Cultural Strategies and Community Economic Development

Abstract

‘During the last twenty years’, Bianchini pointed out at the beginning of the nineties, ‘cultural policy has become an increasingly significant component of economic and physical regeneration strategies in many west European cities’ (Bianchini, 1993, p. 1). This potential contribution to the urban economy was certainly becoming increasingly recognised in Britain, as the Arts Council’s report of the creative future for the arts, crafts and media in England argued. The arts, according to this report ‘can help to keep cities alive’ economically as well as socially and aesthetically (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1993, p. 110). ‘And not before time’, will be the response of many artists and others active in community-based arts development, according to Matarosso (Matarosso, 1998, p. i) although he was not underestimating the continuing need to convince an even wider section of politicians, policy-makers and professionals in other fields (Matarosso, 1998, p. i). There needed to be even greater recognition of the potential contribution of the cultural industries — including community media — to the processes of urban regeneration and local economic development.