Reclaiming economics for cultural commons

Image: The Room for London on top of the South Bank Centre. Ironic because it is an elite space for invited performers and paying guests, yet also connotes a future time of sea level rises and a flooded city that will affect everyone. 

I like the timely mission of the Cultural Value Network in reclaiming cultural value from the ‘econocrats’. I agree with Ben Walmsley and also with Fiona Hutchison that attempts to give financial proxies to cultural activity can be ridiculous. I’ve been one of the voices calling for time and space for cultural work to take root and have unpredictable and untraceable effects. I can get frustrated when contracted to do evaluations of cultural projects that, to fulfil funding requirements, we must pre-ordain outcomes and measure impacts before the ripples have even spread.

Our debates get stuck in an endless to-and-fro between prioritising either the harder economic or the softer spiritual or relational outcomes. Those of us who share common distaste at hard economic measures can also be caught up in other dichotomous debates between the importance of measuring instrumental social outcomes and a wish to place culture otherwise, outside mechanistic and measurable realms. The claim of otherness evades description, causing difficulties in making the case for culture. We get frustrated because we are chafing at the bind we are in, which is global capitalism. This is both bind in the sense of tie and bind as quandary. The capitalisation of the commons provides us (the lucky ones, temporarily) with incomes and cheap goods. How do we break out of that without collapsing?

To move the debate on, I suggest that our main challenge is reclaiming economics from the capitalist ‘econocrats’. Economics is a way of analysing values of goods so that their accumulation and exchange can be efficient, fair and sustainable. However, the current global system of accumulation and exchange is so inefficient (or utterly wasteful), unfair (or socially unjust) and unsustainable (or ecocidal) it is destroying both the natural commons and cultural commons. (Culture of course is not distinct from nature, but an integrated part of it.) We can blame particular Economic schools for promoting this destruction, but not Economics itself. Economics can be a valid tool in a circular restorative system. Indeed, the discipline of economics and structures for accountability may even be vital in shifting us towards a circular economy.

The key principles of a circular economy are:

• measure the quality of systems rather than components
• create industrial systems that mimic ecological systems
• waste is energy (or food)
• diversity creates resilience
• regenerating the biosphere should be the primary reason for any activity.

All of these principles are very fitting with philosophies around the arts and heritage: complexity, flow, reinvention, creativity, diversity and conservation of past knowledge. Cultural organisations and practitioners have much to offer in supporting this. I don’t mean this in the simplistic sense that art can communicate messages, as critiqued here by Jeppe Graugaard writing about Cape Farewell. I mean that cultural organisations can change the way we design our world, can open our eyes to its diversity and soften antagonisms, and a great deal more. You might ask – how can I measure and prove this? You only have to imagine your world without songs, jokes, metaphor, games, stories, tools, designed shelter, gardens, cookery, clothing etc etc to know why they matter, and that these are all as they are now because of the contributions of creative people. It makes sense too that we need cultural infrastructure, whether it is informal community or formal institutions, to give us the most inclusive and excellent access to these things.

I don’t believe the cultural sector should retreat from political realities in wanting to evade financial or instrumental measurement. It should bring the powers of culture to change our lived and political reality. There are risks of course, especially that organisations may risk losing funding if they are seen to be against Government policy. But, it doesn’t have to go that way. The Happy Museum project is an encouraging example. It funds small action research projects into how museums can promote a high wellbeing, low carbon society. At first the stream was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation but now it has £146,000 support from ACE. Moreover, the long term risks of not shifting our political and industrial model towards a circular economy are very great. Even if we cease emitting CO2 today, the sea will still rise 3 metres. If we don’t stop emitting CO2 within a few years, it is highly unlikely that human civilisation will survive through the next century.

I’m aiming to shift my work from short term evaluations and projects, to supporting cultural organisations to travel into this unstable future while helping stabilise it. As a resource for this, I’m developing a ‘value ecosystem’ model for the cultural sector. (You can see an initial sketch in this post. In short, it aims to describe the value of work that feeds planetary, collective, institutional and individual wellbeing nested one within the other. It also suggests that we flip our meanings of hard and soft, so that ‘hard’ becomes the essential work of sustaining culture and ‘soft’ becomes lazy abstraction from the real world.)

In doing this I’ve wondered about the difference between ‘evaluation’ and ‘valuation’ as both a difference of scale and purpose. Evaluation is gathering evidence to describe the value of any project to participants and stakeholders. Valuation is usually the evidenced quantification of the value of investments or assets in a comparative (aka competitive) marketplace. Put like this, valuation sounds very harsh. However, it could be reframed as the valuation of assets and acts of stewardship within a commons. If the context changes to commons, its meaning changes from a market value to common values. Perhaps because valuation happens when an organisation or service is under question or threat, we are more wary of it. It’s like when a marital home and assets are valued at divorce. Perhaps we try to shield cultural services from this brutal treatment because we feel they are somehow like children who can’t be valued as if to be packaged up, only loved. We know the difference between pricing something and loving it.

Culture (as the creative flowering of the demos) is not loved by the powerful, because it benefits power to weaken the public spirit of resistance which might protect local places, traditions, freedoms or diversity. We hear the powerful say ‘if people value culture, or health, or education, people will pay for them’ so in turn cultural organisations scramble to mobilise public support for what they offer. As part of this we’re seeing a flowering of participation in cultural organisations, inviting public to comment on, co-create and contribute to services. This is to be applauded, but it is important for participation projects to be critically engaged. I’ll end on a little exchange on Twitter from today’s Museum Ideas conference. The new Director of the Museum of London, Sharon Ament, spoke admirably about how museums need to tackle problems like climate change and was enthusiastic about the moves by museums and libraries to be more participatory. She was quoted to say ‘At no time has an individual had such a chance to be heard’. Quick as a whip, Tony Butler, who leads the Happy Museum Project mentioned above, responded ‘At no time have the powerful been more unwilling to listen’.

We need to aim for a circular economy to reclaim economics for a commons culture. In doing so, we need to set up circular systems within and beyond our cultural organsiations so that people can have more than just a chance to be heard, but have political agency to make a difference.

Grounded response to a Big Society

On the New Public Thinkers site, Dougald Hine wrote a really useful analysis of the criticism that has been flying around about the Big Society. It was a great example of cutting through the agonistic culture of politics, where something like the Big Society idea is used as an arena for two-sided contest. Dougald suggests that whatever your political colour, the necessity for social reform to reduce alienation and increase agency is being forced on whoever has any power to make change, by the erosion of economic security and social fabric. I commented on Dougald’s piece but as I was doing so, Paul Kingsnorth sent some provocative tweets about arts funding which I wanted to respond to in relation to this Big Society debate. So, here’s a  post to explore this further.

I’m not a political theorist so, although I appreciate structural analysis of the Big Society and think it’s essential, I can’t contribute greatly to it. What I can do is to advocate for persistent and pragmatic action in communities. Eleanor Saitta commented that we need to develop alternative organisational structures that skirt both market and state, but that without large-scale wealth distribution all these efforts will still leave us as ‘starving peasants fighting in the gutters over scraps of food puked up by the rich’. While I’m shocked by wealth inequality, I’m not sure the scenario is currently quite as stark as this. Because, for me, hope lies in imaginative participatory strategies to grow nourishment so that we don’t have to scratch around in the gutters of the rich.  By nourishment, I mean food but also all the other goods that will help us eat, help others eat, and otherwise allow us to stay well. By ‘us’ I mean all life, not just humans.

While we must talk about capitalism, we must also eat and help all the places where eating is going to be increasingly difficult. The way to do that is to harness technology to art in the service of ecological innovation. Note, technology is just a tool whereas art is the force that generates ideas, motivates people to participate and helps spread spores of ideas. Here are a couple of examples:

Farm:Shop is an urban farming project led by artists in an empty shop in Dalston. It uses hydroponics, aquaponics and other technologies to grow food indoors. Some may this isn’t art, it’s growing food. Partly the art comes through the creative social activities they are doing with visitors. But fundamentally, this is the kind of art we need to develop. Francesco Manacorda calls it an ”emerging kind of art…that is interested in cycles, natural materials, growth and roots rather than ‘original’ creations that hang disconnected, in time and space.”

Another example is the vision of ‘bioregions’ to replace the outdated idea of developing places through ‘high-entropy knowledge hubs’ and ‘iconic cultural buildings’. These ‘bioregions’ can still be cultural without a new build major art museum. John Thackara writes hereabout how artists are working on such projects in the Basque Country. An example in the UK is Heartlands in Cornwall, a new bioregion which is also a cultural centre.

The triad of sustainability where economic, social and environmental capital are held in balance has to be challenged, and it is by these examples. If you focus on generating ‘biosphere capital’, then prosperity, social wellbeing and biodiversity can ensue. The Big Society discourses have not easily admitted talk of ‘bioregions’ or ‘biosphere capital’. That, I think, is because in order to develop such capital you need to bring both techne and poiesis into play together, both technology and the imagination. UK society is profoundly technocratic, and is extremely uncomfortable with metaphor being applied in arenas of work and public planning. On the other hand, the cultural elite are profoundly resistant to art being instrumental to social and environmental wellbeing.  The two domains of culture and public services resist porosity with each other (while there are many examples of partnership experiments of course).

Back to Paul Kingsnorth’s challenge. Yesterday, ACE issued its funding news, and many organisations had 100% funding cuts, some lesser percentages and some had an increase. So, there were a lot of hurt feelings at the unfairness of it all. Paul asked “Is there any cut to our services which we in the rich world would be prepare to tolerate? And if not, isn’t the Earth screwed?” and said “the arts, like all human industry, rely on an economy fed by a dying planet. We have to live with less.” This is a fair question and a good one. But I do profoundly believe in state funding of experimental and participatory culture.  Public funding doesn’t have to mean salarying middle class artists and discounting the purchase of culture by middle class audiences. However, ACE made decisions yesterday which cut many of the organisations, like Proboscis, who are doing the kinds of work that is most likely to generate biosphere capital and most likely to bridge the gulf between public planning and culture. Moreover, almost invisible in media coverage of culture cuts is the devastating reduction of museum and archive services, especially in education and outreach. These services directly help with community cohesion and place-making. If their funding is cut, then we need to show philanthropists and corporations that their future prosperity depends on collaborating with creative thinkers and creative communities to generate biosphere capital.

Culture in a Big Society

Originally posted in June 2010, and interesting now over a year later, post-riots:

I was asked by a colleague to write something quickly to help with an enquiry into this question: What is the role of arts and culture in the new big society? As I haven’t blogged much lately, I thought I’d repurpose it….

Is this question really asking, what role will the arts and culture play in the emerging reality? Or, is it, what role can be claimed for culture in a State where cuts to public subsidy are justified by Big Society rhetoric? The first question is the more interesting and it’s one I’m attempting to deal with on Climate Action in Culture & Heritage , given that, even if the smartest science comes quick to the rescue, all nations will be somewhat straitened and disrupted by many impacts of climate change and ecocide (over the next 10-50 years). If it’s the latter, then I can’t really rouse myself to answer it.

There is no new Big Society just because the Government has waved a magic wand to say so. There’s been emerging talk for 15 years about mixed forms of ownership (although to credit the Cooperative movement they’ve been talking about it for much longer, and yet it’s still not well understood, or very mainstream). The first employer to implement co-ownership and workers’ self-education, in the late 19th century, was George Livesey. He was benefactor of the Camberwell library, later to become the Livesey Museum for Children. This was closed in 2008 because Southwark Council felt the costs of employing creative managers were less worthwhile than the ongoing costs of keeping the building secure against vandals. Actually, they wanted to sell off the building (until we pointed out Livesey’s bequest meant it wasn’t theirs to sell). Many
officials who might have fought with us to save it, saw the positive side of closure – that this could be an experiment to see if community transfer of assets could provide a model for others threatened by local authority cuts. Great!

Except there isn’t a model to demonstrate, as the Council chose not to accept the community’s proposal to run the museum, underwritten by a housing trust, and the building remains locked after 2.5 years. Even if we had been given the chance, we may have struggled alone as, inevitably, anger at its closure may not easily convert into drive and imagination from local supporters.

Southwark Council was at the time a coalition of Tory and Lib-Dem, and so could be said to prefigure the current Government. Their idea of Big Society has been difficult to grasp as it is an odd mix of both New Labour ‘community
agency’ (sprinkled with ‘wethink’ digital fairy dust), and the Victorian Livesey’s style of paternalist liberalism (where self-reliance and local heroism are lauded but in the end cultural freedoms become repressed by the dominance of the wealthy, the clergy and the technocracy).

The problem isn’t so much with the Big Society principles, as they represent good things: agency, resilience and democracy. See, for example, Nick Poole’s post on how the Big Society Bank may help shift the funding of culture away from (often wasteful) grants, to more sustainable investments. I think a new participatory democracy is poised to flourish in the virtual and augmented worlds, and the arts and museums sector have a barely tapped role to play in this. I’m also positive about the ways that young people are developing cultural leadership skills due to the youth voice agenda, making itself felt in the arts very strongly. That said, and to return to Nick’s key points, young people’s agency can be undermined when the funding structures force them to rush decisions on behalf of their peers, and there is a lack of planning expertise to support them. See for example, the petty-storm raging in my neighbourhood as a group of teens has raised £50k for a skatepark but haven’t consulted well on its location, so don’t have full local support to site it in a tiny heritage park directly in front of a view across London.

The problem with Big Society is that the persisting system in Britain cannot allow agency, resilience and democracy to flourish. What agency do we have when our representatives have none where it matters? (For example, when Caroline Lucas MP is ignored by the Speaker when she tries to request an amendment that Parliament consider reviewing the renewal of Trident nuclear submarines, which the Lib Dems had earlier estimated at a cost of £100 billion?) What kind of Big Society, especially if it becomes less regulated by law and more led by corporations or ideological interest groups, can be trusted to do good when the unsustainable exploitation of resources for national, corporate or individual profit is held to be the ultimate good? To overcome the devastating crisis we face because of this orthodoxy, we need Government to support the mobilisation of society to one focused end, that is, a life sustaining planet. So, the only really important
question is, what role could arts and culture play in this mobilisation of society (and what role will they play if this mobilisation doesn’t happen)? Perhaps a role for the arts and culture is that they shouldn’t aim just to be a recipient of decentralised funding and goodwill but to transform the way we make decisions about how to live well, helping us take a long view, and helping us operate on registers that are to do with beauty, complexity, mystery, empathy and invention.