We invite proposals for papers/presentations relating to the following themes:
Rights-based governance models for cultural policy
Coordinators: Nancy Duxbury (CES), Isabel Ferreira (CES), Jordi Baltà (Universitat Ramon Llull - Blanquerna, Spain)
There are significant connections between the right to the city and the scope of local cultural policy, including the central role given by advocates of the right to the city to urban imaginaries as a way to transform urbanity (Petcou and Petrescu, 2015) and how, in the work of Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city is complemented by the right to difference, underlining the role of culture as a space where to combat homogenisation (Martin, 2006; Baltà Portolés, 2021) and enable the emergence of interactive pluralism and diversity. These connections are also embodied in recent approaches to cultural policy based on cultural rights, which place emphasis on culture as a terrain to construct spaces where citizens can understand themselves and each other and freely embark on their life projects (UCLG, 2015). Central to this understanding is the availability of governance spaces and processes, which allow inclusive and diverse deliberation, negotiation and decision-making. This can take a variety of forms, ranging from community engagement in the governance and management of cultural venues or projects, frequently at neighbourhood or district level, through formal decision-making bodies at the city level involving a variety of stakeholders, to the development of evaluation models which place emphasis on the exercise of rights. This session aims to gather reflections and experiences on the implications of rights-based approaches for the governance of cultural policy, particularly, but not restricted to, at the local level. Contributions may include case studies and general reflections on the specific implications of these approaches, as well as the obstacles hindering further progress.
Financial turn in architecture: critical perspectives from Europe
Coordinator: Eliana Sousa Santos (CES)
This session aims to showcase critical perspectives about capital and architectural practices within the social and political contexts of the recent past, and to contribute substantial scholarship to the crucial task of mapping and analysing the multiple phenomena underlying some of the fundamental problems of the present, such as housing and spatial inequality. Between 1970 and the present, new housing policies and financial instruments emerged, creating a financial turn when new types of extractive logics in the economy appeared through the exploitation of material properties and the creation of abstract financial instruments. The analysis of architectural production, specifically housing projects, in parallel with the overlapping fields of economic and social policy, may be helpful to characterise other events, such as the global financial crisis of 2008, and give insights over the presently escalating social inequality and the onset of the global housing crisis. The expanded notion of capital, based on Pierre Bourdieu’s definitions of social, cultural and symbolic capital, may be useful to explore new methodologies of analysis and critique of architectural operations. Bourdieu acknowledged the influence of architectural history in the development of some of his conceptual instruments, specifically the concept of habitus, that originated from his reading and translation, in 1967, of Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) by Erwin Panofsky. Later in the 1980s, Bourdieu identified the growing phenomenon of housing financialisation and analysed the housing market in France, a study that was later published in English as The Social Structures of the Economy (2005).
We welcome papers that focus on the production of architecture as capital in its expanded forms (financial, social, cultural and symbolic) and that address different social and geographical contexts in Europe. Themes to be explored might include, but need not be limited to, the following:
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the relationships between architectural production and capital;
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the symbolic and cultural capital of architectural practices;
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financialisation in its several scales: local, regional and global;
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spatial inequality;
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the privatisation of former public buildings, social housing, public parks and landscapes.
Place-based innovation and regeneration: cultural actors as agents of change
Coordinators: Nancy Duxbury (CES), Sílvia SIlva (CES), Paula Abreu (FEUC, CES), SÍlvia Ferreira (FEUC, CES), Anna Hildur Hildibrandsdóttir (Bifröst University, Iceland)
Since the COVID-19 pandemic period, community well-being has been made central, with coopetition strategies, the practices of social economy actors, and the development of local collaborative arrangements and networks highlighted. This situation creates a framework for developing place-responsive strategies, with cultural actors frequently taking on leadership roles to foster culturally sensitive and place-based innovative initiatives that benefit local communities and territories. Aiming to push beyond just presenting inspiring projects, this session explores the challenges and opportunities of cultural actors as agents of change. It looks at whether storytelling, creative industries and sustainable business models can ignite transformative waves in local communities, and spark innovative solutions to address local challenges. It aims to examine how cultural actors leverage place-based specificities and affordances, and the key features and conditions that can enable cultural actors to develop impactful and sustainable initiatives for local benefit. And it considers how public agencies might respond to support these initiatives. Do they allow these agents and initiatives to become part of cultural policy and territorial planning?
Community-engaged research approaches with impact
Coordinators: Nancy Duxbury (CES), Sílvia Silva (CES), Cláudia Pato de Carvalho (CES), Stuart Poyntz (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Community involvement in research projects plays a crucial role in emphasising and understanding the uniqueness of each place, articulating the narratives and knowledges emerging from local history and community stories, and building upon these to craft new initiatives. Multi-sectoral community engagement approaches can facilitate dialogue between different actors and sectors, encourage the sharing of values and aspirations, and contribute to fostering a deeper sense of community, ownership and empowerment that can prevail over time. They can also be crucial in offering possible solutions for social issues identified in the community. In contemporary academia, aspirations to ‘co-create’ knowledge with communities are heightening and becoming more visible, but we also observe resistances to fully embrace the challenges and implications embodied in meaningful community-academia collaboration. These doubts and hesitations raise questions about the broader implications of democratising knowledge through meaningful community-engaged processes. And yet, it is through community-engaged research approaches that meaningful and enrooted change can be nurtured, empowered and enacted. This session will examine leading practices of community-centred work through the lens of participation, engagement, infrastructures and local impacts. How can rethinking-through-practice redefine what the role of researchers can be? How can academia be better engaged with contexts outside the university? How can social innovation projects be co-developed that are aligned with community needs? How can researchers meaningfully and closely work with community members to pursue future-forming trajectories?
Educational living labs: research and practices for an inclusive public space
Coordinators: Gonçalo Canto Moniz (DARQ, CES), Rita Campos (CES), Cláudia Pato de Carvalho (CES), Isabel Ferreira (CES)
More than ever, the privatisation culture threatens the urban space that occupies not only squares, streets or parks but also public institutions, such as schools and museums. The public dimension of the urban space is not guaranteed as a space where citizens have the opportunity o to raise their voices and enrol in participative and collaborative ways, namely to decide on their future, their neighbourhood and their city. Living labs are experimental laboratories based in real contexts promoted by groups of citizens and stakeholders to co-create solutions for the specific needs of their territory. These actions create a dynamic space of interaction between different types of institutions, individuals and organisations, are bottom-up and create the opportunity for dialogue between institutions—such as municipalities, academia, schools or cultural associations—to support the process. In particular, educational institutions play an important role in activating other forms of citizen engagement to identify needs and explore solutions that put children, youth, their families and the surrounding communities in the centre of the public space. In this sense, educational living labs can transform the public space into more democratic and open structures where children and youth play an active role. The articulation of living labs with an engaged citizen social science, promoting the development of small critical research projects that can integrate different knowledge, further amplifies the transformative potential of such processes. Researchers and practitioners are invited to present and discuss research or practices that aim to activate an educational living lab in public spaces as well as in schools (and other education-related spaces), considering also the relations between living labs and citizen science practices .
Co-creation of human-nature based solutions: research and practices for an inclusive urban and rural regeneration
Coordinators: Gonçalo Canto Moniz (DARQ, CES), Isabel Ferreira (CES), Beatriz Caitana (CES)
Urban and rural territories are changing dramatically in the last decades due to social and environmental phenomena, such as tourism, migration and climate change, among others. Local communities are organised and aim to participate in the regeneration of the public space to address the local and global challenges and to promote other ways of using it. National and international programmes are supporting community based initiatives but also governmental or academic ones that put the citizens at the centre of these regeneration processes. The aim is to enhance the co-creation of solutions that can combine the social and the environmental dimensions to solve challenges related to food, socio-economy, sports, education and culture. In fact, human-nature based solutions can contribute to improve inclusivity in the public space through the co-creation process, by putting people in dialogue, and also as a product that creates a sense of community. The co-creation environment is also a place to share knowledges, namely the scientific, technical and the empirical one, coming from citizens’ everyday experience. Sharing knowledge is an enabler for the development of co-governance strategies that rule the dialogue between the different actors that aim to co-create together. Researchers and practitioners are invited to present and discuss research or practices that promote the co-creation of human-nature solutions for their urban and rural territories. The co-creation processes can be activated by groups of citizens and stakeholders as well as by municipalities or academia. The papers should discuss the conceptual framework, present the co-creation methodology and explore the results based on concrete case studies.
Connecting cultural mapping and cultural strategic planning
Coordinators: Nancy Duxbury (CES), Will Garrett-Petts (Thompson Rivers University, Canada)
Cities are increasingly challenged to develop cultural and social policies—and related research methodologies—that are expected to work with other areas such as economic development, social inclusion, and urban planning. Participatory cultural mapping provides a ready approach and platform for this inter-sectoral work. As a field of inquiry, cultural mapping represents two interrelated areas of study and practice. The first focuses on cultural assets, identifying, locating and quantifying tangible and intangible assets, typically with the aim of developing a cultural resource or community asset map. The second area, associated with the rise of critical cartography, employs participatory mapping techniques to create a multi-vocal community narrative of place, bringing stakeholders together in purposeful conversation and group problem-solving. Taken together, the two areas of cultural mapping seek to combine the tools of modern cartography with vernacular and participatory methods of storytelling to represent spatially, visually and textually the authentic knowledge, assets, values, views and memories of local communities. Both forms of mapping have become increasingly employed by governments, most notably municipalities, and by academics worldwide, often under the premise that they promise an ability to engage and connect with populations and communities not normally inclined towards political/academic participation. We wish to discuss how participatory mapping can become an effective mechanism to foster citizen-led interventions and democratic governance, based on processes that spearhead new modes of participatory interaction with citizens (Ortega Nuere and Bayón, 2015). We note, however, in most situations, participatory cultural mapping tends to be employed as a one-time initiative, a project rather than a long-term strategy, and thus typically remains not fully articulated or integrated within community planning and development practices (Duxbury, 2019; Garrett-Petts et al., 2021; Garrett-Petts and Gladu, 2021). We argue that if cultural mapping is to become sustainable and transformative, community engagement must be based on partnerships that are more than merely transactional—that is, focused on more than operational tasks and fulfilment of short-term expectations. We invite proposals that dialogue with these concerns and issues.
Communities of practice in local cultural policy
Coordinators: Claudino Ferreira (FEUC, CES), Jordi Baltà (Universitat Ramon Llull - Blanquerna, Spain)
The notion of ‘communities of practice’, referring to processes of collective learning through practice in a particular domain of interest, involving joining activities, discussions and the sharing of information (Wenger, 1998; Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015), connects well with the understanding of cities as living labs, which can promote citizen participation, empowerment and capacity building. The use of communities of practice is relatively frequent in some areas of local policy and management, such as citizen science (Göbel, Cappadonna et al., 2016; Manzoni, Vohland et al., 2021), but less common in cultural policy—where connections have only been formulated in relatively abstract terms (Sacco, 2011, 2021) or used only when referring to specific areas such as cultural heritage or arts festivals (Adell, Bendix et al., 2015; Comunian, 2017; Kockel, Nic Craith et al., 2020). We believe, however, that the implications of communities of practice in cultural policy, particularly at the local level, could be further explored, including in terms of collaboration with stakeholders in local cultural ecosystems in a ‘horizontal’ setting, connections between local experiences and global developments (e.g., through cross-border networks and projects), and the related adaptation of governance models. This session aims to discuss the implications of communities of practice in local cultural policy, what conditions could enable their emergence, and which existing models in the design, implementation and evaluation of cultural policy, or related cultural projects and activities, may resemble communities of practice—e.g., working groups and networks at the local, national or international level, participatory projects, initiatives connecting culture and education or culture and sustainability, etc. It also aims to analyse how universities, research centres or observatories may play a role in such processes of collective learning.
Urban youth infrastructures
Coordinators: Cláudia Pato de Carvalho (FEUC, CES), Stuart Poyntz (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Youth creative arts and media organisations/initiatives—such as youth groups, associations, youth-arts related initiatives and other non-formal public spaces where youth intervene as agents of social change—represent possibilities related to alternative ways of intervening in society, particularly in urban spaces, but also in non-formal education contexts. Non-formal learning contexts are diverse and tend to be underestimated and sometimes invisibilised in terms of the impact they represent to the development of youth capacities and learning possibilities—and how these may open possibilities in terms of the professional development and professionalisation of youth as creators and artists in the creative sector. There is still a lot to be analysed in terms of the possibilities that these youth creative endeavours offer to the development of the creative sector, contributing to its innovative potential. What types of interactions need to happen, or are happening, between more formal creative arts educational contexts and non-formal educational contexts that may be important for the sector? What type of impact do non-formal educational contexts have in youth’s lives and in their professional future related to the creative sector? How do these non-formal educational contexts empower youth to be active agents of social change in their communities?
