Cultural Intermediation as the Practice of Governing

Work Package Team: Beth Perry, Saskia Warren, Karen Smith and Phil Jones

Project Continuity Day April 4th 2014University of Salford Manchester

Positioning the research

Cultural Intermediation;

a shared conceptual

space

History (WP2)

Arts-based practice approach (WP5)

Communities perspective (WP4)

Governance /contemporary(WP3)

Economic perspective(WP1)

Reflections on knowledge and methods (WP6)

International perspective (WP1)

Evaluation perspective (WP1)

Theory, policy, practice implications

Disconnections/inequalities in cultural urban economy

• From government to governance, from governance to governing• Interdisciplinary approach – an arts and humanities perspective – the

mutual myopia of governance and practice• Duality of structure and agency• De-centring the state (Bevir and Rhodes 2010): narratives, traditions and

dilemmas• A present continuous – no static map or fixed set of relationships • Yet what of enduring conditions, underlying continuities?• Disconnection between the creative city and deprived urban communities

as a result of a crisis of governance• Need for cultural intermediation to be ‘fit for purpose’ for the 21st century• ‘Will the real Creative City please stand up?’ (Chatterton 2000)

Understanding Govern*

‘Policies therefore need to attend to the challenges of governing the processes that link production and reproduction. … the field of governance of culture and creativity is critical’ (Pratt 2010) (italics added) .

We are not alone…

What did we do [1]: Baseline Assessments

What did we do [2]: Cases

Islington Mill, Salford, Ordsall. Images taken by Karen Smith.

What did we do [3]: Diary-Keeping

• Zizek’s (2006) theory of parallax view – accepting the incongruity of two perspectives but keep both in mind at the same time

• Formal and informal cultural urban ecologies?– Professionalised, elite, top-down delivery of ‘Culture’– Everyday practices, vernacular and lay understandings of ‘culture’

• BUT: does a focus on celebrating the everyday relieve those in power from the responsibility for the distributional effects of public policy?

• Interconnections and interdependencies (positive and negative); pathways • Overlooking the ‘grey spaces’

Problematising the ‘parallax view’?

“By accident, rather than design, those most deprived urban communities may continue to excluded from participating or benefiting from mainstream cultural urban policy, with the creative city existing only as ‘enclaves in an urban landscape where poverty and social deprivation still widely prevail’ (Scott, 2006)” (Perry, Warren and Smith in development).

Bundles of Practices in the ‘Grey Space’

• Revealing practices: – Overcoming the invisibility of the intermediary ‘the ghost in the machine’– The active work at the intersections between culture, economy and community– Working across boundaries and functions; making ‘prosumers’; artists as intermediaries– Multiple meanings, competences and materials (Shove 2012)– Time, subjectivities, affect, solidarity (Gill and Pratt 2008)

• Revaluing practices:– Diverse narratives, framings of the state/community– Undervalued work; issues of e(valuation)– Motivations; from the self-interested cultural entrepreneur as ‘cultural intermediary’ to

a more moral cultural economy (Banks 2006)– Practices which reinforce hegemonies as well as undermine them; preoccupations with

self-sustainability– Contemporary contexts – squeezing out; organisational uncertainty; individualisation.

Cultural Intermediation as Governing

“the use of hybrid, in between figures such as the actant or cyborg, designed to connect that which has been held apart, and there reveal the diverse urban worlds that have been edited out of contention. This work of naming has involved the invention of all manner of strange mappings, the network, the fluid, the blank figure – which pose a challenge to our conception of the conceptions of cities”

(Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4).

Conceptual Muddle or The Work of Naming?

Post-War: cultural intermediation as a political project – making communities

1980s – 2010s: cultural intermediation as economic project - neoliberal market-making

2010s: cultural intermediation as social project – making good

Can cultural intermediation – re-framed as a bundle of practices at the intersection between formal and informal cultural ecologies – contribute to the ‘re-governing’ of the creative city?

What is …….and what might be……

“It is not only another world that is possible, but another city’. (Purcell, 2008, p.1)

A new narrative for cultural intermediation?

• Diary-keeping as a shared reflexive space; method of co-producing research

• Value to participants – identity, confidence, realisation, change

• Co-constructing the analysis• Co-producing case studies? Tension between

partnership, extended ethical responsibilities and critical perspective.

Methodological Reflections

• Academic – Writing (Environment and Planning; Urban Studies; European Journal

of Cultural Studies; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research)

– Conferences (City Futures Paris; RGS London)

• Policy / practice implications• Seminars

– Local governance and the creative urban economy– Artists as cultural intermediaries

• Outside in, within and inside out – layering the cultural economy through site-specific investigations

• Informing the co-commissions – a menu of choices

Next Steps