaping can bring refreshing and relaxing environments closer to home in sprawling urban areas where the natural landscape may be out of reach. However, parks are passive, they transmit no inherent intellectual information, and good urban landscaping can quickly become a decentralized park system; making it more difficult to count interaction and value. Libraries are an easy to categorize, intellectual resource to their communities. Libraries offer book and film (both fiction and non-fiction, and strictly educational content) borrowing services, free internet access, meeting rooms and technology classes. Libraries also have well recorded data on attendance and usage history, making them ideal to measure the impact of government services. Another local government service to consider is community centers, senior centers, and cultural centers; places which offer host events and activities, provide their own libraries sometimes, display art, offer meeting rooms, and provide pleasant spaces for citizens to spend their time. Similar to libraries, local community centers can also track their usage and attendance.
Finally, public artwork is a clear and present benefit to communities, beautifying areas, serving as local landmarks, and sometimes playing duel-roles as shade structures or play equipment. The great difficulty in trying to evaluate the impact of public art is the same as that of parks, namely: how can one track public interaction with a passive object or space? Many people may not even be aware that they are looking at public art, or that its presence is preferable to its absence. A more technologically saturated world could record, via cameras, the number of people who look at art and the amount of time they spend doing so, but current local government doesn’t have that capability. Instead, measuring access and availability is the most straightforward way of evaluating the passive impact of public art.
These are the criteria I will use to map the cultural geography of Albuquerque. With census data and government reported statistics I will graphically demonstrate where intellectual and aesthetic enrichment are taking place, and where they are lacking.
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