Ann Markusen on data and place making

Ann Markusen has a new blog entry entitled "Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative Placemaking Success", a review that she suggests:

has applicabiliity to the demand for outcomes measures of many of the types of interventions we do in planning. The blog explores the need for evaluation, the challenge of defining outcomes, conceptual problems with indicators being considered by ArtPlace and the National Endowment for the Arts for their creative placemaking projects, the absence of arts and cultural outcome measures, data and statistical reliability challenges, poor fit between indicators and hoped-for changes from a particular project over time, and political pressures for and dangers of relying on indicators  generated from secondary data sources with little relationship to particular project locations and aspirations.

It should be valuable for all policy makers dealing with "dirty data".