ABSTRACT
Cultural policy is carried out at all levels of government, from supranational bodies such as the United Nations to local and neighbourhood levels. But perhaps the prime site of cultural policy development in the past thirty years or more has been the city. This chapter examines why that might be the case, the variety of ways in which cities develop and implement cultural policy, and the lessons we can learn from what is now an international body of research in urban cultural policy. The first question to ask may seem an odd one: what is a city? Is it
what many of us refer to as the ‘city centre’, the place where concert halls and museums, nightclubs and cinemas are often concentrated? Or is it the particular neighbourhoods of a city, which might have their own distinct cultural scenes? Is it where we live or where we work? Does it include suburbs or small towns, or is it just a few select centres with a strong cultural brand? The question matters both for research and for policymakers. It
is fair to say that, until recently, the majority of academic research on cultural policy for the city concentrated on large urban centres, particularly on what are sometimes termed ‘World Cities’ (Sassen 2006). This might be observed in a particularly magisterial way
in Peter Hall’s 1998 tome, Cities in Civilisation, in which he makes a grand, historic sweep of cities from ancient Athens to modern-day Los Angeles to seek to uncover the connection between cities, human creativity and innovation. Cities, he argues, are the motors of such creativity and innovation, and the reason they are is not just due to size, wealth or political power – though all that matters – but because they are open: open to new ideas, open to immigrants, open to different ways of life. It is this that he uses to answer his own, rather provocative question: ‘why should the creative flame burn so especially, so uniquely, in cities and not in the countryside’ (Hall 1998: 3)? A number of contemporary writers would wish to take issue
with this, and there has been recent growth in literature that looks at culture beyond the city: in suburbs, small towns and rural areas (Bell 2014; Bell and Jayne 2010; Luckman 2012; Thomas et al. 2013; Waitt and Gibson 2009). In part this results from what is seen as an over-concentration in cultural policy on a particular urban model, and concern that this marginalises too many communities and too many kinds of cultural activity, while valorising others. Some of the problems of urban cultural policy with which this chapter will deal, in particular the association between cultural developments and gentrification, seem to be worse in larger cities. In particular, there is growing evidence that larger cities are associated with greater levels of social inequality than smaller ones, particularly given housing cost pressures (Stolarick and Currid-Halkett 2013), and this has implications for artists and cultural producers of all sorts. In addition (and obviously), cities are enormously heterogeneous
spaces; difficult to summarise in one or two lines, despite the best efforts of the city-branding agencies. As emerges in our discussion of the nation (see Chapter 5), cities are imagined communities, narrating themselves in particular ways. Nichols Clark and Silver (2013: 28) give the example of Chicago, ‘transforming its blue collar and localist heritage’ into one that stresses public goods such as arts, entertainment and the heritage of its built environment. But such transformations can only ever be partial. As we shall see in this chapter; the city is also the site of conflict in cultural terms. Debates over identity, land and expression are often played
out with particular ferocity on the urban stage, and many of the most contentious issues of cultural policy are urban in nature.
