Culture is a leading source of intellectual renewal and human growth, and can be understood as embracing all creative activity, not only the traditional, or ‘high’, arts but popular mass culture as well. Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz gives it a collective slant when he defines culture as “the meanings which people create, and which create people as members of societies”. In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams identifies three general categories in the definition of culture, one of which is relevant to this paper, where he states that culture can be understood as “a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour”.

In the post-war era, European discourses about cultural diversity have been focused on the liberal principle of equal respect for all where the aim of minorities groups struggles’ has been to get rid of difference as an ideological construction in order to rescue a more universalistic idea of justice. More recently, other ways of reading difference have gained intellectual ground. In Charles Taylor’s perspective, for example, differences, instead of being undervalued, are prized and cultivated as empowering forces which deserve public recognition (1992).

Contemporary debates have developed Taylor’s insights by claiming that difference needs to be considered as the constant intersection of many features where none of them can claim importance over another. This approach advocates the intrinsic hybridity of identities. This condition of ‘in-betweenness’ presupposes a deeper acceptance of human existence as a porous, constant flux of definitions and redefinitions where nobody belongs completely to any one identity. This way, differences proliferate, opening the way to constant cultural contamination.

This ideal of infinite cultural translation, however, poses serious policy implications as it radically challenges traditional top-down interventions, which have so far been bent on efficiently keeping difference within, for example, the narrow constraints of multiculturalism. Moreover, if it is true that culture has always been an arena of negotiation, and that globalisation has, to a certain extent, always been present in the constant and reciprocal exchange between continents, cultures and social groups, the challenge posed by the new spatial logic of the informational revolution could seriously impinge on any attempts by any single state to legislate for any single cultural identity.

As Manuel Castells argues, “The informational revolution allows for the simultaneous process of centralisation of messages and decentralization of their reception, creating a new communications world made up at the same time of the global village and of the incommunicability of those communities that are switched off from the global network”. This highlights two main features in contemporary urban living that policy-makers cannot afford to ignore: that of spatial segregation and the commodification of space.

Citizenship, says the geographer Alisdair Rogers, is inconceivable without some reference to its spatiality, and, if one thinks, for instance, about the mass of homeless people expelled from the business and tourist districts in 20th-century Western cities, it becomes evident that the denial of citizenship is often experienced also through physical, social and economic exclusion from such spaces.

Conversely, state multiculturalism has at times fostered an approach akin to a commodification of public space, a space where consumers and not citizens are allowed. Here the city offers itself as a stage of an empty spectacle to be viewed by a mass audience. The result of this is the creation in some cities of a sort of ‘multicultural theme park’ where differences are sanitised through the consumption of ‘exotic’ cultural products. In global cities, on the other hand, as competition for scarce public resources between different stakeholders makes community politics a politics of conflict over the allocation of resources, marginalised social groups are increasingly claiming their right to ensure that their existence, and their cultural identities, are recognised by those who hold political, economic and social power.

Given the complexities outlined above, there is a feeling among both cultural practitioners and policy-makers alike that there needs to be a re-examination of policy delivery mechanisms as national and supranational institutions often work through hierarchical departments which are too detached from local territorial dynamics. A decade ago, commenting on this issue, Castells observed that (and this is still true today) because of their flexibility and knowledge of the resources of the local civil society, local governments or forms of democracy are now better placed than national states at managing new urban contradictions and conflicts.

The cultural planning approach has emerged out of this debate as a way of enabling policy-makers to think strategically about the application of the cultural resources of localities to a wide range of public authority responsibilities. By linking culture and other aspects of economic and social life, cultural planning can be instrumental in creating development opportunities for the whole of the local community. In other words, while cultural policies tend to have a sectoral focus, cultural planning adopts a territorial remit. Moreover, as Franco Bianchini and I have argued elsewhere, it is important to clarify that cultural planning is not the ‘planning of culture’, but a cultural (anthropological) approach to urban planning and policy.

This insight derives from a tradition of radical planning and humanistic management of cities championed in the early 1960s, chiefly, by Jane Jacobs. Cities are our own artefacts, argued Jacobs and the trouble in dealing with them is that planners can only contemplate a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Jacobs saw the city as an ecosystem composed of physical-economic-ethical processes interacting with each other in a natural flow. While developing the idea of the city as a living system, Jacobs implicitly acknowledged her debt to the Scottish biologist and philosopher Patrick Geddes, who, at the beginning of the 20th century, imported from French geography the idea of the ‘natural region’. For Geddes, planning had to start with a survey of the resources of such natural region (whose ingredients were Folk-Work-Place), of the human responses to it, and of the resulting complexities of the cultural landscape and of the human response to such a natural region.

The idea of a territory as a living ecosystem, made up of diverse resources which need to be surveyed and acknowledged by the local community at large before policy can intervene, is very much at heart of cultural planning. The notion of cultural planning, widely applied in both the USA (since the 1970s) and Australia (since the mid-1980s), by Robert McNulty and Colin Mercer is however, still uncommon among European policy-makers.

Whereas in the USA precedents of the concept can be traced back to the civic programmes of the New Deal and to the strong tradition of neighbourhood-based community arts centres, in Australia applications of the concept can be related to the community cultural development of the 1980s, and to the local autonomy lent by the federal systems of government to local agencies, which could then run independent cultural development programmes. In Europe, where aesthetic definitions of culture tend to prevail and policies for the arts are rarely co-ordinated with other policies, cultural planning has had, so far, little application. In the UK, however, in the past five years, strategies for the development of the cultural industries sector have partly been based on a framework which, in its attempt to move away from basic cultural policy-led urban regeneration, could be said to be close to a cultural planning approach. This is due among other things, to the fact that policy-makers tend to interpret the notion of local cultural resources in a rather narrow way, mostly as heritage, thus overlooking potential synergies between sub-sectors of the local cultural economies.

The central characteristics of cultural planning, as described by Franco Bianchini and Lia Ghilardi , are a very broad, anthropological definition of ‘culture’ as ‘a way of life’, along with the integration of the arts into other aspects of local culture, and into the texture and routines of daily life in the city. Cultural planning, furthermore, can help urban governments identify the cultural resources of a city or locality and to apply them in a strategic way to achieve key objectives in areas such as community development, place marketing or industrial development. More precisely, in the words of Mercer, ”Cultural planning is the strategic and integral planning and use of cultural resources in urban and community development”.

Cultural resources are here understood in a pragmatic way and include not only the arts and heritage of a place, but also local traditions, dialects, festivals and rituals; the diversity and quality of leisure; cultural, drinking and eating and entertainment facilities; the cultures of youth, ethnic minorities and communities of interest; and the repertoire of local products and skills in the crafts, manufacturing and service sectors. Cultural planning has therefore a much wider remit than cultural policy.

In moving away from a narrow definition of culture as art, and in putting cultural resources at its centre, Mercer argues that – compared to traditional cultural policies – cultural planning is intrinsically more democratic, more conscious of the realities of cultural diversity and more aware of the intangible features of cultural heritage and patrimony.

Colin Mercer stated a set of principles on which to base an effective policy. One of them is that, to assure cultural pluralism, it is essential that cultural planners understand what different segments comprise the community, conduct discussions and carry out research with each group, and include representations from each group on boards, committees and in the evaluation process. This principle calls for a community cultural assessment as an integral and necessary component of cultural planning and establishes the objective presence of the community within the planning process rather than simply as an ‘object’ of planning.

In addressing issues of access, equity, participation, employment and quality of life, cultural planning speaks also about the nature and meaning of civic culture and re-defines the civic realm of a place; this translated into, for example, a special focus on women’s access to the city centre and its perception and external image as perceived by local ethnic and aboriginal communities and young people.

In the USA, during the past 20 years, Partners for Livable Places – a non-profit organisation working locally to promote quality of life, economic development and social equity – has provided new thinking about cultural policy which moves away from the compensatory logic of some arts programmes. It has also addressed issues of access, equity and participation within the framework of more general objectives for social and economic development at all levels: that of the city, the region, the state or the nation.

In 1992, Robert McNulty, project director of Partners for Livable Places, published “Culture and Communities: the Arts in the Life of American Cities”, a collection of case studies focusing on cities and towns representing a cross-section of life in the USA. The overall aim of the research was to place the arts and culture in the broader context of community development, building on their economic role, and expanding that role to include other social and community concerns. Using some examples of cultural planning strategies, the report considers the way in which more and more communities in the USA are seeing the arts as a means of fostering community pride and cultural identity.

McNulty’s report suggests that, in general, the arts and cultural policy need to be seen not as isolated events or institutions, but as essential to the way we understand communities. Furthermore, cultural planning needs to be integrated into other aspects of planning – such as economics, transport, education, environment, urban renewal – in order to play a truly effective role in citizens’ lives. The now renamed Partners for Livable Communities, continues in the development of initiatives (1995, 1996, 2000) which, essentially, seek to demonstrate the social impact of the arts by stimulating cultural-community partnerships at the neighbourhood level. In this context, the use of cultural assets is clearly seen as a resource for both community improvements and economic revitalisation.

This text is part of a paper prepared for the Council of Europe by Lia Ghilardi.
Published by kind permission of the author.
Lia Ghilardi is Director of Noema Research and Planning Ltd, London
www.noema.org.uk
Her email address is: ghilardi@noema.dircon.co.uk