At the recent RSA session “Culture, Communities and Infrastructure: Building Capacity, Capability and Confidence in Place,” Dr Sara Hassan and Professor Abi Gilmore brought together a group of researchers, engagement and knowledge exchange managers to explore exactly this question. Co-convened by colleagues at the University of Birmingham and drawing on the research of the UKRI Local Policy Innovation Partnerships (LPIPs) and its Strategic Hub, the session revealed both the promise and complexity of building meaningful, inclusive cultural policy grounded in place.
In this blog, we reflect jointly on the themes that resonated most and consider how they can inform future partnership working, evaluation, and governance across the cultural policy landscape.
Cultural Infrastructure as More Than Bricks and Mortar
Our starting point was the idea that cultural infrastructure is more than capital projects or economic outputs. In Abigail’s paper “How (Not) to Benchmark,” we challenged dominant policy logics that emphasise standardised metrics, arguing instead for an expansive understanding of infrastructure that includes both ‘hard’ material assets and ‘soft’ relational capacities—such as shared cultural values, trust, and lived experience, in addition cultural venues, funding streams and programmes.
Place-sensitive approaches to cultural planning must account for how communities experience and shape culture in their daily lives. Drawing on work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) LPIP Hub, Abigail examined the risks of methodological nationalism embedded in policy appraisal frameworks. These approaches too often obscure the local relational work that underpins effective partnerships and can exacerbate spatial inequalities in cultural provision.
This was echoed in Madeleine Wagner and Christoph Mager’s work on “festival regions” in Germany. Their geographical framework dissected how multi-local cultural events embed within regional ecosystems—politically, socially, and spatially—revealing that culture can actively shape and be shaped by the geographies in which it is anchored. In Abigail’s presentation, ‘Place’ is seen as a knowledge agenda which is both transformative and enabling.
Reflection: Culture-as-infrastructure demands more plural and contextual forms of valuation. Cultural infrastructure is relational and dynamic. Benchmarking alone won’t capture the rich, networked realities of cultural life in place. It cannot be fully captured by spreadsheets or standard metrics but must be understood through the lived experiences of communities and their spatialised relationships to, and partnerships with, institutions in the context of multilevel governance.
From Swift Trust to Institutional Trust: The Role of Partnerships
Kristel Miller and colleagues from EPIC Futures NI offered a candid reflection on the delicate process of moving from swift, time-bound collaborations to sustained institutional trust in place-based work. Through an autoethnographic lens, they unpacked the messy realities of co-creation, exploring how history, social capital, and leadership shape cross-sector partnerships.
In contrast to abstract policy ideals, this grounded exploration surfaced the necessary conditions for genuine collaboration: reciprocity, equitable power dynamics, and the ability to “hold the space” for co-design—especially when universities play the role of anchor institutions.
Reflection: Trust in place doesn’t automatically scale—it requires consistent attention to local histories, power dynamics, and the everyday labour of relationship-building.
Reclaiming the Value of Culture in Regional Renewal
Lesslie Valencia led the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership’s presentation, which powerfully situated culture not as a decorative afterthought but as a multidimensional driver of inclusive, regenerative development. Based within the city of Bradford, the UK’s most ethnically diverse city during its UK City of Culture 2025 year, their systems-level research approach—linking creative activity to wellbeing, employment, and pride in place—challenged dominant narratives around productivity and growth. Their reminder was clear: if we ask the wrong questions, or measure only what’s easily countable, we miss the real value that cultural life brings to communities.
Victoria Barker echoed this in her discussion of community engagement in cultural policymaking. Codified national policies, she argued, often override the tacit knowledge embedded in place, while top-down growth agendas risk alienating the very communities cultural policies seek to serve. Through examples like Talking Birds’ “Theatre of Place” in Coventry, she illustrated how socially engaged practice can spark civic imagination and create alternative forms of infrastructure which convene citizens and empower community voice.
What stood out was the tension between codified knowledge in national policy and the tacit, situated knowledge held by communities. Too often, the policy system treats culture as a delivery mechanism for pre-defined outcomes. But these examples showed how culture can function as a democratic medium—fostering voice, participation, and new imaginaries of place.
Reflection: Cultural policy needs to be democratised—not just in delivery, but in its design, measurement, and strategic intent. Participatory cultural practices are not add-ons—they are core to building resilient places.
Moving Forward: Toward a Relational Infrastructure Framework
Across the session, a clear thread emerged: cultural infrastructure is not just about ‘what’ we build but ‘how’ we build relationships, capacities, and trust within and across communities. It’s time to move from evaluation logics focused solely on output metrics to relational frameworks that recognise culture’s connective tissue role in civic and economic life.
As researchers and practitioners working across academic, policy, and community settings, we see the need to design evaluation and engagement strategies that reflect these relational dynamics. Doing so is not just more inclusive—it’s more accurate.
We look forward to building on these insights through our continued involvement in LPIP Hub projects and invite others to join the conversation. Only by thinking culturally and acting collaboratively can we begin to reimagine infrastructure for the places we care about.
This blog was written by Dr Sara Hassan, Research Fellow II at City-REDI and Professor Abi Gilmore, University of Manchester. Sara and Abi lead the Cultural Recovery theme for the LPIP Hub.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.