Local Culture Scotland report now out

Culture is infrastructure. That's the proposition at the heart of 'Local Culture Scotland: culture is infrastructure for place-based working', published last week and commissioned by the Scottish Government.

https://creative-edinburgh.com/local-culture-scotland

Led by Matt Baker, Ola Wojtkiewicz, Morvern Cunningham and Simon Sharkey, the report draws on seven months of work with over 50 organisations and individuals across cultural and non-cultural sectors. What it proposes is a national strategic approach to culture in community settings: not culture as an add-on to place-based working, but as part of how places function, recover and change.

For Scotland, this is a serious piece of thinking. It takes the ambitions of the Culture Strategy and asks what it would actually take to deliver them at local level, with cultural practitioners and organisations positioned as partners in community life rather than occasional visitors to it. It's already listed as an action in the delivery of the Culture Strategy, and the team meet the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic later this month.

For the rest of the UK, there's plenty to learn from. Much of the placemaking conversation in England still treats culture as an outcome to be measured rather than a system to be resourced. This report makes the structural case, and does so from the ground up, built with the people doing the work.

I was glad to be brought into the formative conversations as a critical friend, and grateful to Matt for the invitation. Those conversations sharpened my own thinking on the relationship between cultural practice, community infrastructure and system change, and it's been a pleasure to see them land in a report of this quality.

Please read it, share it, and if you're working in place-based practice anywhere in the UK, argue with it. That's what it's for.

#Placemaking #CulturalPolicy #LocalCultureScotland #CultureStrategy #PlaceBasedWorking