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To cite this article: Cecilie Sachs Olsen (2012): Re-thinking festivals: a comparative study of the
integration/marginalization of arts festivals in the urban regimes of Manchester, Copenhagen and
Vienna, International Journal of Cultural Policy, DOI:10.1080/10286632.2012.661420
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2012.661420
Arts festivals have been on the ascendant since the 1980s. However, while these
are proliferating, it remains unclear as to whether they are also ourishing. The
present narrow construction of festivals for marketing and economic purposes
tends to disregard the festivals social and cultural potential, i.e. in terms of
functioning as urban laboratories where new and alternative urban and cultural
strategies can be tested and developed. In order to address these imbalanced
conceptualizations of arts festivals within urban policy frameworks, the article is
based on a comparative case study of festivals that try to function as urban laboratories. By examining how these festivals are integrated in or marginalized by
the urban regime, and how this inuences their operational conditions, the
research elucidates the need to create new and more holistic policy frameworks
to chart an equitable path for the future development of arts festivals.
Keywords: arts festivals; cultural policy; urban regime; policy rationales; instrumentalization
Introduction
Since the late 1980s arts festivals have been on the ascendant and are now a mainstay for urban tourism and policy making (Gotham 2005, Prentice and Andersen
2003, Quinn 2010). There is well-established and substantial literature attesting to
the signicant impacts and benets generated by these festivals across economic,
political and sociocultural domains (Quinn 2010). Researchers have frequently
argued that festivals offer possibilities for crystallizing, galvanizing and articulating
local identities and have historically represented opportunities for local agents to act
and inuence their localised arenas (Bakhtin 1984, Turner 1982, Waade 2002).
Today festivals continue to be supported for their identity-enhancing roles, albeit in
the increased territorial competition between cities and regions they have increasingly become an instrumental tool for urban revitalization, and for attracting visitors
and locals into city spaces through place marketing (Fainstein and Judd 1999,
Evans 2001, Pratt 2008, Quinn 2010).
This paper argues that in this political environment festivals are conceived of in
too narrow a vein by the urban regimes (i.e. those groups and interests ruling the
processes of city making) and prevailing cultural policies. As Geetz (2009) asserts,
public policy with respect to festivals most often relates explicitly to tourism,
*Email: cecilie.sachs_olsen@zhdk.ch
ISSN 1028-6632 print/ISSN 1477-2833 online
2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2012.661420
http://www.tandfonline.com
C. Sachs Olsen
C. Sachs Olsen
contacts with others (snowball sampling), such as artists and partners. The mix of
these two sampling approaches ensured a variety in the resulting sample, so that
sample members differed from each other in terms of key characteristics and positions.
In order to analyse the data I have used grounded theory, which implies an iterative approach where data collection and analysis proceed in tandem, repeatedly
referring back to each other (Bryman 2008). For example did I focus on making
the analyses of my interviews an ongoing activity, so that I could be aware of emergent themes and/or contradictions that I might want to ask more directly about in
later interviews. Coding helped me in this process, as it reduces data into components, for example by synthesizing the interviews in thematic schemes.
Samples of this coding are incorporated in this paper in order to illustrate the
internal validity of my research, as well as the match between my observations and
the theoretical ideas I develop. I want to stress that the coding I have incorporated
is to be seen in relation to the theoretical ideas presented, and not as an independent
analysis.
In order to outline the connections between the more general theoretical ideas
and discussions and the data, I have developed a framework model. This model
enables me to situate the case studies in an overall framework of cultural policies.
Framework model
In line with McGuigan (2004), I dene cultural policy as deliberate action in the
cultural eld undertaken by governments but also including business operations and
civil society campaigns around the conditions and consequences of culture. By denition policy always comes with a rationale, one has to give a reason for doing this
rather than that. The framework model provides a tool for examining the cultural
policy rationales of the festivals host cities. It is based on Skot-Hansens (2005)
AQ11 Figure 1.
C. Sachs Olsen
into culture through artistic production and dissemination, which in the end leads to
new cognition.
Up until the 1970s and 1980s cultural policy in Europe neglected the economic
potential of cultural resources, and dened culture as a separate realm from material
production and economic activity in line with the enlightenment rationale (Garcia
2004). Following this rationale festivals from the nineteenth century upwards were
concerned with high arts and tended to present high-quality classical works in
order to reafrm the civilizing and educational values of high culture, like those
at Salzburg and Bayreuth (Quinn 2005).
The denition of culture became broader and more politically important in the
1970s, as grassroots gained autonomy and cultural policy was seen as a tool to
enhance community building (Kong 2000, p. 386). This development is interconnected with the empowerment rationale manifesting itself in the promotion of special sub-cultures in order to conrm their identity (Skot-Hansen 2005.) At this time,
festivals started to grapple with the denitions of culture, challenging accepted denitions of high and low arts, and wanted their audience to be participants instead
of spectators.
As mentioned, the shift towards neo-liberal entrepreneurialism in the 1980s led
to a strategic shift in cultural policies from social to economic objectives (Bianchini
1993). Thus, there was a shift of emphasis from C1 to C2 where the economic
impact and entertainment rationales became dominant. Cultural policy was now
considered a tool for urban economic and physical regeneration characterized by
the focus on instrumentalized festivals, agship arts developments, high prole
events in the inner city, revival of urban public spaces, and growth in public-private
partnerships (Kong 2000, Garcia 2004). This has resulted in a situation where, as
McGuigan (2004, p. 135) observes, [p]ublic investment in the arts is advocated on
the basis of what are expected to be concrete and measurable economic and social
impacts. This may lead to problems for heterotopic festivals operating within an
alternative approach where the impacts are less immediately tangible than the
instrumental vision of culture, where the latter is reduced to exchange value by
applying market principles to it.
National contexts of cultural policy
Following the shift of emphasis from C1 to C2, a crucial development has been the
ideological de-legitimization of state intervention and public sector arts (Miles and
Paddison 2005). They both persist, but with an uncertain and poorly defended rationale, as their operations are increasingly recongured by market reasoning. We are
here talking about a re-regulation moving from the preserve of the state to market
forces, from manifestly political to economical regulation (McGuigan 2004). One
may say that C1 has been merged with C2. As a result cultural policies may be
guided by competing policy objectives such as older local and national traditions in
the form of C1, as well as global marketing trends in the form of C2 (Bianchini
1993, de Frantz 2005).
This development points to changing governmental attitudes in the way in
which states intervene in cultural policies and uses culture and arts within society.
As Gray (2007) points out, there is an increasing determination of governments to
demand particular forms of justication for continuing to spend money on arts and
cultural policies. More often than not, pursuing economic and/or social objectives
C. Sachs Olsen
are positioned as the only way of achieving other outcomes (Stevenson 2004). Gray
(2007, p. 206) calls this policy attachment strategies, whereby funding for one
sector can be gained by demonstrating the role that it can play in the fullment of
the goals of other policy sectors. He identies this as a conscious strategy pursued
by policy makers to generate the support that is needed for them to pursue their
own objectives. According to Stevenson (2004), the outcomes of these strategies
relates to a conception of culture as a civilizing process that is not dynamic, exible
and situational, but linear and linked to a set of clearly dened political and governmental objectives; the dominant rationales being rstly economic, and secondly
social in orientation (Gray 2007).
In this section I will give brief examples on how this re-regulation affects the
cultural policies of Britain, Austria and Denmark in order to uncover national and
regional stateculture relations in which the festivals, and their host-cities, operate.
To review and assess the full range of cultural policy and practice is beyond the
scope of this paper. Instead, I will focus on re-regulations that are particularly relevant regarding the integration of the case studies in the urban regimes. There has
been a long-standing tradition of justifying cultural policy on the social instrumental
grounds of the transformative powers of arts (Belore and Bennett 2007).
This tendency was present in British C1, alongside a focus on an elitist and conservative enlightenment rationale that was concerned with developing the quality
and professional level of the arts (Grifths et al. 2003, McGuigan 2004). The shift
in the political environment and cultural policy during the 80s resulted in that British C1 was merged with techniques of business promotion (i.e. strategic partnerships and market principles), in order to prove the economic utility of investing in
the arts (Grifths et al. 2003, McGuigan 2004). With the shift to the New Labour
government in 1997, objectives of social regeneration became increasingly important along the focus upon economic regeneration. Thus, a complex interaction
between economic and social objectives occurred (see Stevenson et al. 2010). The
hallmark of the New Labour government, was to be an age of achievement, exemplied by the innovative quality of the arts, cultural industries and creative talent.
Hence, the Art Council and local authorities were encouraged to become even more
strategic (Selwood 2006).
Danish and Austrian C1 had the traditional cultural institutions at its core, and
were based on the idea that culture and the arts are a public responsibility. Therefore, C1 was to be mostly publicly funded through a redistributive cultural policy,
according to the principle of social cohesion, understood in terms of a set of structural relationships that constrain the ability of some social groups to access social,
economic and cultural resources (Stevenson 2004, Wimmer 2006).
In Austria, the rise of new parties in the early 80s and the replacement of the
long-standing social democratic grand coalition by right-wing government in 2000,
lead to a turn in federal politics from consociationalism to aggressive party competition (de Frantz 2005). With this shift the principles of life quality and social cohesion of C1 as advocated by the social democrats were now associated with new
images of private enterprise and innovation characteristic of C2 (Ibid.). Social cohesion was replaced by social inclusion, which refers to the desire of individuals to
participate in society through participation in the economy (Stevenson 2004).
In Danish cultural policies equality was the ruling principle until large areas of
previously national cultural policies were turned over to counties and municipalities.
This was a result of the regionalization that followed a neo-liberal turn, shifting
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C. Sachs Olsen
city with innovation at its heart (p. 14). The strategy encourages new relationships
between the culture and business sectors, as well as expanding international networks and exposure to new ideas and perspectives (p. 16). The connection between
arts and business is not new, as seen through many years of sponsorship of the arts,
but what is new is the strategy to embed the arts more deeply into individual businesses, and the evolution of new partnerships as an integral part of business culture;
It is not only what business can do for the arts, but also what the arts can do for
business (Skot-Hansen 2005, p. 36).
The strategic signicance of culture and the high priority of the innovative quality of the arts appeared as a recurrent theme in all the sample groups in the coding
of my interviews:
City (culture)
City (planning)
We do not want to
control festivals and
events because they
generate tourism and
economy.
We look favourable
on events that bring
in a good amount of
investment and promote the city.
We want high prole
and innovative
events that link to
artistic innovation
and talent.
Festival
Observers
According to Skot-Hansen (2005) the focus upon arts and business is situated in
between the economic impact and enlightenment rationale in the four Es model.
FutureEverything took advantage of the openings this focus provided for its
work in terms of connecting arts and business by developing strategic partnerships
and year-round labs based on technological and artistic innovation. With this work,
FutureEverything blended right in to the cultural strategy of Manchester, which
calls for a programme of festivals that encourages a highly innovative cultural sector (Manchester City Council 2010, p. 14). According to Manchester City Council,
FutureEverything proved that it was good at generating income and investment to
the city and was thus considered a success story. As McGuigan (2004, p. 45)
observes, [m]uch public subsidy today has been tagged to the willingness and
capacity of arts and cultural organizations generally to attract private funding and to
having a properly worked-out business plan.
Central to the business model of FutureEverything were strategic partnerships
where joint projects were built together with local, national and international partners (Hemment 2010). The potential of the arts to be a central element of digital
innovation that provides a new and different perspective made FutureEverything
attractive for organizations like the Arts Council, as well as other partners/funders
and businesses. The report Evolution of Partnerships Impact of technology on cul-
11
tural partnerships, for example, advocates a collaborative business model that can
create a productive research and development environment that brings together
very different ways of thinking to create something new that can be taken to the
market (Arts & Business 2009, p. 5). In the report FutureEverything is presented
as an example of one of the organizations that score highest on a rank measuring
level of collaboration and innovation. The festival was nominated for the Arts and
Business cultural branding award 2010, which is awarded to a partnership that
reinforces the branding and marketing activity of a business through the use of culture. The same year it won the prestigious Lever Prize for world-class arts organizations in the North West.
Thus, by convincing the urban regime of Manchester of the citys and festivals
corresponding cultural aims and visions, the festival developed a high level of integration in the urban regime. The producer of the festival underlines the importance
of talking the language of the politicians and explaining them that the festival ts
their aims. In correspondence with Manchesters preoccupation with being the
worlds rst in technological innovation (Manchester City Council 2010, p. 22),
the festival brands itself with the statement that it has presented a series of world
rsts, such as in mobile and locative media (Hemment 2010) and that it pushes
Manchester to the fore of digital innovation (http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ourwork/futureeverything/). Furthermore, this approach also implies nding quantity
marks to justify the festival, for example by proving the festivals impact on cultural
tourism. In 2010 FutureEverything appeared in an article on cultural tourism by the
Arts Council England (2010) afrming the festivals huge draw as a key destination
for all things digital. As one of the project managers at FutureEverything observes,
Manchester worked closer and closer with FutureEverything to implement the strategic agenda, as the strategies of the city and the festival increasingly corresponded.
In 2008 FutureEverything was awarded Pillar Event status by the Manchester
City Council and received funding for a three-year period. Besides verifying the recognition of the festival by the City Council, the status opened up for leverage into
additional funding, such as receiving a Regularly Funded Organisation status by the
Arts Council, and a three-year funding award by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Copenhagen and Metropolis
Metropolis represents the festival with the lowest level of integration. This can be seen
in connection with the regionalization and increased territorial competition in Denmark, putting a focus on the elite art forms on a national level, and more popular art
forms on a regional level, leaving little or no space for experimental art initiatives like
Metropolis. Moreover, Metropolis was at odds with the cultural policy of Copenhagen
by challenging its aim of branding the city as the leading metropolis of Northern-Europe, and rather wanted to emphasize the intimate qualities of the city.
In 2002 the Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of Culture launched the
joint report Denmarks creative potential, calling for a greater degree of coordination
between cultural and business policy stating that culture and arts is an increasingly
important tool in the regional competition to attract workers, tourists and investments
giving regions and towns a stronger external prole (Kulturministeriet 2002).
In Copenhagen these ideas are reected in initiatives like Gang i Kbenhavn,
getting Copenhagen going (2006), aiming to strengthen the relationship between
business and culture in the spirit of Florida (2002), and Begivenhedsstrategi for
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C. Sachs Olsen
City (planning)
We want to make
Copenhagen a more
open city towards
business and culture.
We prioritize
festivals of high
quality that take
place in central
public spaces and
reach a broad
audience.
Festival
Branding is
important, the tourist
organization invests a
lot of money in
attracting events to
the city. But the
cultural sector is very
limited benetted
from this.
Cities are attracted to
We chose to work
celebratory things, as
with clear-cut,
spectacular projects at soon as you question
something they
a certain size that
become sceptic. It is
stages the modern
a result-oriented
city.
cultural policy that
wants events to
prole and celebrate.
Observers
The city focuses on
festivals for branding
purposes, and often
in connection with
the tourist
organization.
They want projects
that will make the
city more visible.
Culture and sport are
viewed as leisure
activities, it is
supposed to be fun
and ow and
popular, creating an
image of a healthy
city.
As Skot-Hansen (2005) asserts, the entertainment rationale is related to the capitalization of our needs of playing and relaxing by the market. This results in changing
audience expectations towards looking for blockbuster shows, rather than serious
and meticulous appropriation of cultural knowledge (Huyssen 1995 cited Skot-Hansen 2005, p. 35). Skot-Hansen locates the creative industries between the economic
impact and the entertainment rationale in the four Es model. She points out that an
important issue to discuss whenever public funding is allocated to the creative industries is whether creativity is seen as a parameter of economic success, rather than an
inherent quality of arts and culture. In Kulturpolitiskredegrelse, Cultural Policy
Report (2006), the creative city discourse is legitimized by the former:
For Copenhagen to develop into an international cultural metropolis, it has to attract
and facilitate creative industries in sharp competition with cities all over the world.
The presence of creative industries has got a spill-over effect on cultural life and vice
versa. (Kbenhavns Kommune 2006, p. 38)
The claimed spill-over effect on to cultural life bears witness of a supply-side policy (Brenner 2004) where, instead of investment going directly to the demand side,
i.e. cultural production, this is considered a side-effect of investment in creative
industries and does not necessarily inuence cultural production:
13
As Davies points out, Metropolis has not benetted signicantly from the cultural
policy of Copenhagen. This situation may be related to the fact that the festival is
positioned outside the prevailing cultural policy rationales. First of all the divergence between the cultural policies on regional and national level creates problems
for the festival. These policies leave little space for innovative and experimental arts
festivals as they are either treated as theatre institutions by the Arts Council
(Kunstrdet), or are, by the city, placed into a vast amorphous area of other events
usually lumped together with conferences, fests and educational open-air programs.
This is exemplied by the event strategy of Copenhagen where festivals are sidelined with events like the IOC-congress, Copenhagen Bike City and Copenhagen
Fashion Week.
According to Davies, this division between the city wanting to support popular
festivals and the state wanting to support high art, limits the festival. The festival is
locked in one of the two categories in order to get funding, and cannot expand the
concept of the festival. Hence, Metropolis only gets support to present concrete
results in terms of what the city denes as performance works, and not to projects
that are more related to for example architecture and urban planning. Thus, it is
hard for the festival to work with the city in different and hybrid formats through
developing projects across disciplines by focusing on artists, architects and urban
developers. While the British Arts Council supports festivals on an individual art
form basis, placing festivals in a category of combined arts that encompasses a
range of organisations that work across multiple art forms to achieve their aims,
including festivals () (http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/artforms/combined-arts/), the
Danish Art council is holding on to the rigid denition of a festival as part of the
performance art, not leaving much space for experimental festivals like Metropolis.
Furthermore, Metropolis marginalizes themselves by taking distance from the
city of Copenhagen and not sharing their visions. Davies points out that Metropolis
is not seen as a strategic partner of Copenhagen as it is not generated by the city
itself, but came from the outside questioning their ways of doing things. Metropolis
is deliberately at odds with the focus upon branding Copenhagen as an international cultural metropolis (Kbenhavns Kommune 2006, p. 38) through spectacular,
visible and popular events reaching out to a broad international and national audience. It rather presents anonymous performances and happenings in the outskirts of
the city (Jensen et al. 2009). As a result, the festival was criticized by cultural critics for being invisible and simply unnoticed by the citizens of Copenhagen (Dithmer 2007), and the festival was primarily dened as elitist.
As McGuigan (2004) observes cultural debate is often constructed according to
the binary opposition of elitism and populism. It is now more acceptable to be a
cultural populist than elitist as the former is in line with the consumption oriented
marketization of culture, and is linked to the assumption that symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital C (McGuigan 2004, p. 114). Thus, populism is
linked to the entertainment rationale, which can be seen as a focus of the cultural
policy of Copenhagen, as pointed out by the former cultural mayor of Copenhagen:
It is easier to go for what is safe, what we are sure will attract audience and sell
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C. Sachs Olsen
tickets. Nevertheless, the organizers of Metropolis defend its elitist position claiming that being mainstream and entertaining is not in line with their focus on urban
development.
Davies admits that Metropolis is positioning itself in a marginal situation by
questioning and challenging the cultural policy rationales of Copenhagen. As result
the festival is solely looked upon as an event, and not as a strategic partner for the
city to develop long-term urban strategies.
The marginalization of Metropolis is exemplied by the lack of sufcient funding of the festival. For example did the city of Copenhagen make a festival pot of
5 million DKK in 2006. The pot would give 4-years support to festivals stemming
from initiatives outside the city authorities, but Metropolis was not supported.
Vienna and SOHO
SOHO represents a mixed level of integration in the urban regime. The latter tried
to take over the aims and visions of the festival and replace them with their social
inclusion and economic development objectives as they regarded the festival as an
effective tool for an economic upgrade of an area suffering from a lack of investment.
These objectives can be seen in relation to the concept of creative industries that
was imported to Austria in the late 90s. The concept focused upon the economic
potential of the arts and culture, and was followed by studies proving the excellent
conditions for creative industries especially in Vienna, like for example An analysis
of the economic potential of the creative industries in Vienna initiated by the City
of Vienna in 2004 (Kulturdokumentation 2004, p. 3).
The development of creative industry and infrastructure can be seen in connection with a strategy of social inclusion focusing upon the development as imagined
ways of nurturing participation in society and developing citizens. This strategy
points to an entanglement of the economic impact, entertainment and empowerment
rationale in the cultural policy of Vienna. This entanglement was reected in the
coding of my interviews:
City (culture)
City (planning)
Festival
Observers
We want to improve
the identity of the
city. This is very
linked to urban and
public space.
We have become
more integrated in
the cultural policies
because we involve
people with migrant
background. The
chamber of
commerce wanted to
collaborate and
support the basis of
the festival. Of
course their aim was
to change the image
of the area to attract
investment.
It changed in the
80s: in the 70s it was
all about bringing the
arts to the audience,
now it was more
about bringing
audience to the arts.
The art is perceived
as a representative
thing, rather than
dealing with conicts
and problems.
15
One can see that the presence of the empowerment rationale is more linked to the
use of cultural strategies by local politicians and policy makers to achieve political
and economic objectives than the promotion of sub-cultures (Skot-Hansen 2005).
Within this cultural policy context that associates urban life quality and social
cohesion with new images of private enterprise and innovation, it proved difcult
for SOHO to keep its identity as a critical and experimental festival. Even though
the festival did not want to take part in the competition between money-minded art
undertakings (Zobl and Schneider 2008, p. 101), it was quickly recognized by the
city of Vienna for its potential of an economic upgrade of the Brunnenviertel area.
The concept of using the residual spaces of industrialism for the creative industries was becoming a well-established state-supported strategy of urban re-development in Vienna at the end of the 90s (Evans 2001), and soon after the
establishment of SOHO, a close collaboration with the District Management Ofce
of Urban Renewal in Ottakring (Gebietsbetreuung Stadterneuerung) developed. As
Schneider (2008) observes, art was a welcome attendant measure to improve the
mood and atmosphere, and to draw a young, dynamic audience, which would ideally settle there, into the neighbourhood. This can be seen as an example of the
social inclusion logic where upgrading measures go hand-in-hand with social
dynamics, without art becoming a concrete manifestation within the practice of city
planning (Miles 2005). Rather, the art festival has been degraded to a self-organized side effect accompanying the beautication and structural improvement of the
market area (Schneider 2008, p. 16).
The interest from the city of Vienna and the festivals search for sponsors also
led to a collaboration between SOHO and Vienna Chamber of Commerce, the rst
years of the festivals existence. The support from the Chamber of Commerce was
founded on their interest in increased activity and new tenants for the many vacant
commercial spaces in the area (Zobl and Schneider 2008, Rode et al. 2010). The
increased commercial activity in the area only happened to a modest extent, but the
Chamber of Commerce, who funded all press-related work of the festival, nevertheless released glowing bulletins about the revaluation of the neighbourhood at the
SOHO opening every year. As McGuigan (2004, p. 45) points out: Sponsorship is
never innocent or disinterested: it is done for purposes of advertising and public
relations.
Even though McGuigan here referred to private sponsors, this is an example of
how the operations of public subsidy are increasingly recongured by market reasoning, so that publicly funded operations must behave like private businesses and
thereby undercut their own legitimacy. This was what happened for SOHO. The
Chamber of Commerce was in more or less complete control of the public perception of the festival and promoted it as a success story. This lead politicians, special
interest groups, businessmen, companies and consultants seeking to be credited as
co-authors of the festival (Schneider 2008). According to the co-director of SOHO
this is an unpleasant issue as patronage is changed into a business relation, and
sponsors and/or patrons want to be credited as a co-author of something they made
possible but certainly did not initiate, conceive or cooperate on (Zobl and Schneider 2008, p. 103).
As a result, Schneider had struggles ghting and articulating against other
interests in order to keep her vision clear (Schneider 2008). In 2003 she ended
the cooperation with the Vienna Chamber of Commerce because of the conicting interest and as an important prerequisite for an image correction (Zobl and
16
C. Sachs Olsen
Schneider 2008, p. 103). The festival was re-launched the same year in collaboration with the artist Beatrix Zobl. Instead of displaying an agenda concerned
with social inclusion implying economic development and place management,
the festival emphasized social cohesion and the empowerment of marginalized
communities.
However, SOHO is still a strategic part of local authorities in Vienna; it has got
a lot of attention because of its perceived success, and collaborates with many different partners such as artists, architects, tradesmen, youth and local institutions.
Apart from the City of Vienna, the festival receives public funding from the Federal
government as well as from the Culture Programme of the European Union and the
project Migration in Europe and Local Tradition (MELT).3
Nevertheless, SOHO is constantly lacking money. According to Schneider the
lack of sufcient support is because SOHO is an artist initiative and not an institution. It is a grass-root project that works bottom up, while the municipality wants to
implement something top down. One may say that the festival has marginalized
itself nancially by keeping a distance to economic development interests.
Thus, SOHO is situated in the crossing between integration and marginalization
in the urban regime as the festival ts with the social inclusion strategies of the cultural policy of Vienna, but simultaneously wants to distance itself from and criticize the economic imperatives of this approach.
Conclusion
As this paper shows, the level of integration of heterotopic festivals in the urban
regime depends on the festivals correspondence with the cultural policy of the cities. This becomes clear when situating the cultural policy rationales of the cities vs.
the festivals in the framework model (Figure 3).
As Skot-Hansen (2005) observes networks, cooperation and partnerships appear
less difcult when the potential collaborative partners in this case the urban regime
17
and the festivals, share the same rationales. The model above reects this observation: The rationales of the cultural policy of Copenhagen and the rationales of
Metropolis are situated far apart, with no rationales in common, reecting the marginalized positioning of the festival within the urban regime. The cultural policy of
Vienna and SOHO share aspects of the entertainment rationale in terms of visibility
and the opportunities for image shift of the area, while they diverge regarding the
importance of the empowerment and economic impact rationales, which reects
SOHOs positioning between integration and marginalization. The rationales of the
cultural policy of Manchester and FutureEverything are corresponding, and thus
reect the high level of integration of the festival in the urban regime.
As seen in the model, the prevailing cultural policy rationales of Manchester,
Copenhagen and Vienna belong to C2, and points to an approach to cultural development that, as Garcia (2004, p. 317) asserts, tends to be biased towards the instrumental ends of those in charge. In this process certain activities are privileged
while others are discouraged and marginalized (Ibid.) Given that these rationales,
such as economic development, branding and social inclusion, generally have the
structural strengths that the arts and cultural policy sectors normally lack, particularly in terms of political salience and support, it is not surprising to nd them in a
dominant position in policy terms, while C1 adopts a secondary, contributory position in comparison (Gray 2007). However, as Skot-Hansen (2005) suggests, the C1
rationales can be seen as equally instrumental as the rationales of C2, as all four
rationales serve as means rather than goals in themselves (Skot-Hansen 2005, p.
37). Her point may be seen as a critique of a cultural policy that is guided by competing policy objectives, rather than realizing that the potential lies in the dialectic
between the rationales. As seen in the case of Denmark and Copenhagen, the competing objectives between the concern with elite art forms on a national level, and
more popular art forms on a regional level limits the development and existence of
new, experimental and alternative art initiatives like Metropolis. In Vienna, the loss
of dialectic between the rationales is illustrated by the focus of the urban regime
upon the social inclusion and economic development objective, leaving little or no
space for the festivals own objectives of social cohesion and empowerment. These
cases illustrate what Garcia (2004, p. 324) points to as some unsolved contradictions and an unbalanced relationship between economic and cultural priorities in
urban policy, and how this makes difcult the operational conditions for heterotopic festivals that are not sharing the same rationales as their host-cities. Thus,
Garcia calls for a more holistic and exible understanding of cultural policy that
informs both the current notion of an arts sphere, and the economic, political,
social, education and environmental spheres of cities (Ibid.).
In other words, there is a need for a cultural policy model with room for both
the competing rationales and dialectics in between them. Thus, instead of the cultural policies of the cities being situated within certain rationales that may compete
with other rationales, there is a need for a joint starting point that may place the
cultural policies of the cities so that they may incorporate all rationales.
Skot-Hansen (2005) suggests that this might be a superior expressive aesthetic
experience rationale that sees art as experience and not as an impact that can be
measured (see Jensen 2003). According to Skot-Hansen, the experience rationale
supports an ever-enlarging arena of cultural forms (2005, p. 38) and provides an
approach to cultural policy that has room for competing rationales as well as the
dialectics between them.
18
C. Sachs Olsen
My hope is that the present research has helped proposing a re-thinking of festivals as heterotopias with the potential to experiment with city spaces. As Foucault
(1997, p. 356) concludes: in civilizations where [heterotopia] is lacking, dreams
dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and privateers by the police.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Mathieu van Criekingen for helpful feedbacks and constructive
critiques that helped clarify my thoughts and structure my research.
Thanks also to the festival leaders Drew Hemment, Ula Schneider and Trevor Davies for
giving me useful insights into their festivals.
Finally, I want to thank Dorte Skot-Hansen for giving me permission to reproduce her
Four Es model for cultural policy rationales in this paper.
Notes
1. It is important to note that the dichotomy between instrumentalized and heterotopic
festivals does not represent a clear picture of reality as festivals are diverse and often
situated in the cross eld between the two.
2. Original quote: en betydelig del af rdets bevillinger er remrket til specikke forml. dette, sammen med rdets reducerede budget, kan gre det vanskeligt at sttte det
aktuelle, helt nye eller uforudsete (Kunstrdet 2008).
3. MELT is a European project that strives to discover and celebrate the diversity of local
communities, to give visibility to their inherent creative potential, and to foster transnational exchange and mobility of cultural players as well as intercultural dialogue and
international collaboration (http://www.melt-europe.eu/about.html).
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