MADE BY MANY: Who Builds a City
**This column originally appeared in our February 2026 issue**
Every city depends on a workforce that designs its spaces, tells its stories, builds its experiences, and shapes how people feel about being there. We often call this the “creative economy,” but that phrase hides the scale and importance of what it actually is. It sounds like a niche. A scene. A vibe. In reality, it is one of the largest, fastest-growing, and most influential systems in modern urban life.
It is the artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and writers who translate feeling into form. The producers, curators, organizers, and educators who turn ideas into institutions and moments into memory. The architects, planners, and placemakers who decide how bodies move and gather. Media makers, brand builders, UX designers, and immersive storytellers who shape how a city is seen and remembered. The entrepreneurs and operators who build the platforms and systems that allow creative work to scale, circulate, and endure.
These are the people who create the conditions for belonging, imagination, and connection — the social and emotional operating system of a place.
Nationally, the scale of this system is not theoretical. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts, arts and cultural production contributes over $1.2 trillion annually to the U.S. economy — roughly 4% of GDP (BEA & NEA, Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, 2023). U.S. media and entertainment alone accounts for roughly $649 billion and 23% of the global market (U.S. Department of Commerce, Trade.gov).
In plain terms: one out of every twenty dollars in this country is generated by work rooted in culture, design, media, and creative services. That now rivals agriculture and approaches the scale of construction (Arts & Culture: ~$1.2T, BEA; Agriculture: ~$1.3T, USDA; Construction: ~$1.9T, U.S. Census Bureau).
This sector supports over five million jobs nationwide (BEA, 2023) and is growing faster than the overall economy. In recent years, creative industries have expanded at nearly twice the pace of national GDP growth (BEA Arts & Cultural Production Satellite Account).
Translation: while much of the economy inches forward, the systems that produce story, experience, design, and meaning are accelerating.
This is not just a coastal phenomenon. Here in New York’s Capital Region, nearly 47,000 people work in creative industries, generating over $1.4 billion in annual earnings (Alliance for the Creative Economy, 2024). Creative fields rank among the region’s largest employment sectors, rivaling manufacturing and surpassing finance in some counties. More than half of this workforce is freelance or self-employed — a higher share than in New York City or Boston — meaning the region’s cultural engine runs on independent labor and small enterprises (ACE, 2024).
In other words: this is not a hobby class.
It is a labor force.
A growth driver.
A talent magnet.
Globally, cultural and creative industries employ nearly 30 million people and generate more than $2 trillion in revenue (UNESCO, 2022). The International Labour Organization notes that creative and platform-based work is among the fastest-growing segments of the global labor market, particularly among young, highly-educated, mobile workers (ILO, 2023).
What this means, in practice, is that culture is not an accessory to development. It is often its precondition. Culture is how trust forms before contracts are signed. Story is how a city introduces itself to the world. Events are civic rituals, moments when strangers become a public. Music, food, film, and performance are how people learn to feel together.
Long before a development prospectus is written, the question of whether a place is alive or merely occupied is answered by whether people are gathering, creating, and imagining there. Creative labor is the early-warning system of urban health. When it flourishes, possibility expands. When it is squeezed, a city may still grow in square footage, but it hollows out in spirit.
At the national and global level, this is increasingly understood. Culture is modeled as an attractor, a risk-reducer, a value-multiplier. Locally, however, it is still too often treated as atmosphere rather than infrastructure — celebrated in language, but not stabilized in policy, capital, or planning. One early signal of change is Albany’s new mayor, Dr. Dorcey Applyrs, whose first executive action established an Advisory Council on the Nightlife Economy, a step toward recognizing creative and entertainment work as part of the city’s economic infrastructure.
I have spent much of my adult life inside this gap — building, organizing, producing, and learning alongside people who make places feel like places. I have seen how quickly a city can become “hot,” and how slowly its systems adapt to protect the people who generated that heat.
We talk about growth as if it comes from capital alone. We talk about cities as if they are shaped only by policy and construction. But buildings without life are shells and reputation precedes return.
What gives a city its life, its magnetism and its future is the work of people whose labor is often fragmented and undervalued — even though everything we love about a place is built through their collective effort. It rises by their imagination, care, labor, & risk. By people who make meaning before markets and create life before value is assigned.
Because culture is Made By Many — and the fate of a city is written in what it does for, and to, the people who make it.
Have you made something here in the 518? I want to hear your story. Your experiences will help shape what comes next. You can reach me at patrickharris@themetroland.com.