Urban Age Debates: Cities in the 2020s | Changing Cultures

good afternoon or good morning or good night depending on where you are my name is ricky burdette i'm a professor of urban studies at the london school of economics and director of lse cities i'm very quickly going to introduce the evening and then pass on to the chair adrian ellis welcome to the urban age debates this is the fourth in a series of discussions about the future of cities in the 2020s organized together by the alfred herrhausen gesellschaft and lse cities the research center here at the lse as i say it's a series which started in january looking at issues of changing patterns of work in the city then we looked at public space then at public transport and now today this evening on the issue of culture we will then conclude the series later in the year with a discussion a similar one on changing patterns of retail now to um have a very good debate about the issue of culture we've decided to work with a person who knows about what he's talking and that is adrian ellis adrian ellis is an old friend and an expert in this field of culture he's been working in the field for over 30 years running a consultancy called the aea consulting and very relevant to tonight's event he's also the chair and the founder of the cultural the global cultural districts network which brings together an enormous number of cultural districts from different parts of the world and i want to thank them for partnering as knowledge partner in this event so thank you for joining in to this event and i now pass on to adrian ellis adrian thank you thank you thanks ricky and uh thank you both for in inviting me to moderate this event and and to give the gcdn an opportunity to to contribute to this this series um you mentioned that i had been in this uh sector for 30 years that 30 years um throughout pretty well that 30 years there has been a long sweep of investment in um culture and particularly in cultural infrastructure arts buildings if you like um and a lot of that long sweep has been informed by um or prompted by urban policy rather than cultural policy per se if you think about um all that investment in in arts buildings it's often as a um a prompt to the regeneration of city centers it's been about trump priming for private investment in in downtown areas um it's been about the stimulation of of of uh the knowledge economy and the creative economy the sort of um the sort of arguments that are uh associated with richard florida it's been about stimulating tourism and it's not just been about single buildings it's often been about complexes or or clusters um from west kowloon to uh to sadia island and that trend is not it may have started off in europe and and in the states but obviously um it's also a trend in china um the middle east and increasingly in southeast asia in india and in sub-saharan africa um a lot of it is uh is uh policy informed if you like um the most successful are usually where that investment is in the context of an overall strategy which includes uh transport which includes all sorts of other aspects of urban policy uh sometimes you have um somewhat naive belief that build and they will come and you are left with cultural infrastructure which is which is more challenging to to activate 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 either new or um or or significant renovations um along came covered uh covert ground that process to a halt for all the very obvious reasons exactly how that halt worked out was really a function of different public health policies in different countries it was about the the trajectory of covert in those countries and it was also about to some extent um uh the public sector response in terms of emergency aid practice packages which varied enormously around the world but we are now emerging and uh from a period when in effect the the the sector uh as i say ground to a halt international travel local travel um uh uh uh compulsory closures and of course uh equally on the on the on the performance side or on the real challenges in how you operate under under circumstances of covid as we emerge the critical question is are we emerging into the same world or are we emerging into a different world and are we still we in other words are the cultural institutions that are emerging changed by the experience and by other things that have gone on um we know or or at least we know that the the trends in international tourism are going to be critically important particularly for larger institutions in city centers we know that the behavioral patterns may be changing as a result of the period of covid we know that people's sensibility about about international travel as i say you know flight shaming um behavioral changes we know that um uh there was during covert a flight to digital engagement with culture which is not therefore place based uh will that remain will that grow uh will we know that um remote working has become increasingly significant we know there are other changes happening downtown um so the question that we're asking ourselves this evening well the questions we're asking ourselves is is um how do cultural institutions larger and smaller respond to this and what is the part that they will play in the urban debate going forward i have three uh outstanding colleagues to to address these issues uh elaine vidal um who is the chief executive of the south bank center the south bank center which is opposite more or less exactly opposite the houses of parliament in westminster um uh and which grew out of the uh um the 1951 um uh uh festival of uh festival of britain is i think probably europe's largest art center and is an anchor to a cultural district which stretches uh from that west end along the east to to tate um to tate modern and elaine has experience of all the complexities of large-scale cultural infrastructure uh gabriella gomes-mont uh gabriela is i think currently in edinburgh lives in amsterdam uh uh and has deep experience uh and wide experience her deep experiences in a in a very innovative position in the uh mexico city government uh uh in in a think tank working on that interface between the urban and the uh the urban and the cultural and she is i was going to say a serial fellow at ted mit yale and other places but i think they overlapped so i think he's quite serial and uh our third participant is andreas gergen uh andreas is the head of the german foreign office culture and communications department and in that role um has extensive experience of both cultural diplomacy but also domestic cultural policy too and i think andreas who's obviously based usually in berlin is speaking to us from abuja in nigeria where he is currently i think in the the fray of the interesting issue around uh restitution um so and his experience draws not only on the on the on the um in public service but also in siemens where i think uh uh senior position siemens and began his career with the berliner ensemble so um crosses the uh crosses the the whole trajectory so let uh one more um one more comment before we we begin in earnest uh uh we will be uh opening this up to questions so um send your questions as you have them to the uh to the q a section at the bottom of your uh screen and please say who you are and uh if you have a a position that you want to declare um an affiliation you want to declare please put that there too so um elaine south bank you're at the very sharp end of all this um uh tell us do you see as you as as you and the south bank emerge do you see um yourselves emerging into a permanently transformed um position visiting your immediate and larger community and um is your institution itself changed in ways that will impact your relationship to that community uh good afternoon thank you thank you for inviting me along i mean i think the short answer to all of that is it's too early to say um we've been fully open since september we are an 11 acre site with four venues um including the hayward gallery but three uh concert halls and we didn't have the whole site fully open until september um we were closed for a large part of last year but we managed to stream events from behind closed doors um as you referred to earlier we discovered um just how much we needed digital at times like this and um frankly it was a wake-up call because we were not a very digitally savvy organization before the pandemic and that will definitely continue beyond um visitor return is pretty volatile um we we have the advantage at south bank of doing a range of events so we do contemporary music we do classical music we do dance we do comedy we do visual arts um i would say that contemporary music is showing every sign of being alive and kicking and almost every gig that we've had has been sold out um comedy similar pattern a lot of the literature talks that we have been doing very well attended classical music i would say is still showing signs of caution and so you would draw from that quite easily i think a suggestion that there's a demographic issue here um older audiences tend to be the demographic the overall demographic for classical classical music and that looks like it's a bit slow to return i think that he's not reluctant to come to the halls which i think people understand are incredibly coveted safe i mean we went through so many precautions last year to make them covered safe much much safer than supermarkets for example um despite our lengthy closure um but they are very nervous about travel so we are definitely impacted um by people's reluctance to use public transport particularly the older demographic um and in london we have a very in central london we have a very specific issue around the congestion charge and increased parking um restrictions which were brought in a couple of years ago and and have also put those constraints on people who might want to drive um tourism obviously was a huge part of our ecosystem so the 11 acres incorporate bars and restaurants and a number of retail um we were the previous year i think our visitor numbers were something in the region of four and a half million we had 50 000 um so we have had a massive impact um um in terms of overseas tourism and to some degree out of town tourism as well so the things that i think are lasting are the digital um um platform is going we are doing a number even though we're fully open and we desperately want people to come back and come and have the live experience we're doing a number of hybrid events where we are simultaneously streaming and that isn't going to go away um and we are post pandemic investing quite heavily in that digital infrastructure but there was a report out today saying with a number of regional fiestas in the uk that had relied on digital broadcast of their performances last year are reverting only back to in person and the thing we have to remember about digital is a purely economic one which is at the moment you don't make vast amounts of money from it nothing compared to ticket sales for example which is a huge part of our our financial kind of makeup um so it is it is one of those areas in which you have to invest hugely to get going and the um you know the likely results are um as yet a bit hard to work out um and certainly everything that we did last year was free um and so um the streaming was all all easy to access may i just ask one question because you mentioned one aspect of the demographic which is clearly there may be a reluctance with older audiences not so much to be there but but to get there and that has an impact but but you didn't you didn't mention at all the phenomenon of remote working and i'd be interested to know what you think the long-term impact of not just remote working but with it a sort of um emphasis on the uh on the local and uh a tendency for people to sort of stay local um uh and uh remote working for your own organization but particularly for all those workers who are around you and those audiences for whom um for whom uh a visit to the south bank was you know a short post post work day you know across london commute yeah well we're very affected by it um we keep saying that thursday night is the new friday night because many people are choosing to work from home now on fridays specifically fridays um so we're finding the site very lively on thursday nights um we're definitely affected by it um again we're sort of hammering out how 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 it's it's all together a much different schlep um and so i think we're definitely i know in particular i think um theaters are finding that they're very affected by that 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 um because of that shifting pattern we're all having to think about slightly different ways of providing um art and activity for for people we are closed currently on mondays and tuesdays which is the result of the pandemic and the squeeze on our finances we used to be open seven days a week but that is partly to cater for that issue of of people not london just not being as busy as it has been in terms of our own staff again we're sort of still hammering it out we we're currently two to three days in the office um and the rest of the time sort of hybrid working from home but we've never run a site that's open fully five days a week with that kind of working pattern and of course we have some staff for whom there's no choice they their jobs require them to be on site because they're very directly involved in the delivery of the of the cultural program so um again i think it's it's hard to draw any lasting conclusions from it but there i know that the west end theaters think that probably the sunday performances are here to stay umbrella may i ask your perspective on on the same issue both with respect to the um larger often city-centered located cultural institutions and i uh drawing on mexico city mexico city is one of the one with one of the cities in central south america probably all the americas with the richest legacy of particularly museums of national international significance which are in turn also significant tourist attractions or have been historically but also whether you see or whether it's too early to see a a um a sort of tilting in public sector priorities from larger legacy what are often known as legacy institutions to more community-based ones that are more uh locally based and outside of city centers those are great great questions agent um so basically i think one of the the provocations that i'd send um your way in terms of many of the shifts that i've been seeing both with the cities that i'm working with in europe as well as latin america is first of all i believe that um very much in the dna is this question perhaps not phrased like this but that cultural institutions and cultural infrastructure i think is starting to think about how do you become infrastructure for imagination if you will that i think is is actually an additional layer if you will to how we've been thinking about cultural institutions uh as of now i think that there's a expansiveness and experimentation that is happening in the civic realm because you know many times a public amazing public space for example can be strangers meeting in space 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 but that al so that it's a thing in in space but it's also a thing in time because many of these communities actually are um working on much much longer term projects um so basically in mexico city specifically i'm seeing many museums such as centro cultural digital that used to be led by grace quintanilla that unfortunately passed away some months ago but now by mariana delgado which besides becoming an a fantastic place for exhibitions and all these things that we've seen that museums have has functioned as uh since they has such a deep feminist agenda it is becoming a meeting space for the feminist community of mexico city in many ways so sometimes this will take the place of let's say thinking about what electronic uh publishing looks like sometimes it will be about um get togethers and expanding the role of um of digital tools but it has a social intention that allows for this infrastructure for social gatherings to happen which i find incredibly interesting so on one hand in terms of the larger public institutions i do think that there is a a multiplicity that is happening as well as a added experimentation um i've also been very intrigued with od with odi and helsinki with the central library that is now thinking of itself more less like eliza library yes but they call themselves like a living room so nowadays it's not only about doing research and seeing and going to um check out a book but it also is meeting rooms and it also has uh you can actually host events there yourself so it's becoming like the space of that you can take over as a citizens which i find fantastic as well as the central library in mexico city the bible uh when daniel golden was the the director they you had a place where you could do musical recordings where um they were teaching sign language because there was a community it turns out around the library of um of people with certain disabilities that were using the library but didn't necessarily have access to these type of tools etc on a smaller scale what i find incredibly interesting is perhaps vis-a-vis this multiplicity that was speaking about a specificity how many communities and many smaller projects are actually functioning as new civic type spaces where new civic typologies are possible so nowadays you're seeing everything from community kitchens that are also like tool sharing or you're seeing uh places such as collective in mexico city where same thing like you know the feminist communities are gathering to teach skills and i'm quite intrigued about how the symbiotic nature of both the shifts and the changes in terms of the experimentation nature and this expansion of possibilities and this as i mentioned this shift towards um infrastructure for imagination what the future could be like out in amsterdam right now where i live i've also been very intrigued how places such as the um national dance theatre of the netherlands has a fantastic project which is called switch where there nowadays allowing for the dancers themselves to have budgets so that they can become choreographers so it's a place of continuous experimentation and that they have like the whole facilities of the theater at their disposal everything from being able to create costumes as well as the the stage designs and whatnot so shifting roles and allowing for these places especially during shutdown where there was no public events to actually become spaces of of deep experimentation that then will go on to become public showings of what is happening behind the scenes as well and during the pandemic so hopefully these will be some of the things that will happen beyond the pandemic those aspirations seem uh the aspirations to be a community anchor in in new and imaginative ways and to act and have a social function as a a social function and a function at deeper functioning community seems to me uh to be something that has come to the fore for all institutions during during covert large and small i guess the question for many is are there buildings suitable um uh do they have the skills to do it and above all do they have the business model and um uh uh elaine i know i i remember talking to your i think your predecessor's predecessor michael lynch um who always had the ambition that that um the way he stated it and i'm not sure whether it was his coinage but uh he used it very effectively which was to be london's living room which was to be an open space where people gathered and the ideal was that they would come and then decide maybe to go to see something or maybe just a hang but that it served an underlying social function which alongside its its its performance is functioning performance individual arts and yeah sorry it was yes it was an extraordinary innovative piece of architecture in 1951 so the royal festival wall is actually we call it an egg in a box so the concert hall is suspended in a much larger square space and the whole point of the square space around and underneath and above the concert hall was that it would be civic space and it would be available for people to use as they want so it's it's also been called it was called the people's palace i think so and there was always this absolute kind of guiding ideological principle that it would be open and available for anybody who wanted to go in so we open our doors at 10 o'clock and anybody can come in and they come in to work they come into play they come in to have a drink they come in to think sometimes they come because they literally have nowhere else to go and that's fine we welcome all of them and they are joined eventually by concert goers and hopefully some of the cultural events and talks or the dancers rehearsing that we just have going on also in that civic space kind those things bump into each other and therefore people get a kind of introduction or an insight into some element of our artistic program and that will gradually kind of draw them too to to our our main ticketed program but if it doesn't that's fine um and we alongside that run very very specific programs of course for social inclusion and participation so we run you know um monthly tea dancers for those suffering from social isolation or dementia um and you know anybody can come and turn up even if they don't have a partner and they do and everybody takes part and so we have that delicious thing of the the sort of unplanned and um unprogrammed meeting um our sort of orchestration of it um so that we can seduce people in to um participation or just to observe if that if that's what we want to do but it has always been a space that belongs to the community that was the point of it but you know when many many community groups use our space purely for rehearsing and book the spaces and we don't charge them and um you know because they're from the local area and we that is a very also a very important part of the ecosystem andreas you're involved in an international dialogue about exactly these issues which is what is appropriate cultural infrastructure uh what are the roles that it needs to play in urban development what it is playing cultural development etc as you look at um western europe in general germany in particular and even berlin in particular um uh do you see um uh what do you what do you see about the exportability or otherwise of the model that we have broadly lived within in europe and the states over the last few decades it's very challenging to say um to say just in that right moment because i'm in abuja in nigeria so i can't tell you how the situation is in berlin but just getting getting back to the initial question i i think or my my two lessons from the pandemic is a learning about vulnerability in the time in the same time a personal vulnerability which gives another sense to personal presence and the vulnerability of a society which is basically a a threat for the idea of an homogeneous space in a nation state and which leads us to a more enhanced thinking about communities and and that now going back to your point um so what we have seen in invest in europe and and in berlin is as all in in all the countries a sharp decrease in attendances in the museums um in the public sector um with a high amount of money spent just to maintain the infrastructures um which is good on the one hand on the other hand it's a anti jupiter effect so so perhaps perhaps we are on the way to continue to sustain organizations which do not longer fit to the effects of the pandemic meaning to the effects of a reshaping and redesigning of a public space of a citizen space and which do not correspond to the to the needs to the need of the level of a society to rethink about homogeneity and homogeneity in our societies means to deal with the two key issues diversity and sustainability um and and on in in international level so i i think there is a catch still a catch-up effect be it in in lagos with 50 million people be the actual conversation about the benin bronzes and the future of benil city there is a real catch-up effect but but i'm quite confident that the design of the to build public spaces or cultural spaces in those countries who just start will light slightly differ from what has been built in europe and slightly differ from what has been exported for example to the arab countries 20 years ago so it was very interesting by by anti-shrimpitarian uh i think what you're saying is that there is in uh the evolution at least of the private sector process of creative destruction in which um uh established institutions are pushed aside by capital markets etc and new ones spring up because um either they are there is some pro revolutionary process that they have adopted that pushes the other ones aside there is a capital market and that capital market um uh people looking for a rate of return um or the highest possible rate of return either rationalize as the euphemism is or close or move move the parts around there is no equivalent in there is no direct equivalent of the capital market in what i take in the not-for-profit or the public cultural sector which means that when the cards are played they tend not to be replayed easily um and therefore there may be great creativity and great fertility but it's not necessarily taking place inside those larger cultural institutions that preempt the resources the reason i'm sort of unpacking that and spelling it out is that that does seem to be one of the potential um uh implicit one of the potential movements that one has seen during covert uh which is to say that there has been extraordinary creativity there has been uh uh innovation both both in terms of content and distribution but the larger cultural institutions have inevitably been preoccupied with institutional survival and their priorities and their fiduciary responsibilities are about keeping their show on the road and i'm wondering uh all three of you whether you see a growing tension if you like between the fertility of of creativity that may be taking place outside institutions and institutional preoccupation with with organizational survival or whether you see whether you see the relationship between creativity and uh and cultural institutions as being more harmonious i don't see why they can't sit side by side i mean certainly in the case of south bank center which by the way is not wholly publicly funded so public funding is only 37 of our of our total funding so we have always been necessarily entrepreneurial flexible on our toes thinking about opportunity um but but a recent example i don't know if if everybody is aware of a an amazing artistic um innovation in peckham car park um which was the transformation of a of a multi-story car park into a an extraordinary art space and um out of that came the multi-story orchestra and and who who introduce um classical music to different kinds of audiences and we have um started working with them at south bank center so that they can bring that style of introduction of classical music for example to families last sunday we had them here um and they uh did a series of introductions to instruments players music um for families and children so so i think here is a really innovative if you like disruptive um kind of art inspirational um art organization that i think we can work very kind of hand in glove with because we have wonderful spaces too into which these these events can happen but i but i would not be so pessimistic about the survival of the bigger institutions i think in the end the very reason that southbank centre was born which is that a traumatized post second world war government recognized that what a traumatized nation needed was art and culture not um alongside it needed the provision of housing and jobs and all of those things but it actually allocated a huge amount of money for art and culture because it is so essential to a nation's health and in the end it can be uniting and healing and i think for those reasons people will return to institutions and and the wonderful things that go on inside those institutions i i would just agree with uh elaine and one of the things i i believe is happening in um in latin america in terms of large institutions i i completely agree they do have their place is it it seems we're caught in on catch-22 if you're publicly funded a crisis comes and then suddenly the huge budget cuts actually put so many museums simultaneously simultaneously at apparel and i think that we're watching seeing that all over latin america were museums that we're used to having like you know strapped for budgets always but still had things budgets to do things uh suddenly our um completely at odds with with where the reinventions need to happen and then if you're privately funded then you're you're strapped into a more corporate agenda and you lose your freedom so perhaps one of the places of of imagination and creativity that needs to happen is precisely what you were pointing towards you're like are there other financial models um in many ways to think of one of the especially if you start opening up the the conversation to the other scales of things that are happening so for example in terms of urban agendas in general one of the big conversations is about resiliency and i think that pandemic has shown us that redundancies aren't necessarily we've thought about so much about this streamlining efficiencies and whatnot and then suddenly when crisis hits you actually figure out you actually need your redundancies to make your systems work and so for example uh the way that public space has become it's has been had this dual function if you will i think is interesting so you know if we certainly started thinking about cultural institutions and when a crisis hits how those redundancies everything from these places in new york that were used as clovid centers et cetera et cetera do budgets come from elsewhere another thing is when cultural institutions come into specific places within the city and what happens in terms of the real estate value why is there not much more thinking on broader terms in terms of the surplus capture of the of the uh 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 by the public if you will so i think that there's interesting things to think about there um that hopefully we'll be able to break apart this um again catch 22 between being beholden to the private or to the public um that many institutions right now i think is what keeps them in check if you will and unable to uh reinvent them more their way forward i'm not so i'm not so convinced that the capital market equals with fairness or innovation um so for the for the public finance institutions i i think even if you maintain a structure and a structure which has existed since 100 years has its own reasons to exist and may last longer than the pandemic effects but you have to put into it uh a small incentive for innovation and that's actually what's happening because i see many many of that um important public players opening up to another kind of community building opening up to to to um to more diversity and to kind of um to the to the digital space or to the virtual space to be shaped as a meeting space even in in those big elephants um what i was trying to say is but there is still a need for more innovation because the effects of the pandemic will last and and we are trained in that model you mentioned in the early beginning that we export products or we deliver services and people come to request those products and services and these products and services will change because they are under uh to be seen under their criteria of sustainability um so exporting big festivals will be be will be challenged in the upcoming years i'm thinking about the berlinale festival even on the khan festival um and in the same way what we are doing as governments or as cultural institutions be the british council be the girthy institute to try to export german german culture by taking by by buying a ticket for an airplane and by sending a film abroad that will tremendously change let me ask another related question which is [Music] 30 years ago somebody in charge of a cultural institution would be primarily thinking most of their time about what went on within it the programming within it you as cultural leaders are thinking just as much about what goes on outside it as what goes on in it you're thinking about the relationship to a whole series of stakeholders in the local community in the broader community you're thinking about the animation not only of the building itself but the animation of the areas around it and you're thinking often about the the animation of whole districts and your role as an anchor in those districts um you needn't answer this personally but how well equipped do you think we are as a cohort of cultural leaders for those responsibilities in other words uh are we um or uh uh are we are we um um we are we're integral to the urban debate and the contribution to it but our professional formation or professional formation is tends to be in the um in the internal side of these organizations or has been historically do you think that um there is a a need for and it may be generational change but a need for um leadership uh to to be more um skilled with more um familiar with their urban role and urban strategies um well i'm happy to pick that up i mean i i think the one thing that the last 20 months has taught leaders or certainly institutions is that they um 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 um 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 so i think you're absolutely right that leaders of arts organizations are going to continue to need to be constantly thinking about what the pivot is and what it needs to be and flexible but i think many of them have demonstrated certainly all of my colleagues and we formed quite a tight cabal now in the uk i think we've all demonstrated that we are more than capable of doing that i mean a lot of that agent in the uk has to do with the decline in public funding so given that for most of us whatever public funding we get is not sufficient to cover the cost of what we need to do we have increasingly over the last few years had to find other ways of making raising um producing further profits um not profit but but revenue and so um i think it's been the case for a while now that leaders have had to be quite commercially savvy and quite kind of um yeah innovative in the way that they're thinking about running the organizations you see a generational change gabriella so i i do think in in latin america in general i am seeing a museum's reaching out to other communities a lot more frequently of truly trying to build coalitions that go beyond the cultural and then very much thinking about a creative ethos as a social resource that sometimes we'll have purely aesthetic outputs that i think is a fantastic thing to have and then you know as uh louise the filmmaker once said you know what a we should not only think about culture uh in terms of its its um what it produces economically and socially but also even a language for society that we might not necessarily see its effects right away so in that sense i i find that um this need to reach out to not 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 skills of the city um you can become a lot more hybrid in the way that you work in many ways at the same time i do worry seeing this again like i'm referencing right now latin america specifically that many times when um there's a specific patron if you will for institutions then you become beholden to a more commercial agenda and in a certain sense i think this expansiveness and this poetry and this freedom that comes from artistic practices are something to maintain so how to walk that fine balance between both of those needs between um as elin was saying that being innovative but also you know many times being able to support practices such as experimental theater for example that might not necessarily have a a huge revenue at the time is something worthy in terms of culture at large but there is i think a new way of inserting oneself in the city and the society which i find quite intriguing in in general i think it's worth pointing out in the uk i mean it's a very good point about the pressures of commercial funding um i mean let's face it this government has provided 1.57 billion pounds in the in the form of a cultural recovery fund and that was open and accessible to institutions as well as to the smallest arts organization that was struggling to survive so i think the recognition of the importance of of those organizations but also of the role that art and culture has to play i think we have to acknowledge there there was an absolute recognition of that i'd like to open this up to questions this is from august today from aaa which i assume is the architectural association um but i may be wrong the question is how did digital technologies impact and contribute to nation's recovery effort from the pandemic what role did cultural infrastructure plan making cities more resilient particularly of developing nations and um i opened that up the whole panel what was critical during last year there was a rush to put a lot of stuff online from every cultural institution in the world and i think the effect was quite overwhelming it was also completely um uncurated and so it was quite hard to find the excellent in amongst the rest um we decided that we would be quite careful we we were also acutely aware we were we worked before the pandemic with over a hundred thousand artists and performers and most of those were freelance so we were acutely aware that there was a real issue for freelancers so we did as much as we could to bring orchestras back because if they got to play they got paid um so that we could stream it so we were we were curating our um so we were very very traditionally putting the orchestra on the stage putting cameras on it and then streaming it or recording it and broadcasting it later and we didn't have a platform to do that we had never had a streaming platform um on the southbank center site so we were sharing that with with existing digital channels um or through ticketing um organizations like dice um the result of the pandemic frankly is that we're developing our own channel um and of course we are most people are because we have absolutely realized that we need that but more importantly we are now sort of in a in a much more accelerated way digitizing all our archives so that we can put that onto our channel um because we have also reached we've also realized that we may need to reach those global audiences that were previously coming to us in different ways so the digital infrastructure has been key and actually in south bank center terms we've invested quite a lot of money in it um to continue on that digital journey gabriella uh from ramon director of place making europe and a student on the executive mmsc in cities at lse our co-hosts um a question uh to you how would you invest a billion dollars standard cost of a mega project true without the need uh for building big stuff to improve cultural rights production and access in a given place in other words uh if there weren't that that sort of underlying imperative to invest in physical infrastructure what would constitute a um you know a billion dollar strategy for a city i would love to have a billion dollars what can i say i will i'll i'll imagine my my way into mexico city once again um because i was working so closely with these types of subjects for six years so i one of the greatest potentials that i found first of all as you well said adrian like mexico city has it's one of the the cities with most museums in the world but at the same time the physical infrastructure has never necessarily been followed by super juicy budgets so i have the feeling that being able to equip the museums that we already have and that already exist across the city to be able to become expansive and experimental in terms of the way that they function both for mexico city as a whole but also in their specific communities i think would be incredibly interesting but since one of our questions was always how to travel the skills of the city um i was always very intrigued when we were working specific very directly with specific communities across mexico city about the need for typologies that are much more idiosyncratic than these bigger museums can be that very much serve specific ways of being of different communities and one of the things that i did when i was chief creative officer from mexico city we crowdsourced the mexico city constitution and amongst many other things we created an uh urban imaginary survey where we asked 31 000 people across 1 400 neighborhoods several things including the future of mexico city and whatnot and to our surprise uh many of these people actually responded that culture was one of the biggest attributes that they found mexico city could afford them like one of the things that they appreciated the most sometimes even um before education but often we actually cut cultural budgets first and working with the participatory budgets of mexico city we also did a big survey of what was happening on the ground and we found these absolutely fantastic spaces that again were like hybrid beings between cultural institutions but had a very specific social aspect to them such as uh that were a series of former gang members that created a cultural community that were giving infrastructure to bring in people out of gangs and to give them a a way of making money within their communities or um absolutely fantastic community centers that were mixed between senior citizen homes and day care centers and just like a plethora of ideas so the other part of the budget would also be for thinking about the micro scale like how do we expand upon the typologies of civic spaces that now exist because in a way you know libraries are fantastic museums are fantastic public spaces fantastic but why have we not expanded upon the repertoire of the ways that a city can speak and know the type of social energies that can be gathered in these civic spaces so that's what i do a combination between the more centralized and the bigger institutions and giving them space to experiment and expand upon what they're doing as well as the acupuncture smaller community-based uh idiosyncratic uh specific places that empower the local inhabitants to actually take over uh these spaces as we've seen with as i mentioned participatory budgets with quite astounding results andreas lisa in berlin asks a not dissimilar question which is how can society or politics or political processes support cultural community projects compared to supporting traditional cultural institutions in other words i think you know the humboldt forum just opened uh at a capital cost of i think 700 million um euro which is about the billion that was a little a little less than the billion that was mentioned for a mega project earlier um and it is it is the case that larger institutions for all sorts of reasons preempt significant but but it may merit it maybe political clout it may be all sorts of reasons preempt significant sums both of capital and revenue do you see um do you see in this period of change where community engagement becomes is increasing importance and where there is an increasing um emphasis on social issues of social and racial equity do you see a re a process of reallocation being needed and do you see it happening well the the homework phone was exactly the reason for my my silence i thought i would not be in the right position to pick up on that one billion euro question and because i'm not i'm not so convinced that this massive investment is really bringing things forward now we have it and we will work it out um but but coming back to the to the question you know if i had to spend 1 billion euro i would spend a third for artists at risk what we see actually happening in afghanistan should concern us and i think there is a need for cultural infrastructure for those who have to go to exile um and that will bring will bring innovation also to our society second is um a innovation fund so i i think money should be spent to foster to enhance and to enable in the field of innovation and that leads to to that question raised this is the way you can enhance community building in the in the existing organizations and this is partly done in germany or it's in a wonderful way done by the cultural foundation run by hotel focus next question from from the audience is um from serge rameen uh hi i'm a trustee of a local arts center my question has to do with the larger cities attract the bulk of investment in arts infrastructure a similar point and within these larger cities the wealthier boroughs ten years from now what is more likely the peckham or newcastle branch of the national gallery or the national gallery in hokkaido japan uh elaine i'd love you to answer this because there's a there's an interesting issue here with leveling up in the uk and the the priority afforded to london traditionally versus um uh other parts of britain particularly northern england so so and i think that one of the one of the issues underlying this question is um in addressing one inequity which is the inequity between london uh funding and other parts of uh of england and of the united kingdom will there be uh is there a risk of another inequity being exacerbated which is in the inequity between the city center and and the ava and other boroughs yeah i mean it's a it's a a taxing question when when money is tight um i mean i would argue that um in terms of the government's labeling of leveling up um of course the places that i refer to uh need that level of investment you won't be surprised to hear me say because i run the largest art center in europe and it happens to be located in central london but my view is that should not be to the detriment of a very vibrant very culturally rich and diverse capital city which also needs its investment retained in order to deliver what it delivers um i think of course we and um and the mayor's office has helped with this there have been the london boroughs of culture so uh there has been some um incredible investment in the outlying boroughs of of our capital city um but it's tough it's very tough and the there is you know in the end uh one of the the big um challenges that we have is the plethora of choice and um you know we have to reconcile that that consumers of art and culture have a huge amount of choice um and although there is emphasis on the local i think in a city like london where the center still draws um and and where the level of investment is higher that is always going to be quite tricky to pull off that's a very sort of uh britain-oriented um question i aim to elaine but more generally are the questions of uh questions of regional equity and geographical equity gabriella do you see a um uh do you see a leveling in in your work do you see um the pressures toward the preemptive pressures i'm going to i'm going to combine that with another related question because um it's directly ready from pau um rosal costa um coordinator of er econ cult and strategic co-director of valencia will design capital candidacy and his question is what's the relationship between culture and health and well-being it's a space to explore after the pandemic for traditional cultural institutions or is it one more hype and i think that as over the last 20 years as we've seen different arguments be developed about the rationale for public investment in culture that we were talking about at the beginning one where there's a great deal of writing and some of it quite robust currently is on the impact of culture on health and well well-being and uh the implications of that i may be highly distributive uh in that um uh far from it being an argument for say tourism where you need critical mass in a particular city centre area it's much more about immunity value to a wider community and i'm wondering whether for all uh all three of you whether you see a uh whether you see the argument about the contribution of culture to health and well-being as being one that a is likely to have increasing traction and b whether that's got resource implications for how public um public and philanthropic funding is dispersed in the cultural sector that's a great question and perhaps one of the things that i i believe um is important to keep in mind is that sometimes i believe we we suddenly come across certain ideas of what culture is or what culture does that become monolithic in nature it doesn't make them less true but let's say the turn of her towards creative economies and asking culture to produce in the same way that any other human endeavor would i think is incredibly interesting because yes let's actually think about what design and film and the cultural industries actually add to our our gdp and whatnot and all sorts of different types of value but at the same time what does it actually mean to keep exploring very different ways that cultural functions within our society so i've been very intrigued in seeing for example everything from cultural community centers that are deal with loneliness from a very different perspective like you can actually send both the budget as well as the externalities over to the health department of what loneliness is costing cities and societies i think there's a recent book by lorena hurts um that puts the budget for the uk into the billions of dollars in her book the lonely century but what would happen if we started thinking about that capacity and that affordance of culture in terms of how it creates community cohesion what everything from as i was mentioning community kitchens to these cultural centers on a more much more acupuncture level what they can actually do for a society but i think that you know in in a certain sense we cannot necessarily decide that culture is and does a certain thing but rather we need to keep the amplitude of all of these ways of that both aesthetics as well as culture can actually um add things to layers to society if you will so so i would be all for a continuous exploration of all of this everything from you know there's been incredibly interesting results dealing with ptsd with veterans as you've probably heard that are involved with putting on plays of greek theater which is you know just like incredibly interesting from arts programs um with people who have learning disabilities etc etc so i i do think that there's a lot more to explore and um 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 i completely echo that i think it's it's part of what art and culture do um i mean we we do a lot of work at south bank with with dementia sufferers and of course music is the last thing to go with dementia i mean dementia dementia patients retain their their um cognitive recognition recognition of music way way after after others other senses have gone so i would just like to echo also andreas's point about um artists in exile and to say that this saturday at the royal festival where we have the chineke orchestra playing a commission by a young afghani female composer um who is only 17 um and so we are we are doing our best to support those artists who i agree are much in peril so um i want to thank thank the audience for um both attentive active listening and some fantastic questions i want to thank the three panelists for a really um engaged and i think important discussion and um i want to um also just alert you to the i think the final and the sixth um debate or discussion in this series which will be in early december and is on the future of shopping and patterns of consumption and i'm sure some of the uh same discussion around long-term behavioral trends will feed into that too so um thank you to everybody and please stay with us for the final debate in december