City, Culture and Society最新文献

With a focus on local government's role in participatory cultural governance, this paper argues two points. First, self- and critical reflexivity of institutional brokers is important to community-wide capacity building for participatory cultural governance. Second, this reflexivity can be enabled through slow, inquiry-based collaboration between practitioners and researchers. The paper presents the experiences of a practitioner-researcher collaboration between a local authority arts officer and a cultural policy scholar in the development of a place-based local arts development programme taking place from 2017 to 2019 in Dublin, Ireland. The paper surfaces how efforts to promote greater participation in local decision-making require acts of reflexivity as core to the repertoire of capacity building for enabling participatory cultural governance practice in local public arts administration. Three interrelated factors are determined to have helped enable this reflexivity: (1) the arts officer's openness to engage in collaborative processes that (2) emphasised reflection and learning and were supported by (3) the presence of an embedded researcher with mutual interest, beliefs and experience or knowledge of the institutional context. Limitations in the study highlight areas for further research regarding the affective nature of practitioner-researcher collaborations and the potential of promoting reflexive practice in processes aimed at promoting participatory governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which broke out in early 2020, has disrupted China's population mobility on which its cities depend. Especially, during the two years of the pandemic, female migrant laborers have been taking the risk of becoming the surplus population in an unstable and hyper-competitive job market. Such circumstance has led their images and urban engagement to be finitely recorded by the narrative that emerged based on the pandemic -- outbreak narrative in Priscilla Wald's term (2008), serving as an essential archive to examine Chinese women labor and urban history during the COVID-19. Taking an article narrating the vagrancy of a female migrant worker -- Ah Fen in Shanghai as a threshold, this paper explores China's gendered migrancy and female migrant communities during the COVID-19. By tracing China's COVID-19-related outbreak narratives through literary analysis, this paper reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic has flooded more migrant workers, especially female laborers, into the gig economy and this new urban engagement pattern has made migrant women's mobility higher and encouraged them to rebuild migrant communities in the city. However, the high mobility and fragmented urban distribution, in turn, have strengthened their roles as “infected strangers” in the outbreak narrative, particularly in the context of China's strict differentiated quarantine governance. This research, initiated by literary analysis, on the one hand, draws a dynamic map of capital and population flow during the pandemic era, while on the other hand, exposes the injustice among different classes, genders, and ages in urban China enlarged by the virus.

This article describes the specific issues faced by the Ottawa Culture Research Group (OCRG) as it sought to develop cultural indicators for Ottawa, Canada. It examines this effort in the light of conceptual and collaborative challenges in developing indicators of culture and sustainability and how these challenges have been addressed in cities elsewhere. In focusing on the collaborative relationships among the various partners in the OCRG, the article highlights the difficulties of integrating cultural measures of sustainable development within urban administration and governance when the partners have differing priorities and are dependent on multiple and unstable sources of support. It ends with several conclusions about the practices and resources required to sustain measurement initiatives that address both tangible and intangible aspects of culture’s role in the sustainability of cities.

Fiscal decentralisation has been an important tool for local governance and development for many countries in Africa, in the last five decades. In many African countries, decentralized governance was adopted as a way of expanding grassroots participation and generating local resources for development without a consensus on ways to mobilize revenues by local governments. After over three decades of Ghana's decentralisation reforms, it is becoming apparent that local government units in strategic locations have peculiar advantages as well as challenges in mobilising local revenue. Using the Awutu-Senya East Municipal Area, this study explores the locational dynamics of Peri-urban municipalities in mobilising internally generated fund (IGF). The study adopted qualitative methods, including review of financial reports of the Municipal Assembly, interviews of key informants, officials of the finance department and revenue mobilisation unit; selected contracted revenue collectors and operators of local businesses. The study revealed locational influencers of revenue mobilisation to include increasing property values due to rapid peri-urban growth; upsurge of satellite businesses; creations of new municipal areas and leakages in internal revenue mobilisation, due to continuously changing boundaries. While the study resonates with emerging literature on local revenue mobilisation, it departs in its re-examination of geographical advantages and setbacks.

Culture’s role in sustaining urban development is recognised in this Special Issue and yet the urban setting is not an island of cultural development, but rather merges into suburban, rural and remote areas where the significance of cultural activity and the local actors can be overlooked by the urban observer and funder. In Australia, communities outside of capital cities differ significantly from each other, with community arts and cultural development efforts operating at various scales, to address unique local issues, through diverse artforms and ways of working. Funders with different processes, priorities, and relationships with funding recipients support this activity and can play a role in limiting or enabling community-determined responses to complex local issues.

This article explores a case study where adoption of an online outcomes focussed cultural activity planning and evaluation platform unexpectedly contributed to a deepening of trust between a city-based corporate funder and a regional arts producer working in a suburban area of the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. Interviews with stakeholders revealed that the platform, together with the trust that it helped to cultivate, supported a creative, responsive, and flexible community arts and cultural development project that achieved cultural and social outcomes for local young people considered disadvantaged while working towards the funder’s global goal to enable social equity.

The case study suggests that when funders are removed from the contexts where activities will be delivered, a trusting relationship spanning geographic and socio-cultural divides can encourage mutually beneficial collaboration, reduce rigidity to allow an emergent strategy, and achieve impactful community-determined arts and cultural activity.

This paper examines the intimate relationship among gender, religion, and the urban with a special focus on Muslim women in Delhi, India. Drawing on interviews conducted with young, middle-class, unmarried Muslim women, this paper demonstrates that Muslim women's lived experiences of religion and gender are often complex and situated at the intersections of embodied spatial practices of religion, gender and urban-ness. Predominant understanding of Indian Muslim women focuses on their gendered religious enactments such as purdah (veiling), oppression by Muslim men, and their need to be ‘rescued’ from Islamic systems of oppression. However, these narratives do not fully capture the complexity of Muslim women's embodied experiences and encounters with the urban. In turn, this paper investigates how Muslim women's experiences of the urban unfold at the interstices of gendered and religious geographies of the self, families/faith community, and the city in everyday life and exceptional contexts. I argue that the intersection of gender, religion and the city is nuanced, ad-hoc, and paradoxically shift and change within the historical socio-spatial urban context of Delhi.

This case study is concerned with the arrival and impact of private art museum Mona in Tasmania, examining how the local creative community perceives its impact and how it influences the broader cultural landscape. The museum represents a larger trend where affluent individuals establish prestigious private museums with significant global reach. This study has found Mona to be a highly personal endeavour, providing influential networks in support of the owner's personal and business objectives. It highlights the perception that the museum has had a transformative impact on Tasmania, particularly in adding a sophisticated dimension to the state's cultural visage and a new vibrancy that is thought to resonate strongly with tourists. Previous scholarship has shown that private museums operate in a different context and play by different rules to their public counterparts and this study has shown this to be true in identifying problems with how to govern Mona and the local creative scene trying to negotiate a place within this changing context. Mona has brought credibility to the arts, but set high expectations for the local arts scene, creating entry barriers for young artists and challenging arts institutions with more limited resources.

This ethnographic research examines the interplay between perceived Islamic regulatory regime and cosmopolitan space through the experiences of a group of well-educated young Chinese female Muslim converts in Hong Kong, where Islam largely evokes imaginaries of ethnic minorities and “otherness.” As Chinese Muslim converts transition from the ethnic majority to an ethnic minority within the Muslim minority, which is predominantly comprised of Indonesian, South Asian, and African migrants, they navigate the challenges of being both insiders and outsiders. Moreover, Muslim-majority societies are often stereotypically perceived as being incompatible with gender equality and modernity. By focusing on the intersections of gender and ethnicity, this article argues that these women embody and represent regulatory enclosure and cosmopolitan identities simultaneously, necessitating continuous negotiations and contestations. They identify themselves as members of both the local and global Islamic communities, as well as modern, independent females in a cosmopolitan city. Through an exploration of their strategic creation of Islamic practices in response to different situations, this article sheds light on how the gendered, ethnicized body negotiates regulatory enclosure and cosmopolitanism, and how Islam is dynamically constituted and re-constituted locally in response to constantly evolving challenges.

This article presents a systematic literature review on urban heritage. It analyses (a) how urban heritage is conceptualized and interpreted in academic research, (b) urban heritage management modes. This literature review interprets urban heritage as a resource, collective memory, and space. It categorizes urban heritage management practice into six management modes according to stakeholders' collaboration levels: community-led, expert-coordinated, government-led, conflict-resolution, and privatization. These modes are analyzed based on different political regimes. The review observes five approaches to conceptualizing urban heritage: researching people's perspectives towards urban heritage, framing urban heritage, tracing the process of urban heritage forming, reviewing international policies and charters, and exploring the functions of urban heritage. Finally, for the future research agenda, the article recommends a focus on the following themes: the causal relations between factors and effects of adopting different urban heritage modes, researching community engagement and interactions between different levels of government, and analyzing conflict-resolution processes systematically.

The far right has now entered into the mainstream politics of nearly every European country, yet we have confirmed little about the social context in which far-right parties thrive. While most of the literature assumes that far-right sympathies are driven by economic or cultural grievance, this paper looks to cities and contact theory. Recent advances suggest that even indirect or vicarious intergroup contact can reduce prejudice toward out-groups such as migrants. Urban theorists, as well, have long argued that urban design can influence social outcomes by promoting or discouraging interaction between residents. This paper applies this literature to the rise of the far right, which often scapegoats out-groups in its rhetoric. Using data from 73 cities in Spain, we find that residents of cities rich in continuous urban fabric—which promotes contact—are less likely to consider voting for the far right but that this relationship is weaker in highly segregated cities.