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to Past as PrologueBy Lou DeLuca
Kentucky Education, Arts and Humanities Cabinet
From Exploring the Frontier of the Future: How Kentucky Will Live, Learn and Work
pp. 3-4, published 1996
The poet Maya Angelou once said that all people are linked by the dream of a white picket fence. She explained that we all desire satisfying work, a healthy family, and a house, yard and flowers surrounded by a white picket fence. The fence borders a tree-lined street with a variety of houses and fences. Two or three blocks away is a major thoroughfare where we can ride a bus or drive our car past the neighborhood school and convenience center into a busy and prosperous downtown.
Just as we yearn for each picket fence to have a fresh coat of white paint, we want our neighborhood and city centers to be well designed and enjoyable. We want downtown to have a mix of special stores, banks, theaters, housing, offices, hospitals, libraries, and restaurants. We want this living center to exhibit the history of the community in its businesses, buildings, monuments, festivals, parades and parks. While we are proud of our efficient new shopping malls on the edge of town, we know they are not a substitute for the downtown heart of the community.
The phrase "quality of life" is being used by more people to describe a desirable community, and in the future quality of life will continue to gain credence in more segments of society. Decisions about business location and expansion will consider small towns as well as larger cities for their quality of life. Young professionals looking to relocate and take new jobs will also review one-by-one such aspects of quality as housing, schools, medical services, historic buildings and sites, law enforcement, libraries, transportation, shops, festivals, sports, arts and entertainment, parks, and museums.
On the surface, the combination of well-cared-for neighborhoods and schools, shiny shopping malls, active theaters and museums, and a vibrant downtown center create the image of a high quality of life within the community. A look beneath the surface, however, reveals the need for critical ingredients such as diverse economic and educational opportunities, concern for good design, respect for history, accessible cultural resources, a plan/vision for the future, strong families, and broad citizen participation in community leadership.
What are the trends that impact our quality of life? Certainly, there are basic needs, like housing, health care, safety, dignity, and strong families. Trends in these areas are examined in this section by: F. Lynn Luallen, Housing Trends; Forrest Calico, The View from the Heart of the Health Care Revolution; John Curra, The Contours of Crime; Saundra Ardrey, Kentucky and the State of Human Rights; and Stephan Wilson, Families and Children. Another basic need that affects our quality of life is a job paying adequate wages, something a large segment of our population obviously lacks, as highlighted by Miriam Fordham and Dan Jacovitch in their chapter, Poverty in Kentucky. There is clearly a need for broad access to lifelong education and training to maintain and improve personal knowledge and income.
Another important trend is the expanding recognition of the importance of heritage and history to the lives of citizens within communities, and to tourists from outside the community. Well built and historically significant buildings are being re-used for housing and commercial developments because, in addition to saving resources, they preserve the heritage of a community and provide a tourist attraction.
Graham Rowles and John Watkins describe the trend toward an older population and longer retirements in their chapter, Growing Old in Kentucky in the Approaching Age of Age. The aging of the population provides a growing audience with interest in heritage, history, arts, and crafts. A companion trend has been the out-migration from Kentucky of a younger, educated population looking for a "better life." Perhaps the most interesting new trend is the movement of these same young people, as well as many older professionals, back from large cities to smaller communities in order to improve their quality of life, as discussed by Michael Price in Migration in Kentucky. These educated citizens will demand that their communities develop their local museums, housing options, historic buildings, public libraries, arts performances, and downtown design in order to meet their standards of quality.
Increased access to lifelong education, heritage, arts, and humanities will also be achieved through easily accessible "virtual universities," on-line public libraries, inter-active local history museums, and arts performances in the workplace. Equally important will be the trend toward "one stop shopping" which results from the increased demands on family time and increased hours devoted to work. An example is the packaging and marketing of convenient parking and dining as part of an evening out at the theater. Likewise, a community that wants to attract tourists interested in heritage and arts will package those attractions with lodging, dining and shopping.
The desire for an improved quality of life is evidenced in the Kentucky Strategic Plan for Economic Development which calls for government to "promote and develop Kentucky’s cultural and historical assets as an economic tool because Kentucky has a rich culture and history which help define the Commonwealth’s identity and quality of life."
As communities see the need to develop their cultural assets, they will include cultural planning and development in their community economic/tourism development plan. The trend toward collaborative economic and cultural planning will have an impact on local communities as well as on state government. A good example is Governor Patton’s announcement of Renaissance Kentucky, a program which seeks to improve Kentucky downtowns, large and small, by linking economic development with housing, tourism, infrastructure, urban design, and cultural development. Also recognizing this need, the Kentucky Education, Arts & Humanities Cabinet and its 13 member agencies launched a program in 1995 called the Cultural Economics Initiative. This program provided a small grant and technical assistance to 30 Kentucky communities to help them inventory and analyze their cultural/historic resources and integrate them into a larger economic development plan.
Community planning for the development of cultural assets as economic tools is of increasing importance because of other identified trends. Decreasing government and philanthropic funding for cultural institutions is creating a need for more earned income to sustain nonprofits, and more business sponsorship and marketing of events which provide exposure and good will such as education and community service. With the need to broaden the audience will come the need to offer audience-driven programming and "info-tainment," thereby requiring cultural institutions to adjust to entertaining as well as conveying content.
The education, arts and humanities community attempts to interpret the past and look to the future. As the level and accessibility of distance educational and cultural offerings increase, there will be a demand for an enhanced quality of life—the building of a community white picket fence—through more locally planned and produced education, arts, heritage, environmental, and humanities programs.
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