The Impacts of Public Art on Cities, Places and People’s Lives

Working with Griffith University, UAP co-authored an article for The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society on ‘The Impacts of Public Art on Cities, Places and People’s Lives. Through a synthesis of academic articles from international journals, this research identifies public art’s impacts, using categories that include placemaking, society, culture, economy, sustainability, wellbeing, wisdom, and innovation. This systematic review of 839 academic studies over 1960‐2020 identifies the impacts of public art on cities, places, and people’s lives.

This comprehensive study of published material allows for recommendations toward future research on the impacts and evaluation of public art. Defined as art for the public, located in accessible locations outside traditional museums and galleries, our research focuses on its potential benefits and the way in which they have been quantified to date.

Public art’s accessibility to a broad audience and its potential to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds have granted it a unique power to make strong, enduring impacts on cities, places and people’s lives. The impacts warrant a systematic review and categorization, the results of which will provide insights that contribute to justifying the integral place of public art in society. As no such systematic review has previously been carried out, this article seeks to provide a qualitative synthesis of original articles selected from four major databases of international journals using a combination of keyword searches and filtering procedures. The articles retrieved from the initial searches were screened by title and abstract. The remaining 132 articles were read in full, with 50 studies eventually being selected for analysis and synthesis. The public art impacts identified were organized into eight categories, in terms of placemaking, society, culture, economy, sustainability, wellbeing, wisdom and innovation. Implications were then drawn with respect to future research on the impacts and evaluation of public art.

This feature was excerpted from the article What is the Value of Public Art?, produced by UAP as part of their Public Art 360 initiative. You can read the full article here.

Click Here to read the full publication, ‘The Impacts of Public Art on Cities, Places and People’s Lives’ from The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society.