Victoria Barker discusses her BA Fellowship, which looks at community engagement with cultural infrastructures and policy.
As a researcher whose interests sit at the intersection of arts, humanities, social sciences and policy, I have long been interested in the different kinds of value that are created and celebrated by the cultural and creative sector, and how this could be better recognised in policy. Previous City-REDI blogs have asked how “local and regional authorities could work more closely with community groups in exploring alternative economic development approaches”. This chimed with my interests and the work we do in the Centre for Creative Economies, exploring the variegated socio-economic contributions that creative work can make in, and to, places. I was therefore delighted to be awarded a British Academy Innovation Fellowship to work within the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub within the themes of community engagement, felt experience, place-based approaches and cultural recovery.
The Fellowship offers a chance to explore some of the complex relationships between communities, cultural infrastructures and place-based policy. I wanted to respond particularly to what the Bennett Institute have described as a ‘slow-burning crisis of local cultural provision’ (2024), which encourages us to think differently about the kinds of value created by the spaces, opportunities and activities that promote cultural and artistic activity and exchange in places. For policy makers, a 2023 European Commission study suggested that citizens’ cultural participation should be supported as part of efforts to empower communities and to promote civic and democratic engagement.
However, in the UK, this turn to promoting civic engagement adds further expectations onto a cultural infrastructure already experiencing severe economic pressure. It prompts questions around the responsibilities and governance of this work across the range of place-based actors, and ties to the LPIP’s interest in multi-level governance. Within this context, I was also interested in finding out more about how the needs of communities are included in addressing place-based challenges.
The connection between culture, community and democracy has existed for centuries, occupying a range of power structures and balances over time, from the Ancient Greek ‘demes’ through to Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. In the UK, the national has come to override the regional and local in terms of positional power and strategic ownership of the policy agenda. This has led to ‘codified’ knowledge in the form of national policy frequently “over-rid(ing) tacit and practical knowledge generated in local settings (Stone, Pal et al 2020) and where regional or even sector-level policies are driven by top-down targets and restrictive approaches to ‘growth’ (Chapain & Comunian 2009).
This imbalanced power dynamic risks the alienation of local knowledge, interests and engagement in the policy-making process, although the practical challenges of seeking and including this knowledge are manifold (Purdam and Crisp 2009), who point out that whilst “community engagement is seen as a way of bringing about democratic renewal by opening up new structures for more localized decision-making and engendering public interest in governance”, this does not lend itself easily to measurement, and there are risks associated with communication and knowledge exchange processes.
“Data is messier and often harder to capture and interpret at the local and hyperlocal levels. It requires a nuanced understanding of how people transverse a city or even a neighbourhood. It demands combining quantitative and qualitative data to capture both breadth and depth of impact. It also needs people-centred research based on anthropological methods such as participant observation and deep hanging out, as well as more traditional qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews.” Centre for Cultural Value 2024
These difficulties have also been noted by the British Academy, who state that “to give voice to the people and places involved, such approaches to regional policy require more open, inclusive, transparent, and accountable governance structures marrying existing representative with participatory democratic institutions” (2024). Summed up more bluntly, we know that communities and their knowledge can help to strengthen place-based governance, and we know that engagement with culture (and its infrastructure) can help to make connections with communities. We know much less about how to elicit community knowledge for policy purposes, or how to recognise when we’ve done that well.
About the project
My project tackles this at a local level through a place-based exploration of the cultural policy and funding landscape and infrastructure, and how cultural organisations have engaged with communities in quite specific policy-oriented ways. As my project takes place during the earlier stages of the LPIP programme, I have centred my fieldwork outside the geographies covered by the hub and spokes, and am exploring activity in two English cities which share similar cultural policy and funding histories. Derby and Coventry are two statistically similar post-industrial cities in the English Midlands, with interesting parallels in their cultural infrastructure(s) over time.
The project begins with a data mapping across the two locations, alongside a literature review on community engagement, cultural infrastructure and place-based policy. This also takes place alongside the work under the ‘cultural infrastructure’ theme of the LPIP Hub, and wider mapping activity. The second phase of work involves interviews with local authority representatives, cultural policy and funding bodies, and cultural organisations in Derby and Coventry who have taken particular approaches to community-engaged work. Across these activities, I am seeking to explore how policy-making interacts with cultural infrastructure and where community voices feature, and how these social and community experiences connect with cultural infrastructure and policy interventions, and where collaborative capacity might be developed further.
A further phase of the project works alongside cultural organisations to explore alternative forms of knowledge production and presentation, recognising that there are not only multiple layers of place, but also multiple approaches to knowledge. This position also seeks to challenge the power dynamics in knowledge production in relation to policy, bringing lived experience more closely into the discussion around policy-making.
What is already emerging from the work is the time required to develop and embed practice in place. Tied to this, it is also important to acknowledge that direct community voice is absent from my approach. There are pragmatic reasons for this, within a one-year Fellowship. By including and empowering deeper perspectives from organisations that have longer-standing and trusted relationships across their communities, we hope to present some of the future challenges and possibilities to further include community in policy-making. Bringing this back to the LPIP hub, the Fellowship will contribute to understanding the cultural sector’s collaborative capacity and skills for local partnership and the challenges and opportunities that this offers.
Find out more about the British Academy Innovation Fellowship within the LPIP Hub.
This blog was written by Dr Victoria Barker, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Creative Economies, Coventry University.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this analysis post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.