Dear List members in the Yorkshire area
The Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) at Leeds Metropolitan University would like to invite you warmly to the following guest lecture:
Dr Tomke Lask
AHRC/ESRC Research Fellow
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Liverpool
“Impact Evaluation of Culture-Led Regeneration and the Sustainability of Cultural Policy:
In Praise of Slow Methods in times of Marketing, City-Branding and Richard Florida”
Thursday, 27 November 2008
4:30 – 5:30pm
Leeds Metropolitan University, Civic Quarter
Lecture Theatre B3
Accountability is the main preoccupation nowadays when it comes to evaluating the impacts of policies. Cultural policy and the increasingly culture –led regeneration policy in the UK and elsewhere are no exception to this trend. However, whereas measuring economic impacts is based on rather straightforward indicators, creating criteria that make an evaluation of cultural impacts comprehensible and reliable is another matter. One of the problems is that there is an incompatibility between political needs to get hold as fast as possible of “hard” data and the actual time the impact process in the cultural sector requires to become evident, and hence might be measured somehow. The attitude of fast consumers adopted in the context of policy evaluations contrasts with another exigency of our times: sustainability. As sustainability is based on a long term perspective and includes social, cultural and economic aspects, so should the applied methods, if cultural impacts are to be understood as a social fact.
In times of fast changes, nothing can be done fast enough, it seems. But the only way to be able to deliver evaluations “fast done - well done” is to stick to already well-known schemes and, in order to give it an innovative touch, a collection of methods from different disciplines are proposed. This is then called “inter-disciplinary” evaluation. However, preference is still given to statistically exploitable data: tourist numbers, museums visits, employment, developments, money… It is quantity that is the main concern, not quality, because the homo politicus is predominantly a homo economicus: politics talk numbers, not soft data like emotions, unless the latter contribute to the marketing of a person, place or project. The basic question remains nevertheless: can impacts of culture-led regeneration policy and cultural policy in general be measured convincingly only by “hard” data? Which of the “fast done – well done” evaluation methods is prepared to create bottom-up indicators to measure the impacts of cultural policy? The draw back of slow methods like the ones used in social anthropology, is not the quality of its data, but the time it takes to be produced. As these methods take into account the cultural diversity of places, they cannot propose any formula à la Richard Florida.
Against the mainstream attitude, this research is based on slow methods such as ethnography, participative observation and cognitive maps to find out how Liverpudlian cultural habitus is constructed in practice, meaning how the local population engages with the city in everyday life. This will allow an evaluation of how far the ‘top-down’ or cultural policy approach, and the ‘bottom-up’ or everyday life approach match in terms of investing places and undertaking activities in Liverpool. Cognitive maps from different generations and professions are used to capture the historic evolution of the cultural space up to the present situation. The aim is to create a tool that can be used as a permanent monitoring procedure. Readapted it could even be applied to other cities wanting to assess the sustainability and the degree of participation of its cultural policy.
If you would like to attend RSVP to [log in to unmask] or
call 0113-812 8541.
Students are also very welcome!
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Daniela Carl
Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change
Faculty of Arts & Society
Leeds Metropolitan University
Old School Board
Calverley Street
Leeds
LS1 3ED
UK
phone +44 (0)113- 812 8541
fax +44 (0)113- 812 8544
www.tourism-culture.com
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Forthcoming Events
Texts and Tours:
Developing the Potential of Literary Tourism
5 December 2008, Leeds, UK
Traditions and Transformations:
Tourism, Heritage and Cultural Change in the
4-7 April 2009,
New MA Course
MA Cultural Tourism
For more information please go to www.tourism-culture.com
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