ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have demonstrated how important topics in cultural policy reflect both the problems of doing public policy in modernity and the role of social science in constructing areas of policy that are the subject of those problems. Participation and work have an undeniably social aspect, as culture is, in the definition given by Raymond Williams (2010), a shared activity. Participation and work also have individual aspects, on the level of the experience and lived reality of the individual, but also on the level of debates over the individualisation thesis. The present and following chapters turn now to activities that are reflective of the social aspects of cultural policy concerned with local politics and national institutions. The discussion in this chapter is of cultural policy in the urban setting, specifically concerned with the role of cultural policy in urban regeneration, using the city as a site in which the same themes from previous chapters play out. Chapter 6 then turns to concentrate on the role of ideas in institutions, looking at how aspects of the cultural value debate reflect a broader narrative around public value.
