The Urban Institute's Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP) strives to help policymakers make better decisions for neighborhoods and cities. To this end, ACIP informs researchers, practitioners, and policymakers about the presence and role of arts and culture in communities—how arts and culture affect neighborhood conditions and community dynamics. Specifically, ACIP develops quantifiable measures of arts and culture and integrates them into quality of life measurement systems that can compare conditions across communities and over time.

Launched in the late 1990s with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, ACIP's basic premises are (a) that a healthy place to live includes opportunities for and the presence of arts, culture, and creative expression, (b) that arts, culture, and creative expression are important determinants of how communities fare, and by extension (c) that full understanding of U.S. communities is inherently impossible without including these important perspectives.

ACIP's approach has always been deliberately applied. The concepts we develop, the measures we find promising, and the data-related practices we advocate have been developed, vetted and tested in conjunction with practitioners, researchers, and policy players in urban planning, community development, and arts-related fields. In addition, we collaborate with community indicator initiatives around the country in our continuing efforts to integrate arts and culture into indicator systems. At the same time, our years of research on arts and culture in a range of communities across the United States have enabled us to expand the conventional paradigm of what counts as arts and culture in a way that makes it more consistent with, and inclusive of, the demographic realities of our nation—including low- and moderate-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities. Read more about the Arts and Culture Indicators Project and recommended cultural vitality indicators.

Cultural Vitality Indicators

ACIP is releasing cultural vitality indicators from the following data sources into the public domain, under the Open Database License:

• Zip/County Business Patterns (ZBP) data 2006-2008
• Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) data 2005-2009
• Non-Employer Statistics (NES) data 2005-2008

ACIP has also developed cultural vitality indicators based on the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) data on non-profits' I-990 tax forms. For access and more information on the NCCS data, see the NCCS website.

These data files and the procedures for constructing them were developed by the Urban Institute's Arts and Culture Indicators Project (ACIP), with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC). The data (aside from the NCCS data) are licensed under the Open Database License, which means you are free to share and adapt these datasets as long as you follow the following conditions:

• You must attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database.
• For any use or redistribution of the database, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the license of the database and keep intact any notices on the original database.
• If you publicly use any adapted version of this database, or works produced from an adapted database, you must also offer that adapted database under the ODbL.

For full details, read the full ODbL 1.0 license text for the exact terms that apply.

Required attributions are posted on the data download pages for each data source.

National Data Overview
HMDA
Business Patterns
NCES Common Core of Data
American Community Survey

Cultural Vitality Indicators Overview
Business Patterns
Occupational Employment Statistics
Non-Employer Statistics

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