Post-debate Film | Changing Cultures | Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s

[Music] it has been a long sweep of investment in culture and particularly in cultural infrastructure arts buildings if you like that long sweep has been informed by urban policy rather than cultural policy if you think about all that investment in arts buildings it's often as a prompt to the regeneration of city centers it's been about priming for private investment in in downtown areas it's been about the stimulation of the knowledge economy and the creative economy it's been about stimulating tourism but the trajectory has broadly been consistent over those 30 years um the last four or five years before covert there was an investment of about 10 to 15 billion us dollars per year in cultural buildings but we are now emerging from a period when in effect the sector ground to a halt we know that trends in international tourism are going to be critically important particularly for larger institutions and city centers we know that behavioral patterns may be changing as a result of the period of covid we know that people's sensibility about international travel has become increasingly significant as we emerge the critical question is are we emerging into the same world are the cultural institutions that are emerging changed by the experience and by other things that have gone on and cultural infrastructure i think is starting to think about how do you become infrastructure for imagination if you will i think that there's a expansiveness in an experimentation that is happening in the civic realm but there's also this way of thinking about civic space which is no longer about strangers but how do you actually build communities and networks that actually have these specific meaning spaces i've also been very intrigued with od and helsinki with the central library that is now thinking of itself as a library yes but they call themselves like a living room so nowadays it's not only about doing research and going to check out a book but it also is meeting rooms on a smaller scale what i find incredibly interesting is vis-a-vis this multiplicity that was speaking about a specificity how many communities and many smaller projects are actually functioning as places where new civic typologies are possible so nowadays you're seeing everything from community kitchens that are also like tool sharing and i'm quite intrigued about what the future could be like the symbiotic nature of both the shifts and the changes in terms of the experimentation nature and this expansion of possibilities my two lessons from the pandemic is a learning about vulnerability a personal vulnerability and the vulnerability of a society and which leads us to a more enhanced thinking about communities what we have seen in western europe and all the countries a sharp decrease in attendances in the museums in the public sector with a high amount of money spent just to maintain the infrastructures which is good on the one hand on the other hand here continue to sustain organizations which do not longer fit to the effects of the pandemic and which do not correspond to the needs of a society to rethink about a reshaping and the redesigning of a public space of a citizen space to deal with the two key issues diversity and sustainability the effects of the pandemic will last and we are trained in that model will change because they are to be seen under the criteria of sustainability we export products or we deliver services and people come to request those products and services i'm thinking about the berlinale festival even on the khan festival what we are doing as governments or as cultural institutions to try to export culture by buying a ticket for an airplane and by sending a film abroad that will tremendously change weed south bank are an eleven acre site with four venues we used to be open seven days a week we are closed currently on mondays and tuesdays but that is partly to cater for that issue of london just not being as busy as it has been visitor return is pretty volatile tourism obviously was a huge part of our ecosystem our visitor numbers were something in the region of four and a half million we have 50 000 so we have had a massive impact in terms of overseas tourism and to some degree out of town tourism as well i think that he's not reluctant to come to the halls which i think people understand are incredibly coveted safe but they are very nervous about travel so we are definitely impacted by people's reluctance to use public transport particularly the older demographic we keep saying that thursday night is the new friday night because many people are choosing to work from home now on fridays so we're finding the site very lively on thursday nights we're sort of hammering out what sort of lasting effect this change in work pattern is going to have on us so in terms of our audiences there's no question that you know deciding to go to an event after work when you work in central london is an easy hop and a step if you've been working at home it involves the commute in it's all together a much different schlep one of the things that west end has done has been to introduce the sunday performance historically of course the yet has never opened on sundays here in the uk but because of that shifting pattern we're all having to think about slightly different ways of providing art and activity for people it seems we're caught in a catch-22 if you're publicly funded a crisis comes and then certainly the huge budget cuts actually put so many museums simultaneously at apparel and then if you're privately funded then you're strapped into a more corporate agenda and you lose your freedom so this expansiveness and this poetry and this freedom that comes from artistic practices or something to maintain perhaps one of the places of imagination and creativity that needs to happen is are there other financial models do budgets come from elsewhere the one thing that the last 20 months has taught leaders or certainly institutions is that they will sink if they're not entrepreneurial flexible thinking outside the box i mean we have all been so challenged by business plans that are frankly totally irrelevant and had to most of us completely rethink the structure of our organization as well as every business plan we might have hatched in the past in the case of south bank center public funding is only 37 of our total funding so we have always been necessarily entrepreneurial flexible on our toes thinking about opportunity a lot of that in the uk has to do with the decline in public funding we have increasingly over the last few years had to find other ways of making raising revenue imagination and creativity that needs to happen is in terms of urban agendas when cultural institutions come into specific places within the city and what happens in terms of the real estate value why is there not more thinking on broader terms in terms of the surplus capture of the capital gains that are made by cultural institutions coming in and that are actually not captured by corporations and by private companies but actually by the public money should be spent to foster to enhance and to enable in the field of innovation this is the way you can enhance community building in the existing organizations and that's actually what's happening because i see many many of the important public players opening up to another kind of community building opening up to more diversity but there is still a need for more innovation in latin america in general i am seeing museums reaching out to other communities a lot more frequently of truly trying to build coalitions that go beyond the cultural and very much thinking about a creative ethos as a social resource so in that sense i find that this need to reach out not being able to maintain like a monolithic relationship to the rest of the city and the rest of your society can be incredibly interesting in many ways because again like you become more multiple you're reaching out into other communities this creative ethos can travel in very different ways it can travel the scales of the city you can become a lot more hybrid in the way that you work in many ways sometimes i believe we suddenly come across certain ideas of what culture is or what culture does that become monolithic in nature and again that we should not necessarily cinch art to just like one way of being in the world because art for our sake is also a beautiful thing and so how do we just add the growing repertoire of what culture and arts does within societies [Music] you