ABSTRACT
Governments-local and national-have been interfering in culture for ages. Pharaohs,
kings, emperors, dictators, and democratically elected governments have used culture to
impress people. In that sense, cultural planning is nothing new under the sun. A closer
look at means and ends of cultural planning, however, does reveal salient differences
and shifts over time. Cultural planning, to use a rather recent definition, is “. . . the strategic
and integrated planning and use of cultural resources in urban and community develop-
ment” (Mercer, 2006, p. 6). Cultural planning has not only differed over time, but also
across places. The differences in the institutional embeddedness of cultural planning in
the US and many European countries are obvious with much larger role for the state in
the latter than in the former. There are also significant differences between European
countries; the French state-centred approach is quite different from the more private-
sector approach in the UK (Sassoon, 2006). Below, we offer a helicopter view which
neglects these differences. Instead, we focus on the more general changes in the wider con-
figuration of cultural planning after the SecondWorld War. Point of departure for our brief
sketch of the key developments is the overview of urban planning strategies offered by
Evans and Foord (2008, p. 71) and we distinguish four phases.
