IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

This paper considers the ‘infrastructural’ turn in cultural policy and urban studies, examining new work that draws on interdisciplinary lenses to address concerns that liveability, cultural democracy and urban justice continue to be overridden within urban cultural-led development. It draws on three interrelated strands of recent work: firstly empirical research in three major cities – Melbourne, Manchester and Toronto – which aimed to move ‘beyond the creative city’ to see how urban development and planning impacts on the cultural infrastructure; secondly, methodological experimentation with ‘re-performing’ analysis on employment statistical data which considers how industrial classifications hamper a move away from orthodox economics in evidence-based cultural policy making, and thirdly, literature review on cultural and social infrastructural planning and thinking, as part of an attempt to understand what makes all places liveable and how policy can achieve this. I build on the theoretical groundwork of the Foundational Economy Collective (FEC, n.d.) and O’Connor (2024) who make the case for disposable and residual household income; foundational services and social infrastructure as the three central pillars of liveability, to think through how urban cultural infrastructure can be understood empirically and argue for its centrality to policy for liveable cities.