ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a brief outline of the era, describing it as an age of expanding culture with a trend to economic culturalisation. The qualities of our cultural era are hard to capture in any easy definitional sense, although they are often linked by commentators to over-arching phenomena such as a condition of post modernity, the growth of the information economy or culturalisation. Woven into the transformations in the understanding of culture in the period since the Second World War are the important layers of UNESCO philosophy and documents on culture, and its forms, social priorities and uses. Cultural planning has been a major trend in urban and regional planning in the last two decades, notably in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The culturisation of planning and the integration of culture into spatial planning rests heavily on a critical and normative articulation of culture within these processes.
