Power to the people: when culture works as a social catalyst in urban regeneration processes (and when it does not)

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.     

Cultural Capital and Place: Coles Bay and the Freycinet Peninsula,Tasmania

This paper poses the question: what is the role of cultural capital at the interface of environment, economy and society, and what other factors affect this role? A review of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital and later developments of this concept by ecological economists serves to establish the values that comprise cultural capital, and its relationship to natural capital and economic capital. These relationships are investigated through a case study of a small coastal community, Coles Bay and the Freycinet Peninsula, in Tasmania. Three study groups are identified which comprise the communities associated with this place; long‐term residents, repeat visitors and tourists making a single visit. The complexity of the relationships of people with place are revealed through an examination of the different forms of capital (social, cultural and economic) relating to the different study groups. The dynamics of the social, economic and environmental realities of Coles Bay and the Freycinet Peninsula are seen to be complex and interlinked, with the potential to provide a model for action in communities of similar character and location.     

The arts as an instrument? Notes on the controversy surrounding the value of art

In the last decade of the twentieth century a shift occurred in the way western governments defended their cultural policies. New, instrumental arguments were put forward. This collided with the way the arts had learned to see themselves in the twentieth century: autonomous, with a value of their own. This article elaborates this confrontation of the arts and policy in two ways. First, it is shown that the distinction between an instrumental and an intrinsic value of the arts originates in a misperception of recent history. It was the political constellation of the Cold War that made governments in the second half of the twentieth century support the arts to be free and independent. Next, an attempt is made to anchor the value of art in a unique kind of instrumentality. With the help of philosophers and historians of culture, it is argued that the arts should be considered instruments of experience.     

Wissenschaftsstädte – Zur Bedeutung des Topos der ‘kreativen Stadt’ für die Wissensproduktion

Science Cities: What the Concept of the Creative City Means for Knowledge Production. – The article aims to show that the relationship of science and the city has changed since the 1970s in the context of the knowledgeable society. While cities have principally been regarded as the typical space of science, of new ideas and innovation for centuries, since the 1960s and 1970s universities, research institutes as well as industrial research institutes have relocated to the periphery of cities. There, however, these sites of knowledge have been organized in an ‘urban mode’. That means that the concept of the city as a place of science and innovation has determined the architectural, spatial, and social organization of these sites on the periphery of cities. Certain features of the city have been copied, such as social infrastructures, places of communication, restaurants, cafes etc., while others have been left out – housing, cinema, theatre etc. An ‘urban mode of knowledge production’ in the sense of a very stylized model of the city has become a tool to enhance the production of scientific and technological knowledge. – The article exemplifies this by focusing on a case study, namely of the so‐called ‘Science City’ of the Siemens Company in Munich‐Neuperlach.     

Cultural icons and urban development in Asia: Economic imperative,national identity,and global city status

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in – flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.     

Dividing Societies: The Socio‐Political Spatial Implications of Restructuring in Australia

This paper reviews trends over the last two to three decades in the socio‐economic divisions in Australia, focusing on their spatial dimensions. It provides empirical evidence that our society is dividing on multiple dimensions – including shifts in industry and occupational structure, income distribution, the incidence of poverty. And it demonstrates that the differentiations across space in socio‐economic phenomena also have complex multiple dimensions, which are explained inadequately by a ‘city/bush’ dichotomy popularly espoused by politicians and reported in the media. Processes of globalisation, economic restructuring and employment shifts, and changing patterns of population movement are combining to create stark differentials between places both within the major cities as well as in regional Australia. As demonstrated by the recent One Nation phenomenon, voter backlash is strong, and it too has specific spatial characteristics.     

Breaking into the conversation: cultural value and the role of the South African National Arts Festival from apartheid to democracy

The paper examines the value of the South African National Arts Festival (NAF) in the transition to democracy using theories of cultural capital. NAF history from 1974 to 2004 is used to argue that the Festival provided an important arena for the expression of political resistance in the 1980s and, to some degree, continues to do so today. It is concluded that an important part of the value of the arts is their ability to provide a forum for debating the goals and values of society and that individualistic utility theory is not always successful in measuring such social value.     

UNIQUE ISOLATION VERSUS NETWORKS OF OPPORTUNITY: THE COMPETING DISCOURSES OF TASMANIA

In order to understand why people move, we must first try to comprehend how they understand their migration decisions and recognize that such understandings are intricately tied to their understandings of places. Place construction – the way people understand and discuss the nature and meaning of places – occurs at all levels from individual constructions to constructions by economic and political interest groups. These place constructions necessarily influence each other, and hence they are in constant flux and reflect power relations evident in society. This article examines these issues in the context of the negative net migration of young adults in the Australian state of Tasmania through an examination of the experiences of thirty young return migrants who participated in in‐depth interviews and group discussions about their experiences of migration. It finds that bounded constructions of Tasmania – which stress the physical isolation and social and political insularity of the state as well as the uniqueness of the state's environment and society – appear to be dominant for these young returned migrants. However, the article argues that these bounded constructions necessarily exist in relation to networked constructions, which focus on the opportunities for people, ideas, goods and money to benefit through connections with other places as well as the loss of the uniqueness of the Tasmanian environment and society. This article concludes with a discussion of the political, economic and social consequences of these different forms of place construction.     

布尔迪厄的文化资本理论在旅游规划中的应用

伴随着后现代主义的到来,以符号和影像为主的消费文化成为了社会消费的主导。因此,旅游业的发展与规划既需要满足消费需求,又要尊重消费文化。本文中我们试图从布迪厄的文化资本理论的三个方面:文化能力、文化产品、文化制度的角度分析旅游文化资本,希望以此推动旅游文化资本在旅游规划中的运用。     

A HISTORIC NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ARTS SPACE: THE LITTLE INDIA EXPERIENCE

Many cities around the world are redeveloping their neighbourhoods as arts and cultural precincts. Urban industrial zones and lower‐income residential areas have taken on new life as arts neighbourhoods in a bid to attract high‐yield visitors, propel their creative industry and brand themselves as attractive to investors and residents. This article has two aims. Conceptually it explores the notion of arts urbanization – the creation of arts spaces in cities and the socio‐spatial dynamics which they embody. Empirically, the concept is tested using the case of Singapore's Arts Housing Scheme. Under this scheme, historic ethnic precincts take on new roles as arts and creative belts. While the scheme has yielded some success by way of fostering spaces of identity and inspiration for artists, it has also generated social concerns and spatial challenges. Singapore's Little India offers an empirical setting to explore this concept. The paper argues that geography matters to the arts and that arts‐led urbanization creates distinct spatial configurations in cities. For this reason, a greater understanding of and research into arts neighbourhoods and their socio‐spatial dynamics are essential if we are to aspire to sustainable and sensitive development of cities and their creative communities.     

Untangling creativity and art for policy purposes: ethnographic insights on Manchester International Festival and Manchester Day Parade

This paper draws on anthropological fieldwork of a civic parade in Manchester from 2010 to 2012 to argue for engaging with creativity as a process rather than an attribute of a particular sector or individual. It shows how the focus on funding and supporting ‘creative industries’ defined as ‘cinema, television, music, literature, performing arts, heritage and related areas’ actually excludes and diminishes the potential for others to engage with ideas and creative processes. Two major events in Manchester’s cultural calendar – Procession by artist Jeremy Deller, produced by Manchester International Festival and Manchester Day Parade, a council-led civic celebration – both combined community groups with artist input to put large-scale structures and people on the city’s streets. In this ethnographic analysis, I argue that the ‘creativity’ sought from these artists is their adaptive and productive approach to making ideas tangible. By focusing on creativity as a process rather than a character trait, there is even greater potential for stimulating a ‘creative’ city.     

Redefining ‘sub‐culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East‐Central Europe with a case study from early 20th century L'viv‐Lwów‐Lemberg

This paper proposes a new definition of the term ‘subculture’, as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East‐Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now‐Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state – either from the ‘top down’, or else the ‘bottom up’ as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno‐linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term ‘subcultures’ to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg (German) or Lwów (Polish). It argues that Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence – in particular, court records – is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating ‘hybrid’ identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio‐political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19–65; King 2002; Zahra 2008).     

Nature,Capital and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?

Abstract: The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi‐national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved—land, labor and money—and the always‐uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.     

Going ‘mainstream’: evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more ‘mainstream’, MAV has increasingly adopted market‐based rationales for its work – particularly the use of ‘audience development’ policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to ‘cultural development’ goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage’s analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV’s other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.     

LABOUR AND LANDSCAPES: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LANDESQUE CAPITAL IN NINETEENTH CENTURY TANGANYIKA

In a long‐term and global perspective irrigated and terraced landscapes, landesque capital, have often been assumed to be closely associated with hierarchical political systems. However, research is accumulating that shows how kinship‐based societies (including small chiefdoms) have also been responsible for constructing landesque capital without population pressure. We examine the political economy of landesque capital through the intersections of decentralized politics and regional economies. A crucial question guiding our research is why some kinship‐based societies chose to invest their labour in landesque capital while others did not. Our analysis is based on a detailed examination of four relatively densely populated communities in late pre‐colonial and early colonial Tanzania. By analysing labour processes as contingent and separate from political types of generalized economic systems over time we can identify the causal factors that direct labour and thus landscape formation as a process. The general conclusion of our investigation is that landesque investments occurred in cases where agriculture was the main source of long‐term wealth flow irrespective of whether or not hierarchical political systems were present. However, while this factor may be a necessary condition it is not a sufficient cause. In the cases we examined, the configurations of world‐systems connections and local social and economic circumstances combined to either produce investments in landesque capital or to pursue short‐term strategies of extraction.     

Arts practitioners in the cultural policy process: spear-carriers or speaking parts?

This paper considers the argument that arts practitioners are rarely acknowledged by cultural policy researchers as being more than marginally involved in policy-making. Drawing on public policy analysis which pays attention to a breadth of policy actors, and on the concept of civil society, the paper examines whether these approaches can help to better investigate and understand the role of arts practitioners in the policy process. It discusses this subject in relation to cultural policy in general and in the specific arena of British arts policy, focusing on original case-study research of playwrights’ organisations and playwriting policy. The case-study evidence demonstrates that arts practitioners – through involvement in policy debate and implementation, and their own initiatives and activities – are frequently engaged in the policy process and thus more broadly in the democratic public domain. Understanding of cultural policy development is therefore considerably weakened if the role of practitioners is ignored.     

社会资本影响区域经济增长的机理:基于"织网"模型的分析

社会资本对区域经济增长的影响是通过对区内企业、产业集群及区域整体等三个不同主体的影响发挥作用的。在企业由传统成长模式向网络化成长模式转变,产业集群由聚集经济向创新网络转变,区域由空闻结构向网络社会转变的过程中,社会网络及内含资源起着决定性作用。社会资本对三者的作用体现空间上的层次递进特征,即依循企业、集群、区域三个不同主体网络化递进发展的“织网模型”,依次由“发散状企业网络”向“经纬状集群网络”再向“多构面区域网络”发展的织网过程。社会资本及社会网络对企业的作用是摄取关键资源、信息等;对产业集群的影响是建立学习与创新机制、成本节约机制、形成合作竞争氛围;而对区域的积极意义是保持区域良好的信任文化。     

The participation myth

Policy rhetoric around strategies to and the value of increasing participation in the arts has been well documented internationally over more than a decade. But in the UK, which is the focus for this article, targets to increase participation have been consistently missed and there remains a direct correlation between those taking part in cultural activity and their socio-economic status. The starting point for this article is to examine the barriers to increasing participation in the arts and question the way that such policy has been implemented within the English context, which may have relevance for policy-making in other countries. What is demonstrated is that policy implementation is influenced by vested interest of those in receipt of funding and that a narrow range of voices, from a powerful cultural elite, are involved in the decision-making in the arts. The article makes a case for widening the range of voices heard in decision-making in order to support both artistic practice and public engagement.     

Funding the ‘nation’ in the national theatre of Scotland

The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) is a an innovative and ground‐breaking, non‐building‐based, commissioning and producing cultural institution, established in the wake of the devolution of the Scottish Parliament. This article sketches the contours of this new model of a national theatre, exploring the complex dialectic between various economic, political, social and artistic choices, forces and factors that have influenced, and continue to influence, the formative years of the NTS. The article charts changes to the company during these early years and, most significantly, notes the potential effect that the change from arm’s length to direct government funding might have on the company’s long‐term development. It is argued that direct funding aligns the arts too closely to political agendas rather than supporting artistic freedom and expression.