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Cultures of Sustainability and the European Capitals of Culture by Oleg Koefoed

Brief background sketch prior to meeting in Berlin – DRAFT OF DRAFT – May 12th 2011

 

This note is mainly about the thoughts around how the concept of cultures of sustainability can be connected and combined into the practices of European Capitals of Culture. A second note is being developed sketching actually the more practical ideas on how an action-research/action-philosophical project revolving around this possible relation might look; here, I have only just drawn some questions that might be interesting to pursue, without being very specific about how this could be done in practice.

On Cultures of sustainability

The bold opening could be to say: can there be life-enhancing, creativity-serving, emergence-oriented practices in cities becoming ECoC title holders – and can these practices lead to a deeper understanding of the importance of central concepts such as complexity, sustensivity, and resilience/transformation, in the context of a learning ecology of culture in the city? And even more bold: can we enhance it, push it further, be part of the transformation; this latter is a point I will talk about Tuesday afternoon.

A more careful, almost structural point of departure is to look at the different dimensions of sustainability and to connect these to culture as seen in the ECOC city. Sustainability, as we know, is often seen from quite different angles if you consider it from an economic, environmental, social, or cultural perspective (I lately experimented with the idea of a political sustainability also). It seems that the definitions of sustainability tend to change along with the dimensions, so let's have a quick look at the most common definitions (let me underline that this is an exercise to think with, not a claim that the world / reality is divided into these dimensions, although they do have a tendency to being compartmentalised in modern science etc):

Environmental sustainability is normally considered from the definition also found in the Brundtland report: not compromising the needs of future generations while letting the current generation fulfill theirs. In this case, sustainability is about making possibilities in the future while living the possible today. This should then be linked to studies of resilience and transformation, mainly, in which more focus is placed on the dynamic quasi-equilibrium in the interrelation between the system and the world it lives in. The ”future generations” remains, however, as a necessary element in understanding sustainabilities.

Economic sustainability is an issue that encompasses a whole range of positions, as economic theory (and practice) has been challenged in the last decades by a.o. a feeling of need to think more in the direction of sustainability. Newer strands thus include a perpective upon economics that thinks about providing sufficient wealth to some or all humans (meaning, economic development - and leaving open, which development... and which wealth...). Here, there is an important gap between the economics of sustainability and economic theory and practice with a point of departure in neo-classical economic theory or even in neo-institutionalism (which are still the most dominant paradigms in business), mostly used to describe an entity's ability to stay alive in a way which is based on free market powers, rather than through subsidies. Here, in other words, it's about survival of the entity, rather than about sharing. About durability, rather than sustainability. This can, of course, still be seen from the perspective of sharing and creating possibilities, if these options are defined as the basis for being able to survive economically. New currents are also flowing in terms of economics of complexity, for instance, in which evolution, complexity, and sustainability are taken into account as base for thinking and acting economically.

The social dimension may be the one that would be most likely to take a perspective of dynamic balance, given that the issues of equality and inclusion are central at this point. Social sustainability thus, is about including marginalized groups, creating better possibilities for all members of a socio-ecological system, and about creating a system in which the dynamic organisation of structure seeks to take into account both the existing and the future generations. It might be worth taking into account here the issue of future vs emerging, i.e. in relation to generations. Sustainability raises this question and the answer to is one of huge ethical importance: what is done in the present affects both existing, emerging, and coming members of the socio-ecological system. If we leave behind the perspective of the coming members, it would seem that we might throw away altogether the challenge of sustainability and return simply to a modern-industrial world view. At the same time, however, numerous philosophers have claimed that truly acting from the future is a paradox, leaving only the understanding of the conditions of emerging life as a possible perspective.

Speaking of culture and sustainability has been acceptable now for decades, and the issue lies now more in terms of understanding what this really means and what it implies once we start to really take it into consideration. Culture may, in this case, be taken as a specific segment of society, as in ”cultural class”, encompassing all the agents that work in the cultural field of art, design, etc – this is interesting because it comes close to the scope of the ECOC city, dealing first and foremost with development of what has been called the creative class. Taken from this perspective, there are at least two interesting angles, one being whether the activities of these agents of culture are sustainable from environmental, social, and economic perspectives. The field of eco-art deals with this in practice, and many forms of socially engaged art deals with the issue in practice as well. Eco-art is something Sacha Kagan will talk more about, here I will mainly note that it on the whole is a field that rethinks and reworks the relations between aesthetics, ecology and sustainability. And in doing so at times succeeds in rethinking each one of these concepts. The activities in question are always also symbolic and interpretive towards the world and often reflective towards their own practice as well. This leads then to a recurrent calling into question of the meaning of sustainability and its meaning related to the socio-ecological systems in general. Cultural practice is about making meaning, and the way it performs this is by explicating meaning in myriads of ways. A particular part of this field is the 'greening of the arts/culture'. When culture starts greening itself, it brings sustainability to the front of the stage. So the other question, which is how cultural practice might lead to a questioning and reflections about sustainability, is one that lies inherent in the practices of culture. Of course, this does not happen by itself as a logical necessity outside of this kind of logical reflection. Meaning is never given as such, it is interpreted, negotiated, and often the zone of tensions, conflicts, and hegemony. An interesting and important tension here is maybe less between the issues of durability and sustainability than between inclusive and excluding rationales, in that culture can function as a medium for including reflections that are too complex for every day thinking and many other fields as well.

Should cultural practice produce answers, and act as some kind of meaning machine, either for the purpose of pleasing the public, attracting attention, producing happiness, and supporting economy (e.g. Through branding of the ECOC city), making the issue of sustainability mainly a technical one, namely about greening, but washing out the more complex calls and questioning created by the reflexive redoubling of cultural practice? Or should it be supported in the more radical and exploring attempts to use cultural practice to understand the natures of complexity, resilience, sustensivity, temporal continuity across generations, relations between human and non-human elements and forces in the socio-ecological system, etc? It would be my impression personally that only the latter could actually open up for a culture of sustainability, or rather for cultures of sustainability, in the sense that not only one collected field emerges, but many different sub-fields that deal in very different ways with these issues (just think of the difference between the movie Avatar and the work of Aviva Rahmani).

So rather than to speak of one 'sustainable culture', it might be more reasonable to speak of many practice forms and reflections that bring about new ways of questioning the consequences of connectedness and complexity in a dynamic and temporally open form.

In many ways, the only truly interesting angle from my point of view is on the micro-level, where we understand the actions, movements, effects and affects going on, which can call into question the conceptual base AND the political/economic/cultural base of the issue of sustainability. At the same time, sustainability is very much about tensions (as described in Koefoed 2008): i.e. between management levels, strategic decisions being made only rarely in public, and civil society level actions, artist projects that challenge and question, open up and recast focus in a reflective twist – and the sustensive tension is about making that encounter into one that creates long-term, infinite paths of possibility leading to possibility. And numerous other tensions, such as the one between materiality and materialism, between cultures of building new monuments and cultures of recycling what we have, also on a seemingly simple level like this. And the thing is that as soon as you start to open it up, it complexifies, leaving yet another issue open: how do we make way for accepting openness, as well as complexity?

The Cities of culture and ”cultures of sustainability”

”The ECoC programme is currently in its 25th year and has developed significantly in delivery and profile. It has become one of the most coveted awards for European cities which aspire to position themselves as cultural and creative hubs, and aim to demonstrate the value of culture to the revitalisation of their urban economies and in affecting social change. ” ECOC Policy Group report, 2010

Obviously, the ECOC program is not one that automatically leads to this kind of reflective and explorative practice, seeking to include issues that are mostly too challenging to take into account in the organising of e.g. business and politics. Many would probably say the contrary is almost the case: that the ECOC cities tend to become the playgrounds of whatever is in fashion, combining this with some amounts of respect for the heritage of culture, as this will be a logical consequence of the kind of self-referential optic of the city seeking to show, brand, and even understand itself through culture.

However, there are conditions around the ECOC city that are interesting from this perspective, and which tend to create the possibility, if not more, for challenging practices on a more local level, but also for an opening up of the overall issue of the city and its cultures, including cultures of sustainability. On the positive note: the ECoC is an institution that calls for a relative medium to long term perspective, with the domination of the medium term. After 2000, a series of research projects have started to look at the longer effect of the ECoC title, with a focus mainly on economy and art/culture as a driving force in regeneration and economic growth. ECoC is an event that stretches over a long period and calls for organising across a series of disciplines and institutions, thus allowing for some transdisciplinary experiences and ideas to emerge and solidify. With the focus already clearly on culture, there is no need to artificially insist upon relating sustainability to culture. One might say, of course, that the pressure shifts then to relating the ECoC and culture to sustainability by placing issues of sustainability at the heart of a clearly defined cultural project.

To this it can be said that perhaps another dimension has come to be placed so much at the heart of the ECoC that the problem is immediately turned complex again, namely the economic dimension. The ECoC has become an event that contains a strong economic focus, although the budgets for the cities varies considerably. Obviously, there are strong connections on the one side to the issues and field of regional development and regional growth through creativity, and on the other side to the practices and policies of mega-events, under which the ECoC might be considered. An important purpose of this project could be to build and support a network of agents, groups, and institutions interested in maintaining a focus not necessarily tightly connected to the mega-event and regional growth issues.

One of the central issues in my note to Sønderborg 2017 in December was the re-connection of the relation between the human and the non-human. This of course becomes slightly complicated when we include the challenge of a possible economistic focus leading perhaps to a very specific set of relations to the non-human (to things, to the sea, to earth, but also of course to concrete, steel, bricks, walls, etc in the urban spaces).

 

The project – ideas and some questions

Questions – so far relatively unorganised

Research is growing and already quite vast on the effects and organisations of ECoC titles, both EU-commissioned work and more independent reports, as well as reports commissioned by the title cities. I will not make an attempt to assess this research here, but of course relating the existing research to the issues of sustainability would lie in the preparation leading to shaping a full project in the field with focus on cultures of sustainability.

Instead, I will try to sketch some preliminary questions that I expect could govern at least some initial reflections, leading then to more precise and problem-efficient questions, also bringing in the action-research dimension with a clearer profile.

Overall issues:

Practices – identification, analyses

Interventions

On the whole, the project itself would be an intervention in the field, on the one hand cutting through the layers of complications and strategies, to see how we might be able to not only identify the existing possibilities, but also assist in the process to the emergence of the possible strategies that are not present yet, and that might lead to an enhanced culture of sustainability in and across the cities.

An interesting aspect is that we should then develop close collaboration with some of the bidding cities and some of the ones that have already received the title, but not yet carried it out, around the kinds of activities that might enhance cultures of sustainability. This does not mean that we should necessarily be agents in practice ourselves, but rather that the project could develop methods of distinction, assistance, and strengthening if existing and coming practices within the field.

More about this before Monday!

 

 

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