Introduction: Culture, Economy, Policy: Trends and Developments

• Main Author: Kong, Lily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Human Geography; Political Economy; Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1804; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3061/viewcontent/Konglily_2000_CultureEconomyPolicy.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988)Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as “cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest”. In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly significant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have been slow to analyse this integration of the cultural and economic in explicit terms, and it is only in recent years that a reworked cultural geography (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987; Kong, 1997) and a “new” economic geography (Thrift and Olds, 1996) has considered the constitutive role played by culture in economic development and the way in which economic forces are in fact culturally encoded (see Ley, 1996 and the other papers in the special issue of Urban Geography, 1996). Often, this relationship between the cultural and economic is facilitated, enhanced or hampered by policy. Yet, as in the idealist tradition, many more state cultural policies have been based on the notion of culture as a realm separate from, and often in opposition to, the realm of material production and economic activity than is explicitly acknowledged (Shuker, 1994, p. 54).