THEMES / ARTS & CULTURE
The Role of the Arts and Culture in Delivering Prosperity
CUSP views arts and culture not merely as tools for communicating sustainability, but as inherent to prosperity itself. They enable participation in society and contribute to a creative, fulfilling quality of life. Our Arts theme develops this conceptual framework, exploring the interactions between cultural prosperity, place, employment (quality and availability), leisure, and the rights to self‑expression.
Summary
Our starting point is a familiarity with academic critiques of culturally-led ‘regeneration’ and economic development. The links between cultural investment, rising land prices and gentrification are very well demonstrated, while cultural economies themselves often develop labour markets that are marked by social stratification and patterns of exclusion as well as by exploitative or poorly paid work. We have chosen to work with arts and cultural organisations that are themselves challenging the narrow economically-focussed script of the ‘creative economy,’ in order to see if there is a role for cultural investments beyond this.
The outcomes from these smaller-scale investments may not fit the requirements for economic gains that public policy has focused upon but require us to rethink the notion of regeneration itself. This can take a variety of forms from the cultural activism associated with demonstrations and occupations; to discursive resistance to chain stores and the loss of independent businesses; to performance-based interventions that have been used in planning processes to reveal different conceptions of what citizens might want from development.
We work in three case study areas, though other place-based and other cases studies may also be included as further partnerships develop. These are 1) An urban high growth area (Islington, London): an area with the characteristics of hyper-gentrification and displacement, well-supplied with all manner of arts, cultural and leisure offerings. We are particularly working around the Finsbury Park area, 2) An urban low growth area (Stoke on Trent): an area that has suffered hugely from deindustrialisation seeking to re-invent its economy around craft manufacturing and lifestyle businesses; 3) A rural area (Hay-on-Wye, Wales): a town that is renowned for its literary festival and bookshops. Hay and the surrounding areas are attracting incomers who are seeking a particular version of the ‘good life’.
Projects
Blog posts
You And Me Here We Are—A Eulogy for Roger John Coward
Utopias in Hibernation | Blog by Malaika Cunningham
No more fairy tales | Guest blog by Denise Baden
The Light Tree Celebrations | Blog by Malaika Cunningham
Harvesting Real Utopias—Blog by Malaika Cunningham
Bread & Roses | Blog by Malaika Cunningham
Culture and consumption | Blog by Denise Baden
In praise of the small & humble | Blog by Malaika Cunningham
A more personal utopia: the potluck | Blog by Malaika Cunningham
Publications
Participatory performance can play a powerful role in democratic renewal by reimagining the public sphere as a space for playful, reflective, and collective citizen engagement. Malaika Cunningham and Marit Hammond show how arts-based approaches foster connection and imagination around systemic issues like climate change and structural injustice.
Forthcoming book by CUSP director Prof Tim Jackson, exploring the concept of care in the economy, its undervaluation in markets, and its profound importance for health and society. Dive into the history of medicine, capitalism’s impact on health, and the gender politics of care. Irreverent, insightful and profoundly inquisitive, The Care Economy offers a bold and accessible manifesto for a healthier and more humane society.
As part of his PhD research with CUSP, Dr Mark Ball spent time in Stoke-on-Trent playing in a darts league and thinking critically about culture, place, and politics. This style of research is often described as ethnography; where the researcher immerses themself in a scene to better understand it. What is presented here is an argument that draws from those experiences.
In this working paper, we explore young people’s use of shared social understandings to describe what is important in their present lives, to envision their futures, and to respond to the challenges they identify to the realisation of their good lives.
The paper explores energy justice narratives in popular culture, focusing on five Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, highlighting the series’ limited critique of energy production and the class system. The show’s narratives of paternalistic rescue and technological progress remain highly relevant to current energy transition discussions.
Inspired by a line dancing club in Stoke-on-Trent, and drawing principally on cultural theorist Raymond Williams, this article makes the case for appreciating the ways that cultural practices age and change over time.
This is a book which is set out to help children learn about climate change and support them in understanding some of the solutions to the many problems the world is facing. The cross-institutional project was led by Prof Aled Jones at the Global Sustainability Institute. It includes lesson plans and activities for children to help them think about the world with climate change, how they can be active in responding to its challenges and what might happen over the next ten years.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews carried out with members and organisers of the Ages and Stages theatre group in Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom, this article examines the role of community theatre as an arts practice that facilitates intergenerational relationships. The findings point to a need for a deeper integration of arts and cultural practice, intergenerational practice and urban regeneration schemes.
Can Nature Writing be a force for saving what we wish to conserve and carry on loving, and to hand on to future generations? Can it be a contribution to the political and social movements for a re-imagination of the good life, of sustainable prosperity? This is an online collection of previously unpublished authors on nature, ecological challenges, and connections between people and places.
Recent attempts by local governments to engage in participatory policy-making hint at a willingness for a more democratically inclusive approach to policy. However, there is often a gap between the rhetoric of citizen engagement and the actual implementation of these policy-making initiatives.
New edited collection by CUSP investigator Kate Oakley and Mark Banks, critiquing the current model of the creative economy and considering sustainable alternatives; exploring the complex interactions between cultural prosperity, employment quality and leisure; and showcasing interdisciplinary and international perspectives on creative economy assessment.
The so-called ‘creative economy’ model has been one of the central tenets of urban restructuring over the past forty years. This paper focuses on the ‘Ten Streets’ redevelopment project, a recent and ongoing effort to construct a ‘creative quarter’ on Liverpool’s North Shore Dock that the city’s mayor, Joe Anderson, has declared will ‘redefine Liverpool’s economy over the next thirty years’.
CUSP researchers Kate Oakley and Jonathan Ward are guest editors of a special edition of Cultural Trends. In exploring how the idea of the creative economy persists since the 1980s, papers engage with the topic on a social, political, economic and/or organisational level.
This paper explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular, how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics.
The purpose of this paper is to prepare the ground for a strand of work in CUSP which aims to look at the role of culture in everyday life, and in doing so to understand how it might operate as an element of sustainable prosperity. The paper considers the basis on which we might start to think about new legitimations for cultural policy and a fuller understanding of its potential for living well with less.
This paper analyses the potential for cultural work to encourage alternative visions of the “good life”, in particular, how it might encourage a kind of “sustainable prosperity” wherein human flourishing is not linked to high levels of material consumption but rather the capabilities to engage with cultural and creative practices and communities.
This paper explores the ramifications of the combined crises now faced by the prevailing growth-based model of economics. In paying a particular attention to the nature of enterprise, the quality of work, the structure of investment and the role of money, the paper develops the conceptual basis for social innovation in each of these areas, and provides empirical examples of such innovations.
Understanding sustainable prosperity is an essential but complex task. It implies an ongoing multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research agenda. This working paper sets out the dimensions of this task. In doing so it also establishes the foundations for the research of the ESRC-funded Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).
Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society. The article by Kate Oakley and Dave O’Brien considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced.