Stuart Weitzman School of Design
102 Meyerson Hall
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
In 2018 Praxis began our partnership with the Creative Footprint Project (CFP), an innovative study designed to inventory and describe a city’s creative space for live entertainment created by former Amsterdam Night Mayor Mirik Milan and Berlin Clubcommission spokesman Lutz Leichsenring. We relate this inventory to “framework conditions'' under which a city is promoting or discouraging creative space. Our methodology goes beyond economic impact, prioritizing original content, interdisciplinary connections, and cross-functional spaces for thriving local scenes; the goal of CFP is to show the value of spaces that foster talent, strengthen communities, and make our cities unique.
Community members drive the CFP process, allowing us to measure what we know is important to the creative community (like frequency of local and experimental programming), not just what would appear in an economic impact study. Once data has been collected Praxis develops a geospatial, economic, and demographic analysis component to the project. This creates insights about the relationships between creative spaces and transportation networks, real estate trends, and population dynamics. Most policy makers, planners, and citizens only think about night in the city through the lens of nuisance and prohibitive public policy trends; but night time is also when so much of a city’s art, culture, and community are created and celebrated. Understanding how and why nightlife arts and culture operate is key to understanding and supporting the full breadth of a city.