This book emerged from the distinctive scenes around the University of Chicago, which facilitates wide-ranging and open-ended intellectual collaborations, friendships, and explorations. Our own scene centered on weekly Wednesday evening meetings for nearly a decade. Multiple cohorts of talented visitors, postdocs, undergraduates, and graduate students have been regular participants, physically and via Skype.
Scenescapes is emphatically a collective product of the “scenius” of these meetings. Certain individuals have nevertheless offered key support that we acknowledge. Larry Rothfield was a leader in the project’s initial formulation when he was faculty director of the Cultural Policy Center. Clemente Navarro helped refine the theory and develop methods for analyzing scenes. He has been a constant partner in developing scenes analyses in new and exciting directions with his research teams in Spain.
The number of students and assistants who have contributed to the research behind Scenescapes is too long to list, though we are deeply grateful to all. Some 10–15 assistants each year for almost a decade helped assemble, check, double-check, and analyze the scenes database. Some stood out in leadership roles. Sam Braxton and Eric Rodgers led in consolidating our ever-evolving merge files and in helping with initial hypotheses. Chris Graziul was a constant resource on methods and analyses. Meghan Kallman and Whitney Johnson coordinated many tasks. Jessica Gover provided crucial support in preparing the manuscript.
International scenes project collaborators include for Canada, Diana Miller and Matt Patterson; for France, Stephen Sawyer; for Spain, Clemente J. Navarro Yáñez; for South Korea, Chad Anderson, Miree Byun, Wonho Jang, Seokho Kim, and Jong Youl Lee; for Japan, Yoshiaki Kobayashi, Chihiro Shimizu, and Shinya Yasumoto; for Poland, Marta Klekotko and Magda Kubecka; and for China, Di Wu, Jefferson Mao, Cary Wu, and Rui Lin.
Financial support was generously provided by the Cultural Policy Center, Urban Network, University of Chicago, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), and University of Toronto; and financial support to the international scenes collaborators came from many other sources, especially the cities of Paris and Seoul, as well as the National Research Framework (Spain), Polish Ministry of Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs.
We benefited from conversations and feedback from friends and colleagues, often at meetings and workshops where we presented drafts of chapters, such as the International Sociological Association, American Sociological Association, American Political Science Association, Social Science History Association, Midwest Political Science Association, European Sociological Association, European Urban Research Association, International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts, and University of Chicago Urban Forums’ “Modeling Local Area Processes.” We are especially grateful to those who read and commented on earlier drafts of the chapters (or their forerunners): Stephen Sawyer, Erik Schneiderhan, Diana Miller, Matt Patterson, John Paul Rollert, Clemente Navarro, Jon Baskin, Bill Daniels, Terry Nicholson, Elena Bird, Ilana Ventura, Filipe Silva, Forest Gregg, and three anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press.
Anita Silver read every sentence of the manuscript word by word, subjecting it to an exacting Mom Test that issued the final verdict on readability and comprehensibility. We thank her for this and more.
Some portions of this book draw from or adapt previously published work, which we acknowledge here:
Silver, Daniel, Terry Nichols Clark, and Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez. “Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency.” Social Forces 88 (July 2010): 2293–2324.
Silver, Daniel. “The American Scenescape: Amenities, Scenes and the Qualities of Local Life.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (2012): 97–114.
Silver, Daniel, and Terry Nichols Clark. “The Power of Scenes: Quantities of Amenities and Qualities of Places.” Cultural Studies 29, no. 3 (2015): 425–49.
Silver, Daniel, and Terry Nichols Clark. “Buzz as an Urban Resource.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 1 (2013): 1–32.
Silver, Daniel, and Diana Miller. “Contextualizing the Artistic Dividend.” Journal of Urban Affairs 35, no. 5 (2013): 591–606.