Local Culture and Resilience
Cultural Entrepreneurship: Unlocking Potential through Value Creation | M. Peterson
This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of cultural entrepreneurship, exploring current conceptualisations of cultural entrepreneurs and outlining new perspectives and recommendations for cultural entrepreneurs of the future, particularly as it relates to the evolving city. Cultural entrepreneurship is a contested, yet essential aspect of the growth of artists and arts organisations globally. Though there are similarities, this research demonstrates that cultural entrepreneurs from different backgrounds, industries and of varied sizes need different things and have different barriers so cannot be understood in the same way. Despite psychological, political and financial barriers to entrepreneurship in the creative industries, finding a balance between artistic, social, economic and institutional innovation for the various actors throughout the arts offers key insights to how artists and arts organisations can be more entrepreneurial. Through a grounded theory approach, this research connects previously disparate fields of cultural policy, social entrepreneurship and business model innovation to derive new perspectives of how cultural entrepreneurs can survive and thrive in the dynamically shifting world. From this research, a novel approach to understanding cultural entrepreneurs emerges, creating a model to understand more holistically how value is created and captured for the artist or arts organisation. This model has a range of practical approaches intended to provide tangible pathways into combining the concepts of the quadruple bottom line, value ecosystems and different conceptualisations of cultural entrepreneurs, offering a novel contribution to all of these fields in addition to, and most significantly the topic of cultural entrepreneurship.
Valorising Hidden Culture: The Role of Authenticity, Ownership and Identity in Value Creation | L. Parsons
There is, as yet, no common usage of the term ‘hidden culture’ within cultural studies scholarship, but there is considerable evidence that some culture remains in a hidden state (Crossick and Kraszynska, 2016; Belfiore, 2018). The idiosyncratic nature of cultural objects and activities which predominantly occur in the domestic or community spheres means that certain forms of knowledge remain uncodified and thus under-valued (Polyani, 1962; Gertler, 2001). This paper presents a model of capturing value in hidden culture using Leicester, a minority-majority UK city, as a cultural laboratory. Through the lens of domestic and community food cultures, participatory digital methods illustrate the spatial-relational aspects of embodied knowledge transfer in the creation of cultural products. Phenomenological readings of the data concerning food culture explore how tacit symbolism is unconsciously accepted by communities of practice yet almost impossible to codify for outsiders, thus exacerbating the disconnect between societal groups on the peripheries and UK cultural policy.
Creative Autonomous Resilience or Well-planned Exploitation? NoLo as an example of creative regeneration in Milan | S. Mazzucotelli Salice & M. Berti
This paper addresses micro practices of urban creativity as a form of resilience against global neo-liberal development strategies – often presented under the umbrella of the creative city model – where the financial capitals initially intended for urban cultural projects actually flows into large real estate projects. The model of the creative city carries with it a series of contradictions. On the one side some academics, moving along the classic ideas of Florida, elaborated a sort of hagiographic account that presents the creative city as an opportunity to attract creative talents and to create ideas, technologies and contents able to bring a vibrant economy to the city incorporating dynamic cultural atmosphere and thriving quality of life. On the other side some scholars focused on more diabolic accounts presenting instead limits and contradiction of the creative city model: studies and research in this area highlight how the so called “creative” professionals work in extremely precarious conditions in a system where everything – training, updating social reproduction – is an individual responsibility and also stress the impact of gentrification processes that forces relocation of established resident. In such a context, departing from an analysis of the most recent literature on creative cities, the overall objective of this article is to present the case of NoLo – a district located in the northern area of Milan where micro digital manufacturing hubs and cultural industries are leading a process of bottom-up urban regeneration which is challenging traditional global neo-liberal development strategies.