Cultural policy in European cities: An analysis from the cultural agenda of mayors

Culture policy is a rising issue in local governance. However, the character of this policy is not clear according to the classical division between developmental and redistributive local policies. A first reaction is that culture does not fit into either. But if we dig deeper, we can distinguish three different perspectives on the role of culture in city development following three conceptualisations of cities: (i) creative cities (culture as developmental policy), (ii) planning or educational city (welfare policy), and (iii) cultural scenes approach that stress cultural consumption (transversal policy). These conceptualisations are used by analysts as well as mayors, suggesting three hypotheses to be analysed using a cross-national survey of European mayors. The main results show the transversal character of cultural issues in mayors' agendas, as well as differences in handling cultural issues according the classical growth and welfare approaches to local policy analysis.

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