Despite and Beyond Cultural Policy

Abstract

Many cultural activities both at the level of production and consumption take place outside of the realm of public subsidies or private sponsoring. This chapter will address this particular field of cultural practices and their inherent strategies and look into their interrelationship with and relevance for cultural policy. The authors of these practices and strategies are cultural practitioners, producers and consumers, as well as cultural intermediaries who have a vested interest in shaping the cultural landscape of the city and try to do so independently of both the state and the private economy. Many of these emerging initiatives take their origin in the non-commercial and non-governmental realm, referred to as the ‘third sector’. Others have emancipated themselves, however, from the third sector and constitute a novel realm of action in the cultural sphere that is located in yet another non-commercial and nongovernmental realm; we will refer to them as ‘fourth-sector practice’ and discuss their embedding in city cultures based on empirical case studies in Belgrade and Vienna. These two cities offer a number of similarities: above all, their geopolitical position, the historically dominant role of the state in comparison with commercial agencies and the connectivity of the two locations through migration.