Reading the round-up that read me: place and the Hodge Review
The Hodge Review is one of the more consequential policy moments the cultural sector has had in some time, and moments like this are only ever understood in the round.
So thank you to Ceri Pitches, Ben Walmsley, Jonathan Price and Anna Kime at the University of Leeds for their thoughtful synthesis in Arts Professional of how the review has landed across the sector, and for the kind shout out to my own reading of it through a place-based lens.
What their round-up captures well is the breadth of the response: a broad welcome for the intent, real concern about implementation without new investment, and a set of quieter silences the sector has not yet reckoned with. Place, for me, sits among those silences. The review gestures towards place but stops short of any sustained articulation of 'place as a system', and it engages little with English devolution at the very moment culture is being written into the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill.
That gap matters, because place is not a backdrop to cultural policy. It is the relational ground on which need, value and belonging are actually worked out.
#Placemaking #CulturalPolicy #HodgeReview