Cultures and Globalization

Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance

Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar, Helmut K Anheier, Yudhishthir Raj Isar

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446201237, 9781446201220
• eBook ISBN: 9781446291726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Today is a new metropolitan age and for the first time ever more people live in cities than they do anywhere else. As cities strengthen their international and cultural influence, the global world is acted out most articulately in the world?s urban hubs - through its diverse cultures, broad networks and innovative styles of governance. Looking at the city through its internal dynamics, the book examines how governance and cultural policy play out in a national and international framework.

Making a truly global contribution to the literature, the editors bring together a truly international and highly-respected bevy of scholars. In doing so, they skilfully steer debates beyond the city as an economic powerhouse, to cover issues that fully comprehend a city?s cultural dynamics and its impact on policy including alternative economies, creativity, migration, diversity, sustainability, education and urban planning.

Innovative in its approach and content, this book is ideal for students, scholars and researchers interested in sociology, urban studies, cultural studies, and public policy.

PART 1 METROPOLITAN CULTURAL POLITICS, POLICIES AND GOVERNANCEOVERARCHING ISSUES

CHAPTER 1

CITIES AS GEOPOLITICAL SPACES FOR THE GLOBAL GOVERNANCE OF CULTURE

Katharine Sarikakis

‘Global cities’ are generally understood to be the economic and financial centres of global capitalism, where the concentration of transnational corporations and a plethora of specialized services serve the functions of finance and trade. The author of this opening chapter explores such cities from a different angle, that of the political power that makes them central in the governance of culture internationally. These metropoles are placed at the ‘commanding heights’ of global policy because they function as centres of hegemonic political systems. Brussels, Washington, DC, and Montevideo are the cities whose roles in leading and shaping global and regional policy are discussed here, particularly in relation to audiovisual and electronic culture policies.

Introduction

Our everyday connection to the world takes place through familiar dots on the map that take us through cities: our physical connections and explorations, our experiencing of the cultural ‘other’ often begins at the international airports of city-nodes, as we travel to cities even when to reach other destinations. Our symbolic, cultural acquaintance with the world takes place through our communications media and cultural institutions with cities as the nodes of global interconnection serving as the basis from which further ‘knowing’ can develop. We watch the news correspondents greeting us from ‘Washington’ or ‘London’, ‘Hong Kong’ or ‘Johannesburg’, conveying to us views of the world developed about and within these urban spaces. We benefit from a plethora of cultural events in cities when they are designated as the European City of Culture or we visit cities for their cultural and leisure offers: the tourist industry has a term for it, ‘city break’. We turn to cities for transnational, global human connections, for the creation of culture, to explore ideas and challenge world politics. Seattle, Genoa, Paris, Athens are ‘marked’ in our memory as sites of resistance to specific aspects of globalisation. London, New York, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Melbourne have become associated with the translation of human globalisation into transcultural communities.

Cities have invariably played a central role in the construction of world connections, from the ancient polis to the modern metropolis, across political, social, economic and cultural levels. However, in the past two decades, and as globalisation processes accelerate, cities have emerged as the main command centres of the world; not only or just confined within national geopolitical borders, but also with an expanded and complex international role to play. Scholars began paying attention to this international role by studying the ways in which cities have become geopolitical spaces and decisionmaking centres from where the main functions of digital capitalism are managed, namely financial markets and trade. Global cities have become the object of study in these terms, next to the study of cities as spaces rooted in the national, as distinct contexts for urban planning and urban-based cultures. Although debates rightly situate the role of the global city within international webs of connections, the connection of these two realms – the national and the global – are made largely in terms of the political economy of the ‘commanding heights’ of the global market. Some discussions also point to the management of culture and emergence of culture industries in global cities as part and parcel of this international political economy. Yet the connections between the governance of culture and the city as a global policy player have been insufficiently explored.

This chapter proposes the study of the global geopolitics of the city within which a range of decision-making takes place: about culture, about processes of making and consuming cultural artefacts and about processes of designing and negotiating the priorities and directions of cultural development. The chapter therefore approaches world cities as drivers and filters of cultural policy globally, rather than in terms of their own cultural projects, a range of which will be presented eloquently in other chapters in this volume. Instead, here I shall propose a different view of the city and suggest a mapping of the geopolitics of cultural governance beyond the local. I shall argue that certain cities are global political decision-making centres for culture. They become so because the bureaucracies headquartered there make decisions of a global impact on national and international levels and on citizens’ everyday life. I argue that cultural policy-making is a process inextricably linked to the global governance of finance and trade underpinned by communication infrastructures worldwide. Three cities, Brussels, Washington and Montevideo, are taken as exemplary cases for their varying positions in global policy-making and their role in the globalisation of culture.

Culture and the city: a global affair?

The study of culture as an object of policy has been seen largely as a national affair with little attention to its international dimensions. Cities and cultural policy has been approached in relation to national parameters of power, planning and negotiation, and the topic is understood as cultural policy in the city and perhaps for the city. Little attention has been given, however, to the role of certain cities that have become central geopolitical spaces configured to produce global cultural policy. Certainly, not any city can act as such a space, nor is culture as the object of policy a tightly prescribed unit. Rather, it is my contention here that, first, cultural governance at a national level is to a great extent subject to global policy norms, and second, that global cultural policy principles are designed among actors who are geospatially organised to interact with policy-makers. These are not only international organisations, such as the UN agencies or the International Monetary Fund, but associations of industrial coalitions, professional associations and lobbies.

The role of culture in international relations is long established. For example, initiatives to promote cultural production in the form of films or other audiovisual content in foreign markets have been a driving principle of the US State Department and the Hollywood movie industry since the beginning of the twentieth century. International markets and especially European markets were important for the economic survival of the industry but also for the cultural ‘education’ of Cold War era Europe in all things American (Jarvie 1990). A range of cultural exchanges among countries vary from au pair cultural programmes, as they exist among European and North American countries, to the ‘visit’ of whole museums from one country to another, such as the exhibition organised in Beijing by several German museums in 2011, and from the establishment of the European Capital of Culture programme to the flowering of national cultural diplomacy institutions, such as the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Française or the Instituto Cervantes. Culture has served as a ‘public diplomacy’ tool in international politics, in more outspoken efforts with the export of the American ‘dream’ packaged in movies or the World Service by the BBC, and in more subtle efforts by the European Commission to forge a ‘European identity’ (Isar 2010).

Spatially, the governance of culture involves a juxtaposition with the ‘other’, who exists outside the borders of the national. This takes the form of ‘export/import’ of cultural products, ideas, as well as forms and formats of governance. Policy philosophies are being ‘exported’ spatially and culturally, repeatedly. Some global, dominant examples of policy directions are the liberalisation of digital cultural content, deregulation of the media and the ‘creative’ industries, privatisation of digital technologies. These policy ‘trends’ have expanded globally, but their institutional and often ideological origins can be found in specific geographies (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006). For example, specific policy areas, such as European Union audiovisual policy or the promotion of its film industry, are now being adopted by Latin American and African countries. The British approach to the regulation of public funding for public media, education and other ‘creative industries’ is a model other countries are turning their attention to, from South Korea and Taiwan to Australia and Canada. These international spatial dimensions of cultural policy have not been studied sufficiently by either culture or media studies or policy scholars. Before I discuss in some more detail this spatiality, it is useful to contextualise it within the range of the connections between the global city and culture.

‘Global cities’ is a term used to describe those urban centres that become home to actors that ‘produce strategic global inputs’, as Sassen (2001) asserts. Sassen’s investigation of the global city devotes a lot of time to the analysis of the ways in which transnational firms have created new urban centralities and peripheries through the organisation of their functions. The concentration of transnational capital in certain global urban centres derives from the functions of acquisition, cooperation and alliances, as well as the need for access to highlevel experts in key industries (Sassen 2006). At the same time, these actors are in a position to provide services and goods to their clients from afar and through the facilitation of electronic communications. Hence, there co-exists, on the one hand, a dispersal of factories, offices and service outlets and, on the other hand, a concentration of economic ownership and control together with global information integration. These elements have contributed to the strategic placement of some cities as well as the reinvention of others or the reconfiguration of city centres (Sassen 2001). London and New York emerge as the major global cities (Massey [2007] 2010) because of their connections to global trade, to the seats of multinationals and to key stock markets.

Sassen notes that today’s global cities are ‘command points’ in the organisation of the world economy, owing to the concentration of economic actors in clusters in specific global sites. They serve as key locations and marketplaces for the leading industries of the current period, whereby two elements of capital organisation are predominant, namely finance and specialised services for firms. Finally, Sassen locates core production processes as well as innovation within global major cities (Sassen 2001). Next to these, there is a network or further networks of cities that occupy vital positions in the world economy due to their specialised functions and reach within regions. Moreover, as several chapters in this volume will argue, cities present claims of global-ness in their efforts to attract global capital and often govern their external image as one associated with a ‘specialisation’, i.e. city of culture, ‘media city’ and so forth.

Deregulation and the growth of financial markets have led to an increased concentration in the operational sites of the financial industry, and subsequently in a few stock markets. Although there is some dispersal of profits and ownership through subcontracting to smaller companies worldwide, a few large firms reap the majority of profits. The way this takes place is through the specialisation of functions and sections of firms: headquarters and the producer services deliver the components of what might be called ‘global control capability’ (Sassen 2001). High levels of specialisation are the key to the new economy as the ‘symbolic analysts’ become part of a global elite that operates in a corporate, effectively borderless world. Some of the services of large companies are externalised and respond to a growing demand by companies, but also by national governments, for specialised information and analysis. Think tanks, consulting agencies and other such services are based on the ability and capacity to process complex information, which take two forms. A so-called first rank ‘datum’ can be accessed by anyone. A second rank ‘datum’ is the more complex form of information needed to execute major international deals. The capacity and capability to deal with such data is based on a combination of commanding social information material with associated interpretations and inferences that are based on cultural competencies as well as specialisations (Sassen 2001). Within this configuration, culture plays a part as a ‘special’ form of ‘datum’, the mastery of which becomes central in the nuanced processes of negotiation, analysis, evaluation and consultancy. Culture itself is also an economic activity, with market value, as the considerable focus in all current cultural policy on the ‘cultural’ or the ‘creative industries’ demonstrates (Anheier and Isar 2008).

The intersection of the global city and cultural policy can be observed on three levels, whereby culture is operationalised spatially. For one, culture becomes a significant element in the consumption and leisure practices of highly skilled workers in global cities. Due to the emergence of urban clusters in global cities dedicated geographically and infrastructurally to the operation of multinational corporations, a clustering of workers takes place whose consumption habits and needs at a cultural level shape to a great extent the ‘offer’ of cultural production. International publics generate international audiences in very specific localities in the urban landscape followed by international entertainment and information businesses. Culture becomes one of the ‘attractions’ and ‘benefits’ for international workforces converging into city-hubs, and so functions as an integral element of a globally divergent capitalist economy.

Under these conditions, the cultural policy landscape of the nation becomes decoupled from the monopoly of the nation state as more and more cultural activities pass on to private initiatives. This is the second level of culture; its structural configuration stretches across the axes of production and consumption. Cultural consumption has risen together with the privatisation of media and the increase of production volume through the round-the-clock business model of most communications. A series of developments in the political economy of communications has altered the cultural and communicative landscape of nations and the globe fundamentally. These changes have been studied intensively, but as a reminder, it is important to pinpoint the entry of the electronics industry into the terrain of digital communications and the digital spectrum, the convergence of technologies and mergers of companies and across industries and the interdependence of content providers and new communication technologies in communications as the core elements of the transformation of cultural governance. Also, increasingly, cultural experiencing and culture making is based on its technological realisation, from digitisation of archives and online libraries to digital audiovisual content, from interactive technologies in museum installations to non-professional online anime clips (see also Anheier and Isar 2010).

The third level of the relation of culture and the city involves the consequences of the ‘technologisation’ and privat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of boxes, figures, tables, maps and photos
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1: METROPOLITAN CULTURAL POLITICS, POLICIES AND GOVERNANCE
• PART 2: INDICATOR SUITES
• Index