ABSTRACT
Before modern town and city planning, as distinct from building planning and regulation, became formalised in the period before the post-War reconstruction era, the nature and location of arts facilities had derived from early city design and prevailing social and economic systems. The degree to which, on the one hand, a natural diversity is evident in cultural activity and city development, or whether according to Hall (1977) and Cheshire and Hay (1989) ‘convergent development theory’ places urban societies at differing points in an inevitable, linear path towards industrial urbanisation; suburbanisation, post-industrialisation and finally, globalised states, as Burtenshaw et al. observe: ‘this distinctiveness is a result of the variety of historical experiences which have contributed to the physical fabric in which citizens live, work and play’ (1991:1). As power over development, land-use and public culture shifts amongst Crown, Church, merchant/patron and putative ‘state’, dispersing horizontally (e.g. amongst the same class/groups-aristocracy,1 guilds), vertically (e.g. devolution, subsidiarity), and finally democratically, in an increasingly urbanised and secular society the notion of public and private also gains importance in terms of both the cultural economy, ‘market’ and cultural democracy (i.e. ‘identity’, ‘rights’). As Wall, writing on Restoration London for instance, observes: ‘The emphasis on the urban in eighteenth-century literature charts the intersecting boundaries of public and private interests, commercial and recreational space, domestic trade and domestic life’ (1998:150). As such power is redistributed not only as a result of periodic ruptures such as political, revolutionary and nation-state movements, but also particularly in proportion to population growth and city expansion, cultural equity and planning imperatives intensify. The separation and tensions between the polity and the political economy are therefore a growing feature of cultural policy and practice, and therefore of the planning for culture in emerging industrial cities.
