Paper for

“European public libraries today and in an historical context”.

Oslo, 9-10 December 2010

Topic:

Spatial resources and social practices: library buildings as landmarks, memory sites and meeting places.

Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen, Henrik Jochumsen and Dorte Skot-Hansen

The role of public libraries in urban development and culture-led regeneration.

Abstract

Today cities are in a situation of growing competition and they are to a higher and higher degree planned and designed to attract tourists, inhabitants and businesses. At the same time new strategies for culture-led regeneration are introduced into urban planning. In this paper we will present some of the preliminary results of the ongoing research project Public Libraries in Urban Planning – Creativity, Innovation and Experience, focusing especially on the relationship between urban planning, culture-led regeneration and library development. To examine this we will analyze the following three strategies based on international case-studies: The library as an icon, the library as a placemaker and the library as contributing to community vitality. In this connection we will discuss how these tendencies challenge the design, the concept and the mission of the public library.

Introduction

In this paper we will present some of the preliminary results of the ongoing research project Public Libraries in Urban Development – Creativity, Innovation and Experience conducted at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at The Royal Danish School of Library and Information Science from 2010-11. The research project is funded by the Realdania Fund, whose mission is to improve quality of life for the common good through the built environment. The research project will analyze and discuss the library's future role on the basis of international, Nordic and Danish best practice examples, and its overall research questions are connected to the three dimensions place, space and relations:

  • How can the library serve as a catalyst for change and urban development? (Place)
  • How can libraries enhance the creative and innovative city as a space for experiences and new meetings? (Space)
  • How can the library contribute to synergy, connections and transformations through new creative partnerships? (Relations)

In this paper we will focus especially on the first question looking at the relationship between urban development and the development of newlibrary concepts and functions. Today’s cities are in a situation of growing global competition and they are to a higher and higher degree planned and designed to attract tourists, inhabitants and businesses. A “cultural turn” is happening in the cities where there is a growing trend of re-branding and refurbishing cities in an attempt to revitalize economies. At the same time new strategies for culture-led regeneration are introduced into urban planning.What is the role of the library in these models and strategies for urban and cultural planning, and how do libraries contribute to city development and culture-led regeneration? To examine this we will discussthe following research questions based on international examples:

  • What are the trends of urban planning and development?
  • What is the role of public libraries in different strategies of culture-led regeneration?
  • How do these tendencies challenge the design, the concept and the mission of the public library?

As this is a work-in-progress we are looking forward to discuss these research questions and our attempts to answer them.

Cities in competition

Since the 1980s the tendencies of deindustrialisation and globalization have forced cities all over the world to enter thenever ending competition to attract business, tourism and tax-payers. In this competition cities have adopted a 'soft' model for the development of urban infrastructure, and a culturalisation of urban planning has taken place over the past forty years. Where cities in the 1950s and 1960stended to concentrate on stimulating economic growth by creating favourable conditions for trade and industry by planning pedestrian streets and industrial parks, planning in the 1980’s and 1990s came to focus on the (re-)establishment of city centres and the extension of high-profile waterfront areas which offer new combinations of consumption and experience.

This trend has become further refined in the new millennium, when the idea of "just add culture and stir" has become the recipe for success. As the cultural planner Graeme Evans writes in his book Cultural Planning: an urban renaissance?:”The symbolic and political economies of culture have arguably never been so interlinked” (Evans 2001:2).This instrumentalization of culture has led to a whole range of new models for urban planning as f.x. the experience cityandthe creative city.The redesigning and developmentof culturalinstitutions, i.e. the libraries,are challenged by these tendencies, and therefore we will give a short overview of the main concepts in the following.

Experience city

Urban development is becoming increasingly centred on establishing cities as experiencescapes which are seen as a space in the interface between tourism, economy and culture(O'Dell 2005:18-19).The result of this may be a fantasy city in which the entire city becomes a theme park,as the Canadian sociologist John Hannigan describes in his book Fantasy City – Pleasure and profit in the post-modern metropolis (1998). This occurs on the basis of synergies between the entertainment and development industries, as expressed in such concepts as shoppertainment, which combines shopping and entertainment in new ways, eatertainment, in which food is consumed in restaurants with special themes, and edutainment, where "learning is fun". This development has only escalated in the new millennium.Experience has become a focal point in the experience economy and in marketing. Commodities are fused with emotions in what is labelled experience economy and has the capitalisation of emotions and experiences as its purpose.The way in which the experience economy capitalises the need for experiences presents new challenges to the cities and their cultural institutions (Skot-Hansen 2008).

In the book Experience City.DK (2009) the definition of the experience city isbased on a broader notion of experience which encompasses concepts as discovery, practice and to live through something. And as a consequence of the experience one will be skilled, experienced and competent. As the authors state: “This means there is often an element of learning, refinement and culture, which is often ignored in the more marketing and market oriented discourse of the experience economy and experience city (Marling, Kiib Jensen 2008:22). The cultural institutions of the experience city are labelled as hybrid cultural spaces characterised by a conscious fusion between urban transformation and new knowledge centres, cultural institutions and experience environments and as performative urban spaces characterised by stages for performance, for learning and for experience. In other words, they are based on many rationales at once, a tendency which also characterizes the cultural policies of cities to day (Skot-Hansen 2005).

Creative cities

In the last decade cities all over the world have been infected by a “creative fever”, where the notion of the creative city has become a guiding framework for coping with the impact and challenges of globalisation. Cities have to be creative in order to cope with the challenges of technological and structural change, to be competitive or to qualify as locations for the so-called “creative class” (Kuntzmann 2005:162). Especially the American economist Richard Florida has exerted an enormous influence on urban development in the new millennium through his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). His main thesis is that economic growth occurs mainly in cities which are tolerant, diverse and open towards creativity, and he claims that it is the place, rather than the work, which provides the principal attraction. It is therefore a question of investing in urban environments which can attract the creative class: that third of the population "who create economic value through their creative work" (Florida 2002:68). According to Florida, they are not especially interested in cultural institutions in the form of high-profile art galleries or operas.They prefer to wander around an urban district characterised by cafés, galleries, bookshops, shops, cinemas and theatres, preferably in new hybrid forms, and they are eclectic in the sense that they are happy to combine many different forms of cultural expression. Culture for them is not an offer, but a lifestyle.

The concept of creative cities a la Florida has provoked much academic debate and others as f.x. the urban planner and world widely used consultant Charles Landry have defined the creative city in a much broader sense. Inhis book The Creative City- A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (2000) he maintains, that if cities are to flourish, there has to be a paradigm shift in the way they are managed, to draw fully on the talents and creativity of their own residents - businesses, city authorities and the citizens themselves. In this connection he stresses the importance of the creative milieuas a place “that contains the necessary preconditions in terms of “hard” and “soft” infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions” (2000:113). Also the geographer Allen J. Scott has contested the idea that the attraction of the creative class automatically will activate the construction of a vibrant local economy. The mere presence of creative people is not enough to sustain urban creativity, for as he states: “Creativity needs to be mobilized and channelled for it to emerge in practical forms of learning and innovation” (Scott 2006:3). The interesting question here is: How can cultural institutions - and hereunder the library - contribute to establish creative milieus and stimulate urban creativity?

Culture-led regeneration

All the above mentioned trends in urban planning and development are provoked by the transition from an industrial use of urban space to a post-industrial one, where digitalization and globalization have given rise to a post-industrial urban profile (Klosterman 2009). This can also be seen as a response to how cities fight to survive in the context of globalization and the new economy based on creativity and innovation (Mercer 2006).

In the same period the idea of culture-led regeneration as a policy concept began to occur.As Steven Miles and Ronan Paddisson state in their introduction “The Rise and Rise of Culture-led Urban Regeneration”for a special issue of Urban Studies: “What is remarkable is not just the speed with which the culture-driven strategies have become advocated by governments and local development agencies as a means of bolstering the urban economy, but also how their diffusion has globalised. Within a little more than two decades, the initiation of culture-driven urban (re)generation has come to occupy a pivotal position for new urban entrepreneurialism”(2005:833).But looking at the extensive literature on the subject,they state that the key question is still to be answered, namely “To what extent is culture-led regeneration more about rhetoric than it is about reality?” (2005:834).

Whereregeneration as such can be defined as “the positive transformation of a place – weather residential, commercial or open space- that have previously displayed symptoms of psychical, social and/or economic decline” (DCMS 2004:9), culture-led regeneration can shortly be defined as “culture as a catalyst and engine of regeneration” (Evans 2005:986). The idea has given a whole new conceptual framework for both the advocacy of arts and cultureand for more critical research. This can be seen as part of a more general urban regeneration discourse, where the concept has be evolved within specialized fields as cultural geography, town planning, architecture and last but not least cultural policy and administration.Within the later years several academic journals have had special issues on the subject as The International Journal of Cultural Policy (2004), Local Economy (2004),the above mentioned Urban Studies (2005) and Cities (2006).

The first and also widely influential book on the subject wasFranco Bianchini and Michael Parkinson’s Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: the West European Experience (1993), a critical study which revealed the increasingly strategic function of cultural policy as instrument of economic and social development. A few years later Bianchini and Landry in collaboration with others from the very influential think-tank and consultancy firm Comedia published The Art of Regeneration: urban renewal through cultural activity (Landry 1996). Here they enumerate a long list of problems connected to the outcomes of culture-led regeneration some of which are that many of these projects are expensive to maintain post facto, that they absorb large amounts of public sector funds diverted from other beneficiaries, and that they do not necessarily connect with local needs and interests. Another more recent critical analysis can be found in Grame Evansand Phyllida Shaw’s The Contribution of Culture to Regeneration in the UK(2004) where the authors recommend that a cultural dimension is applied to the prevailing tendency to the gathering of evidence on economic and social impact.As they state: “The nature of cultural projects which feature in regeneration may also need to be assessed more rigorously in terms of the impact they produce, i.e. it is not only the opportunity cost between cultural and ‘non-cultural’ investment in regeneration, but between which culture and where, best serves the regeneration and community objectives” (2004:60).

Even though there has been an extensive critique of the expectations and outcomes of culture-led regeneration both from cultural policy research and urban studies, the cultural policy researcher Jonathan Vickery also finds some positive by-products. In his enlightening paper “The Emergence of Culture-led Regeneration: A policy concept and its discontents”(2007) he emphasizes that the idea of culture-led regeneration“did engender an obligation for cultural institutions to become active within urban policy construction, and to re-conceptualize their cultural activities and facilities in terms of a coherent ‘cultural infrastructure’ ” (2007:24).This is especially interesting in connection with the discussion of the role of the public library in urbandevelopment: Have they actually re-conceptualised their activities and facilities as an answer to strategies of culture-led regeneration or are they doing “business as usual”?

In 2005 the BritishDCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) published the policy statement Culture in the Heart of Regeneration. This was part of a consultation document with the attempt to construct “a common way to measure the social, economic and environmental impact of (urban cultural) transformational projects” (DCMS 2004:3). This report outlines three strategies of culture-led regeneration:

  • Cultural icons and flagships
  • Placemaking and urban identity
  • Community consolidation

Even if these three outlines seem to be “somewhat limited in their conceptual reach” according to Vickery (2007:53), we find that they can function as a relevant framework to analyze and discuss the role of the public library in urban development and regeneration. As this paper is a work-in-progress it seems to be both a practical and fruitful model to categorize the prevailing tendencies as we have perceived them in our empirical studies of European and American public libraries. Only, we will rename the last strategy as community vitalization instead of consolidation, as this focuses on a more prevalent role of the library. In the following we will give own definitions of the three strategies, based on theory, and hereafter describe and discuss the functions of new public libraries within these strategies. At the same time we will link to the above mentioned over-all models of cities where it seems relevantfor the discussion.

Libraries as icons

The recent years there has been a world-wide trend for architects to create iconic buildings for cities competing to elevate their image. Especially cultural institutions have become icons, most successful and discussed Frank Gehry’s hyper-expressive New Guggenheim from 1997, which gave the name to the “Bilbao-effect”. Since, many other cultural icons as Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Musica in Porto or Renzo Piano’s Paul Klee Museum in Berne have tried to do the same trick. As the architect Charles Jenks phrases it, politicians and mayors all over the world “demand the ‘wow-effect’ in new buildings and explicitly ask for the ‘Bilbao effect’ which brought in millions of dollars to that rust-belt city” (Jencks, 2006:8). But still, Jencks will not join the choir of critiques who wishes the “iconic age is over”. In his article “The iconic building is here to stay” he states that in spite of the hype, one should not underestimate the desire for good iconic buildings: “They still make people leave home, to enjoy the expressive aspects of the public realm” (2006:10).

In the article “Iconic architecture and capitalist globalization” the sociologist Leslie Sklair sees the most common rationale for deliberately created iconic architecture as urban boosterism for cities who want to be easy recognizable for purposes of commerce as well as civic pride. As he states: “Those driving urban boosterism deliberately attempt to create urban architectural icons in order to draw tourists, conventions and mega-event attendees with money to spend and the images they project are directed to this end” (2006:38).