Suchergebnisse

This book concerns the values and practices of participation in municipal public parks, and the connections they have with cultural policy, urbanism, and social life. Adopting a critical cultural policy lens, it identifies the park as a mundane but extraordinarily treasured place for the production and exchange of cultural values, regulation, resistance, and the practising of citizenship. Drawing on extensive mixed-methods research on everyday participation in diverse local cultural ecosystems in England and Scotland, the book examines the social lives of parks and their users, and the important public values that are generated through their common stewardship and usership. It presents case studies of parks and co-located museums as cultural public spheres, which promote both commoning and commodification. These are contextualized by histories of municipal parkmaking from the nineteenth century to the present and related to the making of local government and to other civic and cultural institutions. The book highlights contemporary issues of austerity, marketisation and de-municipalisation within local government in the context of urban development. It positions the public park as fundamental to democratic cultural governance and makes the case for the primacy of public trust, ownership, and park equity in safeguarding the right to the city

Chapter 1: Introduction: why parks matter -- Chapter 2: A brief history of parks and policy formation -- Chapter 3: Close encounters -- Chapter 4: Parks as cultural institutions -- Chapter 5: Managing the commons -- Chapter 6: Conclusions: Parks and their cultural politics in the 21st Century.

Public parks were first established in the UK in the newly industrialised cities of Manchester and Salford, as nineteenth century cultural strategies for public health, regulation and education responding to moral anxieties about the changing conditions of everyday life. This article looks at public parks as vernacular spaces for everyday participation, drawing on empirical research, including ethnographic fieldwork, household interviews and focus groups, and community engagement conducted for the Manchester-Salford ecosystem case study of the 'Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Value' (UEP) project [Miles & Gibson, 2016. Everyday participation and cultural value. Cultural Trends, 5(3), 151–157]. It considers narratives of participation [Miles, 2016. Telling tales of participation: Exploring the interplay of time and territory in cultural boundary work using participation narratives. Cultural Trends, 5, 182–193], which reveal how parks are valued and recognised as community assets and spaces for both tolerance and distinction, where different communities can meet, become visible, and perform shared and distinct cultural identities [Low et al., 2005. Rethinking Urban Parks, Public Space and Cultural Diversity. Austin: University of Texas Press]. It draws on the conceptual device of 'the commons', defined as a dynamic and collective resource that stands in tension with commodified and privatised space [Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011. Urban Commons Review of Urban Affairs: Economic & Political Weekly, Volume XLVI No. 50 December 10, 2011. http://www.epw.in/journal/2011/50/review-urban-affairs-review-issues-specials/urban-commons.html]., to explore how parks present opportunities for civic participation through contemporary processes of 'commoning' [Linebaugh, 2014. The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press]. I argue that parks are also subject to contemporary forms of enclosure through social exclusion and physical closure, which impact on the likely success of current policy imperatives for community asset transfer and alternative management models.

This article examines cultural participation, its metrics and 'drivers' as they are defined through cultural programming for the London 2012 Olympics. The meanings and interpretation of these terms are considered by examining the development of an evaluation framework for the We Play programme in the North West of England, an initiative funded by Legacy Trust UK and part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It argues that in spite of the dissonance between arts and sports within Olympics programmes and claims of the deleterious impact on arts funding, particular within the regions, London 2012 has engendered creative programming which strategically deploys the Cultural Olympiad to satisfy local cultural policy objectives as well as meeting broader interests in 'legacy' from the Games. Such ambitions require the development of appropriate methodologies for understanding arts participation and engagement for the purpose of evaluation and evidence-based policy making, a particular challenge for such a complex range of activities, sites and settings for arts participation. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.