Cultural Preservation: How Does Culture Define a City’s Identity and Should We Care?
Setup
Cities’ identities are made and remade over time by their cultures, but is a city’s cultural identity integral to its survival? When infrastructure is crumbling, public education funding has flagged, and the world of art and culture is accessible on any device with an Internet connection, is there still a specific, irreplaceable value inherent in the cultural identity of a metropolis? And even if there is, when the issue becomes one of numbers—and specifically one of money or jobs—how are we to know what kind of attention and support that value deserves with our public and private dollars? Hear points of view from politics, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.
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