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Successful cultural planning strategies - Study for the City of Volos


                   

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Successful Cultural Planning Strategies

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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:

 

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

 

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:

 

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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