Place and Crowdfunding: An Examination of Two Distressed Cities

Crowdfunding is a relatively new form of funding made possible by Web 2.0. This study examines community-based projects made possible through the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. Projects were compiled that were successfully funded between the dates of April 28, 2009 and July 26, 2012. These projects were collected for all cities listed on the site in the United States. Subsequently they were compared across three measures: raw numbers of projects, normalized city population, and against the creative class index of Richard Florida. Using these measures, Detroit and New Orleans emerged as cities for further in depth analysis. Interviews with initiators in these two cities were used to determine motivations that initiators had for beginning these projects in these cities. Further examination was made by overlaying locations of Kickstarter projects with demographic data from the US census. Projects were found to be occurring in lower income neighborhoods, filling voids in grantfunding and providing autonomy for Kickstarter initiators to create projects on their own terms in their communities. The types of projects occurring in neighborhoods may also be offering indications of need and of burgeoning industries in the two cities. Many studies taut the value of community involvement for the well-being of individuals, but this is one of the first to examine how people use crowdfunding to engage in their communities and how these projects are geographically distributed. In an economic downturn, grantfunding and government budgets for community projects are often cut. Crowdfunded projects can often direct opportunities for individuals to execute ideas and can be a proxy for cash strapped cities to allocate funding more efficiently.