by Bas van Heur, Els Silvrants-Barclay, Menna Agha.
Introduction
Bringing together researchers, artists, architects and organizers from across Europe, the Building Beyond: Collective Strategies for Just Cities summer school took place from 9 to 11 September 2021 in Brussels.i Neither a traditional academic occasion nor a policy event, the summer school aimed to stay close to the experiences and reflections of the diverse actors ‘on the ground’, in order to critically examine and think through the ownership models, spatial conditions and grassroots processes of collective infrastructures, focusing in particular on the role the arts can play. The standard narrative of the arts and urban development is well documented (e.g., Zukin 1982, Ley 2003, Pratt 2011): in cities dominated by the logic of entrepreneurial governance, artists and the cultural and creative industries have been—and continue to be—both drivers and victims of these urban development dynamics; playing an instrumental role in projects for temporary use and urban regeneration, but also being among the first to relocate following a development phase. The Building Beyond summer school moved beyond this seeming fait accompli by asking more future-oriented questions about collective and anti-speculative infrastructures that counter mainstream urban development by providing tangible access to essential needs, such as affordable homes, artists’ studios and community facilities.
To an extent, the original motivation for this summer school was a very local one. Confronted with insufficient availability of artists’ spaces, the instrumentalization of temporary use by real estate developers, and with Brussels lacking a developed cultural industries policy, the artist cooperative and studio provider Level Five initiated the practice-based research project ‘Permanent’ to investigate the cooperative economy and commons as potential models for the cultural sector. In emphasizing this local dimension, the summer school built on established academic and policy observations concerning the importance of the ‘local’: ranging from literature that criticizes the ‘flagship building’ bias in creative city policies and that directs attention to the role of locally situated arts and community spaces (Bell and Orozco 2020), to work on cultural ecosystems emphasizing the role of place and the importance of physical sites (Gross and Wilson 2019). The local concern also ties in with a much older debate about cultural democracy, its interest in local and community-oriented scales of cultural value, and the ways in which claims for cultural democracy are intertwined with demands for economic democracy (Hadley and Belfiore 2018). In addition, by directing attention towards questions of infrastructure and ownership, the summer school engaged with emergent debates about the cultural commons (Borchi 2018), research into cultural cooperatives and the social economy (Sandoval 2016), and policy reports on funding cultural spaces (Patti and Polyák 2017).
In this article, and in line with the setup of the summer school, we discuss three core concerns: developing diverse and flexible understandings and models of ownership, designing architectural typologies that contribute to more accessible and inclusive cultural spaces, and realizing modes of grassroots urban governance that allow for collective action beyond token participation. Following this discussion, we offer a brief conclusion, in which we point to the next steps for research and policy concerning what in this paper we propose to label collective cultural infrastructures (CCI)—a tongue-in-cheek reference to the cultural and creative industries for which the same acronym is used.
Bas van Heur, Els Silvrants-Barclay & Menna Agha (2022): Collective cultural infrastructures: ownership, architecture, governance, Cultural Trends, DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2022.2103646