What about the workers? Mismatches in urban cultural policy
In a series devoted to participatory processes and urban development, I want to suggest that there is a fundamental mismatch between these areas, and that mismatch is at the heart of the problems of urban cultural policy. Participatory processes, particularly those from a placemaking tradition, are concerned with communities – residential, visitor, institutional, even, occasionally, artists. Alongside this is the construction or support of local cultural economies – organisations, companies, workers and employers. And labour markets which are fractured by class, gender and ethnicity and a marked tendency to provide a few well-paid jobs and lots of low or unpaid work.
Bad jobs support worthwhile cultural initiatives. Placemaking frequently ignores the economic underpinnings of the cultural system. And the rhetoric of participation obscures the exclusions within cultural production.
The talk will consider these critiques, and ways beyond them, where the democratisation of the urban cultural realm includes cultural production itself – in the workplace.
Kate Oakley is Professor of Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow. She has written widely on topics including culture policy and place, cultural labour and labour markets, culture and the environmental crisis and more recently on sport.