Inside out or outside in? Sustaining a national performing arts centre in an emerging cultural city

ABSTRACT

This paper adapts a ‘sense of place’ framework to investigate varying preferences for the physical and cultural offerings of arts centres using a choice experiment. An on-site survey was conducted of local residents and tourists about the Esplanade-Theatres-on-the-Bay, Singapore’s national performing arts centre. Results indicate that sustainability requires an ‘inside out’ strategy – arts content over supporting structures such as amenities and knowledge enhancing workshops should be pursued. However, there was a divergence in the arts appetite of locals and tourists. Computations show that enhancing aspects of the arts centre aligned to the tastes of locals provides a total worth of at least US$130 million which is 50% more than the nationwide worth generated by catering to tourists’ tastes. Thus with respect to market development, developing the local market is a more sustainable strategy than targeting tourists alone.

KEYWORDS:

• Performing arts centre
• marginal willingness to pay
• choice experiment
• sustainability
• cultural valuation

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the two reviewers who provided excellent feedback and read our paper very carefully. 

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 Although the survey was undertaken in 2012, its findings are still relevant given the unchanged arts appetite of local residents as ticketed attendance at performing arts events in Singapore was stable around 2 million annually from 2011 to 2017. In addition, the type of tourists coming to Singapore has remained similar. For instance, Southeast Asia (around 40% of total arrivals) is the largest market followed by Greater China (about 20%), and visitors from American and Europe account for about 9%.

2 Research has shown that the precision of choice experiment estimates is highest in the range of 6–13 choice sets (Caussade et al., 2005). Some studies recommend presenting each respondent with eight choice sets/tasks. To avoid respondent fatigue bias, we halved the number of choice sets.

3 Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) defined status quo bias as the situation where individuals disproportionately show a preference for the current state of affairs.

4 ‘High arts’ refer to genres such as the classical performing arts and art museums in contrast to genres such as rock concerts and movies which are classified as ‘popular culture’ (Hellbrun, 1993).

5 From Singapore Tourism Board data, an average of 10% of tourists visited the Esplanade in 2010–2011. Over this period, international visitor arrivals numbered 12.4 million.

6 This is the percentage of tourists in our sample who said they had visited the Esplanade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon Chang

Sharon Chang heads the Research division at the Singapore Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and National Arts Council. An economist, she specialises in the application of choice modelling and contingent valuation to the fields of arts and culture, as well as tourism.

Renuka Mahadevan

Renuka Mahadevan is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland in Australia. Her expertise lies in the use of economic modelling and analysis in the area of economic and social valuation of arts and events, platform sharing economy, cruising, and elderly travel.