When the University of the Arts closed in June 2024, Philadelphia lost more than a campus.
Nearly two years later, the effects of that loss are still unfolding across classrooms, studios, neighborhoods, and the city’s cultural economy. The closure revealed a deeper question that now confronts Philadelphia and cities like it: How does a city sustain its creative life when the arts institutions that support community disappear?
That question is especially urgent in Philadelphia, where the arts are foundational, not peripheral. Even as cultural institutions nationwide face rising costs, shifting attendance, and post-pandemic uncertainty, Philadelphia is reimagining how creativity lives in public space. A recently announced effort to remake the Avenue of the Arts envisions a greener, more walkable corridor with expanded opportunities for public art and performance, signaling a civic commitment to creativity as part of everyday urban life.
But streetscapes alone do not sustain an arts ecosystem. Cities also need anchor institutions with long-term public missions — institutions that can provide continuity, access, and stability when the cultural landscape shifts. In moments like this, responsibility does not fall to artists alone, but to public institutions with the scale and mission to provide continuity when others cannot.
Model of public purpose
Public universities play a distinctive role in that system.
At Temple University, arts education has been central to the institution’s mission for over a century. Long before today’s conversations about creative economies and cultural infrastructure, Temple embedded the arts into its public purpose, linking rigorous artistic training with teaching, community engagement, and access. That model has helped sustain Philadelphia’s creative life across generations.
This public mission extends across Temple’s visual, performing, and media arts. The Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts (CPCA), home to the Boyer College of Music and Dance and the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts, carries forward Temple’s long-standing legacy of innovation, access, and civic engagement.
Cities do not mark historic milestones through monuments alone, but through the living cultural institutions that carry civic memory forward.
Early Tyler School of Art and Architecture graduates earned degrees in both art and education, and went on to teach in Philadelphia’s public schools, reinforcing a reciprocal relationship between the community and the institution that continues to expand access to the arts today.
More than 15,000 Temple arts alumni live and work in Philadelphia, teaching, curating, leading cultural organizations, and creating spaces where art extends beyond traditional venues. Their impact is felt not only in galleries and theaters, but also in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, where creative practice supports physical and emotional well-being.
It also reaches communities across the city through programs such as Temple Music Prep, which offers Philadelphians of all ages opportunities for arts education, including its Community Music Scholars Program, which has been delivering subsidized, high-quality music instruction to Philadelphia’s schoolchildren since 1968.
In moments of disruption, continuity matters. One defining characteristic of public universities is their ability — and responsibility — to think in decades, not semesters. As Philadelphia approaches the nation’s Semiquincentennial, that long view matters more than ever. Cities do not mark historic milestones through monuments alone, but through the living cultural institutions that carry civic memory forward.
That long view is shaping Temple’s current investments in Philadelphia’s creative future.
Repurposing Terra Hall
The stewardship of Terra Hall, a historic arts facility on the Avenue of the Arts, establishes a permanent educational presence in Center City for Temple. Importantly, along with arts and educational spaces, it will be a place of community convening. It will house programs in dance, music technology, architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, and environmental design, fields that shape how cities grow and function.
Terra Hall will be a place where innovation and partnerships are born that will fuel our city and our arts community. Keystone institutions such as Temple help stabilize the future of the arts, but transformative partnerships across industry, the arts, and education build lasting sustainability.
Strategic partnerships such as the formalized collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts enhance experiential educational opportunities for all ages and strengthen Philadelphia’s arts and creative ecosystem. That partnership also means these organizations will no longer pursue building an additional education wing at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts that had been in the early planning stages.
Coordination between Temple’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is strengthening Philadelphia’s art ecosystem. Their joint programming — including a critic-in-residence initiative, expanded academic opportunities, and studio space for Master of Fine Arts graduates — enriches both student education and public engagement. At the same time, construction is underway on the Caroline Kimmel Pavilion for Arts and Communication on North Broad Street, reinforcing that corridor as a center for cultural and creative life.
None of this replaces what was lost with the University of the Arts. That loss is real, and its consequences continue to shape Philadelphia’s cultural landscape. But it underscores a larger truth: Cities need institutions with public missions that can provide stability, access, and continuity when cultural conditions change.
As Philadelphia looks ahead, reimagining its public spaces, cultural corridors, and creative economy, our challenge is not simply to preserve what exists, but to expand opportunity for artists, students, and communities across the city.
The arts have long been one of Philadelphia’s greatest strengths. Ensuring they continue to thrive requires long-term commitment, shared responsibility, and institutions prepared to serve the public good.
Susan E. Cahan is dean of Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Robert T. Stroker is the Joslyn G. Ewart dean of the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts and vice provost for the arts at Temple.