Arts and Community Change

Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas

Max O. Stephenson Jr., Scott Tate, Max O. Stephenson Jr., Scott Tate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317688563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas addresses the growing number of communities adopting arts and culture-based development methods to influence social change. Providing community workers and planners with strategies to develop arts policy that enriches communities and their residents, this collection critically examines the central tensions and complexities in arts policy, paying attention to issues of gentrification and stratification.

Including a variety of case studies from across the United States and Canada, these success stories and best practice approaches across many media present strategies to design appropriate policy for unique populations.

Edited by Max Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate of Virginia Tech, Arts and Community Change presents 10 chapters from artistic and community leaders; essential reading for students and practitioners in economic development and arts management.

1
Making Beauty, Making Meaning, Making Community

Arlene Goldbard

Reality is not shaped by official pronouncements. Rather, such declarations tend to cluster wherever lived experience has nurtured an underlying truth or principle into a ripeness that attracts official recognition. Just so, the process whereby culture and development have come to be seen as essential, integral partners has been gradual, international, and organic. Today, it is also official.

Increasingly, culture and development are understood as inseparable in the annals of development practice. Addressing a World Bank meeting in 2000, so towering a figure as the economist Amartya Sen began his speech on “Culture and Development” with what has since become a virtually inarguable point:

[C]ultural issues can be critically important for development. The connections take many different forms related to the objectives as well as instruments of development. Cultural matters are integral parts of the lives we lead. If development can be seen as enhancement of our living standards, then efforts geared to development can hardly ignore the world of culture. Economic and social changes in pursuit of development can certainly influence—positively or negatively—the opportunities for cultural pursuits, and it would be appropriate to see that the effects on these opportunities receive serious attention. It can be argued that development is best seen as enhancement of freedom in a very broad sense. If this is more or less right, then surely cultural freedoms are among the liberties in terms of which development has to be assessed.

(Sen, 2000, p. 1)

Indeed, it is a foundational principle of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the chief international authority concerned with community development, that culture drives development:

Consideration of culture effectively enables development when projects acknowledge and respond to the local context and the particularities of a place and community through the careful use of cultural resources, as well as emphasis on local knowledge, skills and materials. Emphasizing culture means also giving members of the community an active role in directing their own destinies, restoring the agency for change to those whom the development efforts are intended to impact, which is crucial to sustainable and long-term progress. Respecting and promoting cultural diversity within a human right based approach, moreover, facilitates intercultural dialogue, prevents conflicts and protects the rights of marginalized groups, within and between nations, thus creating optimal conditions for achieving development goals.

On the other hand, culture as a sector of activity—including tangible and intangible heritage and the creative industries—is in itself a powerful driver of development, with community-wide social, economic and environmental impacts.

(UNESCO, 2012, Culture for Sustainable Development)

Economic impacts are often seen as primary. Since culture generates marketable products, places of significant historic and tourism value, and sought-after experiences of difference, development authorities are increasingly seeing cultural resources as parallel to natural resources, as raw material for economic development.

Experience is showing how the cultural resources of a community can be converted into economic wealth by promoting the unique identity, traditions, and cultural products and services of a region, towards generating jobs and revenue. Investing in the conservation of cultural assets, promoting cultural activities and traditional knowledge and skills developed by humans over very long periods of adaptation to the environment, moreover, are also very effective means to strengthen environmental sustainability and the social capital of communities.

(UNESCO, n.d., Theme)

UNESCO’s portal on Culture for Sustainable Development opens this way:

At a time when the international community is discussing future development goals beyond 2015, all efforts are focused on putting culture at the heart of the global development agenda.

Culture is who we are and what shapes our identity. Culture contributes to poverty reduction and paves the way for a human-centred, inclusive and equitable development. No development can be sustainable without it.

Placing culture at the heart of development policy constitutes an essential investment in the world’s future and a pre-condition to successful globalization processes that take into account the principle of cultural diversity.

(UNESCO, n.d., Portal)

General statements such as these translate into principles and actions of considerably greater specificity. For example, in June 2012, the United Nations– sponsored Rio + 20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, included an International Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Self-Determination and Sustainable Development, which adopted a joint declaration. Consider just a single section of this document:

Within and among Indigenous communities, Peoples and Nations

1. We will define and implement our own priorities for economic, social and cultural development and environmental protection, based on our traditional cultures, knowledge and practices, and the implementation of our inherent right to Self-determination.
2. We will revitalize, strengthen and restore our institutions and methods for the transmission of our traditional knowledge and practices focusing on transmission by our women and men elders to the next generations.
3. We will restore knowledge and trade exchanges, including seed exchanges, among our communities and Peoples reinforcing the genetic integrity of our biodiversity.
4. We will stand in firm solidarity with each other’s struggles to oppose projects that threaten our lands, forests, waters, cultural practices, food sovereignty, traditional livelihoods, ecosystems, rights and ways of life. We also stand in solidarity with others whose rights are being violated, including campesinos, fishers and pastoralists.

(Tebtebba, 2012, Within and among communities)

The deep meaning of each of these assertions will instantly be clear to anyone who works on the ground in culture and community development. Artists who place their gifts at the service of a community’s aspirations, self-development, and concerns live out these understandings every day. Community organizers who have learned to draw on heritage for resilience and strength, who understand that images, metaphors, and stories are infinitely more affecting than dry documents, know their truth.

But what ground did they spring from? Behind every seemingly self-evident conclusion is a history of ideas in dialectical opposition fighting for possession of the spirit of the times. One could say that these debates started in the articulation of “cultural democracy” as a counter to anti-immigrant and Ku Klux Klan agitation in the early twentieth-century United States; (Kallen, 1915) or before the 1930s, when African intellectuals in France articulated the concept of Négritude as against colonial domination and the asserted superiority of colonizers. One might say that World War II brought them home, as people who had been denied full cultural citizenship were expected to fight and die for the nations that had consigned them to second- or third-tier status, survivors returning home with a new awareness of human and civil rights.¹

Wherever they are rooted, they continue uninterrupted to this day in heated debates concerning immigration, voting rights, racial profiling, and other issues that place culture at the center of civil society. This chapter describes some aspects of that contest and its results so far, seeking to illuminate a larger context of ideas, discourses, and challenges affecting the many and diverse practices situated at the intersection of culture and development.

I have seldom met anyone outside academia as enamored as I am of the international cultural policy discourse quoted above. I can still remember my first galvanizing encounter with these ideas. I was introduced to the notion of cultural policy in the mid-1970s when I was handed a copy of New Cultural Policy for Sweden, a 1972 publication of the Swedish Ministry of Culture laying out that nation’s values, plans, and apparatus for cultural development. I had never heard the phrase “cultural policy” before, nor had I been exposed to the term “cultural development.” On first reading, however, both expressions seized my imagination, exciting that sense of recognition that flares when lived knowledge becomes named knowledge and sparking an appetite for more. For example, not just a few rubrics but the whole body of objectives and requirements set forth in Sweden’s policy were described in a language I had never heard before but which I immediately understood. In them, culture was portrayed not as a special-interest area—which is how it is still commonly treated in the United States (U.S.)—but at once as the fabric binding disparate peoples into a whole and as a fit crucible for forging an inclusive, democratic, and equitable society. Cultural development was understood as necessarily countering the negative effects of the market economy, and decentralization was posited as a first principle. These thoughts quickly became my own:

The general objective for cultural policy is to contribute to the creation of a better social environment and to contribute to equality.

For this objective to be possible to achieve it is required

• that the activities and decision-making functions of the cultural area are decentralized to a higher degree (the Decentralization Objective);
• that cultural policy measures are coordinated with society’s involvement in other fields and are differentiated with consideration to the conditions and needs of various groups (The Coordination and Differentiation Objective);
• that cultural policy measures are formulated in such a way as to improve communication between various groups in society and to give more people the opportunity to[for] cultural activity (The Community and Activity Objective);
• that cultural policy contributes to the protection of freedom of speech and to create real opportunities for this freedom to be exercised (The Freedom of Speech Objective);
• that artistic and cultural renewal are made possible (the Renewal Objective);
• that historical [äldre tiders] culture is preserved and reinvigorated [levandegörs] (The Preservation Objective); and
• that society has an overall responsibility for promoting pluralism [mångsidighet] and distributing the supply of culture and to decrease or prevent the negative consequences that the market economy can bring. (The Responsibility Objective).²

By the time I read Sweden’s policy, I had been a cultural activist for several years. For example, I had worked as an organizer for the San Francisco Art Workers’ Coalition, a group dedicated to pluralism, equity, and participation in that city’s public cultural agencies and arts programs. For one project, we had published research documenting how the Board of Trustees of the city’s publicly owned Fine Arts Museums had become an exclusive club. Our chart graphing interlocking relationships with the financial and political sectors showed how easily and often money and influence flowed to those who already possessed economic and social power. Our proposals focused on transparent and representative governance that would value and promote cultural diversity and support for living artists, as opposed to the actions the Fine Arts Museums’ leadership had recently taken, such as allocating taxpayers’ funds to establish a new American wing comprising works exclusively by dead white men. Our work was grounded in the understanding that everyone who made up San Francisco’s neighborhoods had an equal place and entitlement to representation in community life and a share of cultural resources and that public institutions ought to be publicly accountable.

I was an autodidact whose study had been guided by curiosity, with no preset path. Everything I knew about culture, community, and organizing I had learned by doing. Through my experience in cultural organizing projects, I implicitly understood the principles underpinning the Swedish cultural policy’s objectives and requirements. Until I saw them spelled out in so many words, however, it had never occurred to me that such values could be proclaimed as public policy and set in place to guide future actions and decisions. They resonated off the page, burning into my brain. Like just about everyone I knew, I had internalized a tacit consensus that the market ought to be culture’s controlling mechanism: If you wanted to address the great disparities capitalism created, you were free to protest and hope for the best. It was a contest of wills, not rights, but Sweden’s stance suggested to me that rights were at the heart of the matter.

The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 contains Article 27: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community” (United Nations, 1948). It may sound innocuous, but from such a slender sprout a rather full understanding of social obligation has grown, as then UNESCO Director-General René Maheu pointed out in 1970:

It is not certain that the full significance of this text, proclaiming a new human right, the right to culture, was entirely appreciated at the time. If everyone, as an essential part of his dignity as a man, has the right to share in the cultural heritage and cultural activities of the community—or rather of the different communities to which men belong (and that of course includes the ultimate community—mankind)—it follows that the authorities responsible for these communities have a duty, so far as their resources permit, to provide him with the means for such participation. ... Everyone, accordingly, has the right to culture, as he has the right to education and the right to work. ... This is the basis and first purpose of cultural policy.

(Girard, 1983, pp. 182–183)

I discovered that there were libraries full of international cultural policy and cultural development documents, sharing examples from around the world and attempting to extract from these experiences principles that could guide future action. Reading this material had a huge influence on my work.

I began to inquire into the policies of my own country with respect to culture and development. There was abundant evidence of a passionate international cultural policy debate in the forty-odd years since World War II, but through the decades after creation of the National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowments for the Humanities in 1965, the official American government line was that the United States had no cultural policy: Our national strategy was simply to follow the lead of private patrons. In fact, the NEA, our country’s arts funding apparatus (and therefore the agency most emblematic of U.S. cultural policy), was based on something that an early 1960s Rockefeller Foundation panel on the performing arts called the “culture gap,” which was the difference between red-carpet arts institutions’ budgetary aspirations and their ability to raise money from private donors. The NEA was created to fill that gap, a very modest purpose in comparison with the broad scope of culture and the potential sweep of the public interest in its development as reflected in the Swedish policy published just a few years later and in many similar volumes from other world regions.

Just because the United States, however, disclaimed any official or explicit cultural policy did not mean the nation lacked one. I practiced reading between the lines to learn what virtually everyone committed to culture in the service of democracy and community has also learned: that some types of history and cultural heritage are routinely treated as superior to others; that the artifacts and past experience of some cultures are enshrined in museums as national treasures while others are treated merely as relics and specimens or ignored entirely; that neither broadcasting nor education nor any other cultural sector is commonly held to account for inclusion, equity, or any other broad cultural development goal.

I began to see that my ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Place of the Arts in Community Identity and Social Change
• 1 Making Beauty, Making Meaning, Making Community
• 2 Rivers and Bridges: Theater in Regional Planning
• 3 One New York Rising Together? Arts and Culture in Neighborhood Ecosystems
• 4 Sustaining Emergent Culture in Montreal's Entertainment District
• 5 Digital Storytelling in Appalachia: Gathering and Sharing Community Voices and Values
• 6 Shaping the Artful City: A Case Study of Urban Economic Reinvention
• 7 Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy Struggle, and Transformation
• 8 A Dialogue on Dance and Community Practice
• 9 Assessing Arts-Based Social Change Endeavors: Controversies and Complexities
• 10 Theatre as a Tool for Building Peace and Justice: DAH Teatar and Bond Street Theatre
• Index