Valuing Culture in the Global City

John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City 121 ÀGORA doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/Kult-ur.2014.1.1.4 - issn: 2386-5458 - vol. 1, nº1, 2014 - pp. 121-134 ABSTRACT: Culture encompasses three highly inter-related spheres of publicly funded culture, commercial culture and home-made culture. Cultural policy-making therefore needs to address many issues beyond traditional concerns. KeywoRdS: culture, creative industries, cities, cultural value. — ReSUM: La cultura presenta tres formes estretament interrelacionades: la cultura amb finançament públic, la cultura comercial i la cultura casolana. Per tant, les polítiques culturals han de tractar molts aspectes a banda dels tradicionals. PARAUleS ClAU: cultura, indústries creatives, ciutats, valor cultural. — ReSUMeN: La cultura engloba tres ámbitos estrechamente interrelacionados: la cultura con financiación pública, la cultura comercial y la cultura hecha en casa. Por lo tanto, las políticas culturales deben tratar muchos aspectos más allá de los tradicionales. PAlABRAS ClAve: cultura, industrias creativas, ciudades, valor cultural. Valuing Culture in the global City1 1 . This is an edited version of a speech given at a University of Chicago conference on The Future of the City, which took place at the Chicago Cultural Centre on June 7th 2011. John Holden City University, London – Demos 122 John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City ÀGORA I was delighted to be asked to come here to talk about the issue of valuing culture in the global city, because I think it’s a really interesting question. Why do I say that? Well, partly because the world is getting increasingly citified, so what happens in cities matters to more and more of us. In 2008, for the first time in history, the proportion of the global population living in cities passed 51%. China has gone from having 18% of its population living in cities in 1978 to 50% today, and here in the us, 80% of people live in cities. Even if you don’t live in a city, you are still likely to get your news, entertainment and quite possibly your value system from cities. The trend shows no sign of stopping, so it looks as if our future will increasingly be an urban one. The second reason why I think it’s interesting is because I find the role of culture in the life of cities something of a conundrum. I look at the lists of the world’s most liveable cities, as they appear in magazines like Monocle, and I’m struck by the fact that most aren’t places that I’d want to be, even when they have some lovely cultural infrastructure. I mean, Fukuoka at number 14? Portland at number 21? and neither New York or London making the grade? Come on! On top of that, some places that are very rich in the culture of the past, like Kyoto or Florence might be very nice, but they just don’t cut it as pumping, happening, global cities. Then you’ve got the fact that the financial districts of even the world’s most prosperous cities are as dull as ditchwater – just look at Wall Street and the City of London – utterly awful. So for me successful cities are places that are culturally and financially active, right here and right now: they combine the making of money with the making of meaning. These are cities that people actually want to move to; places where history and news are made, and where living artists thrive. Places that get drawn and painted, and built and written about in real time. Often these are places that surprise and confound and are not entirely comfortable, and if you want me to name names, then I’d put Berlin and Istanbul high on my list. I also find it interesting that in the West the role of the traditional arts in the life of cities seems to be changing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, any city with ambition wanted to host a world class museum, an John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City 123 ÀGORA doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/Kult-ur.2014.1.1.4 - issn: 2386-5458 - vol. 1, nº1, 2014 - pp. 121-134 orchestra, and maybe an opera house (for example there are opera houses in the gold-rush town Central City, Colorado and in Manaus in Brazil). But today, by contrast, some of those traditional arts institutions are in crisis in American cities, and they are under threat in parts of Europe. And the reason for that is because the importance of the arts is no longer an unquestioned given. Politicians and private philanthropists everywhere are asking some difficult questions – what value do the arts and culture provide to the place where I live? Does it matter if the traditional arts disappear? And there are equally important questions that city politicians must ask of themselves – how should they react to the changes that are going on in arts funding patterns; what responsibilities do they have in relation to culture? How do they optimize the regulatory and fiscal tools at their disposal? Now, answering these questions is made more difficult than it otherwise would be, because we are collectively in a muddle about some of the important terms in the debate, especially the words ‘culture’ and ‘value’. We no longer have a shared understanding about what they mean. And we are also troubled by the metrics of culture: how do we measure and compare across the arts landscape and beyond? So that’s the starting point for my talk today. I will attempt to provide a simple conceptual framework that will help us to talk about the role of the arts and culture in the city. After that I will argue that a city without the arts is doomed to economic, social, and political failure. And then I will suggest some approaches that cities should take when it comes to culture. So, let’s start with the Cambridge academic Raymond Williams. In 1976 he wrote that culture was one of ‘the two or three most difficult words in the English language’. Back then culture essentially had two different meanings – and most people still think about culture in this way. On the one hand culture meant ‘the arts’ – and the arts were an established canon of art forms (opera, ballet, poetry, etc.), each of which contained its own hierarchies. Now the arts were enjoyed by only a small part of society; one that was also generally speaking well educated and rich, and this social elite defined itself not just through money and education, but through the very act of appreciating the arts, and that’s why the arts themselves came to be labelled as elitist. 124 John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City ÀGORA So that was one meaning of culture, but there was another one; a more anthropological meaning that extended to include everything that we did to express and understand ourselves as individuals within a group; from cooking to sports to dancing to watching television. The problem was, and still is, that these two meanings of the same word became oppositional. Culture in the sense of the arts, and popular culture were mutually exclusive: one was high, the other was low, one refined, the other debased. As an individual, you could aspire to high culture, but by definition, high culture could never be adopted by everyone – that was a logical impossibility, if everyone adopted it, it would be popular culture. And to invert the logic, if under this old model popular culture was popular, that meant the arts must be unpopular. Oh dear. But don’t despair, because this old either/or model of culture, that a lot of people still cling to, is redundant. The meaning of culture has to be radically rethought because two things have happened. The first is an obvious one: and that is that the old notion that somehow particular forms of culture are inherently better than others – by which I mean that they are more capable of bearing intense meaning – that idea has been untenable for quite some time. In fact it became crystal clear in the 1960s that the best cultural responses to the Vietnam war came not from the opera house or from literature; instead they came from journalism, film and rock music, and the high point was when Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. So the question is no longer, ‘is theatre better than tv drama?’ or ‘is ballet better than streetdance?’. Instead the debate about cultural quality moves to niches: is that a good Othello? is that a great tv programme? how do these jazz musicians rate? and so on. That’s the first reason why we have to rethink the relationship between the arts and the rest of culture. The second imperative for a rethink flows from a much more recent, and much more fundamental, shift in the way that the cultural system works. Let me explain what I mean. My contention is that now, for practical purposes, we no longer have the arts and the rest of culture. Instead, there are three, deeply interrelated, spheres of culture: funded culture, commercial culture John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City 125 ÀGORA doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/Kult-ur.2014.1.1.4 - issn: 2386-5458 - vol. 1, nº1, 2014 - pp. 121-134 and home-made culture. Unlike the old high art and popular art they are not separate or oppositional; instead they are completely intertwined. However, they are different from each other in important ways. Funded culture is the type of culture that needs support from governments or philanthropists. This type of culture is defined not through theory but by practice: what gets funded becomes culture. Therefore, who makes these decisions about what to fund, how those decisions are made, and hence who gets to define this type of culture, is a matter of considerable public interest. Who gets funded to do what, and how a society decides to allocate the power to make funding decisions – whether these decisions should be taken in the boardrooms of corporations, or by national or city politicians who are accountable though the ballot box, or by arm’s-length expert agencies – all of these are intensely political questions. The next type of culture, commercial culture, is equally pragmatically defined: the consumer is the ultimate arbiter and if someone thinks there is a chance that a song or a show will sell, it gets produced. Success or failure is market driven, but crucially access to the market – the elusive ‘big bucks record deal’ that Bruce Springsteen sings about in his song Rosalita, or the stage debut, or the first novel – those are controlled by a corporate elite who are just as powerful as the arbiters of funded culture. The really important thing here is that both in funded culture and in commercial culture there are gatekeepers who define the meaning of culture through their decisions. In both cases, if you are an artist you have to overcome an obstacle in order to get your work in front of an audience. But in the third sphere of culture – home-made culture – that is no longer the case. Home-made culture extends from the historic objects and activities of folk art, through to the post-modern punk garage band and the YouTube upload, and here, the definition of what counts as culture is much broader; it is defined by an informal self-selecting peer group, and the barriers to entry are much lower. Knitting a sweater, singing in a choir, or writing a song and posting it on Facebook might take a lot of skill, but they can be done independently without much difficulty – the decision about the quality of what is produced then lies not in the hands of an expert, but in the hands of those who see, hear or taste the finished article. 126 John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City ÀGORA In the past thirty years we have seen an explosion of activity in this third space of home-made culture. Let me ask you: what proportion of the twenty-year olds that you know are in a band, or curate their photographs, or make films with their camcorders? A hundred percent, right? Everyone under the age of 25 seems to be an aspirant musician, poet, writer or filmmaker. In part that’s because the means of production have become cheaper and easier to use. You can now make a film on a $200 camera and edit it on a laptop, instead of needing a crew of 50 unionised workers and a capital-intensive studio. But the really revolutionary technological innovation has been the internet. What the internet has done – uniquely and irrevocably, and in an incredibly short space of time – is to enable people to use culture to communicate, collaborate, and make money in ways that are entirely new. This has played havoc with the business models of the music, film and broadcasting sectors. And it has changed the possibilities for all three spheres of culture and all forms of cultural expression within them, presenting a wealth of new opportunities (such as new audiences; new art forms; new distribution channels) but also a set of questions (what to do about intellectual property; what to fund; how to educate young people; and censorship for example). By fundamentally changing the rules of the game, this revolutionary technology has also changed the role of culture in people’s lives. Instead of being passive consumers of culture, dumb audience members sitting in the dark in silence, nowadays we all take on positions as producers and consumers, authors and readers, performers and spectators all of the time. We graze in comfort across these three spheres of culture without a second thought. Each of us moves fluidly through our cultural lives, creating our sense of individual and collective identity as we go; and we increasingly define ourselves by what we choose to watch, read, listen to and so on. And just as this integrated model of culture explains how and why the arts and culture together have become more important for individual people, by extension it explains why this big cultural landscape has become more important to cities and why culture will, I think, become more and more important in the world of politics and policy. John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City 127 ÀGORA doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/Kult-ur.2014.1.1.4 - issn: 2386-5458 - vol. 1, nº1, 2014 - pp. 121-134 Because under the old model of culture, the high arts could be dismissed as a narrow elitist pursuit; commercial culture could be written off as populist entertainment; and home-made culture could be patronized as ‘amateur’. But put all three together into one completely interlinked and interwoven activity, and culture transforms into being what Jordi Marti, the former Head of Culture in Barcelona, calls ‘the second ecosystem of humankind.’ Now, if all that sounds too high-falutin and theoretical, let me present you with some of the reality of how culture now affects the life of cities and nations. First, this broad sweep of interconnected cultures has become economically important. In a publication I wrote a few years ago, with the admittedly uninspiring title of Publicly Funded Culture and the Creative Industries, I looked at the ways in which the funded arts and the money-making cultural industries were inseparable – because of the way that ideas and skills are shared, because of the way that one creates a market for the other, and because of the way that people make a living by operating right across this cultural landscape. A couple of examples: the famous British actor Sir Ian McKellan appeared in Lord of the Rings, but was classically trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company; and the tv advert for a brand of bread called Hovis has a backing track that uses Dvorak’s New World Symphony played, I believe, by the publicly funded Halle Orchestra. And on and on these connections go. My point here is that so-called high arts are not divorced from the economy of the rest of the creative industries: they are an absolutely essential driver of those industries. And together they form a significant sector of the economy – where I come from in the uk the creative economy accounts for between 7% and 11% of gdp, depending on what’s included. That’s a lot of money and a lot of jobs. In most oecd countries this is one of very few parts of the economy that is significantly outperforming the rest. But rather than thinking of it as an economic sector, I think we should be thinking of the creative economy as an economic system, and like all systems, it needs all of its parts in order to function. 128 John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City ÀGORA A second area of economic growth is in cultural-led tourism, which is why you see cities from Abu Dhabi to Oporto and from Hong Kong to Sydney investing heavily in new cultural buildings. And then there is urban regeneration, where culture has refreshed parts of cities and led to huge increases in property values. Suffice to say that cities all around the world have realised the importance not only of the creative economy itself, and the jobs it creates, but also the knock-on effects of cultural activity as an attractor of a highly educated workforce for other sectors. In many cities, smart public sector investment is driving private sector prosperity, just as it has always done. But here is an important point. We are all familiar with the idea that physical infrastructure such as roads and waterpipes are an essential component of building a city. We can, by extension, get our heads around the need for physical cultural infrastructure like museums and concert halls. What is less familiar, but now equally important, is the idea of investing in the less visible infrastructure of connectivity. The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser says in his book, Triumph of the City, that what thriving cities do is “attract brilliant people and then connect them”. It is interconnection that nurtures and develops human capital. Cities need to constantly form new connections in order to regenerate and renew themselves. They need stimulus and diversity. This is why port cities, like Venice and San Francisco, have historically succeeded whereas single-industry towns that have lost their connectivity, like Detroit and Liverpool, have failed. And this is another reason why cultural life is so important, because not only does the cultural world provide essential social spaces where interconnection takes place; it’s also the case that what happens in those spaces creates the norms of behaviour that build social capital. In turn social capital underpins the relationships and transactions that make a city and its economy function and thrive. What then are the implications of all this for cities? Well first, I think we need a shift in mind-set away from city governments thinking of themselves as providing or delivering culture. I have explained how the entry-costs to John holden Valuing Culture in the Global City 129 ÀGORA doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.6035/Kult-ur.2014.1.1.4 - issn: 2386-5458 - vol. 1, nº1, 2014 - pp. 121-134 self-expression have been lowered and that we now have an observable phenomenon of mass engagement with all sorts of different types of culture. The job of city governance is to enable people to be part of that – to increase their opportunities for enjoying themselves, to improve their ability to learn from the cultures of the past and the present, and to give them the tools and the confidence to create the culture of the present and the future. This involves not just providing the built infrastructure of culture – the symphony halls, the theatres and the galleries, the bars that host live music, and the cinemas – but paying attention to the capacity of people to use those places. In turn that means looking at such things as the education system; how the transport network and planning decisions support cultural activity; it means taking an interest in how cultural organizations treat both citizens and visitors. In other words, it’s a lot more complex and wide-ranging than it used to be – but also potentially much more rewarding. Get this right and the city will flourish socially and economically; get it wrong and the city will fail. Now, I want to spend a little time talking about how we might articulate and measure some of what I have been talking about. If culture is so important, how can we get a handle on the value of culture in cities? Before I do that, let me just recap where we’ve got to: What I’ve been arguing is first, that we need to reframe the arts as an essential part of a broader concept of culture; second, that cultural life has been transformed over a very short space of time from something that was marginal, into something that has become hugely important for our personal and community identity, as well as being of significant and growing importance economically. Third, I have maintained that a successful global city needs to understand these trends and changes, and then needs to construct the physical, regulatory and fiscal environments that will nurture a rich cultural life for its citizens. That in turn means paying attention to things that used to be considered outside the consideration of cultural decisions. Finally I’ve said that I think cities neglect the arts and culture at their peril; and the price of failure is high not just economically but also in terms of human development and fulfilment.