By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

A world without art is madness. Fortunately Somerville has a thriving arts community that breathes vitality and sanity into our city. But if we don’t plan an arts and maker community into our future, we risk losing it. It can be difficult for artists to find the space they need in a small, in-demand city. That’s why we wrote incentives to support the arts and maker communities right into our proposed zoning code. Think of it as a very dull way to do something exciting—and critical.

Artists played a key role in our city’s modern success story. As others fled, artists flocked here and put their stamp on the city—and stayed. Somerville now has one of the highest concentrations of artists in the entire country. They acted like an impromptu urban revitalization program, beautifying our neighborhoods, adding flair to our city squares and infusing our community with creative energy.

Somerville has since become a city about making and doing: a place where creativity flourishes. It’s a community ethos every municipality wants and that money can’t buy. As a parent, I can’t put a price on the inspirational value of my children growing up in a place filled with people who got an idea and ran with it. Our artists and makers bring originality and fearlessness to our community. Making sure that extends on into forever is one of the highest priorities in our attempts to update the city zoning codes.

I’ll add there is some urgency here. We do not want to see a swath of development without these regulations on the books. We have spent years formulating the ideas that can ensure a bright future for our arts and creative economy. Now we need to put them in place.

One of our main proposals is that new developments in our major transformational districts like the Inner Belt, Brickbottom and Boynton Yards devote 5% of their gross floor area for arts and creative space. That way our arts community grows along with our business and residential communities. We want studio space and performance/exhibit space. Just having the provision on the books that developers need to account for the arts opens up a whole set of discussions about how they can incorporate creative and public spaces into their building designs.

Another big idea we’re trying to move forward is the expansion of what we call a Fabrication District. Rather than concentrating it one spot, we’ve identified 78 parcels of land all across the city, encompassing 27 acres that would form this “district.” It would allow for a wide range of artist and maker uses: art galleries, artisan enterprises, creative studios, a culinary incubator with shared kitchen space, a design/fabrication center with shared tools, DIY workshops, broadcast/recording studios, small-scale manufacturing. We’ve seen the shared, co-working space concept take off with the Artisan’s Asylum, the Greentown Labs tech incubator and Canopy Somerville startup accelerator. To a degree, it’s modeled on what you see at art schools, which combine classical arts with print shops and metalworking and high-tech design. The idea is to have a space where everyone’s creative juices are flowing and you can develop unexpected and game-changing synergies.

Our estimation is the Fabrication District can sustain 3,000 jobs. We also want to create a special permit for live-in studios inside that district. I won’t bore you with a recitation of the regulations around it, but the main idea is that work-live spaces are crucial for the artist and maker communities. We also have proposed zoning rules for artists to use their neighborhood residences, garages, and carriage houses as creative/studio spaces. This is the sort of thing we all get to take a peek at during open studios and the goal of the zoning here is just to make sure we’ve got our regulations around that activity up to date.

We’re also looking to foster the adaptive reuse of older buildings, like the Arts at the Armory. If an old storage or industrial site, or an old civic building, can be transformed into a creative space, we want the way to do that written into our zoning code.

Our zoning code is where we put our values into action. It’s easy to say we love our artists and makers communities, but that’s just empty words if we don’t plan for the future of those communities.

Right now we don’t have a firm plan for our arts and creative economy ensconced in our bylaws and it is one of the many things we need to address with a new zoning. If you care about these issues, get involved and make sure Somerville updates its zoning in 2016.