Eleonora Redaelli

Creative placemaking and the NEA: unpacking a multi-level governance

ABSTRACT The role of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in shaping the arts and cultural sector is not well understood. In this paper, I focus on the development of the governance of the creative placemaking policy to unpack the complexity of the role of the NEA. Governance is used to refer to collective action designed to achieve a general interest through different actors from both the government and civic society. I use intergovernmental relations theory to capture governance dynamics in creative placemaking. In particular, I focus on three main tools developed by the NEA to spur a multi-level governance: research, grants, and partnerships. What emerges is that the role of the NEA in the development of the creative placemaking policy is multifaceted as it includes offering and leveraging funding, shaping the conversation, providing insights, and spurring collaborations. These actions create a multi-level governance based on a dynamic exchange between national and local governments, and the involvement of a variety of actors from civil society.

Arts management and cultural policy research

Introduction 1. Knowledge: Disciplines and Beyond 2. Academic beginnings: Arts Management Training and Cultural Policy Studies 3. Functions of Management as Disciplinary Bridges 4. More than Management: Organizational Perspectives 5. Cultural Policy as Conventional Public Policy 6. Cultural Policy Research: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests 7. On Paradigms: From Epistemology to Epistemic Cultures 8. Mapping the Field: Institutional Settings of Knowledge Production Conclusion

Becoming a creative city: perspectives from Augustus’ Rome

The creative city discourse has been shaping cultural policy worldwide. Among the multifaceted goals highlighted by scholars, one aspect that is not thoroughly emphasized is the understanding of creative cities in terms of culture-centric approaches to foster city cohesion. In this paper, I study the value of focusing the idea of the creative city to integrate diverse communities in a historic context: the city of Rome during the reign of Augustus. The aim is to provide a broader historic frame of reference to better articulate the function of the creative city discourse. Through the analysis of primary and secondary literature in Ancient Studies, I highlight three aspects of Augustus’ remaking of Rome: integration, spectacles, and beauty. From these aspects, what emerges is the idea of a creative city as a vital and spectacular place that offers access to arts and culture involving the diversity of the population, presenting a wide range of art forms, and enhancing the beauty of the built space.

Academic Beginnings: Arts Management Training and Cultural Policy Studies

While exploring the meaning of knowledge, in the previous chapter we identified academia and its disciplines as a central place of knowledge production. However, that does not encompass all the agents involved in the field. Disciplines emerge as discursive practices that reflect specific rules of academia, whereas the notion of field includes an epistemic culture that does not conceptualize knowledge as built on a privileged epistemic paradigm, but rather occupies a transdisciplinary space. Nevertheless, academia remains central and we take it as our point of departure for an understanding of the field by investigating how arts management and cultural policy developed within this setting.

On Paradigms: From Epistemology to Epistemic Cultures

This chapter revisits the question of knowledge in arts management and cultural policy research. What is the nature of the scientific claims — claims to truthfulness — being made by arts management and cultural policy research? On what grounds are these research findings to be considered valid, truthful, reliable, or even worth considering? What are the grounds on which the voice of the researcher can be said to be distinct or different from the voice and claims being made by practitioners, journalists, or the general public?

Cultural Policy as Conventional Public Policy

There are many different research traditions that claim ownership of cultural policy as an object of study. The most conventional approach to cultural policy research used by these traditions consists of approaching cultural policy through the lenses of political scientists or public policy researchers — meaning that cultural policy is given no specific status and is seen as a “policy area or subfield” among others (environmental policy foreign policy immigration policy, transport policy fiscal policy social policy etc.). This approach builds on concepts, theories, and methods that rarely differ from those used to study other policy areas — from environmental policy to social policy, regardless of how unique or different these policy fields might be, the outlook and methods used to analyze them are often similar. This lens on cultural policy has been considerably influential in the development of the field and has contributed to a better understanding of national, regional, and local cultural policies. Additionally, the tools developed by this approach for comparative analysis and program evaluation have led to a rich practice of collaboration and knowledge dissemination between academia, governments, think tanks, and the broader arts community. Of course, this conception of cultural policy falls short at times, and many cultural policy researchers who are interested in some of the more specific dynamics of culture may consider this conventional approach to be oblivious to a number of important debates in cultural policy research.

Knowledge: Disciplines and Beyond

The Western construction of knowledge has been the source of a longstanding debate between Platonists and Aristotelians (McKeon, 2001). For Plato, the sensory side of human experience leads away from the critical rationality upon which truth depends (Eisner, 2007). For Aristotle, knowledge is differentiated along three lines: theoretical, practical, and productive. Theoretical knowledge is knowledge that purports to know things that cannot be any other way than the way they are; practical knowledge is knowledge of contingencies; and productive knowledge is knowledge of how to make things. The modern university’s engagement within the philosophical roots of knowledge is reflected in the vocational-academic tension among faculty in the traditional disciplines of letters and science, and faculty affiliated with professional schools.

Cultural Policy Research: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests

In our attempts to situate and define cultural policy research in the previous chapter, we sided with political science and policy studies to formulate what is often seen as a basic definition and understanding of cultural policies. Cultural policy is seen and defined as the outcome of a state-driven process. Needless to say this is only one of many ways of approach cultural policy. As there are no agreed upon definitions of what culture is in the humanities and social sciences, there is no unanimous definition of what cultural policy is. This is, however, common currency in any discussion about the nature of cultural policy research, and by stating this we are only reiterating what is in evidence for most of us. In this chapter, we illustrate how cultural policy research is subjected to a multidisciplinary account.

Functions of Management as Disciplinary Bridges

Discussion on arts management has developed into three main strands as a means of addressing the often complex relationship between business management and arts management (Palmer, 1998). The first strand claims that there is little difference between managing an arts organization and any other kind of business (Shore, 1987). The second strand’s argument considers arts organizations to be fundamentally different from other businesses (Pick & Anderton, 1996). Finally, the third strand’s position reverses the previous arguments and states that business management has a lot to learn from both arts management and the arts in general (Adler, 2006).

Mapping the Field: Institutional Settings of Knowledge Production

Arts management and cultural policy research have a polyphonic nature. While the majority of the research in the field rests on social science and humanities traditions, its close relationship with practitioners often shapes its research in the direction of what one might refer to as an applied field. The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyze the different sources of this polyphonic research, charting the different institutional settings of knowledge production. Considering that institutions are context-specific, as they are linked to the social, economic, and political history of the country, this chapter focuses on the USA. Each section illustrates the characteristics — purposes and logics of inquiry — of the four institutional settings that produce the current knowledge for and about the field: academia, arts organizations, government, and a collection of private organizations. The chapter concludes with a proposal for the development of an ethics of research that would foster a community of practice geared towards cultivating an inclusive view of the knowledge produced in these different institutional settings, but serving the same field.