Effecting cultural change from below? A comparison of Cape Town and Bandung's pathways to urban cultural governance

ABSTRACT

This article compares the cultural governance pathways of two UNESCO “Design Cities” – Bandung and Cape Town – methodologically framing them as “repeated instances” [Robinson, J. (2018). Policy mobilities as comparison: Urbanization processes, repeated instances, topologies. Revista de Administração Pública, 52(2), 221–243] of a globalized drive towards more creative cities. While the value of mobilizing culture for local urban change in rapidly growing cities of the global South is increasingly recognized [Mbaye, J., & Dinardi, C. (2018). Ins and outs of the cultural polis: Informality, culture and governance in the global South. Urban Studies, 56(3), 578–593], postcolonial urban scholars have rightly questioned whether internationally popular cultural policy approaches are able to speak to their complex challenges, underpinned by informality and the after-effects of colonialism [Pieterse, E. (2006). Building with ruins and dreams: Some thoughts on realising integrated urban development in South Africa through crisis. Urban Studies, 43(2), 285–304]. As postcolonial states are slowly shifting away from a centralized cultural institution model linked to symbolic nation building projects [Booyens, I. (2012). Creative industries, inequality and social development: developments, impacts and challenges in Cape Town. Urban Forum, 23(1), 43–60], travelling cultural policies brought in by foreign agencies and adapted by local epistemic communities have inspired a range of responses that can be broadly described as cultural policy innovation from below Cohen, D. (2015). Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung, Indonesia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 36(2015), 23–37]. In turn, we examine how different cultural policy approaches have been locally mobilized and reworked in Bandung and Cape Town in response to situated realities and in partnerships between cultural, academic, business and local government actors. We argue that comparing the emerging “creative cityness” [Nkula-Wenz, L. (2018a). Worlding Cape Town by design: Encounters with creative cityness. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 1–17] of both cities provides valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of urban cultural governance in the global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural change
• cultural urban governance
• UNESCO
• creative cities network
• Bandung
• Cape Town

Notes on contributors

Zayd Minty is a cultural management professional and researcher. He is a research associate at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Arts Cultural and Policy Department and a doctoral candidate at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where he explores the intersection of culture, placemaking and urban governance in relation to the inner city of Johannesburg. His non-profit initiative Creative City South publishes popular writing on cultural policy from the global South.

Laura Nkula-Wenz is a lecturer and student affairs coordinator for the MA in Critical Urbanisms, a joint programme between the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the University of Basel, Switzerland. Laura is an urban geographer with a keen interest in postcolonial urban theory, African urbanism and public culture. Her research focuses on the transformation of urban governance and the construction of local political agency, on questions of urban experimentation and knowledge networks, as well as the nexus of cultural production and urban change. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Münster/Germany.

ORCID

Zayd Minty http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6775-9455

Laura Nkula-Wenz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8298-7544

Notes

1 It is however, no coincidence that this period also marked the run up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, a catalytic occasion for many urban growth coalitions across the country (see Wenz, 2014).

2 Including changes of leadership at CTP, Cape Town Tourism, Accelerate Cape Town and the Convention Centre – all entities previously working closely with one another.

3 The ICCN is a national coalition of over 200 independent creative citizen-led initiatives interested in mobilizing creativity for urban change.