Cultural policies in cities of the ‘global South’: a multi-scalar approach

ABSTRACT

Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives about urban history, heritage and identity, in conjunction with local actors’ interests. Second, the diffusion of hegemonic cultural policy models such as the “creative city” leads to logics of exclusion, gentrification, and has been met with resistance, which suggest that these models can be to the detriment of local residents, despite the progressive values they are often claim to promote. Third, this special issue points to the need to rethink the politics of cultural policy mobility and offers conceptual tools such as vernacularization to make sense of the ways in which urban elites navigate, negotiate and take advantage of circulating cultural policy models.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural policies
• global cities
• scaling
• global south
• policy mobility
• vernacularization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Recent works have engaged critically with ‘Southern urban theories’ (Robinson 2016; Dines 2016)

2. Çağlar and Glick-Schiller (2018) distinguish their multiscalar approach from a multi-level approach. While a multilevel approach would also confront different levels of analyses their multiscalar approach specifically attempts to unveil unequal power structures that play out across different scales and to call our attention to how scales and scaling processes are socially constructed.

Additional information

Funding

Jeremie Molho has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 843269.

Notes on contributors

Jérémie Molho

Jérémie Molho is Marie Curie fellow, jointly affiliated with the National University of Singapore and the European University Institute. He received a BA in Middle Eastern studies and a MA in urban studies from Sciences Po Paris and completed his PhD in geography in 2016 at the University of Angers. His dissertation analysed how different cities outside of the West, including Istanbul and Singapore, developed strategies to position themselves as global art market centres. In the last two years, he has been studying Singapore and Doha’s use of cultural policies to govern their diversity.

Peggy Levitt

Peggy Levitt is Chair of the sociology department and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College and an Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She is also the co-founder of the Global (De)Centre.  Her most recent book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, was published by the University of California Press in July 2015. Peggy has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). In addition to being a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019), she is also a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge 2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (UC Press, 2001).

Nick Dines

Nick Dines is a researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Milan Bicocca and a visiting fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. His research cuts across the themes of contemporary urban change, cultural heritage and international migration. He is the author of the monograph Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples (New York, 2012) and since 2014 is a member of the editorial board of the Italian journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. Among his present projects, he is conducting research that investigates the management of cultural diversity in the cities of Rabat and Cape Town.

Anna Triandafyllidou

Anna Triandafyllidou has been awarded the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University, Toronto that started on 1st August 2019. Professor Anna Triandafyllidou has held a Robert Schuman Chair at the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies) between 2012 and 2019 where she directed the Cultural Pluralism Research Area.  She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Chair of the IMISCOE Editorial Committee, and member of the IMISCOE Board of Directors. She has been Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges between 2002 and 2018. She is the Scientific Coordinator of two large Horizon 2020 projects: The GREASE project (started in October 2018) studies European and Asian approaches on governing religion and addressing religiously-legitimated radicalization, while the BRaVE project (launched in January 2019) analyses wider processes of polarization and violent extremism towards both the far right and Islam, with a view of elaborating policies and practices that build resilience towards such phenomena. Anna Triandafyllidou also leads the EUI team in the SIRIUS project on the drivers and barriers towards migrant and asylum seeker integration in European labour markets.