I ONCE DEVOTED AN IRASCIBLE EDITORIAL to the peculiar, imprecise, clunky nature of the tagline Santa Fe, the City Different. I ventured that the city needed to explain itself with something better than that superannuated slogan.
Since Santa Fe Magazine started, we’ve interviewed over 500 people. I’m always struck that when asked what they love about Santa Fe, how inarticulate and approximate even the most articulate and exacting people were — as if they’re searching for a word, a vibe, a note that is just beyond their ability to explain it.
It’s not surprising, really. If you impertinently ask a person what word or bunch of words to best describe themselves, they somehow get it wrong. Sometimes we need other people, perhaps, to tell our story. Each other’s story. Our own story.
The people I’ve interviewed are complex, versatile, bubbly people who actually are the city’s DNA. It’s the alchemy of all these people in this compressed atmosphere, bumping into each other that forms the city proper.
So, I had a thought. What if, pound for pound, judged by every metric, Santa Fe was the most creative city in the country? I knew who to ask.
Peter Zandan, PhD, is not easily impressed. As co-founder and Chief Data Scientist of Quantified AI, ranked among Inc Magazine’s 500 fastest-growing AI companies in America in 2025, he’s made a career telling powerful clients, from Steve Jobs to Goldman Sachs to Martha Stewart, what the data says, not what they want to hear. So when I floated this idea over drinks, the reaction was predictable. He would often come back with data that supported the opposite.
So after a lot of back and forth, over three months, he came back with a research white paper: his answer.
The result? Well, no one was more surprised than Peter. We sat down with Peter and Maggie Fine, Santa Fe Magazine Roving Editor and co-founder of the Summer Walk Series, to hear exactly what he discovered. — OL
How did you approach this study?
Peter: I went into the project objectively. It all starts with the data. Creative cities get ranked in America. People view communities, like Austin, Texas, for instance, as the live music capital of the world. So being the creative capital of U.S. is a big deal.
So looking at the data was interesting, because pretty much every ranking for the past twenty years or more has put Santa Fe in the top ten, at worst, but sometimes number one, sometimes number ten, but it’s always in the ranking.
This last year, Santa Fe ranked #4 in the entire country in SMU DataArts’ Arts Vibrancy Index, published January 2026. This is their 10th Anniversary Edition, and for the first time they did a unified national list of the top 100 communities, regardless of size. The only places ahead of us: Jackson, Wyoming; San Francisco; and New York City. Santa Fe is also one of just 17 communities to appear in the rankings every single year for the past decade. This is the most current, rigorous ranking available, based on 13 measures of supply, demand, and government support, adjusted per capita and for cost of living.
In Santa Fe, art is not an amenity, it’s core to our economy. Forbes called Santa Fe the third-largest art market in the U.S. in February 2024, behind only New York and San Francisco. Over 250 galleries and dealers in a city of 89,000. Canyon Road alone has 80 to 100 galleries, the densest art corridor in America.
SWAIA estimates that Indian Market generates $160 million annually in revenue for artists and the community, draws 100,000+ visitors, and features 1,000+ artists from 200+ tribal nations. This figure has been confirmed by SWAIA’s executive director and financial coordinators across multiple news outlets.
Finally, Santa Fe was designated a UNESCO Creative City in Crafts and Folk Art in 2005, the first city in the United States to receive any UNESCO Creative City designation.
At the same time, I’m defining creativity in a very broad way: everything from art and jewelry making and design, to scientists and food. I’ve made the umbrella very big, and for a city of this size, nothing compares to it.
If you use the criteria of density per capita, it is without a shadow of a doubt that Santa Fe is the creative capital. If you look at mass, in New York or LA obviously there are more people in artistic professions, but they don’t have the magic that Santa Fe has.
In the white paper you use capital as place.
Peter: A capital is a place, a place for creativity. And it’s a capital city.
You also say, the Creative Capital is not just about how many artists live here. It’s about how creativity accumulates over time and becomes embedded in a place.
Peter: No other city has the creative history that Santa Fe has. You can create an arts district somewhere, you say, We’re going to do some tax incentives to encourage film companies to come and do studio work. But art in Santa Fe goes back for thousands of years with the Indigenous population. They weren’t making art to hang in galleries. It was part of their life. And that Indigenous part of our history has really carried through for the past four hundred years, for which there’s always been an appreciation.
So who can compete with four hundred years of creative effort? That’s remarkable. And I actually think if there’s something that no one can compete with us on, it is that: an ancient tradition of creating.
Maggie: It’s also the disparate influences that came through trade meeting here as well.
Peter: Yes, it’s almost like there are layers. It started with the Indigenous and it’s still here in a big way. I don’t want to ever underestimate that. But then when the Spanish arrived, they came with their crafts. Again, part of life, not gallery-type work. And when the railroad came, that really changed things because people could easily get here. Then there were Los Cinco Pintores in the ‘20s, and all of a sudden you had artists coming, not just to do art, but to live here. It was an early art colony. And it wasn’t one person. It was a group. Then there was Georgia O’Keeffe who came to live and to work here. You used to have to be in New York to be an important artist. But she could be an important artist here.
I also think IAIA is a huge contributor. It came in 1962, and they stopped looking at Indigenous art as artifacts, but saw it as contemporary creativity. And then Meow Wolf has been a huge step because it’s been considered the first truly immersive art exhibit in this country. A lot of other people are copying it, but it came from here. And it came organically; they were dumpster diving, creating art. And they were lucky George R.R. Martin showed up and gave them enough momentum to open up the House of Eternal Return.
Maybe the most interesting thing in the research is this idea of what you call creative collision. If you live in LA and hang out with a certain crowd, you’re going to meet lots of filmmakers. If you live in Chelsea on the Lower East Side, you’ll see plenty of artists. But here, it’s not one kind of creative, it’s a huge variety. And you run into cross sections of them all the time.
Peter: Yes, if you have a community of 89,000 people, that creative collision is much more likely to happen — the scale allows for that to happen. This is actually richer for this community than even the data.
And by the way, there is also nature — that’s a huge one. The light is huge. The environment. It just encourages creativity.
I think the positive response to Santa Fe Magazine is telling.
Usually, when you start something new, the normal reaction is for there to be a lot of no’s. Typically, the first thing people do is tell you why your idea is stupid.
Maggie: But this community has shown a light on the curiosity underneath this magazine and fully supported it. To me, a very simple idea got amplified by the people who lived here who contributed in every possible way. The people we interview. The advertisers. The people who subscribed. This community has pushed, encouraged, and almost made us do this. You know, we were living in upstate New York and I got this call, as people get, to go back to Santa Fe. I always made fun of it as a kid, but I got the call to come home. I was pregnant and our baby had to be born in Santa Fe. And so we found ourselves back in my hometown.
And we were inundated by this instant local connection to this city, which is very layered. I mean, this is not an easy city to pop into. Even being born and raised here, I know I’m an outsider because I’m white. If you’re white here, it’s not about you. Our story has nothing to do with the gestation that caused this city or the genesis of this city.
And the genesis really does spawn from the ancient Native American tribes, where Santa Fe, like Chaco and Pecos, is really significant because it was the place where all the tribes met. Which is incredible because all the tribes didn’t get along. The fact that there were these geographical locations where everyone would meet and trade and pray together is fascinating.
Can you talk about some of these other studies that you came across that made these calculations?
Peter: Yeah, the National Endowment for the Arts, SMU, I looked at a number of organizations that measure which communities are creative.
If people use their imaginations, this environment is very, very conducive to creativity, whether you’re a chef, an author, a designer of lowrider automobiles, an architect, a designer, a jewelry maker, or craftsman. Every maker certainly can be creative and has the capacity, but for reasons that are the intangibles here; there’s an infrastructure here which is really important, but also the intangibles encourage people to think out of the box.
Can you expand on the idea of creative collision?
Peter: Most large communities with millions of people, because of the scale, they live in silos. So the artists hang out together, the physicists hang out together, the authors hang out together. What’s interesting here — and it is probably a math issue — is that all the communities in Santa Fe bump into each other.
So you can be at a concert and all of a sudden realize that the person who you don’t know next to you is doing something very different than what you do. And if you’re both curious and interested, you can interact and become friends. Whether it’s at the farmer’s market or a restaurant — it’s very easy.
Maggie: It’s like the law of serendipity is just a go-to, like texting. We don’t even question it.
Peter: Yeah, here, because of the size, the chances of you meeting interesting people is very, very high.
Someone has actually done research on what’s the perfect size for a city for creativity. And the average size is around 100,000. If you look at Athens at its peak, and you go through the list of creative cities throughout history, one thing among the things they have in common is absolute population size over time. And I think it comes back to the very simple premise of creative collision.
If you live in a city of 100,000, it’s just enough so you don’t run into people you’re sick of. You run into people you don’t know, or sort of know. But if you live in a city of eight million, you’re unlikely to do that. If the city is too small, it doesn’t happen. Anyone who’s lived in a small town often knows that. And if you live in a big city, who knows who you’re going to run into, but it isn’t a creative collision in this way.
Maggie: The feeling of all being connected and having common traditions and running into each other, that is kind of how I grew up. But then when I went everywhere else and it wasn’t there — it’s also unique to coming back home.
But growing up here, we always would joke about it, it would always be like if you come to Santa Fe, it’s because you’re running, hiding, or healing. It’s always one of those three factors. Or all of the above.
What’s also interesting is, if you’re an actress and you go to LA, it’s because you want to make it in acting. Or if you go to New York, you’re going to make it in art or finance. But the whole thing about making it actually isn’t here. Here, it’s all about creating your art for yourself. We come here for other reasons than to make it.
Peter: There’s another thing to add to that. Technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in how we interact. And I think we’re realizing that human connection is something that’s so easy to lose in this technologically-oriented world. So human connection needs more nurturing now than ever before.
Were you surprised by your data?
Peter: I went from being a skeptic — not that we’re a creative city or creative community, but that we are the creative capital. But the more I studied it, and then also looked at it through the lens of density, which I think is probably the best lens to use, we are the Creative Capital of America. The creative collision makes it clear.
The Creative Collision is actually what the magazine is trying to do with our festival: combining this amazing, diverse creativity, people from all walks of life, taking them from the print magazine and producing this creative collision on the stage of St. John’s College.
Maggie: The festival location — St. John’s College — is right under Sun Mountain, right against the campus that was built by John Gaw Meem. Its classrooms are filled with natural light and round tables for conversations, where students study the great minds and the great works of history — this is the backdrop to what we’re doing. We’re bringing all of that vital creative energy, from ancient to now, back to life, using the magazine as a sort of scaffolding.
Peter: I think it’s important to note that Santa Fe does not aspire to be some other city. We aspire to be Santa Fe. So the more Santa Fe we cultivate, the stronger we’ll be. Because other communities are always envious of some other city, whether it’s national or global, fighting for the title of whatever they’re chasing. One of the interesting things is Santa Fe’s not chasing the title of the Creative Capital of America. It’s because we are. It is not a slogan. It is not a chamber of commerce initiative.
And I think the more we don’t take that for granted — and there are initiatives like what Santa Fe Magazine is, what the walk is, what the festival is — the higher the likelihood that we will be able to maintain one of the best attributes of Santa Fe.
But there are risks. The cost of living, for instance. It’s not radically more expensive than average America, but it is more expensive. And we have one of the oldest average ages. The average American population for cities in the country is like age 39, and we’re like 46. That’s a seven-year gap.
We skew older, and we skew more expensive. Santa Fe’s overall cost of living is about 12% above the national average. Not too bad, but lack of affordability, especially in housing, could work against us.
Maggie: Interestingly, since COVID, I have met extraordinary talents from the coasts, which I didn’t use to see — from LA, New York, San Francisco. Young people.
It’s only been since the ‘80s where we’ve really had this second home, all-retired group. But I think that’s shifting into again becoming a place where, as long as the cost of living is recognized and we don’t Airbnb everything, we actually provide housing for the people who want to come here to create things.
So as an analyst who lives here, what advice would you give to Santa Fe?
Peter: More of what we’re doing. More Santa Fe. There’s a lot of activity around making it a quantum computing hub and innovation center, and I think those will be created. They are a creative center rather than another type of center.
And I just hope that different folks who do show up and want to participate in this have the same values that have made this city what it is. So I don’t see it changing course. There’s not a strong pro-growth community here. I think people care more about depth than growth. And that makes us pretty special.
Maggie: Last year we interviewed the Abeytas, one of the oldest families here in Santa Fe. They said their biggest offense from newcomers who come to Santa Fe are people who don’t want to understand or are not curious or don’t participate in our traditions. We expect you, if you come here, to participate, to honor traditions. It’s part of what keeps our city alive.
The city has often been described as a great place to retire, a great place to visit, a great place to go skiing. It’s all those things and none of those things. The proper description of what we are and are becoming is a creative city. And to the extent we can hold on to that, embrace it, and continue to be it in the way we already are — we have enormous potential. We always ask people at the end of the interviews what makes this city so special. And to a remarkable degree, across a wide spectrum of people, none of them can quite put their finger on what it is. They’ll say the light, the place, the people. And sooner or later, they say, I don’t know, I’m not sure.
This is it. This is what makes it special. And if we do anything right, it’s to help explain this.
Peter: Maybe the biggest takeaway from the whitepaper — and the festival — is Santa Fe’s identity and how we define ourselves. Because everyone knows it’s special. We don’t quite know how it’s so special. And so this has been a forcing mechanism to see who we are.
I think the icing on this is the festival, because it’s a celebration. It’s a festival, not a conference. And it’s to celebrate, and it’s not only to recognize, but also to celebrate what we have.
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