Rising East Online

Plan views

Uneven development

by David Powell

Culture and Complexity: David Powell accentuates the pragmatic and the particular in cultural planning, policy and development.

I’m going to deal with some of the mechanics of cultural policy in East and South-East London. But first I’d like to reflect on a couple of points. Perhaps culture has become an important means for government relating to the public but when you try to put your finger on it in economic terms, you can’t find it. Either that’s a wonderful trick that’s been played on us, or we are trying to pin down what are elusive developments concerned with making artistic activity impinge upon social conditions.

In the late eighties and nineties the counting of the beans became more important, and I confess there was a moment in my career as an independent consultant when the business of trying to find out how large all this might be was itself a central task; because we were playing the game of mine-has-to-be-at-least-as-large-as-yours.

Speaking professionally, needing to verify the cultural sector as being very large does take you into all sorts of difficult areas, and, looking back, all the ‘mapping’ seems a bit bizarre. Yet if we don’t take it too literally, charting the developing role of the sector raises some very interesting questions about regeneration in general and the future of the Thames Gateway in particular.

The first thing to bear in mind is that one, big, round idea – cultural and creative industries – tends to be combined with another big, round idea – Thames Gateway – and these are not very good ways to investigate the uneven, variable, differentiated evolution of the elusive phenomenon we are looking for.

But if we recognise the local character of such developments, we will be better equipped to understand how the machinery of public-private capitalism (the machine which nowadays we all have to work with) may work to our best advantage.

We should also understand that what we know about such development in East London is partial, and not shared. There is very little research, and what research is done is handled differently in different places by different people, which reflects a confused and confusing institutional terrain where institutions are trying to look into something which absolutely isn’t a singularity.

Then in the middle of this there are some significant bits of ‘City-building’, along with a kind of politics that puts a premium on cultural development – a case in point being last year’s launch of Creative London by the London Development Agency.

There is a raft of other agencies – local, regional and national – dealing in similar areas, and there is a real lack of precision in distinguishing between the commercial end of the spectrum, and on the other hand developments which are more like culture for its own sake – community-based and non-commercial; but unfortunately we flip and flop between them.

At some levels I am not so fussed about that. The business of trying to make sense of neighbourhoods that don’t make sense, the business of trying to be part of a planning process that builds new places or makes better places for people to live and work, is something you can’t afford to be precious about. Precision at one level, yes; but at another level we have to be pragmatic, and those of us who are somewhere in the machine – between the can and the oily rag – have to find a balance.

So the sector is complex, and its complexity is further indicated by the toolkit issued last year by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which tightened criteria for inclusion in it just as the second DCMS mapping document previously widened them.

Away from the definitions, however, the complexity is palpable in the very distinct ecologies which are there in the streets as you walk from West to East London. There is the intensely commercial City Fringe established in the last 10 or 15 years, with its own circle of food, drink and clubs which service it, and which itself inhabits an earlier City Fringe of bowler hat makers and typewriter repairers; and there is an under-charted connection here between the new City Fringe and the City itself.

Hoxton is the classic example where City Fringe sits maladroitly with people who have been there for generations, and to walk round Hoxton Square is to realise that this is not some Continental Shelf but a much steeper incline. In the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf there is another ecology altogether. Different again is the microdensity of Tower Hamlets and Hackney with thousands of individual artists, small companies, groups and galleries.

The River Lea is another local fault-line. And there are important questions as to how these ecologies will relate to the proposed big developments at Stratford City, and the Royal Docks and Greenwich peninsula: with a putative influx of big media companies, what kind of fringes might those places grow?

Trying to characterise the Gateway as a single location within which all this elusive, cultural and creative activity takes place, is difficult to say the least. So it seems to me what we need to engage with is what’s out there and how it’s moving. Trying to understand it is not the same as trying to assert that it is a central part of some bold, new economy.

Is this the post-Fordist, new economy – the new, epochal proposition? That’s not the question when we are dealing with something smaller, fragmented and in some ways inward-looking, and we need to make sense of it in a public dialogue which deals with access, training and the need to support people in transition.

My candid opinion is that the complex, uneven sector we have been talking about cannot address fundamental inequities en bloc in an instrumental way, which in turn raises questions about the right mode of planning and what the right steps are that the London Development Agency and local authorities might take to ascertain how much public money is needed to create a new City Fringe.

One growth statistic is that the c-word has moved up the chart of visionary terms in John Prescott’s department. Thus in the documents stemming from the Manchester summit, a strong local culture is now held up as a key part of a sustainable community, where only a few years ago culture was noticeably absent from plans for the Gateway – and knowing how money follows key words, that would have been quite difficult.

At the moment there seem to be three models of cultural planning. In North Kent, where we are observing, the emphasis is on community and local entitlement. In Milton Keynes the orientation is more towards facilities, in the manner of Sport England. The working assumption is that you count the number of houses and derive from it the number of sports halls required, but my question in this context is: how do you do that for music?

Meanwhile, in Thames Gateway the picture is much more muddled – the ‘model’ is a real mess of cultural agencies; and to get them all running in the same direction as part of the same conversation is impossible.

Setting aside whether the promotion of the cultural and creative sector as the new economy was a media management trick, at the next level down there is no singularity. Even the way the Olympic bid has been presented, has itself presented East London as a single entity. In the same way, the multicultural becomes an unrealistically singular description of the area. It’s deployed as a way of making sense out of complexity but actually does not do justice to the real context.

We should not be daunted by the multiplex of the real context; and we must recognise that trying to encompass it in singular terms does not help. The pragmatic and the particular are much more helpful orientations.

David Powell is an independent cultural consultant.

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