Can We Design for Culture? Paradigms and Provocations

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Anna Marazuela Kim
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Creative Placemaking ◽  
Cultural Infrastructure

While creative placemaking has proved a long-standing paradigm for the arts in city-making strategy, recently there has been a shift towards a cultural infrastructure approach. This article takes critical stock of this paradigm shift, to engage the broader question of whether we can design for culture in the built environment. Conceptualizing creative placemaking within a larger genealogical framework, I argue that this shift might be understood as responsive to some of the limitations and unintended social consequences of the movement: its temporal nature and contribution to cycles of gentrification and displacement.

Creative Destruction and the Social (Re) Construction of Heritage

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-237
Author(s):  
Erica Avrami
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Creative Destruction ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Economic Concept ◽  
Coastal Sea ◽  
The Face

AbstractIn an era when war, acts of terror, and the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change loom large in the public conscience, the conservation community is grappling with the associated loss of the historic built environment and potential responses. But the built environment—at least some aspects of it—is becoming progressively obsolete due to environmental and social changes. Coastal sea-level rise, inefficient resource and land use, and the role of the built environment in perpetuating social exclusion raise questions about the potential value of destruction and the opportunities it affords for reframing spatial memory and historical narrative in more just and sustainable ways. The heritage field’s preoccupation with the physical, place-based fabric will be challenged in the face of this obsolescence, compelling a reexamination of attitudes toward destruction and reconstruction. This article borrows loosely from Joseph Schumpeter’s economic concept of creative destruction to explore the ways in which both innovation and new lenses on history and memory may be borne of change, loss, and obsolescence. Using the discourse surrounding past and contemporary North American cases, it examines some fundamental ideas regarding capital in the built environment and the economic value of destruction. It also explores the negative social consequences of destruction and the historical influence cum perspective of the heritage enterprise and posits potentially positive values and opportunities engendered through destruction. Finally, it reimagines how approaches to reconstruction by the heritage field may contribute to more socially just and sustainable futures.

Introduction

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Freeland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
General Education ◽  
College Education ◽  
Undergraduate Curriculum ◽  
Student Population ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Academic Leaders ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of

This book began as an exploration of a paradox in the history of American universities. In the twenty-five years following World War II, the student population served by these institutions became more diverse and the societal purposes they served became more varied. Yet, during the same period, universities themselves became more alike. The contradictions were easy to observe. It was obvious that the academic and social backgrounds of students—and consequently their needs, skills, and interests—became more heterogeneous in the postwar years, yet the undergraduate curricula of universities increasingly stressed highly academic subjects, especially the arts and sciences. Similarly, universities pursued a well-documented trend toward greater involvement in practical affairs and social problem solving in the 1950s and 1960s, while also adhering to a narrowing focus on doctoral programs and research in the basic disciplines. I wanted to understand the forces, both internal and external to campuses, that promoted this puzzling conjunction of converging characteristics and expanding functions. I also wanted to assess the academic and social consequences of this pattern. The decline of institutional diversity was only the most startling of a number of apparently inconsistent developments associated with an era of historic growth among universities. Almost as curious was the fact that, while expansion occurred mostly to accommodate increased demand for college education, institutional attention to teaching diminished, as did concern about the undergraduate curriculum. Meanwhile, graduate programs, whose chief function was to train college teachers, tended to slight preparation for instructional work and to nurture research skills. Indeed, as growth intensified academia’s role in socializing the nation’s youth, universities dismantled the programs of general education that were the primary vehicles they had created for that purpose. More broadly, the active involvement of universities in the definition and resolution of social problems went hand in hand with the consolidation of an academic value system quite remote from most Americans. Even the increasing heterogeneity of the student population was not free of contradiction. Academic leaders claimed credit for making their institutions more democratic during the postwar years by reducing traditional barriers to admission—including those of income and race.

Culture Matters: Cuts and Resistance

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-72
Author(s):  
Ingrid von Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Grass Root ◽  
Cultural Agency ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Financial Losses

The chapter focuses on the cuts administered since 2010 in the fields of literature, music, visual arts, film and performing arts, and their teaching to the young. Budget constraints have led to the closure of numerous essential institutions, such as theatres, libraries and youth centres, museums and art galleries. The chapter looks at significant sectors and examines the social consequences of their financial losses, starting with the relatively modest cuts for prestigious national institutions and the ‘creative industries’ and moving on to the disastrously major ones for the local councils and the Arts Council England. Forms of resistance are analysed as a means to reclaim cultural agency, ranging from grass-root activities to Labour Party opposition. In several cases volunteers and philanthropists have stepped in to keep institutions running, while individual celebrities and political groups have publicly voiced protest, sometimes with spectacular actions.

scholarly journals Building Relationships

2019 ◽  
pp. 166-187
Author(s):  
Jennifer Loy ◽  
Tim Schork
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Innovative Approach ◽  
Building Relationships

This chapter describes how digital immersion, changing social values, and environmental and economic pressures have the potential to create a paradigm shift in relationships between people and their built environment with the growing sustainability imperative. It responds to emerging opportunities provided by digital technologies for the construction, maintenance, and heritage curation of the life of buildings, and draws on aligned changes in thinking apparent in manufacturing, healthcare, business, and education in the 21st century. The ideas that shape this chapter are relevant to architects and educators, but also to scholars and practitioners across disciplines because they provide an innovative approach in responding to the types of changes currently impacting societies worldwide.

Circularity in the built environment: a call for a paradigm shift

2020 ◽  
pp. 425-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tove Malmqvist ◽  
Alice Moncaster ◽  
Freja Rasmussen ◽  
Harpa Birgisdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Paradigm Shift

The end of high culture and the Anthropocene

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 160 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-94
Author(s):  
Harriet Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Activity ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Social Interventions ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Cultural Infrastructure ◽  
Human World ◽  
New Phase

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus’s extensive studies of the topography of ‘high’ culture. I reconstruct Márkus’s conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of ‘high’ cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of ‘high’ culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus’s claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus’s account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems.

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