Deborah Stevenson

Civic gold rush : cultural planning and the politics of the third way

Cultural planning is a strategic approach to city re‐imaging and cultural industries development that variously involves establishing cultural precincts, nurturing creative activity, and re‐evaluating public life and civic identity. In the context of varying political configurations and local histories, cultural planning is touted as a policy intervention capable of achieving a wide range of cultural, social, economic and urban outcomes. This article considers key factors leading to, and legitimating, the incorporation of so many aspects of social and human endeavour into cultural planning, and the reasons why cultural planning must inevitably fail in its own terms. Two influences are identified as being particularly important. First, the adoption by cultural planning of an understanding of culture as the entire way of life of a group or community provides theoretical legitimacy for its wide‐ranging agenda but is also a source of instability. Second, it is argued that the political priorities of the “Third Way” have been significant factors shaping cultural planning around the world. Central here is the use of cultural planning as a tool for achieving social inclusion and citizenship – aims that are imagined principally in terms of economic accumulation.

Urban Space and the Uses of Culture

This paper was published as International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2004, 10 (1), pp. 1-4. The final version is available from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/1028663042000212292. Doi: 10.1080/1028663042000212292

Transforming Retirement: New Definitions of Life After Work

This quantitative research study uses survey data of women born between 1946 and 1951 in Australia. It follows earlier work that identified the importance of transitions from work for women of the baby boomer generation. We provide important insights into the lives of women who have partially or fully retired and the changing nature of womens work and retirement. For many women, retirement is characterized by newfound freedoms, opportunities, career change, and evolving identities, yet others view retirement as a continuation of previous occupational and gendered roles and commitments. This study has important implications for retirement policies for women.

Footsteps and memories: interpreting an Australian urban landscape through thematic walking tours

This article is concerned with the currently common deployment, under the rubric of cultural planning, of place‐making and local cultural heritage awareness projects. Such exercises sometimes seek to accommodate the impacts of de‐industrialisation and urban transformation by identifying and marking places of contemporary and historical significance, and interpreting them and their broader connections to people and to place. The article critically reflects upon a project conducted by the authors that developed two interpretive heritage walks in a large, working‐class suburb in Australia. This interpretive exercise afforded a valuable opportunity to investigate the contours of the place‐making process and its determinants. By tracing the development of the walks and their accompanying interpretive brochures, the article identifies and discusses a number of emergent key issues relating to social class, gender and ethnicity. In particular, it considers the interpretive opportunities and constraints presented by contracted cultural heritage research and its applications.

Negotiating community title : residents' lived experiences of private governance arrangements in a master planned estate

Residents of private residential estates must negotiate the complex of expectations, rights and responsibilities that comes with the community title legislation that defines the management and structure of these neighbourhoods. Of particular importance is the way in which the governance structure of these estates simultaneously supports and threatens their social and financial viability. Drawing on the findings of research conducted in a privately governed master planned residential estate in Sydney, Australia, this article considers the residents’ lived experience of the community title scheme. It argues that a perceived lack of transparency in the contractual arrangements which residents enter into when they purchase a property within a private estate directly frames a set of expectations that are at odds with their legislative responsibilities. Also evident is the existence of tensions between the demands placed on residents by the structure of private governance that manages and polices the estate and those of the local government that manages the area within which the estate is located. The article concludes that there is a need for policy attention to be given to the development and management of private residential estates in Australia.

Convergence in British Cultural Policy: The Social, the Cultural, and the Economic

It is increasingly the case that cultural policy at all levels of governance is expected to address a suite of concerns much broader than those traditionally associated with the arts and creative practice. Indeed, in many nations, including most notably Britain, the concerns of cultural policy now embrace the economic and the social, as well as the cultural. In Britain, this convergence is occurring as part of a broader policy concern to ameliorate social exclusion by providing people with opportunities to participate in the creative economy. Drawing on the findings of a major study of the factors shaping cultural policy internationally, this article identifies and maps the priorities, key intersections, and convergences associated with these priorities in British cultural policy. The article argues that, in spite of taking different forms and having varying emphases depending on the constituency and the level of governance involved, the convergence agenda currently dominating British cultural policy is nevertheless remarkably consistent in terms of the discourses surrounding culture, the remit of the cultural sphere, and strategic policy implementation.

Cultural planning in Australia: texts and contexts

t is now commonplace for Australian local governments to formulate cultural plans, either as stand-alone documents or as part of a broader cultural development agenda. Indeed, the rush to embrace cultural planning is without doubt one of the most significant cultural policy initiatives of the last two decades. As conceptualized in a range of influential manifestos, cultural planning is expected to be much more than a locally focused arts policy (Ghilardi 2001; Landry and Bianchini 1995; McNulty et al. 1986; McNulty 1991). Rather, it is framed in terms of an understanding of culture as the entire way of life of a group or “community.” Cultural planning is sold as a strategic approach that, directly and indirectly, intersects with a wide range of local government planning concerns as well as with the gamut of cultural practices and forms, from the traditional arts to popular culture (Landry 2000). As Graeme Evans explains, “Cultural planning . . . is set up as addressing the social, economic, urban, environmental, and the creative because each of these spheres are aspects of ‘culture’” (2001, 7). According to the literature, cultural planning is a coordinated way of recognizing and nurturing local rituals, beliefs, and everyday activities and priorities. It is a strategy for fostering creativity and difference and articulating core community values and place-identity (Landry 2000; Landry and Bianchini 1995; Greenhalgh 1998). The rationale for adopting an expansive (anthropological) understanding of culture for cultural planning can be found in the body of influential cultural planning treatises that have defined the field,

Religious Belief across ‘Post-secular’ Sydney: the multiple trends in (de)secularisation

Abstract Cities were once thought to be crucibles of secularisation, where the retreat from religion and its expression would be most pronounced. This decline in faith was linked to the heightened levels of heterogeneity and cosmopolitanism within cities. However, there is recent evidence of both the continuation and of the recession of the secularisation process in contemporary Western societies, with the mix and pace of these trends being quite unique to different countries. Significantly, this combination of processes has been argued to be part of a ‘post-secularist’ paradigm. Drawing on census data, this paper examines the spatial patterns of religious affiliation and non-belief in the Australian city of Sydney. Sydney has divergent geographies of faith and non-faith indicating the spatial multiplicities of religious belief. The decrease in Christianity in some areas of the city has been matched by an increase in non-Christian faiths, while in other areas there has been little change. Some parts of the city—especially those areas with a strong mix of affluence, diversity and cosmopolitanism—betray the strongest levels of secularisation and the retreat of faith. At least five geographies of faith and non-belief are recognisable within Sydney. While post-secularisation has been recognised as internationally uneven, this research demonstrates that it is also uneven across a world city like Sydney. The Sydney variations in (de)secularisation reflect city-based effects, including the historic and contemporary patterns of immigrant settlement, established and emerging religious communities, the segmented geographies of class and affluence, and the development of zones of cosmopolitanism. The findings point to the need for further research on the micro-geographies of religious belief and non-belief and community relations, and the on links between religious communities and civil society.

Reflections of a 'great port city' : the case of Newcastle, Australia

As the material form of the city and its symbols are negotiated and contested, the mobilisation of images and identities of place are central to the legitimisation of urban redevelopment. Frequently, these processes and their outcomes consolidate the status of those interests which have long controlled the urban agenda, In this paper I explore (with reference to the deindustrialising regional city of Newcastle, Australia) the extent to which powerful discourses of urban symbolism and the everyday meanings people attach to the places of their social and cultural worlds arc implicated in the process of selling to local residents the ‘ideal’ of the redevelopment of the inner city.

Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts, collaborations and constituencies.

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britains local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britains domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.