‘Policies Aren’t Pieces of Paper’: Tussles and Tactics in Action-Oriented and Agile Cultural Policy Research

Abstract

Too often policies are thought of decrees, immovable objects, binding forces, and something that is delivered and received rather than made and negotiated on an ongoing daily basis. This chapter reflects on a five-year collaboration between the African Centre for Cities and the City of Cape Town’s Arts & Culture Branch, focusing on what it means to make and do policy locally, on an everyday basis, and in the context of fiscal restraints (exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic) and shifting politics and urban priorities. The chapter starts by introducing four interconnected ways in which to approach cultural and urban policy-making through collaborative policy research: as embodied, emplaced, enacted, and embedded. It then locates Cape Town as a city of contradictions, a creative city that is often at odds with its own creative identity and shows that while cultural policy exists, there is a mismatch between these ambitions and the fiscal reality. Despite these challenges, there are municipal champions within the governance arrangement of the City who are working to leverage policy for more inclusive and emplaced aims, and the chapter turns to consider Knowledge Transfer Programme and scholar-municipal collaborations in action-oriented policy research, paying pays particular attention to cultural mapping and planning as an antidote to elite-centric urban cultural objectives. Finally the chapter returns to what this means for local action-oriented cultural policy research, arguing for how emplaced and embodied policy knowledge and practice can be enacted in situated and embedded ways.

Introduction

The Knowledge Transfer Programme was established in 2012 between the City of Cape Town and the African Centre for Cities, based at the University of Cape Town, as a platform for long-term scholar-official collaboration and coproduction to address the urgencies of the present moment, with a critical and practical eye towards the future. The objectives of the collaboration were linked to shared interests in resilience, the green economy, climate change, culture, heritage and the Sustainable Development Goals, pairing city officials with scholars around mutual interests and concerns. From 2016, researchers from the African Centre for Cities worked closely with the City of Cape Town’s Arts & Culture Branch, and in this chapter, I reflect on the 18-month programme to consider how knowledge was created and embedded through these pairings, through a process of thinking tactically about how to assert, insert, and sneak cultural objectives into the activities of the City.¹

In one of our reflection discussions a municipal official collaborator said, ‘Policies are not pieces of paper; policy is not something you read, it is something you do’. As argued by other scholars (see Bell & Oakley, 2015), and in this volume (Bell & Orozco, this volume; Durrer, et al., this volume) too often policies are thought of decrees, immovable objects, binding forces, and something that is delivered and received rather than made and negotiated on an ongoing basis. In reality, policy is something that is done, and therefore is embodied by the people doing the doing. Policies are thereby situated in places and shaped by people; they are processes of enactment as opposed to words on a page, and ultimately, only exist in their implementation.

The idea of policies being mobile, mutating and assembling on site and in local situations is not new (McCann & Ward, 2012a, b; Prince, 2017; Robinson, 2015), but the intricacies of what this means in relation to cultural and urban policy coalitions and conversations at a local scale is less evident in the empirical record. This chapter reflects on making and doing policy locally, on an everyday basis, in the context of fiscal restraints, and shifting politics and urban priorities. It draws on the experience of embedded research and policy coproduction and draws on the collective reflections of the research team that included researchers from the African Centre for Cities, the City’s Arts & Culture Branch and cultural practitioners connected to the project. Of particular interest is how the City of Cape Town’s Arts & Culture Branch’s cultural mapping and planning project has been one avenue of manoeuvring, mobilizing, and mainstreaming culture in the City.

The chapter starts by introducing four interconnected ways in which to approach cultural and urban policy-making through collaborative policy research. These are as follows: emplaced, located in the specificity of place; embodied, or lived and practised through the practical and political knowledge of those who deliver cultural policy mandates, enacted or implemented in practice; and embedded, institutionally in agile and action-oriented ways, where embedding is both a process and an outcome. It argues that thinking about policy and practice through these four concepts reveals how cultural policy can interact with people, places, and politics in tactical ways.

Second, it locates Cape Town as a city of contradictions, a creative city that is often at odds with its own creative identity. As a Creative City of Design, Cape Town has recognized the potential for culture, arguably in niche and often elite ways, favouring the market over the lived reality of the urban majority. This section shows that while cultural policy exists, there is a mismatch between these ambitions and the fiscal reality. Despite this, there are municipal champions within the governance arrangement of the City who are working to leverage policy for more inclusive and emplaced aims.

Third, as the chapter emerges out of a long-term engaged process of collaborative research, this section turns to consider the Knowledge Transfer Programme and scholar-municipal collaborations in action-oriented policy research. It pays particular attention to two protagonists working with an embodied practice of cultural mapping and planning as an antidote to elite-centric urban cultural objectives. By doing so, it examines the tensions, tussles, and tactics of municipal-scholar collaborations in cultural mapping and planning. This section situates the chapter within the research findings, teasing out the thresholds of potential concern and mutual interest, and introduces two activities related to cultural mapping and planning that aim to counteract the challenges in transversal ways. Finally, the chapter returns to what this means for local action-oriented cultural policy research, arguing for how emplaced and embodied policy knowledge and practice can be enacted in situated and embedded ways.

Cultural Policy Emplacement, Embodiment, Enactment, and Embeddedness

The notion that cultural policy is emplaced, is inextricably entwined with urban objectives as they are conceived, situated and localized, is not new. The practices and politics of policy flows have been of growing interest to policy scholars, particularly in political science and geography for the last ten years. Although there have been numerous critiques about policy transfer (Benson & Jordan, 2011; Sassen, 2001), and elsewhere I have cautioned about how cultural policy may land in unintentional ways (Sitas, 2020a), there have also been more nuanced approaches to understanding policy mobilities. For example, simplistic notions of policy mobilities have been challenged, with a reminder that policy development is relational and emplaced (Cochrane & Ward, 2012; Prince, 2017). Policy mobilities are not only one directional and transactional from the global North as best practices to be adopted wholesale in the global South. They move and mutate and are as much a product of interaction between and within global organizations and nation states (McCann & Ward, 2012a), what Peck and Theodore (2010, p. 170) express as ‘a three-dimensional mosaic of increasingly reflexive forms of governance, shaped by multi-directional forms of cross-scalar and interlocal policy mobility’.

McCann and Ward (2012a) point out that there are benefits to understanding ‘policy-making as both a local and, simultaneously, a global socio-spatial and political process’ given the ‘multi-disciplinary perspectives on how, why, where and with what effects policies are mobilised, circulated, learned, reformulated and reassembled’. This chapter is interested less in the ways in which the global-local relationship functions in relation to specific policy objects, and more in what this practically means in local contexts, and particularly within urban agendas. Whereas Robinson (2015, p. 831) is interested in ‘how policymakers compose their ideas amidst myriad influences from elsewhere’, I am interested in what policy makers and scholars do with this tacit knowledge in tactical and emplaced ways within contexts riddled with conflicting rationalities (Watson, 2003). This notion of policy emplacement as socio-spatial is useful to understand how a policy appears in a particular place, in this case, in the arrangements of urban governance in Cape Town.

Cultural policy is embodied: it is lived and practised through the practical and political knowledge of those who deliver cultural policy mandates. Embodiment has been theorized by a number of disciplines, and refers to the bodily being of people, and the psychological, social, and cultural conditions within which they live—the physicality of the body dialectically related to consciousness and situatedness. In other words, the knowledge that is used to underpin action is not only externally sourced—it is intellectual, experienced, already known, generational and sensorial (Hawkins, 2019; McKenzie, 2017). As Freeman and Sturdy (2014, p. 9) put it ‘this is practical and gestural knowledge, deeply embedded in bodily experience and incapable of expression in verbal form… as well as “embrained knowledge”… that can be thought of as “know how”’. An implicit knowledge of knowing how to do something, for example, instinctually knowing how to navigate complex politics within institutions like municipalities. It is an attunement, and sense of intuition that comes from both experience and a sensitivity to the effective and affective realms of working in complex contests. Embodiment is useful to understand how policy is experienced and deployed by particular people, and within a set of specific power dynamics that are fundamentally emplaced.

Cultural policy is enacted: it is something that is done, shaped largely by the ways in which it is emplaced and embodied. Of interest to this chapter is how cultural policy is emplaced, embodied, and enacted through cultural mapping and planning. Much research focuses on numerical accounting of cultural policy in the city, of the economic impact of particular sectors, trends within cultural industries, and surface level monitoring and evaluation impact analysis data. Cultural mapping refers to socio-spatial methods of surfacing local information about culture at a very local scale. Cultural planning involves making decisions about how to integrate this information into the planning of cities (see Redaelli, this volume). Cultural mapping has been particularly successful at identifying ways to make intangible and intangible aspects of culture visible (Longley & Duxbury, 2016; Radović, 2016). It is also seen as useful in participatory storytelling and community identity formation (Cauchi-Santoro, 2016; Jeannotte, 2016) and as a development tool (Freitas, 2016).

Although these processes are well documented in Canada, in Australia and in much of Europe, less is known about cultural mapping in the global South. Given that the basis for colonialism and apartheid in South Africa was essentially a socio-cultural project, it is logical that cultural acts can contribute to undoing the socio-spatial legacy of segregation. Recognizing the value of local knowledge and practice is essential for valuing diversity, plurality, and just placemaking, and it is this ethos of enactment of cultural policy that drives the Arts & Culture Branch’s endeavours to assert the importance of culture in the City and for the city at large.

Cultural policy is embedded within institutions and inter-institutional collaborations; embedding can be a tactic for action-oriented policy research. Embeddedness here refers to the interconnected ways in which emplacement, embodiment, and enactment coalesce in the context of policy in situated action: to be embedded is therefore to be firmly located in place, people, and practice. This chapter is interested in how collaboration and coproduction shape the ways in which policy is lived and leveraged on a daily basis, and the role of coproduced and embedded research in embedding cultural policy.

It has been increasingly recognized that coproduction is useful for relevant and responsive research (Culwick et al., 2019; Simon et al., 2020). As Perry et al. (2018, p. 189) assert, ‘the value of this approach lies in its context-sensitivity and iterative flexibility to articulate between internationally shared challenges and distinctive local practices’. In addressing ‘wicked urban problems’, and within global policy flows, embedded research can mitigate against the risk of lifting international best practice and implementing potentially unsuitable solutions elsewhere, as can be a common trend within municipalities. Pivoting from ‘best’ to ‘good’ practice allows examples to be used as inspiration as opposed to wholesale adoption (Patel et al., 2015). States in the global South are unlikely to have the fiscal capabilities to address urban polycrises (A. Simone & Pieterse, 2017), and therefore shared resources and responsibilities are crucial for embedding emplaced and embodied knowledge within public institutions and civil society (Patel et al., 2015) This chapter looks at what this embedding means in the context of cultural mapping and planning as a collaborative act of asserting the role of culture in meeting objectives of urban justice (Fainstein, 2010; Sitas & Smit, 2017).

Cape Town: Cultural Governance Arrangements in a City of Contradictions

Cape Town is a city of complexities and contradictions. It is both beautiful and brutal and everything in between. Although the region has been populated for 15,000 years, as a city, its built form, spatial design, social dynamics, and cultural flair has been fundamentally shaped by its more recent colonial apartheid pasts, and post-independence trajectories. Situated on the southernmost tip of the African continent, Cape Town is well known for its iconic Table Mountain looming large over the affluent central business district. Less evident in the global imagination are the stubborn divides, the spatial scars of forced removals, and the dysfunctional urban sprawl that curtails many residents’ access to the city.

Cape Town is a secondary city in South Africa, with a population of around four million people. Around 42% of Capetonians are Black, 40% Coloured,² 16% White, and 2% Asian. Wealth in the city remains largely controlled by White elites, and unemployment (particularly amongst the youth) has jumped to over 30% since the Covid-19 pandemic, largely impacting on Black and Coloured residents (Statistics South Africa, 2021). Women and young people are least likely to have access to the formal labour market, and 33% of the economy is classified as informal.³ Around 20% of residents live in informal dwellings (7% in backyard dwellings and 13% in informal settlements),⁴ lower than many other African cities, but this figure still accounts for a sizeable chunk of the population. The crime rate in Cape Town is the highest in South Africa, and one of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world.⁵ This disproportionately affects poor neighbourhoods and is exacerbated by gangsterism. The Group Areas Act (1950) carved up the city spatially according to race and estimates of over 60,000 people were forcibly removed between the 1960s and 1980s from neighbourhoods classified as White under the apartheid regime. These racialized divisions have yet to be dismantled. The Covid-19 pandemic has compounded existing inequalities, deepening food insecurity, job loss, and limiting access to essential services, as well as putting major fiscal restraints on the City.⁶

Despite the divisions, Cape Town is by no means the sum of its statistics or only defined by its despair. It is a diverse and effervescent city, with a well-developed and multi-faceted cultural sector including state galleries and museums, independent and market related galleries, residency spaces, collectives, consultancies, as well as an active film industry and many public and private educational institutions dedicated to the cultural sector. The Visual Arts Network South Africa (VANSA) has produced an artmap⁷ inventory of the formal institutions, yet many more exist that are less visible. Alongside this, there is also a plethora of less formal spaces for cultural action: artist collectives are actively re-defining what vibrancy means outside of the centre; backyard music studios abound; and young people are tech-savvy and connected in ways previously unimaginable.

Cape Town has embraced an identity of a creative city, and in particular, has joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a Creative City of Design. As a Design City, ‘Cape Town is committed to democratizing design, strengthening the local and international design-ecosystem, embedding design-led innovation into the city administration, and using design as a problem-solving tool for urban challenges to improve the lives of its inhabitants’.⁸ In 2014 Cape Town was awarded the (relatively hollow title) of World Design Capital. The wholesale adoption of global titles has been critiqued for being inadequate in addressing the structural urgencies linked to growing inequality, yet the role of creative city worlding has found traction (Nkula-Wenz, 2019). The critique of creative cities has been well documented by scholars across the globe (Pratt, 2008, 2011; Sitas, 2020b), with cautions about Florida’s (2002) elite-centric planning, and other forms of culture-led development (Evans, 2005; Miles, 2005; Zukin, 2010).

Despite these critiques, which city officials are well aware of, the language of creativity, and the role of arts, culture and heritage, are all tactically instrumental to the identity of the city. The role of creative and cultural industries, as well as heritage tourism, are well versed and on the tip of official tongues. It is estimated that the cultural and creative industries contributed R62 billion or 1.7% of the total GDP in 2017. In 2018, a South African Cultural Observatory mapping study showed that the greater cultural economy employs 6.94% of the national workforce. It generates one million jobs (Lutshaba et al., 2020). According to the previous Mayor Patricia de Lille in the Arts & Culture Branch brochure, ‘Cape Town, known as “the creative city” for many years, has an energy and vibrance that will fast become a successful economic driver’. Like elsewhere, there has been a tendency to focus on the formal art and design market and economy, on dominant simplistic notions of cultural expression, and on tangible tourist-centric types of heritage.

The cultural governance arrangement in Cape Town is an assemblage of moving parts that shift at different times and tempos. And even culture has many legislative lives that operate in different ways in different tiers of government. On a national level, culture falls within the mandate of the Department of Sports, Arts & Culture, as initiated by the 1996 White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage. Policies are also under construction and in conversation locally on an ongoing basis. So much so that this White Paper has itself been under revision ever since it was created, and even at its last draft in 2017, has been unable to transition from a draft to notarized completion. As the latest guiding document, its overarching mission is to: ‘Accelerate the transformation of the arts, culture and heritage sectors and related institutions to effectively contribute to building an inclusive, creative, caring and prosperous society in which the diverse creative and cultural practices, heritage and knowledge traditions and rights of all in South Africa may flourish and prosper’ (Revision of the Department of Arts and Culture 1996 White Paper, 2017, p. 8).

Cape Town is one of the few cities on the African continent that has a city-level cultural policy. Co-developed through an engaged process which included multiple stakeholder meetings, public workshops, policy reading groups, and expert input, the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy (2014) ‘was conceived as an iterative one, to be evaluated annually with new data, through engagement with the sector and adjusted through the legal processes that governed policy development’ (Minty, 2018). An ambitious policy, it aims to address a number of urban challenges in its 10-page problem statement, including the socio-cultural legacy of colonialism and apartheid, inadequate and misaligned investments, increasing economic inequalities, and the non-existence of a shared story of and for the future of Cape Town. In 2021, having received criticism for being under-costed and un-implementable despite its best intentions, a policy review process was set in motion to address the urgencies of the present milieu.

While the City of Cape Town embraces the notion of creativity, the dominant conceptions are often at odds with the reality—what enters the official narrative of creativity is not always synchronous with what is happening on the ground. There are champions within the City, particularly in the Arts & Culture Branch, that are finding ways of leveraging the narrative of creative cities for other ends. These narratives are closer to Landry’s (2007) notion of creative cities as about creative infrastructure and governance, and in the interest of Simone’s cityness, where the city can only be understood in relation to its hustle on the periphery, and the affects and effects of local living and collective life in the majority city (Simone, 2010; A. M. Simone, 2016). In other words, to nurture a creative city is to pay attention to what is happening in the margins, which in Cape Town should reflect the interest of the majority. It was this shared threshold of interest that provided the foundation for the collaboration discussed below.

Cultural Policy and Municipal-Scholar Collaboration

This common commitment to ensuring a more inclusive approach to the role of culture in Cape Town could be mobilized through a longer-term research relationship between the African Centre for Cities and the Arts & Culture Branch. This section explains how this collaboration came about. In 2012, the Knowledge Transfer Programme was launched and involved embedding researchers between the City and the academy, focusing on the coproduction of policy knowledge and implementation. According to Patel et al. (2015), ‘co-production is a creative response to contemporary urban challenges, especially in contexts where capacity is limited and where conventional technical and analytical expertise is lacking or inappropriate’. The Knowledge Transfer Programme sought to establish a platform for scholar-official collaboration and coproduction in order to address the urgencies of the present moment, with a critical and practice eye towards the future.

The Knowledge Transfer Programme (2020) is underpinned by a Memorandum of Agreement, monitored by a steering committee, and involves a careful navigation of interests and expertise. It was funded by the Mistra Urban Futures project, a collaborative, coproductive, and comparative research network working in Cape Town (South Africa), Kisumu (Kenya), Sheffield/Manchester (UK) and Gothenburg (Sweden). The purpose of the project was to explore the role of coproduction in and between secondary cities (Simon et al., 2020). Although Mistra Urban Futures funding ended in 2019, due to the perceived success, the collaboration continues. In 2017, building on pre-existing relationships between myself and the Arts & Culture Branch as a consultant and sounding board, the African Centre for Cities started working formally with the Branch with an explicit focus on finding tactical ways to strengthen the cultural mapping and planning work and insert cultural objectives across different departments in the City.

Although there were other activities and actors in the collaboration, such as me as the research lead on the collaboration, other colleagues within the Branch, and a wide range of cultural practitioners in civil society, this chapter focuses on the two main protagonists involved in cultural mapping and planning as a way to illustrate the embodiment of policy-related action. In both cases, the politics and priorities of those involved shaped the way in which cultural mapping and planning was used as a tactic for asserting the importance of culture beyond the mandate of the Arts & Culture Branch. Researcher and arts practitioner Vaughn Sadie was appointed to join as an embedded researcher to work with Shamila Rahim who had been a project officer in the branch for some time, and who had spearheaded cultural mapping and planning in the City. As a member of the steering committee, and research lead, sounding board, and critical friend to the collaboration between Rahim and Sadie, I paid close attention to and was involved in shaping the reflective and reflexive processes as ongoing dimensions to the project. This chapter comes out of my long-term observations within the collaboration, our collective reflections that were built into the research process of the Knowledge Transfer Programme, informal conversations, as well as exit interviews with Rahim and Sadie at the end of the formal relationship.⁹

Rahim comes from a museums background, having worked for a long time with District 6 Museum before joining the City and returning to her civic home in 2022. Her history as a cultural activist meant she was bringing a civil society network and a very particular kind of politics to her position. Having grown up in the violence and volatility of apartheid, Rahim carries with her an astute engagement with race, class, and gender, not only intellectually, but as experienced as being a Black woman in a racist and misogynist city and municipality. Crucial to Rahim, therefore, was to explore ways in which the City could use history, memory, and cultural vibrancy to enrich life in the city. Her concern was that despite the best intentions of the post-apartheid state, inequality persists, and culture needs to play an important role in its undoing. Rahim expressed unease at the flows of cultural resources to already well-positioned institutions and championed the push to use cultural mapping to surface and support what happens at a local neighbourhood scale in Cape Town.

Vaugh Sadie is an arts practitioner and has been a project manager for publicly engaged arts programmes deeply embedded in local contexts, such as in the neighbourhood of Cosmo City in Johannesburg; Dundee, a small town in rural KwaZulu-Natal (KZN); and Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape. Sadie has been committed to finding creative and participatory ways to tap into existing networks and practices in neighbourhoods to ensure relevant and responsive work. Reflecting on this practice, Sadie had been working on his doctoral thesis on community-driven public art and the implications for a nodal-based approach to cultural governance. This research resonated well with Rahim’s cultural mapping and planning work and brought both practitioner and academic experience into the collaboration. Although Sadie had a markedly different upbringing from Rahim as a white man, his politics aligned with those of the project, and he shared a commitment to find ways to leverage local knowledge in the interest of a more culturally just Cape Town. Sadie supported refining instruments such as the Cultural Planning Toolkit Framework, ran workshops to identify blockages and opportunities, and given his relative autonomy from City hierarchies, was able to leverage the connection to the African Centre for Cities tactically to move within and around the City in ways officials embedded in a department may not be able to do, especially those in a very marginal department in the greater organizational structure of the municipality. Importantly, both Sadie and Rahim are not ordinary civil servants or scholars—their straddling of state, civic and scholar settings meant that they already embodied an intertwined set of politics and priorities.

It is also important to note that Rahim and Sadie were not working under stable conditions. Critiques of the state too easily assume a monolithic homogenous entity with coherent ideas and streamlined strategies, but the reality is that municipalities can be as inconsistent as the cities they are mandated to govern. The notion that the state is static couldn’t be further from reality when looking at the Arts & Culture Branch, a small entity with many an unfunded mandate. In the last ten years, the Branch has been moved three times. For a while it was a Unit under Social Development, then moved into Tourism, which was under Economic Development, only to be demoted to a Branch under Social Development again. In the last five years, the City has undergone three massive overhauls—configuring and reconfiguring priorities dependent on who is at the helm (Cirolia & Robins, 2021).¹⁰

Despite this constant movement, two key priorities of the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy have remained consistent: building an evidence base to inform decisions and focusing on cultural infrastructure. In response to these, in 2015 the Arts & Culture Branch focused attention and resources¹¹ into two interconnected projects: cultural mapping and planning; and creative spaces. Since 2015, the Arts & Culture Branch has conducted cultural mapping and planning processes in 52 wards with considerably limited budgets. It was around the Cultural Planning Toolkit Framework that African Centre for Cities and Arts & Culture Branch first started working together in 2016.

In an attempt to tackle often elite-interest-led perspectives, the Arts & Culture Branch, through Rahim, initiated an emplaced approach to surfacing cultural activities and resources ordinarily out of the view of the City. The Branch has been experimenting with cultural mapping and planning as a grounded research method to make sense of the fine-grain neighbourhood-level cultural fabric with an eye to finding locally responsive and relevant programming for connecting the city through cultural activity. According to the Cultural Planning Toolkit Framework (City of Cape Town, 2017):

Cultural planning sits at the intersection of people, places and policies. It provides a framework for addressing the needs and objectives of a city’s cultural sector and cultural life including arts, culture and heritage groups and practitioners that shape a city’s cultural ecosystem. (p. 9)

In Cape Town, Rahim was convinced that cultural mapping and planning is able to surface the kinds of emplaced information that can work to address the inconsistencies and tussles over culture in a local context and do justice to the notion of a creative city for the majority. Employing her experience as a museum practitioner with extensive experience in oral histories, Rahim rather than centralizing value frameworks within the City, deployed researchers, equipped with oral history skills with the intention of surfacing knowledge, values, and practices in the neighbourhoods being mapped. In this way, she argued, cultural mapping and planning can de-centre the power of cultural decision-making, building civil society as opposed to centralizing decisions in a state that is so fiscally and politically constrained.

Rahim and Sadie bring a very particular set of politicized agendas to their enactment of cultural policy in Cape Town, and this shaped the way in which community researchers were deployed and the ways in which the data was gathered and processed. For example, Rahim favoured conducting oral histories as a form of socio-cultural inventorying and employing local youth instead of consultants, which is the norm for these kinds of municipal procurement processes. As such, the embodied knowledge of residents became visible as part of the process. Therefore, the way cultural policy is enacted through the cultural mapping, and planning processes are not the delivery of an end product—it is not only about a map but also about a set of relationships that are made visible from and also those that emerge through the mapping process. In doing this, cultural mapping and planning de-centres the power of cultural decision-making, building civil society as opposed to centralizing decisions in a state that is so fiscally constrained. This does not come without challenges.

Tensions, Trade-Offs, Tussles, and Tactics of Action-Oriented Policy and Governance Interventions

The chapter now turns to critically reflect on the collaboration, observing first its tensions, trade-offs, and tussles, before turning to some of the tactics that were developed through the Knowledge Transfer Programme. These tussles are often underpinned by wildly different expectations on the purpose and location of arts and culture in the City. Although the mandate for arts and culture sits within the Arts & Culture Branch, there are slippages in how culture appears in urban agendas in other spaces within the City. Culture can be elastic, porous, and sticky and is easily attached to other things in problematic ways. Interviews with various officials showed that the definitions of culture are varied and attached to a myriad of values that are not always compatible. In the context of enacting cultural policy in the City, there are five interrelated challenges that emerge out of the incoherence of the expectations of culture in the City.

First, there are discursive disjunctures at different scales. As mentioned earlier, there are different mandates for culture at different tiers of government. Whilst a national government may be interested in nationalist identities linked to reconciliation and social cohesion that emerge out of the 1994 moment of democracy; local government may be interested in the specificities that make a place identity unique. These are due in part to policies, but also the people who are responsible for enacting them and the political will at the time. While collaborations such as these may not be able to untangle these differences, they can recognize where opportunities lie to align.

Second, it has become clear that the argument for the importance of culture has not yet been adequately won. Although there is a wide recognition that culture is important, what this means for what the City actually does on a daily basis, and mandates as priorities beyond the Branch is less evident, especially in the face of complex and interconnected crises. Crucial to connecting culture to urban development priorities is building a coherent narrative asserting the strategic aims of institutionalizing cultural objectives across different spheres of local government.

Third, the inability to assert a coherent narrative has a lot to do with the diverse values associated with culture and some values are more tangible than others. The National Department of Sports Arts and Culture recognizes a wide array of values.¹² Common in many cultural policies, the values are all encompassing, but they can also have incompatible logics. For example, economic value may not be compatible with social value. This means it is easy for a municipality to pick and choose which value matches with the urban priority of the time at the expense of other values, and in the case of the Arts & Culture Branch, has depended on where it is situated within a particular dispensation. Decisions that impact on the cultural life of the city are rarely those taken by the Arts & Culture Branch whose mandate is very narrow and marginal to the development objectives of the City.

Fourth, action in local government is not always straightforward, and institutional limitations and inertia can create blockages, stumbling blocks, and a reluctance to commit or rock the proverbial boat. Municipalities are hierarchical and procedural, separated out and siloed, and at a system level are complicated to manoeuver within without an astute recognition of, and aptitude to work around, power dynamics. It was quickly recognized that researchers can hold an intermediary and agile position, transcending the power dynamics and procedures that municipal officials have to adhere to. In other words, researchers can say the things municipal officials may not be allowed or able to say. Researchers can be ambitious and provocative in what is being proposed. A researcher can meet with the Director of the Directorate, while a project officer at Branch level cannot, or would not bring the same weight.

Finally, there are incompatible logics and logistics at a local scale and in localities. One of the challenges is that arts and culture are managed under one directorate (social development) and heritage under another (spatial planning)—the former focusing on the intangible dimensions to cultural life in cities, and the latter the material forms of culture in the built environment. This has resulted in scuffles over tangible and intangible heritage in specific neighbourhoods, where the social, spatial, and cultural priorities don’t align. Both Branches are marginal to municipal decision-making and development objectives will often trump any attempt to assert the importance of socio-cultural life.

These are complex tensions and there can be a lot at stake, and although it may not be possible for the Knowledge Transfer Programme to solve these in entirety, there are collaborative in-roads that were initiated in the process that can set the groundwork for change. In addition to the everyday encroachments of culture into the development agenda of the City through Rahim and Sadie’s persistent attempts to render culture visible, there are two processes that emerged out of the collaboration that are worth mentioning: the first is the SA-EU Dialogue Exchange and the second the coproduction of a policy positioning note.

The SA-EU Dialogue Facility¹³ funds policy dialogues between Europe and South Africa. Through this collaboration, in 2019 and 2020, a dialogue entitled Cultural Mapping, Planning and Impact Assessment for Sustainable and Just Cities was funded. Driven by the National Department of Arts and Culture and the African Centre for Cities, the dialogue was designed as a collaboration with the Arts & Culture Branch, the Urban Futures Centre (Durban University of Technology), the Wits City Institute (University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg), the Cities Lab Katedra (University of Deusto in Bilbao), Urban Development Unit (Gothenburg Cultural Affairs Administration), School of Art history and Cultural Policy (University College Dublin), and the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (through the Catalytic Sectors Office at the City of Cape Town).

The purpose of the exchange was to review local policy to identify ways to strengthen urban policy implementation through culture; identify good practice cases as examples of strengthening policy discourse and practice; and provide a platform for building a network of cultural policy partners. This involved a study tour to Gothenburg and Bilbao; a conference hosted in Cape Town; and the production of a report looking at policy and good practice as Patel et al. (2015) imagined. The report was coproduced with local expert, Molemo Moiloa, and cultural mapping and planning expert, Nancy Duxbury, adding weight and relevance to the content. With additional of funds from Mistra Urban Futures, the report was translated into four toolkits.¹⁴ These have been widely circulated in the City and well-received, and viewed as strategically helpful for Arts & Culture Branch project officers to leverage interest in other parts of the City. Although there were tangible material outputs in the form of these reports and toolkits, it was the intangible and relational outcomes that are perhaps more interesting. The conference in Cape Town invited strategic participants within the City from other departments to be in conversation with their counterparts in European cities, linked engaged scholars, and through this, made the Arts & Culture Branch visible in ways that it had not been before. It strengthened the relationships that had been made in the lead up to the events through negotiating partnerships at different scales of government. In addition to the ongoing building of a relationship between scholars and officials around issues of arts, culture and heritage, it galvanized a research partnership committed and contributing to collaborative research between municipalities and scholars across the world.

The second activity was aimed at consolidating the embedded research relationship and took the form of a coproduced policy note entitled Culture, Sustainability and Urban Innovation: Towards Culture as a Strategic Objective for Urban Development in the City of Cape Town (2021). The City has been in the process of institutionalizing the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly through its Resilience Strategy, and therefore the note situates culture at the heart of sustainability and justice through framing culture in relation to environmental sustainability; social sustainability and wellbeing; livelihoods and innovation; and underpinned by creative and cross-cutting governance. The framing was responsive to emerging priorities in the City, making sure that the note was legible to audiences across different departments, and resonated with the strategic direction of the City. It connects culture to urban development objectives and the localizing of the Sustainable Development Goals through providing examples of innovative work the City is already doing in relation to the following: people and participation; processes and programmes; places and planet; policies and partnerships; and politics and political will. In particular, this note has been useful in the process of reviewing the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries Policy (2014).

With both activities, the process of putting them together was arguably as important as the outputs themselves. In order to ensure relevance of the content, the report and note were produced through collaborations within and beyond the Arts & Culture Branch, involving municipal officials in other departments, members of civil society from arts and culture organizations, and scholars from different disciplines. Coproduction was used as a tactic not only for developing relevant and responsive content, but also to strengthen networks with different actors in the urban and cultural governance arrangement in Cape Town.

Conclusion: Emplacing, Embodying, Enacting, and Embedding Cultural Policy Through Action-Oriented Knowledge Exchange

Although there are multiple entanglements between the global and local, the global in local, cultural policy largely sits in situations and situatedness. The Knowledge Transfer Programme has shown that policy in action is inevitably and necessarily emplaced in contexts that are incoherent and conflicted as much as they are creative and cool. This chapter concludes by drawing together four reflections on knowledge exchange in action.

First, for cultural policy to be responsibly and responsively emplaced, situated knowledge is vital in the processes of implementation. This includes taking seriously spatial, social, cultural, and historical knowledge. The collaborating partners in this exchange brought contextual and institutional experience, data, and methods into the collaboration. Whereas cultural consultants are often requisitioned to deliver on specific outcomes over a finite time period, the African Centre for Cities comes with a wealth of existing research and networks that spans beyond the cultural sector. This coupled with the Arts & Culture Branch long, albeit shifting with the political times, commitment to culture, brought a particular set of sensibilities and sensitivities to the cultural mapping and planning process that were ground-up, identifying already existing practices, and creating platforms for creative practitioners to interact with the City in novel ways. While with fiscal restraints and limited state budgets for culture, there may be some way to go in resourcing culture in the majority city, cultural mapping and planning provides an evidence base that at least secures a seat at the proverbial table. This voice and visibility enhances the City’s ability to plan and develop appropriately, and civil society’s capabilities to hold authorities accountable.

While the SA-EU Dialogue engaged with cultural mapping and planning policies and practices from elsewhere, the objective was not to implement them wholesale from elsewhere. Engaging in these kinds of activities is not only about the substantive work of producing novel evidence bases of Patel et al.’s (2015) good practice, but also as a form of rendering cultural objectives visible beyond the narrow mandate of a municipal unit. The collaborations did not only include cultural policy practitioners. Inviting spatial development planners and urban researchers into the fray meant that applicability could be distributed to other departments and disciplines. Although this was not always smooth, especially when conflicting logics and priorities collided, incremental in-roads were made into manoeuvring cultural objectives beyond the mandate of the Arts & Culture Branch. This has been met with some measure of success, with the Branch being invited into development processes in neighbourhoods such as Delft and District Six.¹⁵

Second, just as cultural policy is situated in place, it is embodied in the literal bodies and in the various forms of tacit, tactical, and technical knowledge of municipal officials and scholars in the collaborative research arrangement. Collaborations between institutions always require careful negotiation, interpersonal aptitudes, and a great deal of trust to build action-oriented relationships of exchange. The work within the Knowledge Transfer Programme is not only technical; a large part of it is building and maintaining relationships. There could be someone technically excellent and prolific at producing policy notes, but this is less important than being attuned to politics and power dynamics in order to circumvent conflict and find tactical ways to tackle the tussles.

This involved an ethic of commitment and care—not only for each other, but for the projects themselves. Crucial to understanding embodiment in these emplaced situations, is that it is not individual—it is collective and political. Developing the note involved emplaced and embodied knowledge and relied on strong relationships with those across the City. Both the dialogue and the production of the policy note involved careful negotiation and tacit and tactical decision-making and are examples that demonstrate the action-oriented potential of research alliances. This has led to discussions for cultural mapping and planning to form the backbone of the new arts and culture policy.

Third, building relationships is the foundation of collaborative work, and essential for embedding and institutionalizing culture within the fabric of the functioning of municipalities. The embedded nature of the research allowed for reach beyond the Branch’s immediate orbit, drawing on other networks within the City that had been established through the long-term collaboration—such as those developing the Resilience Strategy. Of particular use was the connection to the Knowledge Transfer Programme Steering Committee. Whereas culture had been seen as tangential, the project made visible the work of the Arts & Culture Branch and the potential to institutionalize culture beyond the Branch became a priority on the agenda. Whereas the Arts & Culture Branch and the Heritage Branch had not historically worked together at all, the SA-EU Dialogue Facility created a space where the two departments could intersect, interact, and start building a relationship for future action. Relationships are fundamentally embodied and rely on the interpersonal skills of those engaging with each other. Although mistrust can be worryingly prevalent within municipal institutions, embedded research collaborations can create spaces where ordinarily fractious encounters can be alleviated. For Holderness, another of the City-embedded research champions, ‘the gains have certainly been tangible, long-term and mutually beneficial’ (2020), demonstrating how the momentum of these processes is not lost after the embedded encounters.

Ultimately, being embedded in an institution and immersed in the daily activities of the City allows for reflexive, responsive, and relevant cultural policy work as situated and situational, and above all nimble—which is not a quality ordinarily attributed to policy. Municipal officials and scholars within such an arrangement learn how to work in adaptable and agile ways that move between different kinds of knowledge and institutional contexts. There is also mutual benefit—where city officials gain access to evidence bases, and scholars gain access to data and institutional insights at a deeply engrained institutional level not usually afforded to academics. It means that action-oriented research is not formulaic and can be multi-faceted and involved being there and being aware.

Finally, as one of the few cities on the continent with a cultural policy at the city scale, the City of Cape Town has demonstrated a commitment to the cultural and creative sector. The City has been successful at landing design as an urban imperative which has tended to favour the interests of cultural elites. In surfacing other forms of cultural and creative practice at a neighbourhood scale across the majority city, cultural mapping and planning allows Cape Town as a creative city to encounter itself in a less elite-centric, and a more inclusive way. This evidence base has implications for how resources flow and how civil society can actively engage authorities through alternative in-roads to the faltering political processes of South Africa’s participatory democracy (Sitas & Pieterse, 2013). This involves recognizing that the status quo of inequality requires new and multiple tactics to enable a creative city no longer at odds with its own place identity.

Notes

• 1. I use ‘the City’ with a capital ‘C’ to refer to the City of Cape Town as a municipal entity. The city with a lower case ‘c’ refers to the city at large.

• 2. The term ‘Coloured’ has a different meaning in South Africa than elsewhere. Here ‘Coloured’ refers to a distinct racial classification named under the apartheid regime which refers to those with a mixed Khoisan, Black, European, and Asian ancestry, dating back from the 1600s.

• 3. The informal economy includes activities that fall outside of the formal economy. These are usually paid in cash, are short-term, and are precarious forms of income.

• 4. This data comes from the City of Cape Town (https://www.capetown.gov.za/Family%20and%20home/Residential-property-and-houses/Informal-housing/About-informal-housing) but it is difficult to account accurately.

• 5. Institute for Security Studies.

• 6. National and municipal budgets have been radically cut and diverted to alleviate stress on the health, social services, education, and economic systems. The effects are being measured and monitored by state institutions such as National Treasury, as well as numerous non-governmental entities and universities.

• 7. http://www.artmap.co.za/city/1/cape+town/.

• 8. https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/cape-town.

• 9. While the embedded research project has ended, our relationships and collaboration continue in less formal, and more ad hoc terms.

• 10. The African Centre for Cities has been tracking these shifts as part of the long-term engagement with the City of Cape Town, and the research collaborations have been shaped by, and morphed, in relation to how the urban priorities emerge within shifting urban mandates.

• 11. Although resources were allocated to cultural mapping and planning, these were comparably very limited and much of the work was undertaken by Rahim over and above her key performance areas.

• 12. The following values are recognized: ‘Inherent Value: Intrinsic value in their own right in the context of aesthetic needs of society and individuals. Creative Value: Innovation and problem-solving capacities. Social Value: Bringing about societal transformation and in being instrumental in socially good ends. Economic Value: By generating wealth, contributing to direct and indirect economic growth and creating sustainable employment. Educational Value: Cognitive, conceptual, spatial, design and cooperation skills development. Recreational Value: Entertainment and relaxation function. Therapeutic Value: Mental and physical therapeutic applications. Environmental Value: The application of natural and of recycled materials’ (Revision of the Department of Arts and Culture 1996 White Paper, 2017).

• 13. https://www.dialoguefacility.org/.

• 14. The following toolkits were developed: cultural mapping, planning, and impact assessment for sustainable and just urban development; strengthening urban policy to address cultural diversity: good practice case studies from Europe and Africa; incorporating cultural mapping, planning, and impact assessment into policy development; and holding government accountable.

• 15. Delft is a rapidly densifying and economically marginalized neighbourhood in Cape Town that has seen the relevance of cultural infrastructure in the development process. District Six is neighbourhood in the central city that was a heart of cultural life before forced removals during apartheid. The repopulation of the area by those who were dispossessed is being developed with the support of cultural mapping and planning and the Arts & Culture Branch.