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CITIES AND THE NIGHT TIME ECONOMY
PART II

First published in Planning Practice and Research, Vol.10, No.2, 1995

Email: a.lovatt@mmu.ac.uk and j.oconnor@mmu.ac.uk

II The Role of Culture

The 1980s saw the gradual recognition of this changing role of culture in the city (and elsewhere). Local government, arts organisations, business people, both companies and umbrella groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, community groups, training organisations, and of course, local artists began to create fluid, often informal coalitions around the elaboration of (formal and informal) cultural strategies aimed at the 'regeneration' of the city centre and (hopefully) the city as a whole.

This role of culture in 'regeneration' has been defined in terms of its input into the built environment, in terms of the economic benefits of the arts and cultural industries sector, and in terms of the re-imaging of the city on the national and international stage. It is right that all these should be included; but it is being increasingly recognised that just as the deep resources of a city lie within the skills and creativity of its people (to which cultural strategies must be central) the cultural vibrancy of a city lies in the involvement and the identification of the people within its orbit. It is not only the raised horizons as to what it is possible to do that is important but also the decision to do it here.

The old civic symbols of the great northern cities no longer work as indicators of place and of a unified cultural ambition. Nobody now believes they ever did completely. Nobody believes that they could be 'updated'. We are too complex a society and too well aware of the smallness, the powerlessness of the local. But any strategy for the regeneration of the city centre as a culturally vibrant and open space must look towards its function as a focus for its local citizens and develop a new responsiveness to their changing needs and desires. It must look to how its spaces can provide maximum access to a wide range of people and groups, and to how the production, distribution and consumption of culture in the city can begin to articulate a local sense of place in its new interaction with the global sphere.

If globalisation changes the older relationship of here and there, it also undermines many of the older hierarchies of place (Shields, 1991). If the nation-state is now too big and too small, then the old organising oppositions of capital and province, of metropolis and backwater, no longer hold as they once did. Manchester, for example, which became 'provincial' from the 1870s with the rise of London as a new kind of world city (Briggs, 1963; Sassen, 1991) may be facing its identity crisis of working-class city with no work, but it is doing so in a new national and international (or rather inter-regional) space in which the deconstruction of the North and South opposition (Shields, 1991) involves New York, Barcelona, Glasgow and Ibiza as much as it does London (O'Connor and Wynne, 1995). The sense of a local space linked more intimately with other cultures through consumption, media, travel and migration can give rise to new levels and currents of creative and entrepreneurial activity which can mark a distinct, though perhaps fluid and multiple local identity (identities).

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Send email to: a.lovatt@mmu.ac.uk and j.oconnor@mmu.ac.uk