Setting the Scene

The Scenes Working Group aims to better understand how culture and amenities — such as music, art, theater, restaurants, and beaches — contribute to a community's vitality.

Though arts critics have long invoked "scenes," as part of their vocabulary, social scientists have barely begun to address the idea. This project, recognizing that jobs explain less and that lifestyle is a critical element driving economic development, examines a theory of scenes as elements of neighborhood reality. Building on previous work about culture, we have tackled scenes as a new way of understanding urban life.

This theory of scenes is more than physical structures, or people labeled by race, class, gender, or education. These elements are included, of course, but the project stresses the specific combinations of these factors, and the activities which unite them.

These four components are in turn defined by the values people pursue in a scene, general values such as legitimacy (defining a right or wrong way to live), theatricality (a way of seeing and being seen by others), and authenticity (a meaningful sense of identity). We divide these further into sub-dimensions such as egalitarianism, traditionalism, exhibitionism, localism, ethnicity, transgression, and corporateness, to name a few. All the dimensions combine in different ways in different places.

Simultaneous with theorizing, our project has assembled over 700 indicators of amenities from Starbucks to public schools for every zip code in the US. We coded the indicators according to our scenes dimensions, and use them to model the processes that lead neighborhoods to develop or decline, stressing how multiple subcultures support distinct scenes and development patterns.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the nascent theory of scenes, please see "A Theory of Scenes" by Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, and Lawrence Rothfield. It lays out the dimensions and subdimensions of scenes in detail, and describes the dataset that we've assembled.

If you're looking to get started working with out data, please see our documentation page.

Questions or comments about the site? Please contact kmjohnson@uchicago.edu.