This is a book about the power of the arts to enhance city images, urban economies and communities. Anchored in academic discussion of the Cultural Industries - what they are, how they have emerged, why they matter and how they should be theorized - the book offers a series of case studies drawn from five countries: Australia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US to examine how the arts contribute to sustainable urban regeneration.
Fields, Capitals, Habitus provides an insightful analysis of the relations between culture and society in contemporary Australia. Presenting the findings of a detailed national survey of Australian cultural tastes and practices, it demonstrates the pivotal significance of the role culture plays at the intersections of a range of social divisions and inequalities: between classes, age cohorts, ethnicities, genders, city and country, and the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The book looks first at how social divisions inform the ways in which Australians from different social backgrounds and positions engage with the genres, institutions, and particular works of culture and cultural figures across six cultural fields: the visual arts, literature, music, heritage, television, and sport. It then examines how Australians' cultural preferences across these fields interact within the Australian 'space of lifestyles'. The close attention paid to class here includes an engagement with role of 'middlebrow' cultures in Australia and the role played by new forms of Indigenous cultural capital in the emergence of an Indigenous middle class. The rich survey data is complemented throughout by in-depth qualitative data provided by interviews with survey participants. These are discussed more closely in the final part of the book which explores the gendered, political, personal and community associations of cultural tastes across Australia's Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian populations. The distinctive ethical issues associated with how Australians relate to Indigenous culture are also examined. In the light it throws on the formations of cultural capital in a multicultural settler colonial society, Fields, Capitals, Habitus makes a landmark contribution to cultural capital research.
Karen Newman demonstrates that speculation and capital, the commodity, the crowd, traffic, and the street, often thought to be historically specific to nineteenth-century urban culture, were in fact already at work in early modern London and Paris. Newman challenges the notion of a rupture between premodern and modern societies and shows how London and Paris became cultural capitals. Drawing upon poetry, plays, and prose by writers such as Shakespeare, Scudery, Boileau, and Donne, as well as popular materials including pamphlets, ballads, and broadsides, she examines the impact of rapid urbanization on cultural production.
In a time of too many graduates for too few jobs, and in a context where applicants have similar levels of educational capital, what other factors influence graduate career trajectories? Based on the life history interviews of graduates and framed through a Bourdieusian sociological lens, Culture, Capitals and Graduate Futures explores the continuing role that social class as well as cultural and social capitals have on both the aspirations and expectations towards, and the trajectories within, the graduate labour market. Framed within the current context of increasing levels of university graduates and the falling numbers of graduate positions available in the UK labour market, this book provides a critical examination of the supposedly linear and meritocratic relationship between higher education and graduate employment proposed by official discourses from government at both local and national levels. Through a critical engagement with the empirical findings, Culture, Capitals and Graduate Futures asks important questions for the effective continuation of the widening participation agenda. This timely book will be of interest to higher education professionals working within widening participation policy and higher education policy.
Culture is one of the most complex and contested fields of European integration. This book analyzes EU cultural politics since their emergence in the 1980s with a particular focus on the European Capital of Culture program, the flagship of EU cultural policy. It discusses both the central as well as local levels and contextualizes EU policies with programmes of other European organisations, such as the Council of Europe. By asking what "Europe" actually means for European cultural policy, the book goes beyond the confines of official organizations and the political sphere, to discuss the contribution, impact and appropriation among a more diverse group of actors and participants, such as transnational experts, local bureaucrats, cultural managers, urban dwellers and the visitors. Its principal aim is to debunk the myth of Brussels as the centre of cultural Europeanization. Instead, it argues that European cultural policy has to be seen as a relational, multi-directional movement, involving a wide variety of stakeholders and leading to conflicts and collaborations at various levels. This book combines the perspectives of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, at the intersection between EU, urban, and cultural studies, and changes our understanding of ‘Europeanization’ by opening up new empirical and conceptual avenues. Challenging the dominant interpretation of European cultural policies, The Cultural Politics of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and cultural studies.
Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Toxey, Alexei Vranich
At a time of increasing city competition, national capitals are at the forefront of efforts to gain competitive advantage for themselves and their nation, to project a distinctive and positive image and to score well in global city league tables. They are frequently their country’s main tourist gateway, and their success in attracting visitors is inextricably linked with that of the nation. They attract not just leisure visitors; they are especially important in other growing tourism markets, for example, as centres of power they feature strongly in business tourism, as academic centres they are important for educational tourism, and they frequently host global events such as the Olympic Games. And there are more of them: first, the number of capitals has grown as the number of nation-states has increased and, secondly, pressures for devolution mean more cities are seeking national capital status, even when they are not at the head of independent states. We need to understand tourism in capitals better – but there has been little research in the past. This book develops new insights as it explores the phenomenon of capital city tourism, and uses recent research to examine the appeal of ‘capitalness’ to tourists, and explore developments in capitals across the world. This book was published as a special issue of Current Issues in Tourism.
The issue of capital city relocation is a topic of debate for more than forty countries across the world. In this first book to discuss the issue, Vadim Rossman offers an in-depth analysis of the subject, highlighting the global trends and the key factors that motivate different countries to consider such projects, analyzing the outcomes and drawing lessons from recent capital city transfers worldwide for governments and policy-makers. Capital Cities studies the approaches and the methodologies that inform such decisions and debates. Special attention is given to the study of the universal patterns of relocation and patterns specific to particular continents and mega-regions and particular political regimes. The study emphasizes the role of capital city transfers in the context of nation- and state-building and offers a new framework for thinking about capital cities, identifying six strategies that drive these decisions, representing the economic, political, geographic, cultural and security considerations. Confronting the popular hyper-critical attitudes towards new designed capital cities, Vadim Rossman shows the complex motives that underlie the proposals and the important role that new capitals might play in conflict resolution in the context of ethnic, religious and regional rivalries and federalist transformations of the state, and is seeking to identify the success and failure factors and more efficient implementation strategies. Drawing upon the insights from spatial economics, comparative federalist studies, urban planning and architectural criticism, the book also traces the evolution of the concept of the capital city, showing that the design, iconography and the location of the capital city play a critical role in the success and the viability of the state.
This outstanding text provides students with the essential foundation in the historical geography of the United States. Distinguished scholar Richard L. Nostrand skillfully synthesizes decades of historical geography research in an engaging and thought-provoking overview. His regional geography framework emphasizes the three themes central to cultural geography—cultural ecology, cultural diffusion, and cultural landscape—to explain the formation and change of culture regions in the United States. He shows convincingly that regions are a valuable pedagogical device for developing students’ understanding of place and context.
