CITIES AND LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

3. CITIES AND LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Sheffield and Manchester — like many other cities across the globe dependent on 19th century ‘smokestack’ manufacture and export — experienced catastrophic deindustriali- sation in the 1980s and have since been looking to new sources of employment. In a more halting and unfocused sense there was a gradual recognition that this demanded not just the attraction of new industries or services, but a complete ‘re-invention’ of what they were as cities. This accompanied another common notion that cities were now engaged in competition with other cities — not just at the national but also at the inter- national level. In this context they were competing on a ‘European’ or ‘global’ stage. Many British cities had more or less accepted this notion by the end of the 1980s — that their futures depended on attracting and generating new investment and new business through an openness to private sector co-operation and partnership; new planning flex- ibility; local tax and funding incentives (usually through central government initiatives); marketing schemes; integrated business support and training (one-stop-shops) and so on.

MANCHESTER/LIVERPOOL | Local Music Policies

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MANCHESTER/LIVERPOOL | Local Music Policies

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The interaction of this with cultural policy is too complex to be mapped here. In gener- al and for our purposes, we would say that cultural policy has followed two tracks (Wynne, 1991; Bianchini and Parkinson, 1994; O’Connor and Wynne, 1996; O’Connor, 1998). Firstly, it has looked to its input into image. The ‘old industrial’ image was off-put- ting to inward investors — PR and marketing campaigns for towns and cities took off exponentially in the 1980s. Mostly this was an external consultation exercise with little strategic rethinking. Within this, cultural facilities were held to be very attractive to the ‘footloose’ executives and senior management, upon whose preferences relocation could depend (it was argued). Cultural capital should be mobilised in the image campaign — if the facilities were not there, then they needed to be built. This line became increasingly sophisticated in both its marketing and its understanding of image and cultural pull.The early 1990s saw cities linking ‘quality of life’ issues and tourism which used a wider notion of culture — the ‘feel’, the ‘atmosphere’, the bars and restau- rants, the night life. Cities became ‘European cities’ — a strangely mythical, amorphous notion involving café bars, cappuccinos and late licences. This image- and facilities-based approach, linked to the attraction of real estate investment in the central sections of the city, was part of an ‘urban regeneration’ model drawn from North America. Culture renewed the built stock, revived the image, created a tourism infrastructure and under- pinned the vibrant, late night ‘European city’ (Lovatt and O’Connor, 1995). The second cultural policy area concerns the employment possibilities of the cultural sec- tor, though its intellectual make-up is more complex than that. Stemming from the Greater London Council (GLC), this approach emphasised the economic potential of the cultural sector alongside a set of intellectual arguments intended to overcome the art/industry, culture/economy, creativity/business divide that was fairly entrenched culturally and insti- tutionally in Britain (and to some extent in English-speaking countries generally). It was also linked to a redefinition of what ‘art and culture’ was in a way that pointed to popu- lar culture and to culture as a ‘way of life’. The GLC began to elaborate a cultural industries strategy involving film and video, music recording, publishing, design, etc. It was abolished before it really took off — but it was picked up by other cities. Although concerned with economics, employment and other ‘hard’ issues, this cultural industries approach was very difficult to pursue, mainly because it fell between two constituencies (arts and culture/economic development) and because making it work demanded a level of understanding and experience which was simply lacking in most city authorities. However, by the mid-1990s cultural industries strategies became common in Britain’s towns and cities. It was out of this policy context that the music industry policy with which we are concerned in this paper emerged. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------