New Regimes of Government

Abstract

This chapter analyses municipal Plans Estratègics as new genres of governmental discourse reflecting the changed priorities of the creative city, focusing on those published during the 1990s. The Plans were non-normative municipal documents resulting from wide consultation with local representatives of the different social, economic, and political actors (business, university, unions). We argue that its very form is ideological, as it provides a safe frame for debate and for the expression of concern, a horizon that includes a guarantee that discussion will lead to cooperation and consensus. Plans constituted one more structural move away from increasing regular citizens’ ability to intervene in power, and conversely, a move toward the sharing of power with non-elected representatives of private interests. As technologies of government, they placed a particular frame and set of limits on the possibility of citizens exercising influence on government, by circumscribing valid participation to the production of profit for the city. With respect to ideas on culture conveyed by these early Plans, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that, contrary to other critics’ views, there are from the beginning signs of the instrumentalization of culture in the way it is conceived as a form of people management. The definition of citizens’ desirable behavior in these documents laid the foundations for the unexpressed full-blown development of the cultural creative city.