Finding the sweet spot: critiquing a cultural ecosystems approach to civic cultural strategy making

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to debates about how cities create resilient systems for making, re-making and maintaining representations of culture. Our case traces how collaborative festival production implicitly created an infrastructure founded on shared values. This was formalised into city cultural policy using an ecosystem framework, which institutionalised these values, and meant that the ecosystem became partial, excluding creative commercial and community organisations, city residents from diverse backgrounds, and influential non-city bodies. Using the same model to analyse the strategy making process, we argue that this framework can only develop resilience where there is explicit inclusion of the diversity of the city’s cultural interests. This diversity is central to resilient ecosystems, and whilst this framework may offer more inclusive strategy approaches, it also decentralises ownership and leadership. We ask – is there a ‘sweet spot’ for resilient and inclusive cultural policy between centralised strategy and a laissez-faire approach?

KEYWORDS:

• Festivals
• cultural policy
• cities
• cultural ecosystem
• resilience

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Derby Festé and the SCG members for their time and contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Available at: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/NPO_2018-22_Relationship_Framework.pdf, Accessed 22 December 2020; https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Great_art_and_culture_for_everyone.pdf, Accessed 22 December 2020.

2 Researchers included one of the authors, as part of the broadly ethnographic approach documented here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Victoria Barker

Dr Victoria Barker is a Research Associate for Creative Industries Policy and Evidence at the University of Manchester. Her PhD on the ecosystem of micro-enterprises in the creative industries was awarded the Royal Geographic Society Economic Geography Research Group (EGRG) thesis prize in 2019. Her research interests include business support and place-based aspects of micro-enterprise and freelance work in the creative industries, and cultural evaluation and impact. As a freelance consultant, she has worked on projects for arts and heritage organisations across the West Midlands, as well as environmental organisations in Scotland, and the further education sector across the UK.

Jennie Jordan

Dr Jennie Jordan is an independent researcher in creative and cultural industries. She is a member of De Montfort University's Centre for Urban Research in Austerity and a research associate at the University of Loughborough. Her research interests focus on arts and festival organisations as influential institutions within urban cultural policy and placemaking. She has published on festivalisation and creative leadership and the business-side of festival management. She has extensive experience as a senior manager and consultant within the UK cultural sector at a number of festivals, arts centres and municipal authority arts services. Her consultancy work includes projects for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England, Nottingham Playhouse and the East Midlands Cultural Consortium.