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16 - Conclusion: reconfiguring urban cultural infrastructure
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 243-258
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Infrastructure is definitive of cities, intimately embedded in their constant change – their expansion and densification, their sprawl and contraction, their construction and decline (Melosi 2020). In addition to reconfiguring energy, water, sewage, solid waste, transportation and communication systems to persistently address complex societal issues (e.g., climate crisis, environmental pollution, deepening inequalities and exclusions, economic decline and privatization) and reshaping urban futures, infrastructure is also cultural. Over a decade of interdisciplinary scholarship has investigated the centrality of urban infrastructure to the transformation of cities demonstrating how “direct user involvement” in its malleable networks (Furlong 2010: 47) actively shape the extent to which residents can participate in urban life (Baumann & Yacobi 2022). Despite offering technology-and actor-focused explanations of infrastructural capacities and entanglements (Rutherford 2020; Rutherford & Coutard 2014; Silver 2014b), such research has largely neglected the cultural sector. Even as more recent scholarship attends to the palimpsest of socio-technical layers that rhythmically persist across time and space within systems (Monstadt 2022) – the “heterogenous configurations” of “different coverage, technologies, operations, logics and ownerships” (Lawhon et al. 2018: 723) that reinforce the longue durée of infrastructure choices (Moss 2020) – culture remains underexamined.
By focusing on the cultural infrastructure that supports practices of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, this book affirms the centrality of culture to the imagination, mediation and constitution of cities in the present and into the future. It has illustrated how cultural infrastructure is multi-faceted and relationally embedded in different material and socio-economic structures and social practices that undergird cities and city-making around the world. As cultural institution and artefact, this infrastructure might appear inert and fixed within local geographies and histories, but it is in the often-uncomfortable tension between obduracy and change where artistic and prosaic cultural practices unfold, creating urban imaginaries of living otherwise. Following Escobar (1992), embodied practices and imaginaries of living otherwise produce alternate political practices leading to forms of cultural innovation that chart different infrastructural futures. Subaltern and countercultural politics and practices of difference emerge in cities everywhere whether from their spatial, economic, cultural or sexual margins.
1 - Introduction: configuring urban cultural infrastructure
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 1-28
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
Cities are works of art. They are imaginative objects. They have life forces of their own that bring into view colliding individual and collective needs and ambitions and “heterogeneous views of functions and requirements of administering, of instituting, and distributing resources” (Blum 2003: 5). As centres of commerce, transportation and government, where large numbers of people live and work, cities are dense gathering places, sites where cultures intersect and collide (Bain & Peake 2022). It is from the emblematic co-presence of strangers, social interactions and critical engagements that collective life is built through institutions, public spaces, workplaces and homes within neighbourhoods (Miles 2007). But that density also brings with it socio-political conflicts, inequality brought by struggles over resources and infrastructure, as well as the threat of terrorism and disease transmission (Anheier et al. 2021).
In recent years, the global Covid-19 pandemic has, within a short period of time, produced a counter to the historical role of cities as sites of population concentration and social interaction. It has spurred urban exoduses and the digitization of many urban education and medical institutions, workplaces and retail and entertainment environments. Through information communication technologies (ICTs), the domestication of urban social relations has intensified, potentially eroding and reconfiguring long-established public-private spatial binaries that inform the meanings of urban places and the social structures and morphologies of cities. While ICTs enable spatiotemporal transcendence, meaning that “fewer relationships or transactions require … copresence”, they also increase the capacity for centralized surveillance and social control from various corporate and state actors (Calhoun 1992: 221). A constrained urban public life is concomitantly the product of this dramatic and rapid reworking made possible by the continual malleability of the material and human cultural infrastructure of cities that are ever-open to such change.
Often treated as superficial in contrast with the frameworks of urban economies, material and human cultural infrastructure is what makes cities themselves archives and works of art. In their diversity and multiplicity, cities are also synonymous with the production and consumption of culture.
Part II - Performing Culture
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 79-84
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As a mode of cultural production, the performance of culture – whether high or low, formal or vernacular, material or digital – involves a series of embodied actions that unfold over time and at various scales in a range of purpose-built and adaptively reused spaces. It is by moving in different ways – physically, but also imaginatively, affectively, socially, culturally and politically – that bodies, individually and collectively, produce and perform culture and hence co-generate urban spaces. Performative actions may include instruments and props, be guided by scripts and scores, and culminate in distinct situations or events. On a spectrum from amateur to professional, performers are artists (e.g., actors, poets, musicians, dancers and Carnival krewes) who present their work publicly after it has been tested and refined through rehearsal.
Performances of urban culture, then, are supported by a distributed infrastructure of rehearsal spaces (as well as performance venues, the city streets and community and cultural centres) that are accessed across cities, often in a time-limited way through short-term rentals. Where they can still afford to operate in cities, rehearsal rooms and recording studios can be rented by the hour or day to individuals and small groups. Many larger cultural institutions like universities, colleges, theatres, museums, libraries, dance studios and music halls also offer rehearsal spaces through rentals and residency programmes, but these come at a cost and must be applied and budgeted for. Those performers with long-term institutional relationships and contracts usually have access to stable and affordable rehearsal facilities, but individuals and community groups often struggle to access such spaces and are forced to be more mobile. In a panoply of small rehearsal spaces in the backrooms of bars, suburban garages, strip-mall storefronts, abandoned warehouses and even on pavements, subway platforms and apartment balconies, the uncertainties and vulnerabilities underlying creativity and cultural experimentation play out. Yet, as Bingham-Hall and Kaasa (2018: 10) specify, “[i] f performers are mobile, use infrastructures for time-limited periods, and are less tied to specific locations”, their infrastructural needs are less likely to be articulated in a unified political voice that can be amplified through media coverage, and they are less likely to be implicated in the contentious “politics of place” that contributes to neighbourhood-based gentrification.
Part IV - Collecting Culture
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 201-206
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Cities themselves are living archives. Their built form and streetscapes are at once prosaic and visually spectacular, messy and ordered, permeable and bounded. As complex, incomplete and ever-changing entities, cities and their cultural infrastructure are the repositories of urban life (Rao 2009). Nevertheless, there are cultural institutions within cities that have explicit mandates to collect, store and exhibit memories, histories and knowledge that become the foundations of state-sanctioned culture. These range in practice from small personal collections to the activist reading rooms and archives of oppositional groups, to state-sanctioned municipal libraries, national archives and metropolitan museums. Within these collections are images, texts and material culture from the past through to the present that are catalogued, indexed and stored for selective display and reinterpretation. In cities, these repositories provide the cultural infrastructure through which to recuperate the past and reimagine urban futures.
The collection of culture – the possession and assembly of rare and valuable objects – “is consumption writ large” (Belk 1995: 1). Whether compiled for archival activism or to nostalgically represent the past by refashioning new spaces and subcultures, collections make new relationships between objects, spaces, communities and their histories (Sellie et al. 2015). Collecting invariably brings objects together and, in the case of hierarchical structures like libraries, museums and archives, gives them an order in relation to one another based on classification systems (Derrida 1996). As Elsner and Cardinal (1994: 2) assert: “[i]f the peoples and the things of the world are the collected, and if the social categories into which they are assigned confirm the precious knowledge of culture handed down through generations, then our rulers sit atop a hierarchy of collections.” Collecting is a process of social display that distinguishes between things. It aspires to be distinctive and sometimes disruptive of norms while also reinforcing what constitutes taste and culture.
This section focuses on the socially admissible collecting of museums, libraries and archives, attending to how this cultural infrastructure of collection serves the public good (Bain & Podmore 2020). More than just tangible institutional repositories of written, visual, sonic and material culture, they are also spaces of urban encounter across socio-cultural, ethnic and generational divides that are embedded in locales (Amin 2008).
Part I - Producing Culture
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 29-32
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Cultural production – its services, activities and networks – are embedded in, and transformative of, places. Within cities, residential, industrial and commercial neighbourhood sites that fall into disrepair are revalorized through creative activity (Rantisi & Leslie 2010). Contemporary urban planning and policy solutions have leveraged the culture-capital compromise wherein the “authenticity” of artistic labour and the appeal of creative lifestyles (Zukin 1982) are employed to breathe new life into decaying urban industrial infrastructure – store fronts, strip malls, schools, religious institutions, factories and warehouses (Zukin 2010).
Sites of cultural production – where the process of artistic creation and art-making result in the fabrication of objects or activities – are often mythologized in the public imagination, yet they have straightforward infrastructural requirements. Spaces of cultural production demand the permanent storage of, and access to, tools, equipment and materials which suggests the need for stable locations that do not necessarily require the co-presence of audiences (Bingham-Hall & Kaasa 2018). Art schools are one such key site of cultural production, that resemble laboratories or factories of research, experimentation and innovation. In art schools, emerging communities of artists work at the avant-garde edge of their disciplines, looking “to the past and tradition for inspiration” but their “main currency” is “hip coolness, progressive ideas and place in the contemporary art scene” (Becker 2009: 38). Within this world of culture-making, it is the makers themselves who are highly esteemed, and those cultural workers – those artists – who gain critical attention for their labour who are most admired, along with the spaces they inhabit (Becker 2009).
Beyond art schools, art studios have long been privileged as sites for undisturbed experimentation with materials, sound, light, movement and ideas that constitute the making of cultural work as well as the formation of professional identities (Bain 2004, 2005). The studio is celebrated as a “space for ongoing as well as finished projects, colour, paintings, scraps, scribbles, prototypes, ideas, chaos, order, language” (Sjöholm 2014: 505– 6). As a site to showcase oneself to curators and collectors, studios are not just places to make and store artwork. Rather, artists are collectors of objects and archivists of their own work and studios become places “where careers are stored and developed” and “where artists look both forward and backward in their practice” (Hawkins 2017: 91).
The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, Julie A. Podmore
-
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 07 August 2023
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Cities are synonymous with the production and consumption of culture. It is their material and human cultural infrastructure that also makes them archives and works of art. The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities critically re-examines the relationship between the urban and its cultures. It expands our understanding of the concept of urban cultural infrastructure and highlights the foundational role of culture to the materiality and sociality of urban life and the governance of cities.
The book begins with a theoretical overview of the cultural and infrastructural turns in urban studies scholarship. It then explores definitions of cultural infrastructure and its 'hard' and 'soft' dimensions before critically considering the vulnerabilities generated in the cultural sector by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapters are organised in four thematic sections focusing on aspects of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, which feature detailed case studies from 17 cities across the global North and South.
This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of urban studies, but also to policy-makers planning and creating cultural infrastructures as well as those working in cultural institutions and creative industries.
List of Contributors
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp vii-viii
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15 - Queer counter-topographies: LGBTQ+ community-based archives as urban cultural infrastructure
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 229-242
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
An archive is understood to be a repository of historical artefacts, a place to which objects, images and documents from the past are consigned in anticipation of the collective will to remember (Appadurai 2003). In contrast with modernist state archives (the Archive), community-based archives are collections of materials that originate from, are collected by, and preserved for a “grassroots” community of interest to document and maintain control over community heritage (Caswell 2014). Since the rise of the LGBTQ+ social movement in urban North American and Europe in the 1960s, activists have been generating and collecting the materials that provide the basis for their own community-based counter-archives (Sheffield 2020). LGBTQ+ community-based archives are sites where “evidence of non-normative sexualities and gender non-conformity has been preserved”, repositories of queer knowledge that can potentially challenge “heteronormative and homocentric ways of being and knowing” (Sheffield 2020: 11). Such “activist archives” provide an infrastructure to “forge new relationships between parallel histories, reshape and reinterpret dominant narratives, and challenge conceptions of the archive itself” (Sellie et al. 2015: 454). Binding together material, digital and imagined spaces, these sites of “memory-in-action” provide community support networks, capacity building and skill-sharing both through their references to the past and practices in the present (Sizemore-Barber 2017: 127).
This chapter reflects on such sites of “memory-in-action” as urban cultural infrastructure. While LGBTQ+ community-based archival collections are geographically variable, due to the historic metropolitan materialities of their communities, their informational and physical infrastructure is primarily urban. Unlike the “hard”, large, official and durable urban infrastructure that underpins modernity and materially manifests biopolitical social norms (Gandy 2011), the infrastructure of LGBTQ+ community-based counter-archiving is oppositional, relational and place-based having been co-constructed and maintained through soft networks of people (Amin 2014). As social movement archives, their collections – or information infrastructure (McKinney 2020) – provide some of the only documentation of the queer “city-as-archive” (Rao 2009). Thus, they are intimately bound to the project of tracing local “queer infrastructure” described by Campkin (2021: 82) as the “dispersed, interconnected, heterogeneous” LGBTQ+ urban community spaces that traverse time through memory and stretch across metropolitan areas.
Frontmatter
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- Book:
- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp i-iv
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Contents
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
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- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp v-vi
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Part III - Consuming Culture
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 143-148
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Summary
Around the world, urbanism in the twenty-first century is marked by contradictory trends in consumption. In high-income countries, a seemingly unending drive towards mass production and centralized global distribution in large warehouses and big-box stores sits in tension with a middle-class quest for novelty within niche markets of consumption and commodification (Zukin 2010). In a competitive world of late neoliberalism where cities have only themselves to sell, the hyper-drive to ground global capital in place and retain creatives and “culturepreneurs” leads to pockets of urban homogeneity in tension with a search for difference and particularity (Lange 2011). Informal street hawkers and traders juxtapose with a global drive to homogenize the retail landscape through shopping malls, while DIY subcultures in wealthy cities appropriate the ancient informality and localism of pop-up trade. In mid-and higher-income countries, some neighbourhoods are branded as districts of art and entertainment, while gentrification is encouraged by introducing hipster bars, cafes, galleries, studios and farmers’ markets into low-income communities and public spaces (Hubbard 2016). This palette of middle-class cultural amenities fosters consumptive opportunities to build cultural capital and distinction.
Civic leaders and real estate developers seeking to normalize neoliberal urban rule also deploy cultural capital in the marketing of lifestyles, identities and urban spaces (Novy & Colomb 2013), such that neighbourhoods, or specific spaces within them, might be experienced as “cultural” by visitors. The expressly symbolic leveraging of urban cultural infrastructure and the affective atmospheres of creativity, ethno-cultural “diversity” and heritage to change the perception of a place – culture-led urban placemaking – is inevitably linked to the destructive dimensions of urban regeneration. It builds the products of culture into places often at the expense of local communities. Civic leaders also deploy technocratic spatial rationalities in the planning of streetscapes, demonstrating hostility towards disorderly and informal appropriation of urban space by hawkers, panhandlers and the homeless for the discordance they present to a modernist aesthetic of cityness (Watson 2003). In contradistinction to the emphasis on physical and technical infrastructure as modes by which cities are made productive, street trading emphasizes “people as infrastructure” to facilitate economic and social opportunities for poor urbanites (Simone 2004).
Index
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 283-291
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References
- Edited by Alison L. Bain, York University, Toronto, Julie A. Podmore, Concordia University, Montréal and John Abbott College, Québec
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- The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
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- 23 January 2024
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- 07 August 2023, pp 259-282
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