A few thoughts on culture as a 'major event'; Cities of Culture, Boroughs of Culture & the rest

It is important to recognise that these projects are far from perfect and tend to be cobbled together from multiple, competing and often contradictory agendas and assumptions.

Multiple narratives are simultaneously constructed and told (or sold), depending on who your audience is. They are of such a size with such a range of stakeholders that they literally mean something different to everyone (Which isn’t necessarily always bad thing).

Personally, I am interested in how any investment in the creation of new cultural programmes (and it is an investment) can be leveraged to effect positive change and to centre the civic role of culture as part of everyone’s everyday life.

Cultural production is an incredible tool to address social justice, representation, and equitability, it can also make life demonstrably more fun, uniquely creates both jobs and joy and is arguably the future of our economy. The cultural and creative industries in the UK now on a parity with the GVA of the construction industry and three quarters of financial services, this isn’t a nice to have, it’s an economic imperative.

Arts, culture, and creativity are things that (unlike sport, manufacturing, AI, fintech, biotech, net zero, democracy, equality etc. etc.) the UK is actually pretty good at.

The fact that the cultural and creative industries of the UK against the most trying of circumstances continue to grow is more down to the entrepreneurialism, resilience, and funnily enough creativity of the sector than any wider strategic vision. With successes often taken for granted whilst the creativity that drives these successes continues to be systematically devalued from the ground up (particularly in terms of a creative education) by successive governments.

Here lies a strange contradiction at the heart of a lot of these initiatives be that City of Culture, Borough of Culture whatever. A contradiction made up from either a wilful blindness to the positive effects that supporting a rich cultural ecosystem can have. (I’m reminded of that poster during the pandemic – the stock image of a ballet dancer with the words ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber - she just doesn’t know it yet’) or a hubris that the same creative ecosystem can pick up the slack in everything from social care and community cohesion to house prices, international positioning, and re-election.???

There is no format to these things and there shouldn’t be, everywhere is different and each project is responding to different needs.

Access to cultural experiences and opportunities are not equitably distributed, this is a class as much as it is a geography issue. There is a huge disparity in the value placed on different definitions of the word culture and phoney wars constructed to weaponize it, in some way these projects can begin to act as antidote to that.

?They are not about place-making, places are already made, they are not panacea for decades of underinvestment and neglect.? They are not the start of something or indeed the end, they are part of a much bigger process in the story of a people and place they call home. When viewed as part of a continuum, not a means to an end but as part of a process, they become far more effective, in this continuum of place there is no such thing as ‘legacy’.

As mentioned, everyone at every level of the delivery of these projects thinks they are addressing their own agenda. I have come to realise that any attempt to curate a place, no matter how good the intention, how strong the methodology of co-creation comes loaded.

Communities are experts in their own experience and need to be at the heart of decisions about how money is spent.

I am interested in addressing the balance of power in these programmes and how the noise created by the competing agendas of stakeholders is drowned out by the cacophony that tends to define the messy collation of communities that make up a particular place, this applies as much to a borough of a city as it does to an entire city or indeed the union of nations.

The implied imposition of set of stories, even asking people to align with a sense of local or national identity misses the point. Top down does not work and by flipping the power balance and dialling up this cacophony something much more interesting is uncovered.

When the stars align these can be unprecedent opportunities to effect genuine, positive change and when done right ensures that the public square becomes one of plurality and genuine representation, a place where collective futures are imagined and, through carefully engendering a sense of optimism people feel able to fall in love with where they live.

For a modest investment, this bedrock of engaged communities is how a healthy, pluralistic society can function fairly and effectively, it is also how we can remain at the forefront of creative innovation and how in my opinion how the best art is made.

Nov '23 - written as provocation for Roundtable on 'Creating the golden thread, an ambition for major events in the UK'

?

?

?