Regional planners and state arts agency say mapping cultural districts will improve planning and visibility

Annis Sengupta, director of arts and culture at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, opened a panel on using geographic information systems to integrate arts and culture into planning and decision-making.

"GIS is one of the most powerful tools we have to support cities and towns in achieving greater information transparency and access," said Stephen Larrick, manager of digital services at MAPC, who outlined how spatial data can improve asset management and service delivery and visualize current conditions for future planning.

Claudia Serrasuela, Arts and Cultural Planning Director for the City of Cambridge, demonstrated the city’s cultural infrastructure GIS and said mapping cultural resources reveals patterns and disparities across neighborhoods. "Mapping data allows us to visualize cultural resources in a way that reveals patterns, relationships, and opportunities that are not obvious on the ground," Serrasuela said. She showed how attribute tables — the names of organizations, type of space, addresses, neighborhoods and disciplines — let planners layer historic sites, public art and demographics to evaluate proposed development sites and advise developers.

Carolyn Cole of the Mass Cultural Council described a year-long redesign of the cultural districts initiative and said one of the clearest takeaways from communities was visibility. "Without being formally mapped and adopted locally, they felt completely invisible," Cole said, arguing that embedding district boundaries in municipal GIS helps districts carry weight in local decision-making and qualifying for state grant programs.

Panelists said state agencies are interested in having district layers in Mass GIS so they can check overlaps with protected lands, environmental-justice areas, transportation and other investments, which could reveal opportunities for partnership or targeted funding.

As part of that work, the Mass Cultural Council told the panel that district designations submitted through its application process this year will lead to the inclusion of cultural-district boundaries and asset data in a statewide dataset to be published by Mass GIS. The presenters said that dataset will be publicly accessible and available for communities and agencies to use in analysis and advocacy.

The panel emphasized that modern GIS workflows can be built with simple tools — surveys, spreadsheets or interactive web maps — and do not require specialized degrees, making the approach accessible to cultural districts and community groups. The session closed with presenters encouraging participants to begin collecting and standardizing cultural-asset data for inclusion in local and statewide GIS layers.