In this blog, Owen Garling and Professor Michael Kenny from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge share insights from their ongoing work looking at 'cultural infrastructure'.
One of the key recommendations made by Culture Commons and 30 UK-wide partners in 'The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK' centred around developing more inclusive and responsive approaches to mapping both tangible and intangible cultural infrastructures.
We further proposed that the Welsh government, alongside civil society and the creative, cultural and heritage sectors, could be ideally placed to explore a nationally co-ordinated approach to the co-design of a new taxonomy for 'cultural infrastructure' on behalf of the UK.
In this blog, Owen and Michael explain how infrastructure has risen up the policy agenda in recent years, and how increased interest in cultural infrastructures could help our sectors to drive towards a more equitable distribution of resources that meets the needs of different communities.
We are accustomed to taking all the infrastructure which makes our lives and societies possible for granted. Many of these are largely invisible to us – like electricity or the supply of water. Those that are the focus of policy debate and public concern are typically related to issues of travel and connectivity, like railways.
But there has in recent times been a drive to expand the range of assets that fall under the heading of infrastructure, and the concept of ‘social infrastructure’ has come into wider use; a term that is used to delineate the spaces, facilities and amenities – like libraries, parks and public squares – that underpin the lives of communities, and form part of the very identity and character of places.
More recently still, the concept of infrastructure has been extended in a related, but distinct direction. The idea of ‘cultural infrastructure’ has in the last few years entered the policy lexicon, as a growing number of stakeholders in the worlds of Arts, Heritage and Culture have sought to reframe their arguments about the different kinds of value associated with artistic and cultural production.
These concepts of social and cultural infrastructure, and in particular their definition and measurement, are the focus of a current research project that we are delivering with the support of the British Academy.
But how exactly should we approach the concept of cultural infrastructure? And how might it be measured?
The genesis of the idea that sites of cultural production and consumption might be thought of as a kind of ‘infrastructure’ lies in part in the increasing resonance and authority that the latter term has come to acquire in the funding and policy communities. It is also distinct, in terms of its genesis and usage from the related, but different, concept of ‘social infrastructure’ which came to acquire a powerful resonance in the context of post-Brexit debates about the social fabric of hinterland areas and ‘left-behind places’.
By contrast, the idea of places having their own forms of cultural infrastructure emerged from distinctive debates driven by thinkers such as Richard Florida, about the role that culture played in making urban places vibrant and attractive to innovators and various kinds of cultural entrepreneur.
Despite these different starting points, we have found it fruitful in our own work to focus upon the shared infrastructural characteristics that these spaces and amenities possess. After all, spaces like theatres, galleries and museums are social spaces as much as they are cultural spaces; and social spaces, such as libraries, community centres and pubs, also contribute to the cultural life of communities. At the same time, the term ‘cultural’ signifies those places and entities that have at their core an irreducible commitment to the making, contestation and exploration of meanings – through very different kinds of artistic and cultural media.
The concept of a distinctively cultural infrastructure also carries a particular resonance in the context of the overriding contemporary preoccupation with economic growth. The new Labour government has indeed depicted economic growth as “the only route to improving the prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people.” One of the key sectors contributing to economic growth are the Creative and Cultural Industries. As the Creative Industries Sector vision pointed out:
“Our creative industries are world-leading, an engine of our economic growth and at the heart of our increasingly digital world. From 2010 to 2019 they grew more than one and a half times faster than the wider economy and in 2021 they generated £108bn in economic value. In 2021, they employed 2.3 million people, a 49% increase since 2011. Their impact reaches beyond their borders to other sectors, with advertising, marketing and creative digital innovation supporting sectors across our economy.”
As with all industries, the infrastructure that supports the stability and innovative capacity of this important sector is fundamental to its success and ongoing contribution to the economy.
But as a number of pundits have observed, cultural activity and meaning encompass far more than the creative industries, and a narrow focus on the economic benefits of cultural production and consumption neglects the richness and forms of meaning-making that cultural spaces and amenities afford for communities across the country.
In her speech to the recent Labour Party conference, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, used the opportunity to focus on this element of culture, arguing that “we will never accept that culture is just for the privileged few, to be hoarded in a few corners of the country, and we will never accept there is a trade off between excellence and access.”
Why would a mapping exercise be of use?
In spring 2024, the Labour party published Creating Growth, which set out some embryonic plans for the arts, creative and cultural industries. These included a commitment to “the creation of a new Cultural Infrastructure Map, [which] will identify our existing arts and cultural institutions, the local networks that could provide them with extra support and, most importantly, highlight the cultural deserts that need to be reclaimed and replenished.”
There are many different maps available that show us the location of most other kinds of infrastructural assets. For example, both the National Grid and UK Power Networks provide maps of their geographic locations. Could something similar be developed for our cultural infrastructure?
Whilst Labour have spoken about developing a national map of this kind, any such mapping exercise poses difficult questions of definition and measurement. A host of tricky decisions need to be made, such as what elements of the arts and culture should be included, and whether such a guide would include the networks and people, as well as physical amenities and asserts, that comprise cultural life. Decisions will also need to be made on both what to include (are the cultural infrastructure assets in one place the same as in another?) as well as how to represent them (is the symbol for theatre the same in Aberystwyth as it is in Aberdeen?).
The greater the geographic scale, the less detail that might be able to be included, and conversely, the smaller the scale, the more detail that can be included at the expense of only covering a small area. Neither type of map is inherently better than the other, with each fitting a different purpose. Too much information on a large-scale map and it will be difficult to read; too little information on a small-scale map, and the usefulness of the map may be diminished. Equally, such maps are important in so far as they have a use value. There needs to be a connection between what they are telling their users and potential actions on the part of relevant agencies.
We have written previously at the Bennett Institute about the case for cultural infrastructure and highlighted the disconnect between the profile that combined authorities and central government give to the importance of the creative industries and cultural sectors and the severe reductions in funding that local authorities have experienced - findings that Culture Commons research own research also backs up.
As we pointed out in an LGA collection on culture and devolution, “it is striking to note that the total investment by local government in arts, culture, tourism and heritage of over £1 billion is less than one per cent of the £103.8 billion of Gross Value Added generated by the UK’s Creative Industries in 2020.” One use for mapping our cultural infrastructure is to start to understand how to square this circle.
Given the foundational importance of cultural infrastructure, any maps of cultural infrastructure assets need to do more than reference the infrastructure that is in place, or that is needed, to support the creative economy. They should also shine a light on what is of value in the lives of our communities both now and into the future. Rather than being approached as a purely technical exercise, this kind of mapping needs to involve community stakeholders in meaningful ways.
As our previous work on social infrastructure has shown, this may well broaden our understanding of what should be included as cultural infrastructure but will give a much richer picture of what is important in sustaining healthy and creative communities. For example, our work on social infrastructure identified the importance of private sector spaces that function as social infrastructure. Taking this approach to cultural infrastructure may well help identify cultural spaces that are of particular importance to different communities.
In our on-going work on the measurement of both social and cultural infrastructure, we are wrestling with exactly these issues. One of the key emerging findings is that any system of measurement – and this would include the production of maps – needs to be thought of as a process rather than a single, final product. The process that has led to the production of key metrics or indeed maps, is as important, if not more so, than the end result. The decisions and choices that are made throughout the process are crucial in shaping the end result, as are the voices of those who have been involved in the process. But like infrastructure, these elements are often invisible to the end user.
It is therefore heartening to see included within Culture Commons’ open policy development programme, a recommendation that calls not for the production of a cultural infrastructure map, but rather for a national standard for mapping these types of infrastructure. Together with our proposed approach to measurement, this will help address the local nature of cultural infrastructure as well as enabling a degree of consistency that could lead to comparisons between places.
We believe that opening up the process of measurement and making explicit the decisions and choices that have gone into the process of producing these maps and measures, will lead to better kinds of metric and more useful and stimulating mapping tools.
This blog was commissioned as part of a major four nations open policy development programme on devolution and increase local decision making led by Culture Commons at 30 UK-wide partners.
Owen Garling is the Bennett Institute’s Knowledge Transfer Facilitator and provides an important conduit between our own researchers and policymakers in the UK and internationally. His work helps to ensure that the institutes research reaches the right policy and public audiences as well as making sure that the research is focussing on the questions that matter. His work covers all of the Bennett Institute’s research themes. With over two decades of experience of working in the public sector in and around Cambridge he has a particular interest in how the Bennett Institute’s work can support policymakers working at regional and local levels as well as at a national level.
Professor Michael Kenney has held positions at Queen’s University, Belfast; the University of Sheffield, where he was appointed Head of the Department of Politics; and Queen Mary University of London, where he was the inaugural Director of the Mile End Institute. He served on the Leverhulme Trust’s Advisory Committee (2010-2018), was co-director of the British Academy’s “Governing England” programme (2015-2018), and is currently a visiting Fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit and a member of the advisory board of the Constitution Society. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of the Social Sciences. As well as being a Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, he is a Professorial Fellow at Fitzwilliam College.
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