Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Ballyogan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. […] Somewhere on the Ballyogan road on the way from A to Z. (Beckett, 2009, p. 14)

Despite the fact that places are “numerous, fluid, and intersubjective” (Durrer et al., 2019, p. 326), they are politically and administratively defined and acted upon (Ginesta & San Eugenio, 2021; Barnes, 2001; Peterson, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991). In Ireland as elsewhere in Europe and the United Kingdom (UK), locale-specific classifications and descriptions are key political and administrative practices determining national (and international) distribution of resources at local level. These resources are harnessed to ‘make’ or promote senses of place that may support national, regional and local “tourism, economic development and rural and urban regeneration” (Ashworth & Graham, 2005, p. 7); foster potential for greater cultural democracy and social justice (Williams, 1984; Upchurch, 2016) or further exacerbate disparity. Statistical data, geography and built environments intermingle with cultural forms and traditions, affording “generalisation and the location of ideas of belonging within political and social contexts” that change over time for different purposes and from different perspectives (Ashworth & Graham, 2005, p. 3). Cities are Capitals of Culture. Urban neighbourhoods and rural towns are World Heritage Sites (on Ireland, see McCarthy, 1998; Collins, 2020a).

How interpretations of local places are administratively constructed, operationalised and negotiated in cultural policymaking, and here specifically in relation to the arts, is the focus of this chapter. The quote above, taken from the 1980 novella, Company (1980) by twentieth-century Irish writer Samuel Beckett is useful for setting out these concerns, with which this chapter grapples, in two ways. For one, it refers to the Ballyogan Road located on the fringe of Dublin city, Ireland in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County. Along this road is where the residential area of Ballyogan—the so-called ‘hard to reach’ locality that is the focus of this chapter’s case study—is located. Secondly and following the analysis of Nugent-Folan (2013, pp. 71–72), it indicates how places may be simultaneously characterised as both unspecific and specific localities that provoke structures of feeling (Williams, 1977). Put another way, the quote illustrates how localities, as places, are open to multiple interpretations not only by individuals living and working in and through them—or even those simply passing by—but also by national and local state and civil society actors (Ashworth & Graham, 2005; Paasi, 1991). Meaning or senses of place are made and enacted through these different encounters and technocracies (Lefebvre, 1991).

The chapter argues that study of public (arts) administrative practice provides insight into how place-meaning and value is endowed in cultural policy (Tuan, 1977). By means of a single case study, it considers how senses of place are constructed through situated conventional bureaucratic practices aimed at taking more place-sensitive approaches to public and arts service delivery. The case focuses on the public administrative practices of an individual team in a specific local authority: the arts office in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council (dlr), one of four authorities in the Dublin region. The chapter reflects on the learning gained by arts office staff from their work in Ballyogan through Exit 15, a local arts development programme funded and supported by dlr County Council, Arts Council Ireland, and partnership with Voluntary Arts Ireland (VAI, now Creative Lives) from 2017 to 2020. Ballyogan is a residential area about 12 km from Dublin city centre that was established initially in the 1970s and 80s as a result of planning policies favouring suburban sprawl at the time (Corcoran et al., 2010). Characterised in both national and local public policy and administrative practice as a ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘hard to reach’ place, Ballyogan was identified by the arts office as requiring targeted, place-specific access to participation in the professional, publicly subsidised arts.

In this analysis of place-meaning construction as an administrative practice, the chapter recognises the ordinary practices of one agency—local public (arts) administration—as an important contribution to the relational complexity of place-based cultural policymaking (Comunian, 2011). In doing so, the chapter contributes to a growing body of literature in cultural policy studies that seeks to bring attention to place-based policy in areas beyond the confines of the urban landscape (Gilmore et al., 2019; Miles & Ebrey, 2017; Bell & Orozco, this volume) and where local governments are acknowledged as key actors in cultural policymaking (e.g. Collins, 2020a; Durrer, 2017; Gray, 2002; Johanson et al., 2014; O’Brien & Miles, 2010). Rather than focus on the types of participation that happen in Ballyogan, or that might have resulted because of Exit 15, the chapter examines the use of public sector methods as cultural policy in practice (Jancovich, 2017).

The chapter begins by contextualising the characterisation and targeting of Ballyogan as a disadvantaged and ‘hard-to-reach’ locality in need of access to the arts. Links between arts and culture with ‘place identity’ (Pollock & Paddison, 2014) within broader public and arts policy and administration at national and local level are explored against work in literary studies, geography, public administration and cultural policy. After a brief description of the broader programme and research methods, the chapter more specifically examines how the arts office staff, who were directly engaged in Exit 15, accept, employ and doubt this characterisation of Ballyogan in their initiation and management of that programme. The “experiences, analysis and social interactions” (Dunlop & Radaelli, 2020, p. 257) that result from their encounter with Ballyogan through Exit 15 highlight for those individuals the important role that meaning-construction as an administrative practice plays in place-based arts policy and provision.

Alignment is found in how national and local public and arts administrative practices label localities. This mutuality indicates the use-potential of labelling for locale-specific arts resourcing. Even if perpetuating zero-sum technocracies of place (Durrer et al., 2019; see also Stevenson, 2019), this usefulness has also prompted awareness for staff of how place-labels limit the understanding of the cultural life of particular localities. Such learning has the capacity to impact the perception of, and public service provision with and for, localities by the arts office and across the local authority more broadly (Dunlop & Radaelli, 2020). Yet, this potential for prompting broader systems-change for place-sensitive cultural strategies will require critical reflexivity that reaches beyond a specific team (Cunliffe & Jun, 2005).

Background Research: Ireland’s Public Policy and Administration Context

The relationship of art and culture as a “signifier and maker” of place has held a privileged position in Irish identity (Cronin, 2018, p. 83), even if slower to take within explicit cultural policy at both national and local level in comparison with the rest of Europe (Bayliss, 2004). It has been recognised as fostering economic and social development and to alleviate “the impact of peripherality” by raising the appeal of different localities for living, working and establishing businesses (Bayliss, 2004, p. 822). Though, the west of Ireland has held an important position in the ideology of place as ‘Irish’, particularly for tourism (Graham, 1997), the development of Temple Bar in Dublin from dereliction to a centre of cultural and tourist consumption, and Dublin and Cork’s rise to European City of Culture in 1991 and 2005, respectively (Bayliss, 2004; McCarthy, 1998; Montgomery, 1995), are probably the most recognised studies of their kind in Irish cultural policy outside of the country. More recently, Collins (2020a, 2020b) has critiqued the ‘making’ of Galway as a creative city with Kitchin et al. (2014), drawing on study of Smithfield and Wolfe Tone Square, to question the on-the-ground benefits of Dublin City Council’s efforts to establish itself as a ‘European city’ through public realm design and architecture.

The ways in which its localities are perceived and acted upon politically and administratively and in relation to art and culture is particularly evident in public policy in Ireland surrounding the global economic crash. Some discussion here provides the temporal context and political climate in which dlr arts officers initiated Exit 15. It also situates the public administrative repertoire available to Irish arts officers for locating their work in specific places. The Irish economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s, fuelled by reliance on foreign direct investment and a “neoliberal policy agenda of promoting the free market, minimizing regulation, privatizing public goods and retreating from state services” (Kitchin et al., 2014, p. 1070 in Collins, 2020b, p. 71) saw “the uncontrolled growth of Dublin into surrounding counties”. This situation exacerbated the “scattershot” and “haphazard” suburban sprawl established during Ireland’s developer-privileged planning system of the 1960s–1980s, when Ballyogan was initially being established as a residential area (Corcoran et al., 2010, p. 32).

The 2008 crash and the burst of the property market revealed a stark “spatial and social divide” left in the wake of this type of development,

economically as measured by unemployment…; socially in terms of access to housing and emigration…; and physically in terms of abandoned unfinished developments and quality of life. (Moore-Cherry, 2019, p. 52)

Culture has come to signify some of this division as well as ‘place potential’. Within this shifting context, rural Ireland has typically been idealised as the “stronghold of … Irish cultural, sporting and language identity” (MacFeely, 2016, p. 395). While urban areas may be associated with loss of traditional culture (Nordin & Llena, 2012), they have also become associated with creativity and innovation in order to foster economic development and foreign direct investment, even if policy in this regard is fragmented (Collins, 2020a; Kayanan et al., 2018; Lawton et al., 2010). Though sociological studies on Irish suburbia and the urban fringe by Corcoran et al. (2010) demonstrate otherwise, those localities are often viewed as “sub-creative” (Bain, 2013, p. 4), “non-places” that lack local attachments or structures of feeling (Corcoran et al., 2010, p, xxi; see also Phelps, 2012).

Most recently, Ireland’s National Planning Framework (NPF) has paid particular attention to the role of the arts at local level as signifying correctives to spatial and social inequity at both national and local level (ACI, 2016a; Coveney, 2017; EMRA, 2019; GoI, 2018).1 As colleagues and I have argued elsewhere, place often politically signifies either that which is to be celebrated or corrected (Durrer et al., 2019). Speaking at Arts Council Ireland’s inaugural ‘Places Matter’ conference in January 2017, in the year the NPF was being launched, then Minister of Planning, Community and Local Government, Simon Coveney (2017) indicates this type of role, one where artists and arts engagement can construct ‘liveable’ “place-identities” (Pollock & Paddison, 2014, p. 86; see also Forest & Johnson, 2002), at local and hyper-local level:

So whether it’s listening to a seanchaí [storyteller] on Oileán Clare [Clare Island] or the buzz of Temple Bar or whether it is new movie studios in Limerick, we need to ensure that we are creating difference through imagination, talent and that we are promoting that type of thinking as a uniquely Irish trait that actually attracts more investment, more people, more talent into that career … or just simply enjoying and enhancing quality of life in the places that people live. (Coveney, 2017, n.p.)

It’s also about “attract[ing] visits … residents … [and] people to want to stay in their own localities” (Coveney, 2017, n.p.). To realise this ambition, Coveney (2017) notes the importance of aligning national and local level policies and initiatives:

It’s about what we can do … as policy makers through local government and national government to actually put the tools in place and the resources in place to create vibrant, different places in different parts of the country.

Alignment with national government policy is important for local-based development. Ireland is “one of the most centralised states in Europe, [thus possessing a] political infrastructure … [deemed] unsuitable for the devolution of any real power [at local level]” (Collins, 2020a, p. 73). This situation exists despite some recent reforms that have seen a push for more citizen-engaged community and economic planning at local level and the initiation of Public Participation Networks. The importance of alignment with the national for supporting “people and places as central to policy and provision in the arts” is recognised in arts policy (ACI, 2016a, p. 6). Arts Council Ireland (ACI) has stressed this relationship as part of the vision to see the arts as central to Ireland’s “local and national identity” (ACI, 2016a, p. 12). In addition to sitting on the expert panel for the NPF, the Arts Council has more formally concentrated activity on local areas and spatial demographics and analysis to address what are perceived to be problems of access and participation in the professional, publicly subsidised arts.

Within the time frame of Exit 15, this work has included a number of new Arts Council actions aligning the national and local with a focus on place. 2014 saw the launch of a mapping tool developed in partnership with University of Maynooth’s All-Island Research Observatory for venues to profile audiences within a 30-minute drive of their facility (ACI, 2014a). Recognising the higher spend that local government often provides for the arts (for instance, 5.2 million vs 6.5 million funding for venues in 2016 (ACI 2016d, p. 4)) and the role of arts officers, the Arts Council has also included more formal signalling of local government as a ‘partner’ in national arts development. In 2016 Arts Council Ireland initiated a formal and explicit partnership agreement with the County and City Management Association (2016) that extended the historical and existing annual funding relationships between the entities, especially since the evolving establishment of local authority arts officers across the country from the 1980s. This agreement included the initiation of a joint biennial conference series drawing attention to place: the ‘Places Matter’ conference in 2017 and the revision and introduction of new funding streams dedicated to resourcing local government arts policy development, including the one under which Exit 15 was funded (ACI & CCMA, 2016). Most recently and part of this longer term working, ACI has launched a dedicated spatial policy (ACI, 2022).

Indicating the importance of the public sector context to such developments, it is notable that this particular shift in thinking about spatial planning and the role of local government for promoting place-specific access to the arts emerged after a strategic (ACI, 2014b) and a value for money review (O’Hagan, 2015) were conducted. These reviews were carried out as part of a wider government programme of public administration and policy reviews resulting post 2008, when, in order to rebalance Ireland’s debt, “virtually all public sector infrastructure [was] curtailed or suspended” (Russell & Williams, 2021, p. 60, 69; see Leahy & Hilliard, 2021 for final unwinding of these measures).

How the above public sector working context and the associated national and local level public policy discourse interact with people, places and art frames how Irish local authority arts officers operate (Durrer, 2018). While aligning with national policy is important at local government level, so is local authority-led initiative. Collins (2020a) notes that the “lack of resources and power [remaining] at the local level in Ireland” has fostered a situation in local authority planning where

competing on local assets like cultural depth are an obvious, if not enforced, choice for local authorities. …[as] the centralised nature of the Irish State has left local authorities short on money and power to affect development. (p. 644)

Competition for resources is important in relation to cultural (arts) development in the Irish context where local government engagement in arts development is discretionary (Indecon, 2019; Arts Act 2003, sect 6, 2). Although it is a requirement to develop plans for the arts, the nature and amount of dedicated local authority spending to deliver on those plans remains open to political and institutional interpretation, interests and values. The political will of local councillors and the interest of higher level management, including the authority’s Chief Executive Officer matter here. Whilst elected officials vote on budgets, it is the public administrators that devise them. In fact, “what power there is [in Irish local government] remains largely concentrated [amongst its public administrators, especially] in the executive” rather than with its elected representatives (McInerney & Kitchin, 2014, p. 108). Local corporate planning as developed by the local authority executive is significant, yet alignment between national and local policy for leveraging resources must be negotiated, even with some greater fiscal autonomy at local government level of late (Turley & McNena, 2019).

What can result in such circumstances is place-based cultural initiatives that may be more focused on ways to “gain access, influence, and control over … resources” rather than on uncovering or nurturing the “creative and cultural practices that the people of those places wish to pursue” (Durrer et al., 2019, p. 327). This is a context where policy rhetoric regarding place-meaning (and thus value) emphasises ‘place potential’, correction or idealisation as the policy problem for place-identity and development (Cairney, 2012; Bacchi, 2000). How places come to be identified as such are part of the administrative process for how those resources are leveraged (or not).

Much UK and European cultural policy research critiques this model of place-based work as determining senses of place by ‘correcting’ what it is perceived that particular localities lack. Such approaches often rely on statistical data that (1) labels individuals who are not engaging in professional, publicly subsidised forms of culture as ‘hard to reach’ (Jancovich & Bianchini, 2013; Stevenson, 2019) and (2) fails to recognise situated, vernacular culture (Durrer et al., 2019; Gilmore, 2013) and the atmosphere, “texture, feel, [and] lived experience” of local places (Ferguson, 2010 quoted in Hicks, 2020, p. 464; see also Jones et al., 2013). This practice is not particular to the publicly subsidised arts, but also common to the repertoire of local government service provision within Ireland (as well as the UK) as a whole (Brackertz, 2007; Boag-Munroe & Evangelou, 2012). Like cultural policy research, this practice is critiqued for its tendency to characterise people and groups as ‘problems’ based on their restricted engagement with public services. Lack of service engagement is typically seen to reside with the individual or group themselves, rather than the systems that produce these services (Brackertz, 2007, p. 3; Boag-Munroe & Evangelou, 2012).

Some cultural policy studies indicate that place-targeted resourcing has potential to support the vernacular culture of a place in addition to sponsoring the publicly-subsidised professional arts. In recognising difference and potential complementarity, the structures of feeling that particular places hold may be nurtured (Stevenson & Blanche, 2015). There is also resonance here with research in public administration and local government studies. On the classification of people as ‘hard to reach’ in local government practice, Brackertz (2007) explains,

An alternative way to view the ‘disinterest’ or ‘lack of motivation to contribute or become involved’ often associated with hard to reach groups is by emphasising differences rather than deficits. The difference thesis suggests that when people are motivated to acquire information and that information is functional in their lives, they will make use of this. (p. 3)

Understanding motivation is dependent upon engaging directly with people in localities. Interrogating the potential of this ‘difference thesis’ requires a stronger grasp of the everyday, bureaucratic processes by which constructions of place are permitted, held and perhaps questioned.

Close study of the work of local authority arts officers can provide new insight. In Ireland as elsewhere, arts officers negotiate national and local plans with local realities, operating in a relational policymaking space that make and administer places (Kenny & Flynn, 2009; Lefebvre, 1991; McInerney & Kitchin, 2014). They are recognised as members of multiple specialist groups: the arts sector; the public service; government; and of a particular locality (Clancy, 1994). Amongst this range of actors, they play “important brokering roles … between, [across and within] government …community, [civil society,] and the professional and non-professional arts”, especially in how local places come to be understood and acted upon and with, in relation to the arts (Durrer, 2017, p. 19; see also McInerney & Kitchin, 2014).

Operating in a centralised state and the hierarchical system of local government work (Coakley & Gallagher, 2018), theirs is a context where local government administration remains a key aspect of the “machinery underpinning the functioning of government and governance” and policymaking as a core area of public service work (McInerney & Kitchin, 2014, p. 2). According to McInerney & Kitchin (2014, p. 184),

while [Irish] local public administration has little if any control or influence on how national policy decisions are made, [agency lies in its] considerable scope to influence and shape how those policies are delivered.

Irish arts officers negotiate “funding and policy directions” from multiple departments related to local government, arts and culture (Kenny & Flynn, 2009, p. xi), children and young people, and social exclusion. They thus hold no “standard or consistent role” within local authorities across the country as a whole (Kenny & Flynn, 2009, p. xiii). Focus and activity of work varies by the nature of the institutional, local and social / professional context, which means that individual arts officers’—their perceptions and practices in, with and for places matter in local and national arts development (ACI & CCMA, 2016). It also means that single case studies are useful for developing insights into how senses of place are administratively constructed. As a result, programmes of work, like Exit 15, are meeting places of state and local policy and art and public administration (as signifying) practice, in which arts officers are involved in constructing place-meaning in Irish cultural policy.

Exit 15

Established in 1994, and prior to the 2022 Census results, dlr arts office serves a population of approximately 206,000, 10.3% of the Dublin region’s population of 2 million (dlr, 2016a), living “between the outer suburbs of Dublin City and the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains on the East Coast of Ireland” (dlr, 2016a, p. 11). Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County is understood as “unusual” in comparison to the rest of Ireland, as it is made up of “two pockets of urban”, the former towns of Dún Laoghaire and Dundrum, each with their own centre and where some of the wealthiest and most educated people in the county live. There are also a number of other suburban areas that border “a very rural part of the county” (AO2, 2019, p. 2), of which Balloygan is one.

The remit of the Arts Office is to support the “sustainable development of the arts within the County” (dlr, 2016c, p. 5). During the timeframe of Exit 15, the County arts plan noted goals associated with place potential, correction and idealisation, specifically “enhance[ing] … quality of life, promot[ing] and support[ing] a sense of local identity and pride of place, and support[ing] the local economy” (dlr, 2016c, p. 17). Such work is carried out through a wide range of activities including the initiation and management of programmes and venues, and funding distribution to a range of community and voluntary groups, school activity, venues, artists and more.

Exit 15 stemmed from two attempts to receive funding from ACI’s Invitation to Collaboration fund. When the first attempt failed in 2016, dlr arts office and VAI shared the financial and human resourcing of a dedicated arts researcher / coordinator to be based in Ballyogan 1 day per week. The eventual finances provided by ACI afforded what is known as Exit 15, a multi-year long artistic programme, consisting of two phases: Phase 1 in 2017–18 commissioned three artist residencies as arts participation ‘tasters’ for people living and working in Ballyogan. Socially-engaged artists Michael Fortune (working in film), Michael McLoughlin (in sound, visual and performance art) and Mark Storor (in visual and installation arts) separately connected with people in Ballyogan and the surrounding area for varying periods of time and intensity. The residencies were instrumental in recruiting five local residents who were paid to serve on a panel with dlr arts office and VAI to select an artist from a shortlist for a longer-term residency in Phase 2, 2018–20: Coiscéim Broadreach, the public engagement programme for Coiscéim Dance Theatre. Funding from ACI particularly afforded what the arts officers were perceived to be highly-skilled, “high quality” socially-engaged artists (dlr, 2016b, p. 3) in addition to materials to support the engagement of an academic researcher to facilitate in-action reflection, which McInerney and Kitchin (2014, p. 184) argue is of limited opportunity in Irish local government as compared to the UK. The programme’s aims and objectives are further discussed below, as important to the analysis of place-meaning construction and the valuation of a particular place as ‘hard to reach’.

This chapter draws particular attention to the experiences gathered from and with two key members of the arts office team who managed Exit 15. Engagement with these two staff involved interviews, facilitation of monthly reflective meetings, observation of project meetings and adaption of the ‘Most Significant Change’ (MSC) process, employed here as a tool for self- and departmental reflection (Dart & Davies, 2003), which informed reflection meetings and close of project interviews with the researcher. As part of that reflective process, data also includes observations from meetings facilitated between dlr arts office staff with a staff member from a local authority cultural office engaging in similar work in Northern Ireland. Analysis presented here is also informed by data captured in the broader ethnographic study of Exit 15, which included walking tours, arts-based methods, interviews with artists as well as people living and working in the area, focus groups and observation of art activity (see Durrer et al., 2021).

Discussion

Research on Exit 15 indicates that an intermixing of administrative “filters” label places for the identification of service provision and leveraging of resources for place-specific local arts service provision. In the case of Ballyogan, it was identified as a ‘hard to reach’ and ‘disadvantaged’ locale in need of correction. The following discussion will focus on how these labels have been accepted and employed by dlr arts officers before moving on to how the arts activity these resources made possible facilitated their questioning of this approach. Note that even though the structure of this chapter might indicate a linear process of acceptance, use and doubting, the realities of public-sector practice are non-linear (See Sitas, this volume).

Filtering Places and Accepting Place-Labels

The acceptance and use of Balloygan as a ‘hard to reach’ locality is based, in part, on how localities are broken down into data units and what place-meanings are evoked as a result. As one of the arts officers explains: “the filter I would have been looking at Ballyogan at initially would have been the kind of filtering of a particular area” (AO2, 2019, pp. 1–2). Identified with one of the highest levels of local authority housing in the County with high occurrences of anti-social behaviour, Ballyogan is a ‘Small Area’, targeted for addressing social inclusion locally within a national action plan (dlr, 2016a). As the smallest scale of analysis available to planners, ‘Small Areas’ comprise coherent townlands or neighbourhoods of between 80 and 120 dwellings, rather than wildly varying population sizes of the larger Electoral Divisions. They are thus argued to be a more useful unit of measurement and analysis for determining funding and action goals in service provision (Brunsdon et al., 2018, p. 186).

Classifications are by their very nature relative. In the case of Balloygan, its classification is determined “relative to the rest of the county” (AO2 2019, p. 2), but also the nation (dlr, 2016a). This juxtaposition is indicated in dlr County Council’s Local Economic Community Plan (LECP), 2016–2021 (dlr, 2016a) at the time, which states,

While Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown local authority area is among the most affluent local authority areas nationally, thirty-seven Small Areas within the County [such as Balloygan] have been identified as being ‘very disadvantaged’ or ‘disadvantaged’ …[and] compris[ing] a population of over 11,000 or 5% of the county. (p. 11)

Statements like these indicate that Ballyogan and the remaining 36 Small Areas are lacking in some way in comparison to the rest of the County. They are also anomalies, particularly in the context of the County’s other wealthier Small Areas, some of which also contain the highest percentage of professional, managerial and technical workers in the Gross Domestic Average “by some margin” (dlr, 2016a, p. 13). However, including “over 11,000” people, these anomalous 37 Small Areas require corrective attention.

The discussion above demonstrates how such ‘filters’, are the “features [from which] … strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing the County” are identified and addressed in policy design and delivery (dlr, 2016a, p. 11). As one arts officer explains this “information [on Ballyogan] …would have indicated that terminology, ‘hard to reach’” (AO2 2019, p. 2). These data units and the characterisations that result are utilised to assess what people in localities engage with various public services and how. Their ‘reachness’ is also assessed; that is, whether they are in need of being ‘reached’ (or not) by particular developments, supports, services or targeted intervention (Brackertz, 2007).

Place-specific units of measurement also allow for area-based auditing of service provision, such as funding distribution and infrastructure. They additionally afford assessments of areas based on institutional knowledge and the politics of space—both geographic and socio-economic. In relation to arts funding distribution, AO1 (9 Mar 2018) explains:

we don’t have a tradition of providing a service there. There are very few amateur community or professional arts organisations or individuals based there as per the data we see in terms of arts grant applications … we were working under assumptions that there wasn’t a lot happening there, … we weren’t seeing a lot of enquiries and activity coming in our direction from there. (p. 6)

Review of their own grant application database through place-specific analysis indicated a lack of reach, or “representativeness”, within their arts service. This lack not only had implications for the “democratic legitimacy” of the arts office (Brackertz, 2007, p. 3; also noted in AO2, 2018), but also the perception that Ballyogan was a place in cultural deficit (AO1, 2018).

With regards to infrastructure, the relationship of landscape and road and transportation links to the spatial access of arts venues was noted as contributing to the arts officers’ acceptance of the ‘hard to reach’ characterisation. AO1 (2018) explains how this infrastructure was perceived to create barriers to Ballyogan residents’ access to arts venues supported within their remit:

Geographically it [Ballyogan] is hard to reach, especially …in terms of public transport. Let me get my geography right. There’s a north-south access, where from Bray, M11, M50, it pulls everything into Dublin city. There’s very little east-west. There’s no history or pattern of people traveling from the mountains to Dún Laoghaire [town] or seeing Dún Laoghaire as the capital of the county, no matter who you are or where you come from. People that live in Dublin 14 [postcode] look to the [nearby] Mill Theatre and then they look to the cultural offering in the city centre. They might even go to the Mermaid [Arts Centre], but they’d never go to the Pavilion Theatre [in Dún Laoghaire]. There’s no pattern of east to west. … It is the farther you go or the nearer you go to the mountains, the harder it is for us to reach communities. (p. 6)

Geographical and spatial relationships of transport to cultural infrastructure indicate that people in Ballyogan may not have mainstream arts services available to them.

Yet this physicality of space is also political. Institutional (political and administrative) knowledge is thus another form of analysis that constructs place-meaning. Broadly speaking, institutional (political and administrative) attention was being paid to Balloygan, not only due to its status as “disadvantaged” but also because of its ‘place potential’. Arts officers noted Ballyogan as “developing very fast” and being “primed for development” (AO2, 2018, p. 8). The local authority had recently opened the new Samuel Beckett Civic Centre, housing the local Family Resource Centre, childcare services and facilities for hire in addition to a County Council Leisure centre with sports pitches and Barnados Youth Prevention Programme and Employment Service. There have also been local authority plans to develop new housing in the area over the years 2016–2022 and beyond (dlr County Development plan, 2016–2022; McCárthaigh, 2021).

Institutional knowledge facilitated arts officers’ awareness of the challenges to developing this ‘place potential’, which their colleagues within the broader institution perceived existed. This knowledge also prompted an identification of Ballyogan as ‘hard to reach’. Arts officers referred to opposition that fellow colleagues in other departments had described when meeting local residents and attempting to engage services in the area. They noted awareness of tensions in the relationship of the local authority to people living in Ballyogan as historically grounded, stemming back to the lack of amenities and services provided to people living in Ballyogan when it was first initiated—part of a wider shortcoming within national development plans at the time (Corcoran et al., 2010). The arts officers, as well as local residents themselves, also noted more recent strains between residents and the local authority, resulting from many residents’ frustration over the Civic Centre development. Many local people had not been utilising the building prior to Exit 15, describing it as a poor replacement for what many felt was the local authority’s lack of delivery on a promise of a library and a swimming pool. To many residents the building and the unresolved tensions signified disregard by elected officials and local authority staff. For the local authority, it indicated local resident’s resistance to services, even if due to perceptions of mistrust (Brackertz, 2007, p. 1).

These different forms of place-meaning construction, the auditing of funding distribution and infrastructure, as well as the politics of space and institutional knowledge, are technocracies of government derived from everyday bureaucratic practices. They contribute to a ‘place identity’ for Ballyogan as ‘hard to reach’ and thus how the arts officers initially come to sense the cultural life of Ballyogan:

there’s a particular narrative that, for various different reasons, like it’s not a bad thing, that a council would look at, would be in terms of housing needs. You know, statistical information from the census around who’s living in a particular area. The demographics of that particular area. The social make-up of that area. All of those kind of things. (AO2, 2019, pp. 1–2)

While “not a bad thing” per se, such practices do reveal values that privilege socio-economically derived interpretations of place as priority in even place-specific cultural policy.

Employing Place-Labels

These interpretations of Ballyogan as geographically isolated, socio-economically deprived, anti-social and lacking cultural engagement, but nonetheless with ‘potential’, aligned with national public and arts policy rhetoric in ways that facilitated the leveraging of financial resources (ACI, 2016a; GoI, 2018; dlr 2016a). Both arts officers indicated the importance of “the LECP, the corporate plan, the concerns and needs of the … council members, [the] county development plan, [and] most importantly our own [arts] plan” over “external” bodies, “the exception being where there are considerable external funding resources available, [like]… [ACI’s] Invitation for Collaboration” (AO1, 2018, p. 6). The objectives of ACI’s Invitation to Collaboration fund aligned with the objectives of dlr’s Arts Plan (dlr, 2016c) to have arts service provision “everywhere” (Durrer, 2016, p. 1) and in serving the public pay particular attention to “connecting with [and delivering a service to]… people who are traditionally overlooked” (AO2, 2018, p. 17). The investment afforded by the first and successful second attempt at the Invitation to Collaboration Fund, including the partnership with VAI allowed for the financial and human resourcing of activity that would not have otherwise occurred.

Located on the urban periphery, as a residential area, a ‘non-place’, it is Ballyogan’s ‘disadvantaged’ status that affords it the opportunity to receive these financial resources. dlr arts office made use of this status by referring to Balloygan as a ‘hard to reach’ community in the funding application. Emphasising engagement with “hard to access communities” (ACI, 2016c, p. 2), Arts Council Ireland defines ‘access’ in two ways: as a practice: “working to overcome physical, social and cultural barriers to engagement with the arts, so that the arts are available to as many as possible” and as an outcome: “a reasonable spread of different art forms available to the general public throughout the country” (ACI, 2016b, p. 3). Taken together, these top-down, Arts Council and local authority based spatial approaches to understanding people’s engagement with arts and culture, were accepted and employed in order to resource the kinds of engagement it was perceived the locality of Balloygan was not able to ‘reach’.

dlr arts officers imposed descriptors of Ballyogan’s sense of place based on the socio-economic, geographic, cultural and institutional deficits that had featured in the place-identity of Ballyogan within the local authority. These constructions were employed in public calls for a Programme Coordinator at the initiation of their work in Ballyogan, after their first unsuccessful attempt at securing Invitation to Collaboration and later in the call for artists for Phase 1 of Exit 15:

“We [dlr arts office] propose to concentrate on the Ballyogan area that has one of the highest percentages of local authority housing, travellers and hosts a young population, bucking the trends of most parts of the County. … Currently we have identified this area as being hard to access and one that requires a concentrated period of engagement and support of an arts worker on site”. (dlr, 2016d, p. 1)

Despite the language employed and the place-meaning it indicates, dlr arts office was not intending to further label Ballyogan as ‘hard to reach’, but to explore how to change the reach-ness in order to create dialogue. Through the programme they sought “to build relationships between people living and working in Ballyogan and arts office, “to ask people … in Ballyogan about what types of creative and artistic activities in which they are interested” and to “support and expand those interests” (Durrer, 2016, p. 1). Core to the objectives of the Arts Council funded Exit 15 programme was also

“to learn more about processes for working with local communities on determining and developing local arts provision and policy [and] … to reflect on [that process in practice]”. (dlr, 2016b, p. 3)

There is no doubt that the arts office sought to increase participation in the arts, but this goal was just as much about their core remit as public sector workers in a local authority: to expand engagement with the service (AO2, 2019). Further, of note is the “‘ready to learn’ state” (Dunlop & Redaelli, 2020, p. 259), in which these arts officers approached working in Ballyogan. This ‘ready to learn’ state meant that reflection was embedded into the initiation and management of Exit 15, further discussed below.

Challenging Assumptions, Doubting Characterisations and Changing Practice

While the classifications constructed a sense of Ballyogan as a place in deficit that facilitated the leveraging of funds, this interpretation was questioned once the arts office began initiating contact. As one explains, “through working on the different phases of Exit 15, it’s kind of fair to say that … I would question the wording on hard to reach, now…” (AO2, 2019, p. 2). Doubt on the deficit-based approach to place-specific work was raised for the arts officers. They began to reflect on and critically question their own use of normative language that problematised people over systems (Cunliffe & Jun, 2005) in two areas.

First, is the role of classification and language in place-meaning construction. It was the dedicated coordinator and the artistic processes that allowed the arts officers to “get to know” Ballyogan and “endow” it with a value that was not about perceptions of deficiency (Tuan, 1977, p. 8). The second area of doubt raised for the arts officers is the over-emphasis on access to the arts at the expense of engaging with the everyday culture of a particular locality. AO1 (2018, p. 6) explains that the language of the programme moved from “arts to culture, because we began to see … that there was culture there, but it wasn’t the traditional arts culture”.

The public sector methods that informed initial understanding of Ballyogan as ‘hard to reach’ were particularly seen to be challenged by those practices more directly associated with the arts. Financial investment and external partnerships afforded different opportunities and thus methods for engagement and experimentation. Arts Council funding afforded enough finances for residencies with artists of international repute and recognition for unique skills in socially-engaged practice. While taking different methodological approaches to socially-engaged practice (Durrer et al., 2021), the artists’ work with people in Ballyogan and its surrounds illuminated folkloric tradition, people’s memories and the everyday experiences of living and working in the area.

Partnership with VAI, with its then remit to support voluntary (rather than professional) arts and creativity, afforded opportunity to resource more vernacular and locally initiated interests and activities. VAI led a participatory budgeting process for local-resident-led projects, a practice new to dlr arts office. The partnership also afforded shared resourcing of a dedicated Programme Coordinator that facilitated ‘hanging out’ with local people (Durrer et al., 2021), something arts officers felt had previously existed in the service, but had been lost due to austerity measures. The work of the Programme Coordinator, meeting and speaking with people over cups of tea, facilitated a dialogic process for learning about cultural engagement. Taken together, these practices exposed dlr arts office to senses of place not accounted for in existing forms of analysis. It also changed their impression of what happens, culturally, on the urban periphery where the relationship of “memories and stories to physical location” is just as important as in any other landscape (see Stevenson & Blanche, 2015, p. 182; see also Jones et al., 2013).

This activity “corrected an understanding” (AO1, 2019, p. 3) for dlr arts officers who now see the place-label of ‘hard to reach’ as an “assumption” rather than a reality (AO2, 2018, p. 2). The arts officers have come to be more embracing of the “difference thesis” to which Brackertz (2007, p. 3) refers. This perceived correction and efforts to embrace difference is evidenced in practice, where the language in the call for the artists for Phase 2 was altered. Instead of a written socio-economic descriptor, the arts office produced a video call. The short film depicts people from the locality providing their own descriptions of Balloygan as well as what type of artist with which they wanted to work (Exit 15 Creative Space, 2018).

All told, this reflection on place-labelling afforded by the initiation and management of Exit 15 has prompted arts officers to question if it is the offer of the service that is the ‘problem’, rather than the people or the place (Jancovich & Bianchini, 2013). The arts officers see possible “impact [on arts office-specific] policy moving forward” (AO1, 2019, p. 3) through making changes to their own working methods. Targeting localities, with dedicated time in one locality, will continue as an important element of the arts office’s repertoire. The difficulty to “justify” spending time getting to know people that had resulted due to post-2008 austerity measures is now felt to be less of an issue due to learning gained from the time spent in Ballyogan (AO2, 2019, p. 19). One arts officer explains, as result of Exit 15 it is felt that “if I blocked off now a day, a week to do this type of work in different contexts, I don’t think I would have an issue now” (AO2, 2019, p. 19). The support that may be garnered for this may also be linked to the alignment that place-specific work has with national policy’s interest in place-based work.

Still, undoing long-standing administrative procedures is not a straightforward process.

AO2 (2019) explains,

But I’m not going to be able to change that terminology, so you have to work within the boundaries of it to get what you want, as well. It’s just, I suppose, I’m questioning it more. (p. 3)

Further, such terminology, while limiting, affords opportunities that might not otherwise exist, particularly the leveraging of resources. Highlighting institutional benefit of programmes like Exit 15 is crucial. With regard to Exit 15, the programme raised the local authority’s national profile through securing Arts Council funding. It fostered new local authority presence in Ballyogan and has worked to communicate this presence through presentation of work to Councillors at Council Special Policy Committees and discussions with colleagues in other departments that are working in Ballyogan. While this has resulted in conversations in the local authority about Balloygan that are “positive”, rather than negative (AO1, 2019, p. 2, 16), they are still being defined against a deficit-based construction of place. Difference, after all, is still relative.

While the agency of public administrators does matter, the commonality of the language and approach as an administrative practice makes questionable the level of potential for changing its use. The particularly hierarchical nature of both local government work as well as the centralisation of state power in Ireland makes this challenging. Playing to the deficit can be the most “useful” or effective way to establish targets and leverage funds for policy service provision (AO2, 2018, p. 7). Nevertheless, in surfacing these assumptions and practices, engagement with Exit 15 has provided the arts officers “a means for thinking more critically about the impact” of deficit-based practices and their role in that practice (Cunliffe & Jun, 2005, p. 227). Systems-change seemingly requires working within the system to change it. Opportunity for new action and changes to administrative practices that support approaches to place-based work that may be more open to their ephemerality (Cunliffe & Jun, 2005) may be within closer grasp, but as Belfiore (2021, p. 8) points out any “significant policy change…will be gradual.”

Conclusion

Through examination of a place-specific arts participation programme, Exit 15 by Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council arts office, this chapter has explored how multiple interpretations of local places are administratively constructed in cultural policymaking in relation to the ‘reach-ness’ of potential arts participants. Taking the Irish context specifically, the chapter indicates the importance of understanding place-specific work in relation to broader socio-cultural and political imaginaries and policies on place that often seek to correct or celebrate them. Understandings of place are typically driven by data that limits our understanding of the interaction of people with people as well as socio-economics, geography, built environment, culture and institutions. Arts practice and the endeavours of arts administration practice may provide new methods that have the potential to prompt more situated and place-sensitive, targeted work in localities across different landscapes. While systems change for a more place-sensitive strategy in cultural policymaking may be limited by public administration, meaning-making can be a critically reflexive practice where a change in the system may occur. In considering place-meaning construction as an administrative practice, the chapter demonstrates the role of local public (arts) administration as place-based cultural policymaking in practice (Jancovich, 2017). It is thus a snapshot on the contribution study of public (arts) administrative practice can provide our understanding of how place-meaning and value is endowed in cultural policy (Tuan, 1977).

AcknowledgementsExit 15 was funded by under the Arts Council Ireland’s Invitation to Collaboration Scheme. It was additionally supported by dlr’s Community Development Section and Arts Office and Voluntary Arts Ireland (now Creative Lives).

Note

  1. 1.

    While established prior to Covid, the goals of the plan remain largely intact, though now supplemented by additional policies post-Covid, such as Town Centre First as well as Our Rural Future: Rural Development Policy, 2021–2025.