This document summarizes the work of a research project team examining cultural intermediation and governance. The team took an interdisciplinary approach, studying cultural intermediation through an arts and humanities lens. They examined cultural intermediation's role in both formal governance structures and informal everyday practices. Through baseline assessments, case studies, and diary-keeping with participants, the team explored how cultural intermediation connects and disconnects different cultural sectors and communities. Their goal was to understand how cultural intermediation could help "re-govern" creative cities to be more inclusive. The team planned to share their findings through academic publications, policy discussions, and local seminars.

1. Cultural Intermediation as the Practice of
Governing
Work Package Team:
Beth Perry, Saskia Warren, Karen Smith and Phil Jones
Project Continuity Day April 4th 2014
University of Salford Manchester

2. Positioning the research
Cultural
Intermediation;
a shared
conceptual
space
History (WP2)
Arts-based practice
approach (WP5)
Communities perspective
(WP4)
Governance /contemporary
(WP3)
Economic perspective
(WP1)
Reflections on
knowledge and
methods (WP6)
International perspective
(WP1)
Evaluation perspective
(WP1)
Theory, policy, practice
implications
Disconnections/inequalities in
cultural urban economy

3. • From government to governance, from governance to governing
• Interdisciplinary approach – an arts and humanities perspective – the
mutual myopia of governance and practice
• Duality of structure and agency
• De-centring the state (Bevir and Rhodes 2010): narratives, traditions and
dilemmas
• A present continuous – no static map or fixed set of relationships
• Yet what of enduring conditions, underlying continuities?
• Disconnection between the creative city and deprived urban communities
as a result of a crisis of governance
• Need for cultural intermediation to be ‘fit for purpose’ for the 21st century
• ‘Will the real Creative City please stand up?’ (Chatterton 2000)
Understanding Govern*

4. ‘Policies therefore need to attend to the challenges of
governing the processes that link production and
reproduction. … the field of governance of culture and
creativity is critical’ (Pratt 2010) (italics added) .
We are not alone…

5. What did we do [1]: Baseline Assessments

6. What did we do [2]: Cases
Islington Mill, Salford, Ordsall. Images taken by Karen Smith.

7. What did we do [3]: Diary-Keeping

8. • Zizek’s (2006) theory of parallax view – accepting the incongruity of two
perspectives but keep both in mind at the same time
• Formal and informal cultural urban ecologies?
– Professionalised, elite, top-down delivery of ‘Culture’
– Everyday practices, vernacular and lay understandings of ‘culture’
• BUT: does a focus on celebrating the everyday relieve those in power from
the responsibility for the distributional effects of public policy?
• Interconnections and interdependencies (positive and negative); pathways
• Overlooking the ‘grey spaces’
Problematising the ‘parallax view’?
“By accident, rather than design, those most deprived urban communities may continue to
excluded from participating or benefiting from mainstream cultural urban policy, with the
creative city existing only as ‘enclaves in an urban landscape where poverty and social
deprivation still widely prevail’ (Scott, 2006)” (Perry, Warren and Smith in development).

9. Bundles of Practices in the ‘Grey Space’

10. • Revealing practices:
– Overcoming the invisibility of the intermediary ‘the ghost in the machine’
– The active work at the intersections between culture, economy and community
– Working across boundaries and functions; making ‘prosumers’; artists as intermediaries
– Multiple meanings, competences and materials (Shove 2012)
– Time, subjectivities, affect, solidarity (Gill and Pratt 2008)
• Revaluing practices:
– Diverse narratives, framings of the state/community
– Undervalued work; issues of e(valuation)
– Motivations; from the self-interested cultural entrepreneur as ‘cultural intermediary’ to
a more moral cultural economy (Banks 2006)
– Practices which reinforce hegemonies as well as undermine them; preoccupations with
self-sustainability
– Contemporary contexts – squeezing out; organisational uncertainty; individualisation.
Cultural Intermediation as Governing

11. “the use of hybrid, in between figures such as the
actant or cyborg, designed to connect that which has
been held apart, and there reveal the diverse urban
worlds that have been edited out of contention.
This work of naming has involved the invention of all
manner of strange mappings, the network, the fluid,
the blank figure – which pose a challenge to our
conception of the conceptions of cities”
(Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4).
Conceptual Muddle or The Work of Naming?

12. Post-War: cultural intermediation as a political project – making communities
1980s – 2010s: cultural intermediation as economic project - neoliberal market-
making
2010s: cultural intermediation as social project – making good
Can cultural intermediation – re-framed as a bundle of practices at the
intersection between formal and informal cultural ecologies – contribute to the
‘re-governing’ of the creative city?
What is …….and what might be……
“It is not only another world that is possible, but another city’. (Purcell, 2008, p.1)
A new narrative for cultural intermediation?

13. • Diary-keeping as a shared reflexive space;
method of co-producing research
• Value to participants – identity, confidence,
realisation, change
• Co-constructing the analysis
• Co-producing case studies? Tension between
partnership, extended ethical responsibilities
and critical perspective.
Methodological Reflections

14. • Academic
– Writing (Environment and Planning; Urban Studies; European Journal
of Cultural Studies; International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research)
– Conferences (City Futures Paris; RGS London)
• Policy / practice implications
• Seminars
– Local governance and the creative urban economy
– Artists as cultural intermediaries
• Outside in, within and inside out – layering the cultural
economy through site-specific investigations
• Informing the co-commissions – a menu of choices
Next Steps