Introduction: Cultural Policy’s Geographies

In this chapter, we want to contribute to the task that Eleonora Redaelli (2019, p. 12) calls ‘thinking spatially in cultural policy’, which she describes as a project that works to ‘highlight elements—such as distance, proximity, agglomeration, location, etc.—in their relational manifestation’ (p. 12). In particular, given the emphasis of this book, we are interested in the question of spatial scale, and the scale of the local. Along with a number of other scholars, we share Redaelli’s call to think spatially—or, we might prefer, think geographically—about cultural policy practice and research (Bell & Oakley, 2015; Gilmore et al., 2019). And, like Redaelli, we understand culture and place to be relational, and see this relationality as layered and dynamic: culture and place are folded together, interleaved, mutually shaped and shaping. This shaping is manifest in cultural practice and in cultural policy. In the chapter, we attend to these issues by first discussing debates about key geographical concepts—spatial scale, the local—and then working these through in the context of one of our previous research projects (Bell & Orozco, 2021). Before that, we would like to make a few broader observations about cultural policy’s geographies.

Cultural policy operates in and on space and place; the research base as well as the practical applications of particular policies show us this time and again. As Michael Volkering (2001) observed, policy is territorial, concerned with mapping and with boundaries (this is not to say that policy is purely territorial, it is also relational and mobile; see McCann & Ward, 2011). In terms of research, we can identify a number of key ways in which cultural policy is spatialized. Perhaps the most common geographical approach comes in the form of either single-site or comparative case work: cultural policy studies are grounded, one way or another, in the particularities of place. The practice of cultural mapping is important here, in terms of producing accounts of the culture of place at various scales (Duxbury et al., 2015).

In terms of the broader working-with-geographies in cultural policy research, most obvious here is the scale of the nation (and the role of national government in policymaking), but more recently the urban is arguably overtaking the nation as the most-researched scale, given all the policy and research attention on things like capitals of culture and creative cities (Gilmore et al., 2019). Indeed, Redaelli (2019) takes the city—or rather, particular US cities—as her proving ground, and her reading across her cases, including in her chapter in this volume, exemplifies the comparative approach in cultural policy research, also seen in national scale work, for example, in typologies of national policies such as the facilitator-patron-architect-engineer classification of arts funding approaches (for a discussion, see Bell & Oakley, 2015). National comparisons yielding typologies have been a cornerstone of comparative cultural policy research.

We can find many more examples of comparative research working at national or urban scales, as well as work focused on the regional scale (see Bell & Oakley, 2015 for examples). Of course, comparative work is attuned to the specificities of place—each case must first be assembled so that it can then be compared—but is also interested in relationships or non-relationships, in policy transfer and in distinct policy ecologies and their outworkings. Beyond this kind of approach, for all its value and its limitations, we can see geography being worked with in other ways in cultural policy research, for example, in studies that explore the geographically uneven distribution of cultural resources or unequal access to cultural activities (Brook et al., 2020; Gilmore, 2013; Mak et al., 2020; O’Brien & Miles, 2010). While we might see this as comparative work, too—this place gets more arts funding than that place, here people can go to art galleries and there they cannot—this kind of research often moves beyond cases to think about the broader gradients, or ‘power-geometries’ between and within places (Massey, 1993). Rather than place-hopping from one study site to the next, here we see a fuller map in the making, one which shows the contours of culture.

So far, we have somewhat casually dropped in words like scale and place into our discussion, taking these as self-evident concepts (and real things) that need no further clarification or complication. However, that is about to change, as we move deeper into the literature and debates that, across the past few decades, have led to contested reimaginings of place and scale in human geography. In the following sections of the chapter, we trace the broad form of these debates, waymarking key moments and key ideas, in order to give greater clarity to the ongoing cultural policy discussions to which this book is a central contributor. If cultural policy is local, how are we to know the local when we see it or think it, how do we conceptualize scales and their relationships, and in what ways does place matter in cultural policy?

The Question of Scale

We begin our discussion with spatial scale, which has been one of the central and most vexed concepts in human geography in recent decades, subject of, at times, intense debate about its ontology (what is scale?), its epistemology (how do we know scale?) and its methodology (how do we study scale?). While we cannot do full service to every twist and turn in these debates, we here want to provide enough of a sense of what has been argued and what is at stake to offer up something useful for thinking about cultural policy in a scalar way (for fuller detail on the scale debates, see chapter-length and book-length overviews by Herod, 2009, 2011). It should matter to us as cultural policy researchers that we have a working knowledge of this terrain, since we are seeking to navigate it, too—and having some landmarks will help us, while not foreclosing the establishing of new desire lines as we find our own way. So, take what follows in these sections not as the map, but as a map.

Broadly speaking, the ontology of scale has passed from Kantian idealism (scale is an ordering concept or mental contrivance we impose on reality) to Marxian materialism (scales are material social products with real outcomes) to social constructionism (moving from the production of scale to the construction of scale) to relationalism (scale as process and interaction) and fragmentation, with one endpoint being calls to delete scale from the geographer’s lexicon and instead deploy a ‘flat ontology’ (Herod, 2009, 2011). Beyond the ontology of scale lie further questions about metaphors of scale and the work that they do, a particular focus on how we understand scalar relationships, and a tackling of two co-implicated scales, the local and the global. If we set the flat ontology argument aside for a moment, there is within the non-flat literature a strong sense of the continued usefulness of scale, notwithstanding considerable disagreements about whether this usefulness relates to the ontological or epistemological register. Scales can help us think about the world, but we must be mindful of the work that scales do in how we think; or as Herod (2011, p. 256) concludes, ‘ideas about scale structure the knowledge we create about the scaled nature of the world’.

So far, so abstract. It is now time to bring the focus in, to talk about scales rather than the concept of scale. There are a number of different typologies of scale deployed in the literature, but the one we will discuss here is well-used (see, e.g., with various moments of scale-jumping, Bell & Oakley, 2015; Bell & Valentine, 1997; Herod, 2011; Smith, 1993), and it goes like this: body-home-community-urban-region-nation-global. Neil Smith (1993, p. 102), who introduced this particular typology, describes it as ‘inherently incomplete and open-ended. It could hardly be otherwise’, he adds, because ‘scale is actively produced. At best, this typology provides a framework for organizing a more coherently thought-out analysis of spatial scale’. Smith is a key scale thinker, aligned with the Marxian-materialist approach, adding in social constructionism and various other insights, but having a clear understanding of what goes on at each scale. The body is for Smith the site of personal identity (viewed as socially constructed), the home the site of personal and familial reproduction, the community the site of social reproduction, the urban the daily sphere of the labour market, the region the site of economic production, the nation the site of state power, and the global the site of the circulation of capital. In sum, Smith sees scale as ‘the geographical resolution of contradictory processes of competition and co-operation’ endemic to capitalism (p. 99).

While this Marxian-materialist mapping has been challenged and complicated by other thinkers, and while we do not think that each scale can or must only be yoked to its role in capitalism, this typology seems to us to capture the sense of different scales that are nevertheless linked. Yet this typology raises an immediate question: how are we to think about these scales in relation to each other? Smith’s list implies a hierarchy, a set of scales each with their proper place, with others ‘below’ and ‘above’ them. This is a key issue that Herod (2009, pp. 226–230, 2011, pp. 46–56) explores, diagramming different ways of thinking about scales-in-relation, or what he calls the Gestalt of scale. In the later of these discussions, he proposes six different scale diagrams, in two groups: first, scale as a ladder, as concentric circles, or as Russian dolls. These three models of scale are all hierarchical, suggesting either moving up, from body on the lowest rung through to global on the highest, or outward, from body at the centre to global at the outer edge, or a nested hierarchy in which ‘smaller’ scales are contained within ‘larger’ ones. Then Herod proffers three more relational diagrams, showing scale as tree roots, as worm burrows, and as a spider’s web. What Herod is trying to get at with these depictions is something non-hierarchical, intertwined, even rhizomatic: all scales are connected but these connections are not neat arrangements where each scale is in its place and this place is fixed, like the rungs on the ladder or the nested Russian dolls. Rather, he suggests that in these non-hierarchical forms, ‘it is difficult to determine exactly where one scale ends and another begins’ and it is equally difficult to use the language of ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ scales (Herod, 2009, p. 230). As we will return to later, these latter diagrams resonate with more non-linear, networked views of scale and geography.

While this re-viewing of scales and scalar relations takes us a long way from more hierarchical views, for some writers this does not go far enough. Instead, they question the very utility of scale, its very existence, and propose instead a flat ontology, or a human geography without scale (Marston et al., 2005; see also Ash, 2020). Here the project exemplified by Herod’s latter triptych is grouped together with other ‘attempts to alternatively complicate and unravel the hierarchy located at the heart of scale theorizing’ (Marston et al., 2005, p. 417). For Marston et al. this complexifying does little to unsettle the problematic aspects of scale as a concept, such as the slippage between size (small to large) and level (low to high), lingering hierarchizations and dualisms, its ‘God’s-eye’ methodology, and the problem of form preceding content: ‘most empirical work is lashed to a relatively small number of levels—body, neighbourhood, urban, regional, national and global. Once these layers are presupposed, it is difficult not to think in terms of social relations and institutional arrangements that somehow fit their contours’ (p. 422). We include this latter quote knowingly, given that this is the scale list we are working with—at least, the statement might make us pause for thought about the impulse to ‘fit’ places to scales. Herod (2011, p. 254) cautions against ‘scalar fetishism’ in a similar way: we should not ascribe particular character to particular scales, notably in formulations such as ‘global=abstract=space=powerful’ versus ‘local=concrete=place=weak’ (see also Gibson-Graham, 2002). Instead of scaled places, Marston et al. (2005) recommend using the language of sites (Ash (2020) offers events as another non-scalar term), and shifting emphasis away from fitting every case into the scaled matrix, instead of looking at each site in its own singularity, without presupposed scale and all its attendant consequences.

Marston et al.’s (2005) intervention caused a moment of pause in the scale debates, generating considerable contention (it is notable that their 2005 paper was accompanied by no less than five critical commentaries, plus the authors’ response). But it is fair to say that not everyone rushed to join the flat ontology turn, and that scale remains analytically useful for a range of intellectual projects. As an aside, cultural policy researchers might be especially interested in a later paper where there the flat ontology perspective is applied in the context of the Nollywood film industry in Lagos, Nigeria (Marston et al., 2007). Here, Marston et al are particularly interested in not reading Nollywood through a local-global (Nollywood-Hollywood) frame, so as to resist what they call the ‘ordering impulses’ (p. 53) that would wrap Nollywood in a story of globalization and see it only as a localized bad copy or bastardized version of global Hollywood. Nollywood is, rather, ‘uniquely in itself by virtue of its specific, situated conditions of production and consumption’, they write (p. 57, emphasis in original). This in some ways returns us to the single-site case study (site or event) as a method, which we noted in the introduction to this chapter has been prominent in geographized cultural policy studies.

If you have been following things closely so far, you may have noticed something: the flat ontology critique (and others besides) focuses explicitly on one scalar relationship: that between the local and the global. And this question has been at the heart of many of the rethinkings of scale in the past few decades, as globalization has itself become a core concern of geographers and others. In fact, the bulk of Herod’s (2009) chapter-length overview of spatial scale is taken up with this question. Yet the scale typology from Neil Smith that we highlighted earlier does not have the local as one of its scales. Put bluntly, where is local in this version of scale? Once we might have argued that the local is anything below the national scale (apologies for reinstating hierarchy); now we might say that anything that is not global is local, so body-home-community-urban-region-nation are all forms of local, and only the global stands alone. As we go on to explore in the next section, this question of how we define the local (other than by what it is not) goes to the heart of how we think about scale.

Where Is Local?

Given the title of this book, this question seems rather pressing. What does it mean to say that cultural policy is local? Similarly, what are we to make of related calls to situate the local in global cultural policy (Gilmore et al., 2019)? What is at work in this pairing is a question that geographers (and others) have been wrestling with for some time. Certainly, globalization has given us cause to rethink space and scale, and one prominent but problematic strand of this thinking has been to counter-pose the local and the global as antinomies, as mutually exclusive, each defined by not being the other. Manuel Castells (1996), for example, framed the global as the space of flows and the local as the space of places—though he soon complicated this formulation (Castells, 1999). Likewise, Ulf Hannerz (1990) talked of cosmopolitans and locals, the former footloose and jet-setting ‘globals’, the latter rooted and frozen in place. Such rigid binary thinking has however now largely been jettisoned in favour of more mixed-up, messy and entangled views.

Herod (2009) usefully splits his discussion of this issue into ontologies and discourses of the global and the local in order to show how globalization resurfaced the question of the local, before the two terms were brought into a more productive conversation with each other, not held apart on either side of a binary, as opposite ends of the scale. Summarizing a key intervention by J.K. Gibson-Graham (2002)—an intervention we have already alluded to—Herod writes that taking a more networked, worm burrow or spider’s web view of this relationship helps to deconstruct the local-global or local/global, and to see, among other things, that ‘the local is global’ and ‘the global is local’, and that

the global and the local are not locations but processes. Put another way, globalization and localization produce all spaces as hybrids, as ‘glocal’ sites of both differentiation and integration. … Thus, the local and the global are not fixed entities but are always in the process of being remade. (Herod, 2009, p. 224)

In this way, rethinking the local-global aligns with broader trajectories in critical human geography towards a view of the world in terms of flows, networks and assemblages. While Ash Amin (2002) deployed this language to write about the ‘spatialities of globalisation’, we should add that this applies equally to what we might call the spatialities of localization: hence the coining of the terms ‘glocal’ and glocalization to suggest the always-coexisting local-global and localization-globalization (Swyngedouw, 1997).

We are drafting this chapter in the run-up to local elections here in the United Kingdom (UK), and so it is worth pausing for thought and noting how the language of the local can sometimes seem self-evident, as it does in the polling booth. Local elections for local government are so called because they are not national, and in this kind of politics the local scale (of local councils, local authorities and so on) is relatively stable (although subject to boundary changes and other reshapings and rescalings—we are being asked to vote for an elected mayor too this year, whose constituency outsizes that of our local councillor). Katya Johanson et al. (2014) take this approach in their discussion of how local government organizes cultural policy, and to us as cultural policy researchers this makes pragmatic sense. When in the UK in the early 2000s a series of local cultural strategies was produced, these were largely unbothered by the question of where and who they were local to—they were local in the sense of being produced by and for local government and local communities (Gilmore, 2004). Of course, these strategies were also enmeshed in larger debates and issues, such as how to define culture, how to fund it, and so on, just as the local elections are wrapped up in bigger debates, whether being seen as a comment on national politics, or in terms of connecting to global issues such as the pandemic and climate change. And the idea of local cultural strategies reaches beyond the local—the requirement to produce them came from national government, and there is a broader global trend towards this kind of policymaking, too.

As Johanson et al. (2014) write, in the Australian context which they focus on local government has become especially closely linked with cultural planning and provision, given that local council officers are on the ground, embedded in the locality—and given the requirement to meet the needs of local people (not least in hope of being re-elected). And so here we can see a connection between the local (or locality) and the idea of localism. Nigel Clarke (2013) provides a useful discussion of this relationship in the UK context, wherein localism has come to be a political hot topic in recent years (to both New Labour and Conservative/coalition governments), in the context of local government reform, decentralization and devolution (including elected mayors), privatization and concerns about ‘Big Government’. Clarke sits this ‘new’ localism alongside the debates about the local that we have already sketched. As he writes:

localism makes room for geographical understandings about scale and place, alongside political understandings about decentralisation participation and community, alongside managerialist understandings about efficiency and forms of market delivery’—which he short-hands as ‘spatial liberalism’. (Clarke, 2013, p. 502)

A key critique of this version of localism, Clarke notes, is that ‘it imagines natural localities in which needs can be agreed’ and in so doing ‘fails to recognise the translocal geographies of many lives, which continually move across borders’ as well as ‘the radical plurality of many localities’ (p. 503). In addition, he writes, localism has ‘exhibited a problem of spatial ontology’ in not recognizing that ‘society cannot be reduced to local communities’ and that ‘localities are increasingly linked’ (p. 503)—he calls these two lines of critique ‘the world in the city’ and ‘the city in the world’.

Here we want to pick up Clarke’s brief nod to translocal geographies, since this concept has been useful in rewriting the local. Drawing on the literature on transnationalism, translocalism has focused on connections between localities (and mobilities), connections often embodied in the lives of their residents (Greiner & Sakdalporak, 2013). It emphasizes multi-scalar and multi-local linkages, both material and imagined, that give rise to translocal subjectivities, practices and imaginings. Hall and Datta (2010) make productive use of the concept in their analysis of Walworth Road in the London Borough of Southwark, reading shop signs and window displays for the countless connections outwards and inwards that bring people, goods and practices together, mapping both the street in the world and the world in the street, to paraphrase Clarke. Like glocal, the idea of translocal requires us in the form of the word to see this intermingling, but unlike glocal, in the translocal are other scales than the glocal and local. As Greiner and Sakdalporak (2013) write, translocality is

not restricted to transnational migration but also includes various forms of internal migration as well as commuting and everyday movements both within cities and between rural and urban areas. (p. 376)

It is also ‘those segments of the population that are considered immobile, as they form a crucial dimension of connectedness’ (p. 376), for example, through memories or imaginings. This means that ‘translocal spaces are constantly co-produced by mobile and immobile populations’.

So, to go back to our question: where is local? Taking this translocal approach suggests a more dispersed, networked view of the local, not as the global’s other, but instead as a multi-scalar site where flows come in to land (or not), networks have their nodes (or not), assemblages are assembled (or not), enduringly or ephemerally. The translocal can perhaps be thought of through Doreen Massey’s notions of a progressive or global sense of place (Massey, 1993) and the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place (Massey, 2005). Indeed, Massey’s work on place as ‘a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus’ (1993, p. 66) is often evoked in discussions of scale and of the local, while her famous walk along Kilburn High Road in London resonates with Hall and Datta’s work on the translocal street. There’s also a different view of localism at work is her discussions of place, a progressive localism (see also Featherstone et al., 2012).

To wrap up this discussion, we have traced a path through debates about spatial scale, having previously noted cultural policy’s geographies. Scale has been hotly debated at the level of ontology, epistemology and methodology, and what should be clear is that we cannot take it for granted in our discussions, even when dealing pragmatically with something like local government. We have shown how the ontology of spatial scale, and its discourses, metaphors and imaginings, has been considered from different perspectives, and that—notwithstanding calls to expel scale from geography—there is an analytical usefulness in thinking with scale, if handled with care. And as we went on to explore, one particular vexed formulation of scaling is the local-global pairing. Instead of seeing this pairing as a hierarchy or dualism, we can instead see them as mixed and merged through neologisms such as glocal or translocal. Here, scale is not erased, but it is certainly unsettled. In the remainder of this chapter, we want to use some of these ideas to re-encounter a previous research project that was very much concerned with these questions.

Scaling the Donut Pilot Project

In this last section of the chapter, our intention is to use the discussion above to think through a research project we were involved in, called the Donut Pilot Project, which we have previously written about (Bell & Orozco, 2021). Our intention is not to repeat the detail of that project or its findings here, but rather to revisit what we learnt through the research and reinterpret it in light of the focus on spatial scale. In short, the Donut Pilot Project worked with three small arts venues who are part of the Donut Group, a network of venues situated in the ‘outer inner city’ of Leeds, UK. The pilot project aimed to explore how these venues ‘sit’ within their immediate localities, and how audiences feel about visiting them. The project involved 16 interviews with venue staff, 139 interviews with audience members at events, and street interviews with 120 people in the venues’ immediate neighbourhoods. We gathered data on cultural engagement across and beyond the city through these interviews, mapping the cultural activity spaces centred on each venue. Part of the context for the project was the Leeds bid to be European Capital of Culture (ECoC) in 2023, and the research fed into the bid book and into discussions about levels and geographies of cultural engagement and arts participation across the city.

The question of scale hangs over the Donut Pilot Project and over our findings: we were equally interested in the scales of the city, the neighbourhood and the individual venue. We were exploring the uneven geographies of cultural provision and participation, and we assessed these in the context of neighbourhood characteristics derived from the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD—a set of statistical measures of deprivation based on national data) and Experian’s Mosaic classification of neighbourhoods (one of a number of widely used classificatory systems that works at the neighbourhood scale). In common with a number of other projects, using the IMD and working at the lower-layer super output area (LSOA—a standardized areal statistical unit used by the UK’s Office for National Statistics) helped us to correlate patterns of deprivation with those of cultural activity (Brook et al., 2020; Mak et al., 2020). What this showed us, when read alongside our qualitative data, was something more to do with scale. While it is true in one sense that ‘the story of cultural consumption is a story of inequality’ and that the power-geometry of this inequality is at least in part geographical (Brook et al., 2020, p. 108), it is clear that there are ‘neighbourhood effects’ that also come into play, as we discuss below. Here, rescaling our analysis changes the resolution through which to explore the geographies of cultural engagement and participation.

In terms of the urban scale, we wanted to insert the Donut Group into discourses and debates about culture in Leeds in the 2023 ECoC bidding process (and that bid and competition of course also bring other scales into play, notably the national and regional). There was an ongoing concern among the city’s arts community that the bid would over-focus on large, city centre venues and activities, and that those on the margins would be further marginalized. This was confirmed through box office data collected in support of the bid, which highlighted a ‘donut of low engagement’ sitting between the city centre and the affluent suburbs. So here we see a scalar distinction between core (big) and periphery (small), centre and margins, and between the city as a whole and smaller scales through which it might be analysed. Our research contested this notion of low engagement by mapping the cultural activities of the pilot venues’ audiences and those living around the venues to show an entirely different map of cultural activity. Of course, this is in part a methodological issue: not every venue has box office data, and in this regard, our point is that methods need to be fit for the scale of enquiry. But it is more than a methods question, it is about ways of looking. Looking at the city scale shows us one thing; looking at a more micro-local scale, in this case the scale of the neighbourhood, tells us something different. We are, as we said at the time, looking here at ‘“other geographies” within the city’ (Bell & Orozco, 2021, p. 90).

When we move to the neighbourhood scale, moreover, we can begin to develop a picture not of static places, but of translocal connections. This means really zooming in on people’s everyday lives. As Chapple and Jackson (2010, p. 483) put it:

When the neighborhood is our unit of analysis, rather than the audience, we have a way of understanding what art means in daily lived experience, rather than as a special event occurring in a designated place… This approach unsettles our current methods of calculating and mapping impact from the venue out, rather than the audience in.

The cultural activity spaces that we uncovered for audiences and local residents showed how they move between and across different parts of the city—to the city centre, of course, but also to many different places. For us, this chimes with the version of the translocal that is interested in daily mobilities such as commuting, or in this case going to a cultural venue or event. The neighbourhood scale—or what Smith (1993) calls the scale of community—is the site of social reproduction, and the scale of daily life (though he makes the city the scale of the labour market). Attending to this scale seems to us to be particularly important in terms of rescaling cultural policy away from the currently dominant urban, national and global scales. As we concluded, ‘“close reading” of context … is essential if we are to fully understand arts spaces in place, and this matters for cultural policy as well as for the lives of those who live around these venues, whether they use them or not’ (Bell & Orozco, 2021, p. 96).

In terms of those ‘neighbourhood effects’ that we alluded to earlier, these resonate with work in health geographies about the balance between contextual (place-based) and compositional (population-based) factors in shaping outcomes—in this case, outcomes around cultural activity. As Mak et al. (2020) show, again using IMD data alongside a classification of neighbourhood types, while deprivation does correlate to participation rates, neighbourhood characteristics render this correlation more variable, and at the individual level there are local residents who buck the trend, for example, by moving across the city to seek out cultural activities elsewhere. This is making a simple but important point: while local venues serve local populations, those populations are also on the move; they are translocal. And Mak et al. (2020) make another key observation about scale, when they compare data from regional-level correlations with those at the LSOA (neighbourhood) level: while the former shows us broad patterns, the latter presents a more nuanced picture. The neighbourhood, it seems, is a particularly important scale when it comes to exploring cultural policy’s geographies.

As noted, the Donut Pilot Project also worked at the individual level, since it relied on qualitative interview data, and we mapped cultural activity at that scale, too, to show who is doing what and where. While these individual stories aggregated up to patterns, enabling us to reach general conclusions, it was in the rich detail of the participants’ accounts that we could really explore these questions, and by listening carefully to what was said, develop a fuller understanding of the landscape we were engaging with. When we presented our findings to stakeholders, we made use of stand-out quotes in order to move beyond the aggregate, and this was a powerful tool for generating discussion. Again, this is in part a point about methods, but it is not only that. And sometimes the way participants spoke revealed scalar thinking at work, for example, when someone said that a particular venue had made the city bigger, meaning that it rescaled the city to include a neighbourhood that would not previously have been considered part of the city’s arts ecology (which for this participant equated to the city centre).

At the individual scale, we did not limit ourselves to people, but also looked at individual venues, building on important work at this scale which seeks to understand the arts ecology of places through close attention to individual venues, viewed relationally (e.g. Grodach, 2010, 2011). We thought about the venues as buildings, and how they sat in their locale, resonating with research on how cultural institutions from libraries to arts centres and museums work (or not) in their urban setting—again, largely read at the neighbourhood scale, looking at the specificities of site and the immediate environment (Delrieu & Gibson, 2017; Glow & Johanson, 2019; Paül & Augustí, 2014). And we thought about venues as symbols, as sedimented histories, as nodes in networks that reach way beyond the local. By talking to venue workers and audiences as well as those who lived around each venue, we got different perspectives on what these venues mean locally, how they are understood, and how they are used. We also heard about neighbourhood reputation and how this influences activity patterns (and how the venues contribute to that reputation). Of course, by isolating each venue for analysis, we were mindful to also look for connections and to build a bigger picture. To repeat Chapple and Jackson (2010), working from the venue outwards helps us grapple with scalar connections rooted in the particularity of place. It should be added here that in looking at the individual person/venue scale, we are not here advocating a flat ontology, but rather keeping site singularity in play as part of the whole (but here, importantly, the parts and the whole carry equal weight, which is in itself a kind of flatness).

This brings us to a final point. Readers may have spotted the term arts ecology being used in this discussion, but without being defined. That is because we wanted to zoom out again here, and to look more at connections than individual cases (see also Redaelli in this volume). In looking for a phrase that seemed to capture this, we opted for both ecology and ecosystem (which seem appropriately organic metaphors after all those tree roots, worm burrows and spider’s webs earlier). This was also in part because we had been captured by a description of visiting one of our pilot venues that resonated with the idea of the edgelands, unloved scraps of land on the city’s fringes which are, nevertheless, teeming with life (Massie-Blomfield, 2018). But more than this, the idea of an arts ecology also seems to us to work well with the relational view of scale that was certainly in the backs of our minds during the Donut Pilot Project, and which we are here bringing more to the front. It is intended not only to show a web of connections between venues, audiences and neighbourhoods, but also to think about scalar connections, from the city to the neighbourhood to the individual (and of course, other scales that we have not touched on here but that are nonetheless also drawn into the ecology).

Our aim in revisiting the Donut Pilot Project, then, has been to more directly draw on discussions and debates about spatial scale as a way to show that while cultural policy is local (or, maybe we should say translocal), we need to think about what that really means for research and practice in cultural policy. The relational view of scale, and the focus on the interconnections that make up the ecology—while not subsuming other scales to this one—seems to us to be a productive way to work with scale and to use terms like local to say something meaningful about cultural policy’s geographies, rather than merely a counter to the global.