The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities

Examining the diverse forms of infrastructure that facilitate cultural practice and make cities distinctive, this interdisciplinary collection eschews currently dominant but limited explanations of cultural infrastructure grounded in economics and the creative industries by introducing broader insights from across the arts and social sciences. In so doing, it provides policymakers, researchers, and students alike with wide-ranging opportunities to engage with fresh perspectives and to probe the complexities of urban cultural infrastructure as it is lived, made and governed. -- Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research, Western Sydney University
What does it mean to look at the culture of cities through an infrastructure lens? This book's perspective is a powerful antidote against the instrumentalisation of culture to power urban economies and markets. The book maps a landscape of cultural production in cities making visible the complex and often contingent arrangements that make urban cultures alongside the many ways in which spaces of cultural production are reinvented and appropriated. Short, illuminating section introductions and four illustrations of architectural inspiration from Chan Arun-Pina bring together a carefully curated collection of essays. Cultural infrastructures become dynamic, changing, performed, alive. The deliberate engagement with the challenges of cultural production through the pandemic and in the post-pandemic period reemphasises the ever-changing language of cultural production. This book will appeal to artists, performers, curators, planners, entrepreneurs, infrastructure managers, and students and scholars of urban cultures, to look at their city anew and recognise urban culture in-the-making, full of hope and potentiality. -- Vanesa Castan Broto, Professor of Climate Urbanism, University of Sheffield