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Not cool, but cosy - Five perspectives on Nordic city cultural policies
... An equality ethos grounds the cultural institutions led by the CAA (c.f. Valtysson 2016). Children and young people, the elderly, national minorities, and people with a different mother tongue than Swedish are prioritised in all documents. ...
Cultural policy has seen a shift from attention to the producers of culture to consumers of culture, often called the participatory turn. Widened participation is a common argument for subsidising publicly funded arts; however, when realising participation as a policy goal, it can be fraught with tension. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of how cultural institutions resist participation. When is participation seen as problematic or undesirable, and why? How do cultural institution workers legitimise limiting participation? The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with civil servants and managers of publicly funded cultural institutions in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on rationalities of balancing values based on problematisations of participation and discourses around the institution's core mission. The respondents balance serving the public and the cultural field, popular knowledge and expert knowledge, and their professional and private roles. The article offers a model for understanding when certain balancing acts are more likely to occur than others. Ultimately, resistance towards participation relates to different ideas around the governance of culture.
... en "Cultural and Creative Cities monitor" 4 . Även i Norden finns forskning inriktade mot de stora städerna (Valtysson 2016). ...
This report seeks to explore the geographical spread of
music in Sweden during the last pre-pandemic year 2019.
Statistics from the 1980s are also presented. It was found that in
many regions there has been a reluctance to adhere to the policy
goal of providing cultural experiences for ‘all’. Rather, in some
regions there has been a clear urbanisation process that leaves
residents in many smaller towns and municipalities without ample
opportunities for musical experiences in their vicinity. Other
regions, however, manage to meet concert demand even in their
rural municipalities. This leads to large differences among the
residents of Sweden in terms of their opportunities for concert
experiences depending on which region they live in. Of course, it
is not possible to have a completely even supply. But are the huge
differences among the regions and their respective choice of
business model and their results really acceptable?
Openness is a term often found in relation with urban development projects that seek to add social value to the built environment, not least within the context of Nordic welfare cities. In this article, we explore the Oslo Opera House (OOH) as an example of contemporary Nordic architecture and interrogate its purported openness through an atmospheric lens. Our study is based on extensive fieldwork and unfolds using three interconnecting generators of atmosphere: materials, light, and movement. We argue that openness is paradoxically shaped through partial atmospheric enclosures, and further suggest that understanding the workings of atmospheres is crucial to coming to terms with how our contemporary urban spaces are produced and experienced.
This chapter discusses the concept of cultural policy in relation to digital media, digital communication and digital culture. It sets out to account for the different definitions and roles that traditionally have been ascribed to cultural policy and for some of the challenges when “the digital” enters these conceptual and definitional frameworks. When cultural policy is framed on the premises of digital media and digital communications, the notion of participation and online participatory cultures is prominent. The chapter, therefore, engages in discussion on the cultural policies of participation, and how digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Spotify facilitate and condition participative patterns and agency of citizens.
This chapter introduces the topic and structure of the book Digital Cultural Politics: From Policy to Practice. It, therefore, briefly touches upon the subject of individual chapters and further explains the narrative structure and the spatial metaphors of moving from macro perspectives, to meso perspectives, to micro perspectives; and the analytical strategy of moving from policy to practice. The two first chapters provide the foundations and explain how digital communication and digital media further relate to cultural policy, and the advantages of treating cultural policy, media policy and communication policy together, when seen from the perspective of digital cultural politics. The next three chapters provide concrete manifestations on archival politics, institutional politics and user politics; and how these can be analysed as digital cultural politics. Examples of analysis include Google Cultural Institute, Europeana, the Danish Cultural Heritage project, the Internet Archive; the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC; the British Museum, Rijksmuseum, Te Papa Tongarewa and Brooklyn Museum.
Abstract
In the article our aim is to analyse theoretically the questions:
(1) what is the relevance of institutional approach in research about cultural policy and cultural institutions, and
(2) how do modern cultural institutions change.
Cultural policy and cultural institutions cannot escape the strong mechanisms for change in their environments. The continuous urge to change and adapt to new conditions causes dynamics and instability and permanence in the institutions. Our empirical references concerning Nordic countries is twofold: On one hand, we consider cultural policy- making as an institutional formation taking place in concrete historical contexts; on the other, we refer to cultural institutions in a traditional sense. By analysing institutionalist theories, we will present reflections on what might be the contribution of this theoretical tradition to understand and explain developments in cultural policy-making and in traditional cultural institutions. We ask if the Nordic cultural policy has proven its resilience to globalization and neoliberalism in spite of the economic crisis of the 1990s. The main idea is that the concept of path dependency can be used as an explanation for cultural policy resilience.
In the analysis, one argument is that the Nordic model has been changed in a liberal direction, but changes are not significant enough to replace the original model. We argue that the Nordic model is still far less resilient towards changes that lead to a less on public funding based cultural policy towards more marked based ideas. However, after the economic crisis was over at the end of the 1990s, some of the things were changing. For example, more public funding is targeted to support instrumentalisation of art and culture to strengthen national economic competitiveness.
European countries have built cultural policy regimes, which reflect the patterns of national political histories and national cultural fields. These models consist in various ways of establishing culture as a policy domain, in the definition of cultural policy rationales, and in modes of organization and governance compatible with democratic standards. This triple specification process has never been fully achieved. It is being challenged in a way that questions these policy regimes and the notion of cultural policy they had defined.
During the last 20 yr cultural policy has become an increasingly significant component of economic and physical regeneration strategies in many West European cities. One should be careful when generalising about the evolution of urban cultural policies because of the scarcity of comparative research on this theme and the great diversity in the definitions of "culture' adopted by national and city governments. There are also differences in their ideological backgrounds, levels of financial resourcing and powers, and in the nature of relations between the public, private and voluntary sectors in Euroepan cities. Successive chapters deal with Glasgow, Rotterdam, Bilbao, Bologna, Hamburg, Montpellier, Liverpool and Rennes, with each covering historical economic, socio-cultural and political contextualisation for the experience of cultural policy making in the specific city. The introductory and concluding chapter offer a framework for evaluating the significance of cultural policy, and assessment of its impact in the various cities. -H.Clout
Introduction: Urbanizing Cultural Policy Carl Grodach and Daniel Silver Part 1: Urban Cultural Policy as an Object of Governance 1. A Different Class: Politics and Culture in London Kate Oakley 2. Chicago from the Political Machine to the Entertainment Machine Terry Nichols Clark and Daniel Silver 3. Brecht in Bogota: How Cultural Policy Transformed a Clientelist Political Culture Eleonora Pasotti 4. Notes of Discord: Urban Cultural Policy in the Confrontational City Arie Romein and Jan Jacob Trip 5. Cultural Policy and the State of Urban Development in the Capital of South Korea Jon Youl Lee and Chad Anderson Part 2: Rewriting the Creative City Script 6. Creativity and Urban Regeneration: The Role of La Tohu and the Cirque du Soleil in the Saint-Michel neighborhood in Montreal Deborah Leslie and Norma Rantisi 7. City Image and the Politics of Music Policy in the "Live Music Capital of the World" Carl Grodach 8. "To Have and To Need": Reorganizing Cultural Policy as Panacea for Berlin's Urban and Economic Woes Doreen Jakob 9. Urban Cultural Policy, City Size, and Proximity Chris Gibson and Gordon Waitt Part 3: The Implications of Urban Cultural Policy Agendas for Creative Production 10. The New Cultural Economy and its Discontents: Governance Innovation and Policy Disjuncture in Vancouver Tom Hutton and Catherine Murray 11. Creating Urban Spaces for Culture, Heritage, and the Arts in Singapore: Balancing Policy-led Development and Organic Growth Lily Kong 12. Maastricht - From Treaty Town to European Capital of Culture Graeme Evans 13. Rethinking Arts Policy and Creative Production: the case of Los Angeles Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Vivian Ho Part 4: Coalition Networks, Alliances, and Identity Framing 14. When Worlds Collide: The Politics of Cultural Economy Policy in New York Michael Indergaard 15. What's in the Fridge? Counter-mobilization in Post-industrial Urban "Cultural" Development Stephen Sawyer 16. Urban Cultural Policy in Spain: Governing the Entertainment Machine Clemente Navarro 17. Planned and Spontaneous Arts Development: Notes from Portland Samuel Shaw 18. Local Politics in the Creative City: The Case of Toronto Daniel Silver
This article considers cultural participation in relation to locality, by looking at the case of Macclesfield, a town in northwest England. It does so in the context of current arts policy, which aims to rebalance arts participation patterns across localities. Such policies are grounded in particular forms of evidence of differentiated levels of participation, which indicate the position of places within league tables and indices of activities according to the “volume and value” of arts participation and engagement. However, these obscure other cultural practices related to a different understanding of places and their on-going production. The article argues that arts initiatives predicated on situated, vernacular and sometimes ostensibly mundane practices, often excluded from formal definitions of “the arts”, can help such policies to negotiate local “structures of feeling” [Taylor, I., Evans, K., & Fraser, P. (1996). A tale of two cities – global change, local feeling and everyday life in the North of England. A study in Manchester and Sheffield. London: Routledge] and the multiple trajectories and stories of place, in order to engage those who do not usually attend or participate in the arts. It calls for a different approach to evidence, which draws on historical and relational aspects of space and place, to reveal the specificity and contingency of cultural participation for even the most “unexceptional” place – the “crap town”.
This paper develops a distinction between ‘explicit’ or ‘nominal’ cultural policies (policies that are explicitly labelled as ‘cultural’) and ‘implicit’ or ‘effective’ cultural policies (policies that are not labelled manifestly as ‘cultural’, but that work to prescribe or shape cultural attitudes and habits over given territories). It begins by defining the distinction through reference to a suggestive inconsistency located within the work of the French thinker Régis Debray. It then specifies the distinction further in relation to certain anglophone references in cultural policy studies and wider political thinking (Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole, Raymond Williams, Joseph Nye). Finally, it explores the history of laicity in France conceived initially in terms of a conflict between the implicit cultural policies of the Catholic Church and the republican State, as well as certain tensions implied by the realpolitik of laicity.
The work of Richard Florida has proven extremely influential in cultural policy circles in recent years. His arguments concerning ‘the rise of the creative class’ and the concentration of ‘technology, talent and tolerance’ in successful cities are grounded in certain theoretical assumptions and supported by specific kinds of evidence that should be submitted to critical interrogation in order to test their robustness. This paper addresses the following questions: What are the theoretical assumptions underpinning Florida’s arguments? Is the evidence upon which these arguments are substantiated sound? What are the implications of Florida’s thesis for cultural policy? A critical reading of Florida’s key writings is presented. The paper also comments on the impact of Florida’s work around the world and focuses upon a particularly significant policy document in Britain, the Work Foundation’s Staying Ahead – The Economic Performance of the UK’s Creative Industries. It is necessary to trace the intellectual framework of ‘post‐industrial’ thinking about contemporary capitalism, the incorporation of bohemianism into business and aspirations for urban regeneration and competitive advantage in a global economy with local and regional peculiarities in order to evaluate the ‘Florida thing’. The paper reflects upon the synthesis of cultural policy with economic policy and argues that this is not the best way forward for the politics of art and culture in the twenty‐first century.
I introduce my discussion on cultural policies in the Nordic countries with a brief summary of Jürgen Habermasiews on different forms of rationality and communication in the modern world, as put forward in his seminal works The Theory of Communicative Action (1987 [1981]) and "Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy" (1996 [1992]). Based on a previous study, Nordic Cultural Policy in Transition, I then suggest a model for analysing cultural policy, with special attention to the changes in Nordic attitudes in the period from 1960 to 2003. Finally, I discuss the above model in a critical light and attempt an assessment of its relevance in a Nordic context. KEYWORDS Theories of Jürgen Habermas and cultural policy, Nordic cultural policies in transition, ideas and strategies in cultural policy, instrumentalisation of arts, culture and cultural policy.
Förslag till kulturvision: Strategisk plan för kulturen i Stockholm stad
- Michel Foucault
Foucault, Michel (2002). The Archaeology of Knowledge. London & New York:
Routledge.
'Förslag till kulturvision: Strategisk plan för kulturen i Stockholm stad' (n.d.) Stockholm:
Kulturförvaltningen.
‘Cultural Policy in European Cities: an Analysis from the Cultural Agenda of Mayors
- J Navarro Clemente
- N Clark Terry
Navarro, Clemente J. & Clark, Terry N. (2012). 'Cultural Policy in European Cities:
an Analysis from the Cultural Agenda of Mayors'. European Societies, vol. 14, nr 5,
pp. 636-659.
Why Urban Cultural Polcies?
- Skot-Hansen Dorte
Skot-Hansen, Dorte (2005). 'Why Urban Cultural Polcies?'. Robinson, Jill (ed.).
EUROCULT21: Integrated Report. Helsinki: Book on Demand, Lasipalatsi Media
Centre, pp. 31-40.
The Archaeology of Knowledge
- Foucault Michel
‘Editors’ Introduction: Nordic Cultural Policy