This special issue of Cultural Trends focuses on the idea of spatial equity within cultural policy, and particularly how the spatial (in)equity of the distribution of investment in cultural venues impacts on the opportunities that people have to participate in culture. This is a topic that has received surprisingly little attention. It is commonly found within cultural economics studies that distance from a venue influences whether or not people attend, yet these findings have not been reflected in either cultural policy studies of cultural participation, nor in the sociological literature on cultural consumption. The idea that use of a type of facility might be influenced by whether it is available in an area is so conceptually simple, and there are such dramatic spatial differences in government spending on culture, it is difficult to understand how this link has not previously been made.
This special issue, therefore, focuses on the question of cultural policy and opportunity from three different perspectives. Graeme Evans discusses how, over the last 30 years, cultural planning of provision became so detached from thinking about cultural participation, so that where people undertake their cultural engagement was hardly considered. Orian Brook's paper provides an empirical analysis of museums and galleries attendance in London, which, through the use of an accessibility index, suggests that access to museums and galleries is significantly and strongly positively related to the probability of attendance, after having controlled for the important social stratification which has been the focus of the large majority of the existing cultural participation studies.
Finally, we are delighted to have a guest commentary from the geographers, Danny Dorling and Benjamin Henning, both experts in the subject of spatial inequity across a range of political and social fields. They place spatial inequalities in cultural funding within the context of other inequalities, including university funding and the location of nuclear power stations. Their observation that “people in the UK and especially the English have become culturally attuned to seeing and experiencing a geography of extreme inequality as normal” provides the most telling explanation for why the Rebalancing our Cultural Capital report, which has recently brought the topic of spatial inequalities in cultural funding to the fore, contained almost no surprises in the figures that were presented, and yet was found to be so shocking.