Danielle Wyatt

Libraries as redistributive technology: From capacity to culture in Queensland’s public library network

Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not flow automatically from mere technical connection to the network. This article argues that public institutions play a vital role in redistributing technological capacity to enable emerging forms of social and cultural participation. In particular, we examine public libraries as significant but often overlooked sites in the evolving dynamic between digital technology, new cultural practices and social relations. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork across the public library network of the state of Queensland, we attend to the strategies and approaches libraries are adopting in response to a digital culture.

Making and remaking multicultural arts: policy, cultural difference and the discourse of decline

Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is ‘no longer’ viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.

New Communities, New Racisms: A Critical Introduction

This critical introduction surveys conceptual developments of ‘new racism’ and traces the sociological, governmental and theoretical deployments of ‘new communities’. It offers a critical summary of the articles presented in this themed journal issue and situates these within Asian-Australian cultural studies.

Coda: Library Futures

This very brief concluding chapter reflects on our findings and gestures towards an alternative path for libraries—one that frames them less as an instrument of the smart city then as its antidote, in service to the need to disconnect as well as connect within a digital culture.

Mixed Metaphors: Between the Head and the Heart of the City

This chapter presents a situated account of libraries in the smart city by drawing upon case studies of public libraries in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Geelong. Both cities have made significant investments in libraries over the last decade, and both have linked these investments to city-led digital and smart city strategies. Through interviews with professional library staff, and a review of the policy documents, marketing material and media reporting on these developments, we draw out different visions of how libraries are understood to contribute to the smart city. This situated, ethnographic account provides a glimpse of the embodied realities behind the rhetoric of libraries in the smart city, revealing some of the tensions and opportunities this strategy represents. Our fieldwork reveals how ideals of the library as free, inviting spaces—the heart of their communities—sit sometimes uncomfortably alongside ambitions that they will be engines of innovation in the knowledge economy.

Introduction: More Than Just a Library

This chapter introduces the key argument of this book, which concerns the role of public libraries within the smart city. We argue that the expansion of the library into other sectors of social and cultural life is connected to the economic development strategies of the cities in which they are built. As we outline, this is becoming particularly apparent in ‘smart city’ visions, made possible by the ubiquity of networked technologies, which numerous cities are adopting to position themselves as efficient, innovative, and liveable. The chapter situates this trend within broader contemporary debates about the library’s social and cultural significance, and provides an outline of the structure of the book.

Beacons of the Smart City

This chapter examines how libraries are becoming increasingly entangled in the economic agendas, planning policies, and development strategies of their cities. We outline how this process is unfolding using examples of libraries across the Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and South America that function as central pillars of their cities’ ‘smart city’ initiatives and digital strategies. We outline the twofold way in which this integration of public libraries into smart city planning is taking place. First, through the integration of smart city technologies—sensors, dashboards, and data analytics software—into the physical fabric of libraries. Second, and most significantly for this book, the incorporation of new services and spaces into libraries that support the underlying agendas of the smart city—to transition citizens, businesses, and government into a ‘smart’, ‘creative’, and ‘sustainable’ postindustrial knowledge economy.

Metrics, Metrocentricity, and Governance Models: The Uneven Transformation of Libraries

Drawing on our discussion of public libraries internationally (Chapter 2) and in Victoria, Australia (Chapter 3), this chapter elaborates on the emergent challenges they face as a result of their entanglement in the smart city. We examine three broad challenges. First, we argue there is a gap between the new expectations imposed on libraries and the way they are measured and evaluated by government organisations, with measurement frameworks that fail to account for their newly expanded role. Second, we argue for a renewed approach to the governance of libraries, calling for planners and policymakers to recognise their more complex, multifarious, and dispersed contribution to the life of the communities they serve. Lastly, we argue that reinvigorated investment in libraries has been highly uneven, with libraries in urban locations attracting considerable high-profile investment at the expense of regional and outer-urban libraries.