Successful cultural planning strategies

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Successful cultural planning strategies - Study for the City of Volos

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The Study of strategic cultural planning

In reference to international experiences made with regards to cultural planning, one prime purpose of the study was to examine in particular the role of culture when it comes to:

valorization of cultural heritage
reinforcement of indigenous cultural production
development of cultural tourism

Some basic ideas can be circumscribe what culture of a city can manifest now and in near future:

Culture is next to the economic, social and political structures an integral part of any city but requires special handling and investments, if the story of the city is deemed to be a successful one in the eyes of those who grew up there and who wish to stay at this place. They do so by retaining cultural heritage (memories) thereof, while it is equally true that people move out and on if their cultural needs are not fulfilled. Equally Stephen Faigenbaum illustrates with his documentary film about Detroit how difficult remembrance of a place can become, especially if the house in which he grew up in along with the street he used to play in has been completely destroyed. Once someone can no longer find any traces of his childhood, that past may be retained only by music, post cards, photos etc., in short, a kind of intantible heritage, but this at the risk of becoming rootless in cultural terms. It means the language of origin (James Clifford) has vanished, while the languages of desire and social norms will not coincide with the place where one wants to live and to work.
Urban developments can be linked to relocations of major functions to the outskirts of a city e.g. removing Les Halles in Paris and replacing it with Centre Pompideou, but this can and does drive life out of the city. Hence care has to be taken that interventions do not create highly artificial, equally alienating entities. For once lively neighborhoods - in Detroit alone the removal of the local community schools rings the death bell on that community - no longer exist, then the informal social control of people looking out for one another will be lost and instead feel highly insecure due to moving about in a highly alientated, equally unreal environment.
Local networks are lost if they have no linkages whatsoever anymore to daily life and only respond passively to what impact upon social and economic life will have all the decisions taken at global level to drive the economy still further outside any immediate sphere of human interaction. The latter is propagated by making cities into 'smart' places in which moving about becomes like a navigation with technical tools e.g. mobile phones equally tracking devices for where one happens to be at that moment, but with this location also being registered by surveillance and security systems. It means local networks are replaced by control systems of highly anonymous character but with a definite impact once this leads to profiling of people and authorities acting accordingly to this system of categorization.
The link between cultural and urban renewal projects is crucial for local development but such viable structures need to be put in place, so that urban areas and even entire districts do not become mono functional ones e.g. solely for entertainment or for banks and thereby drive out the diversity of life (insofar as the latter is a crucial indicator for cities as to what kind of life they can sustain.)

Today ever more cities realize the importance of culture for economic development. For this reason, cities turn to cultural planning, as they perceive it to be a tool to develop this relationship between economy and culture further. New concepts such as 'cultural economy' emphasize the 'spill over effects' of a dynamic sector called nowadays 'creative and cultural industries'. It suggest an all out strive for an economic development based on a specific culture i.e. the art of doing something and a way of life. This includes not only the passages for consumption as described already by Walter Benjamin, but ever since Bunel started to make his film 'The obscure object of desire' new places of urban vulnerabilities due to being over exposed to the likehood of someone letting a bomb go up. In present terms, it is coined to be the new kind of terrorism to be experienced everywhere around the globe, but the real reasons for exploiting these new vulnerabilities may be much more the outcome of living in a 'schizophrenia of peace'. It means there can be music bars on the one side of the street, while on the other side bombs can go off. The latter happens to send once again a chilling message that is both symbolic and frightening because hurt and killed are primarily innocent civilians, and not those who supposedly are to be blamed for a society being defined and divided over and again by differences between various kinds of losers and those who can claim some sort of success.

Nevertheless the success stories being propagated as to how to make it, they reflect as well how the social composition within a city can suddenly be overturned when first artists move into derelict areas and later follow bars, galleries, loofts and other kinds of expensive forms of consumerism. This building up of a potential conflict between different kinds of losers and winners is called 'gentrification'. Tied in with the question but what strategy should and can a city follow, if these types of conflicts are to be avoided, then the city's capacity to communicate and to accommodate different kinds of people has to be enhanced, culturally speaking. How this can best be done, will be one prime subject matter of this study. It entails a focus on what happens at local level.

Quite another matter is the introduction of a cultural plan. Here a city must undertake some basic steps:

For the cultural plan to be accepted by all the citizens, there has to be ensured that the entry point into such a deliberation coincides with what people can realize as the start of a significant change in their lives.
As participants, it has to involve besides artists and experts, citizens who should be brought into a dialogue with the decision makers who work in the various institutions of the city, and here primarily the cultural institutes such as museums, theatres, etc.
By involving the cultural factor, the political decision making process shall be altered from being merely top down to enhance bottom up learning processes and public participation.
For the sake of cultural governance i.e. rule by cultural consensus, it means that the cultural sector must have a voice in the decision making process.
It means also that any business or development plan has to be approved by means of a cultural impact study.
Thus the cultural and political self-understanding by which decisions are made within a city, and which reflects a network of interest groups, cannot rely solely on the usual methodologies used e.g. feasibility studies, environmental impact studies, but must now have cultural impact studies as prerequisite prior to the adoption of any decision to go forward with this or another project.
One clear aspect has been all along that sustainable development can only be attained, if a city fulfills an extension of Agenda 21 into the Cultural Agenda 21 and ensures that what people can uphold, shall be taken into consideration as prime contribution to cultural sustainability.
Since the cultural self-understanding is as well about values not only shared with other citzens, but is a reflection with what value premise politics works, then it says as well what intellectual life and culture is required to live in freedom and therefore what is democratic rule of law.
All these values are something in need to be valorized by the arts. The way things are valued, that affects the reflective capacity of citizens with regards to the so-called 'self understanding' given to them through participation in what shapes culture.
That the process of political deliberations and decision making processes is structured in such a way that an ongoing learning process allows as well lessons to be drawn from experiences already made in the past.
There is a need for an active memory base - a museum of the city - to guide citizens when deciding how to proceed further, since it does make already a huge difference if at the outset an open assembly is held or if this comes only at the end, that is when the cultural plan has already been drafted by experts and therefore is merely presented to the public at large, in order to inform what has been decided upon beforehand;
The difference between a professional and an informal deliberation process prevails at times but it should not lead to the wrong conclusion that creativity and innovation does not take place at informal level as well, and which is all the more important since at this level people can verify by themselves what they have heard and believe so far to be the aims of the city after the mayor has announced the cultural plan in order to bring about a certain kind of development.
There is a difference between investment priorities e.g. the EU practice distinguishes between cultural heritage, cultural infrastructure and cultural services, but also between types i.e. classical, contemporary etc., and this in recognition while the need to improve cultural services is most urgent, more often investments in that direction are neglected due to measurable indicators tending to favor so called hard measures, including the construction of new museums.
Culture has to do with creative hubs but also networking; altogether cities require are neighborhoods full of life and open, friendly streets and places which allow a flow of people, and out of which can be created a flow of ideas.
An entire culture begins to be innovative, once real needs are recognized and conditions formulated under which they can be fulfilled without negative consequences for others or for what has been created before. (In contradiction to that stands, for instance, the slogan, creation through destruction).
Given the basic link between creativity and ethics i.e. artistic work resting on an ethical vision, understanding of culture is a prerequisite for developing such concepts that can make democracy work, and not merely be mystified or declared as being an illusion.

The study was prepared within the framework of the Interreg III B CADSES project HERMES with contracting side being for DEMEKAV - the Municipal Enterprise of Volos its director, Vasilis Sgouris. It is considered to be work in progress and covers by now a time span 2003 - 2013.

Hatto Fischer

Athens (2007) 2013

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Successful cultural planning strategies - Study for the City of Volos

Successful Cultural Planning Strategies