Culture and Civil Renewal

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1 For a large print version please contact the engage office: info@engage.org This PDF is an extract from engage publication: engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts Regeneration Issue 17 Summer pages ISSN The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks. This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end. Culture and Civil Renewal The human face of regeneration Emily Keaney Research Assistant, Institute for Public Policy Research, London Word count: 2228 Pages: 5 There is a new buzzword flying around the corridors of Whitehall: communities. Only this year, in March, Tony Blair asserted that At the heart of my politics has always been the value of community, 1 and Gordon Brown at this year s Volunteering Conference spoke of his vision of society as a community of communities all working together for the common good. 2 A utopian vision? An unrealistic dream? Perhaps, but it is also a powerful force driving much of the Labour government s policy-making agenda to date, and it is also at the heart of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport s cultural agenda. DCMS currently has four strategic priorities. These are children and young people, the economy, delivery, and communities. For communities, the goal is to increase and broaden the impact of culture and sport, to enrich individual lives, strengthen communities and improve the places where people live, now and for future generations. 3 This is also included in the Public Service Agreement for the department, against which their performance and achievements will be judged. It is likely, therefore, to be one of the central themes of future policy-making. This focus on communities has already begun to have a significant impact on regeneration policy. The cultural sector has always played an important role in this field. Big buildings like the Sage and the BALTIC in Gateshead, the Tate Modern in London and The Lowry in Manchester have been the 1

2 figureheads for grand programmes of economic regeneration and urban renewal, and they have undoubtedly generated some impressive achievements. It has been estimated, for instance, that Tate Modern generated 100 millionpounds worth of economic activity, creating 3,000 full-time jobs, with over half of these effects enjoyed within the local borough, Southwark. 4 It has also been estimated that The Lowry and associated initiatives have created 6,500 new jobs in the local community, and the regeneration of Salford Quays, as a whole, has created some 11,000 new jobs. 5 However, there has been a shift from a focus on capital projects towards seeing local people as the principal asset through which renewal can be achieved. This shift in emphasis has been fuelled, in part, by a concern about who is reaping the benefits of regeneration focused on capital projects. There is concern that while they can create dramatic improvements in the economic performance of an area and attract new blood into it, this is achieved, at least in part, through a process of gentrification which excludes the most deprived members of the community from its benefits. These types of schemes are not able to tackle the root causes of deprivation and exclusion among the communities in which they are placed and, therefore, a different approach is needed which focuses not only on improving a location but also on empowering that community of communities to enable them to play a more active role in improving the environments in which they live. This is the main focus of the government s policy of civil renewal. The civil renewal unit, a division of the Home Office, describes civil renewal as both a political philosophy and a practical approach to improving quality of life. It involves local people in identifying and solving the problems that affect their communities. The civil renewal unit has also identified three essential ingredients that make up civil renewal: Active citizens who contribute to the common good Strengthened communities in which people work together to find solutions to problems Partnership in meeting public needs, with government and agencies giving appropriate support and encouraging people to take part in democracy and influence decisions about their communities. Perhaps most importantly though, the typical civil renewal initiative involves at its heart the people who are most affected by an issue in their community. It is about doing rather than being done to. 6 Civil renewal is, therefore, very firmly rooted in this emphasis on the importance of community. However, it also has roots in several other schools of thought, including Robert Putnam s emphasis on the importance of social capital, 7 the change in emphasis in citizenship theory from a notion of citizenship constructed around the possession of rights to one based on both rights and responsibilities, and civic republicanism s focus on the importance of participating in the civic sphere, dating back to Aristotle. Even more importantly, it was also a response to growing concern in the UK over low voter turn out and a loss of trust in the political system. It was regarded as a 2

3 useful tool for helping to reverse these trends. Civil renewal was also thought to offer a route away from the traditional arguments about the role of the state. Neo-conservatives have traditionally seen strong, self-supporting communities as something that takes place at the point where the state stops. A strong welfare state could crowd out forms of mutual support that would otherwise arise. The traditional view on the left, on the other hand, is that the welfare state and public provision of services are vital to ensure equal opportunities for full participation in the activities and institutions of civil society. The new focus on civil renewal was seen as a way for the left to move beyond these entrenched positions and create and establish new terms of cooperation between the state and its public. So, policymakers have finally begun to realise what the practitioners on the ground have known for a long time: people matter. But what is the role of the arts sector in this agenda? In fact, artists and arts organisations have always worked to engage people in communal life, forge new collective identities and school people in association, though it is only recently that policymakers have begun to recognise this or to evaluate initiatives. Below, I distinguish two ways by which engagement in the arts might strengthen social capital and contribute to civil renewal. Skills There is an ever-increasing body of evidence which shows that participation in arts projects can help to develop skills. These can often be highly vocational skills, providing the participants with the wherewithal to make them more employable. Examples include the Bankside Arts Training Trust which provides pre-employment training for local people who are interested in working in the arts; or the programme being run at Orleans House, a small gallery in Richmond which is now able to act as an examination centre, allowing some of the young people it works with who have fallen out of the mainstream education system to take GCSE exams in an environment in which they feel secure. These kinds of skills are in themselves valuable tools to help an individual break out of poverty and exclusion, but they also provide a crucially important sense of self-worth and confidence which is vitally important in the creation of civil renewal. Self-confidence and self-worth are very important. However, it is not enough for individuals to feel confident about their own talents. There also needs to be a sense of pride in and confidence about the potential and abilities of the community as a whole. There is emerging evidence that the arts could also help to provide this. Work by Andrew Newman and Fiona McLean 8 exploring the impact of museums on social exclusion has shown that museums and galleries can play a significant role in allowing socially excluded communities to construct a positive narrative about their identities. Exhibitions and outreach work can provide a space for untold or unacknowledged stories and histories of a community, facilitating a sense of pride in the community. As one participant in the research put it I felt that Pollok is more interesting, it s like a diamond that has been uncovered. It s like they got all this information they didn t know was there. Pollok felt it wasn t on the map, or 3

4 they ve nothing to talk about, but they have got history. A current example of this is the Museum of Liverpool Life s exhibition, Living It Up: the Tower Block Story, which tells the story of tower blocks in Liverpool, and the powerful communities of tenants who have fought to have many of them retained and refurbished. It is accompanied by a project called tenantspin, a community-led internet TC channel co-managed by high-rise tenants, HAT and Foundation for Arts and Creative Technologies (FACT), which aims to promote resident participation in regeneration and social housing issues through constructive debate and shared experience and which will be presenting a series of webcast discussions about Liverpool s tower blocks to complement the exhibition. 9 Active Citizenship If the cultural sector is uniquely placed to furnish people with the skills and confidence they require to play an active role in their communities, it is also an extremely effective way of getting people involved, encouraging volunteering and participation. According to the Home Office Citizenship Survey, the arts sector is the third most popular area for formal volunteering, and its popularity rose faster than any other area between 2001 and It was also the second most popular area for social participation, defined as being involved in groups, clubs or organisations. Furthermore, according to a Canadian study by Sharon Jeanotte in 2003, 10 cultural citizens are also more likely to be active citizens in other areas too, and the more cultural activities a person is involved with the higher the likelihood they will be a volunteer elsewhere. This helps not only to build the networks and relationships that are so vital for creating social capital but also encourages people to become involved in other areas in their communities too. However, here we must strike a note of caution. There are several problems that are yet to be overcome. The first of these is that buzzword itself: community. There is a lack of clarity surrounding the definition of community. There is no single model or definition and the term has been used to describe communities of interest, like black and minority ethnic groups, faith communities, older or younger people or disabled people as well as geographical communities, including community and resident organisations. Putnam has also suggested that we ought to take account of vocational communities. Communities can also exist at a variety of levels, including the parish, neighbourhood, locality and wider areas. Moreover, we should beware of assuming that communities are homogenous; in fact, they are often riven with dissent and power struggles and can be easily co-opted by particular vested interests. This is, of course, something with which those on the ground who work in and with communities every day will be familiar. Nevertheless, it is a complicating factor for anyone who is attempting to use this approach to regeneration. This is not the only obstacle to overcome. Participating in cultural activity has the potential to achieve all the things set out above, but it does not automatically do so and not all types of artistic activity will produce the same results. It goes without saying, furthermore, that the work needs to be of extremely high quality. The idea that artistic excellence can sit side by side with social aims is now generally accepted. However, what does need to be 4

5 made clear is that if an artistic project has particular social goals these need to be very clearly defined and understood. Art that takes place within communities can be challenging and controversial and its impact on the community can be divisive. The Angel of the North is only one of the most high profile examples of artistic projects that have divided opinion and created factions within a community. However, this does not mean that projects like this should not be undertaken and supported. It is part of the role of art to challenge us as well as to unite us. We must simply be very clear about what a particular project is trying to achieve and the methods that are used to achieve it. The arts sector has a huge amount to contribute in the shift from regeneration through transformative buildings to focusing the transformation on the communities who live and work in the vicinity of these buildings. Iconic buildings certainly can have an impact on transforming an area but for that transformation to begin to tackle social exclusion a more fundamental change needs to take place. Civil renewal is an attempt to make that change, to alter behaviour as well as landscapes. Now is the time for the cultural sector to contribute to this debate, to build on the networks, experience and expertise that the sector already possesses and to use it to take this agenda forward. Notes press/2005/press_11_05.cfm /valuing_museums.pdf 5 Figures from LDR9CultureClub.pdf 6 Civil renewal unit website, Home Office, 7 Putnam, Robert D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York, Simon & Schuster. 8 Newman, Andrew and Fiona McLean, Capital and the evaluation of the museum experience. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2004, 7(4), The tenantspin project is described by FACT s Alan Dunn in Who Needs a Spin Doctor? Part Two, in engage 15, Art of Encounter. See: 10 Jeannotte, Sharon. Singing Alone? The contribution of cultural capital to social cohesion and sustainable communities. The International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2003, Vol. 9 (1), pp