Research paper
Toward a precision, complexity-informed cultural policy design: Structural bottlenecks to culture-led development in Skaraborg, Sweden

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cnsns.2022.106886Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We characterize the dynamic complexity of cultural vibrancy in the Swedish sub-region of​ Skaraborg.

  • We find that cultural vibrancy in Skaraborg is characterized by a ‘flare’ dynamics.

  • In the long term, vibrancy remains concentrated in the region’s main town.

  • This is due to important structural bottlenecks such as lack of highly educated women in the workforce.

  • Our approach sets the basis for a precision cultural policy design framework.

Abstract

We analyze the spatial–temporal dynamics of cultural vibrancy in the Swedish sub-region of Skaraborg. Our database consists of 4170 geo-localized cultural activities and facilities, mapped between October 2013 and March 2014. We make use of the TWC methodology for the dynamic simulation of the evolution of geo-localized activity starting from an observed distribution of events, and of the AutoCM ANN architecture to understand how cultural variables are related to the rest of the Skaraborg socio-economy. We find that cultural vibrancy in Skaraborg is likely characterized by a ‘flaring’ pattern of initial, widespread activity followed by a re-concentration into the main local urban hubs. The deep reason behind this unsuccessful developmental trajectory is the lack of centrality of cultural production in the local socio-economy, and of integration across cultural production sectors. This is in turn due also to structural bottlenecks of a non-cultural nature such as insufficient access of women to higher education. We make a case for the necessity to develop a new precision cultural policy design approach founded upon the science of complexity for both policy design and assessment, and we provide and illustrate a first technical toolkit to this purpose.

Introduction

Culture-led development has been an important topic in the local development literature of the past decades [1]. However, despite the hype that has gradually built around this topic, results have been mixed [e.g. 2]. Whereas in certain cases cities and regions have succeeded in positioning culture as a transformational developmental driver, in others results have been less satisfactory [3], [4]. What makes the difference between success and failure in this sphere? A major problem is the tendency to consider ‘culture’ as a homogeneous domain of basically equivalent and mutually substitutable activities in a developmental perspective [5]. When thinking in highly aggregate and abstract terms, it is tempting to think that investing in ‘culture’, be it building a new theater, promoting an artistic project or creating a new facility for cultural entrepreneurship, e.g. a business accelerator for gaming startups, should bring about a positive effect on the local economy no matter what — but such generalization is often problematic [6], [7], [8]. More generally, it is often customarily thought that the positive effects of cultural initiative would naturally spill over to the local social fabric, due to the beneficial action of aesthetics, creativity, imagination, and so on [9]. But equating culture with creativity or the presence of creative workers with the existence of a solid local cultural economy is a dangerous mistake [10]. In fact, pursuing a developmental strategy aimed at turning the urban system into a creative city or a cultural city may lead to very different, and possibly conflicting routes [11]. What is generally missed in such approaches is a full understanding of the deeply nonlinear nature of the mechanisms behind culture-led development [12], and of the complex interaction across many different variables [13], so that the developmental impact need not result from the action of a single or a few factors at work, but possibly from a composition of many different factors operating (or failing to operate) together [14], [15], [16].

To get a clearer understanding of the critical factors that harness rather than block the developmental potential of culture, we need to develop a toolkit that simultaneously analyzes two different aspects: the spatial dimension of the nonlinear processes operating at the urban or regional scale, and the structure of the interdependencies among the system variables — in particular, the pathways through which cultural variables affect non-cultural ones, and the centrality (or lack thereof) of cultural variables within the organizational structure of the system.

The spatial dimension of the analysis can be, as a first approximation, boiled down to the measurement of the system’s overall cultural vibrancy [17], [18], that is, the level of activation of its potential cultural drivers as defined by the cultural activities and facilities located on the territory. The pathways through which the cultural drivers have an effect on the overall functioning of the system may instead be analyzed through a suitable network representation of the essential interactions across the system variables, and more specifically of the structure of the connectivity of cultural variables within the network.

This methodology has already been developed and tested at the regional scale on a number of different cases: the Region of Veneto, Italy [19], the Region of Halland, Sweden [20], and West Kosovo [21]. In the case of Veneto, the methodology has been applied to a large Italian region with world-class cultural heritage (the region alone has 9 UNESCO World Heritage Sites) and one of the nation’s largest cultural production ecosystems, with a strong polycentric structure. In the case of Halland, the analysis has shifted to a Swedish region with significant heritage and cultural production and a less complex but still significant polycentric structure. In the case of West Kosovo, we have considered a (sub-)region whose cultural dynamics are strongly affected by the attraction power of nearby countries, namely Serbia and Albania, whose ethnic groups characterize the overall composition of the region’s population.

This diverse collection of cases has provided an important test of the methodology’s capacity to track the fine-grained features of the local cultural ecosystems and of their relationships with the whole local socio-economy. The analysis has yielded significant insights, which can be summarized as follows.

First of all, contrary to what is often intuitively maintained, there is no clear relationship between density of valuable cultural heritage and cultural vibrancy. World-famous heritage cities such as Venice may feature the highest concentration of cultural sites and even activities, but this does not make of them a culturally vibrant location if, as in the case of Venice, such sites and activities do not reflect a place-based production dynamics but rather function as a mere platform of global visibility of what has been created and produced elsewhere, and as a global tourist attraction [22], [23].

Secondly, the spatial dynamics of cultural vibrancy may be very complex, and may also reflect major environmental cues and constraints such as the direction of an important transportation route (e.g., a major railway, motorway or railway) or the proximity to larger or more culturally vibrant regions which exert a strong attraction power on the local dynamics [24]. When two culturally competing, external attractors are located at the opposite sides of the region, as in the case of West Kosovo, this may create a bistable dynamics where two distinct subregions emerge as satellites of the external attractors.

Thirdly, the time dynamics of cultural vibrancy may be equally complex, and may reflect in turn major intervening events and changes occurring both on the local territory and in neighboring ones at the appropriate scale [25]. Thus, an initially monocentric pattern of vibrancy may evolve into a polycentric one and vice versa. This has been for instance the case in the Swedish region of Halland, where a monocentric organization developed into a polycentric one, which eventually folded back to the original scheme.

Finally, and as already pointed out, the dynamics of cultural vibrancy is strongly affected by how cultural variables are connected to non-cultural ones within the territorial system [26]. Whether vibrancy is spatially and temporally sustainable depends on the existence of positive feedback mechanisms such that cultural impulses are caught and magnified in other sectors and fed back into the cultural sphere, in a way that generates cross-sectoral activation, also thanks to the creation of social and economic value [27]. Unlike what is commonly maintained, what is crucial for a culturally vibrant territory is not sheer size – metropolises are not necessarily the most important and vital cultural hubs – but a logic of local interrelationships in which culture is deeply seeded and functionally integrated into the local socio-economy [28]. We can therefore have large metropolitan areas where culture does not play a major driving role, and relatively smaller, less densely populated areas where it does — as well as vice versa, of course.

In this paper, we consider another case of a Swedish sub-region, that of Skaraborg, in the Västra Götaland region. The interest of this case lies in the fact that it is a small territory with a strong rural identity, in one of the countries with the highest performance at EU level for innovation and cultural participation. It is therefore interesting to check to what extent a culturally vibrant territory may emerge (or fail to emerge) in relatively difficult conditions (rural setting, absence of large cities and of main close-by metropolitan areas, etcetera), but in a favorable larger environment (that of Sweden). In the light of the previous discussion, the crucial factors that will explain the observed (and projected) space–time pattern of cultural vibrancy largely depend on the specific structural organization of the local socio-economy, and in particular on how cultural variables sit within it, how they are connected and what they are connected to.

This analysis will allow us to exemplify a new methodology of precision cultural policy, that is, finding out which are the critical variables that determine cultural vibrancy and their related impact pathways, in order to design and test a new generation of cultural policies that allow to boost the cultural potential of a territory by addressing directly the main structural bottlenecks that prevent the seizing of available opportunities. In this perspective, cultural policy is not to be regarded as a single policy lever, but rather as an element in a larger menu of interdependent policy levers that, building upon a new approach informed by the science of complexity, may allow to break existing policy silos and unleash the potential of new, system-wide local development strategies.

The remainder of the paper unfolds as follows. Section 2 presents the methods. Section 3 presents the data. Section 4 contains the main results. Section 5 discusses them. Section 6 concludes.

Section snippets

TWC maps

To map the cultural vibrancy of an urban area or of a region, we make use of the TWC (Topological Weighted Centroid) methodology. As this approach has been presented extensively elsewhere [29], here we propose a more concise formulation. The key concept of the approach is the Topological Weighted Centroid. It allows to represent and analyze geo-referenced data by means of a specific form of pseudo-distance, which is influenced by the relative positions of the whole set of observations. The

Context: The Skaraborg sub-region

Skaraborg is a sub region of the Västra Götaland region, located in the western part of Sweden between the big lakes Vänern and Vättern. The area has a high-productivity agricultural landscape. Skaraborg has approximately 265,000 inhabitants. It used to be its own county, Skaraborg county, but since 1998 it has been incorporated as the eastern part of Region Västra Götaland. The municipalities in Skaraborg are Essunga, Falköping, Grästorp, Gullspång, Götene, Hjo, Karlsborg, Lidköping,

Spatial–temporal dynamics: centroids and scalar fields

The Alpha map for all the surveyed activities and facilities in every sector across the whole sub-region of Skaraborg is shown in Fig. 13. As explained above, the Alpha map describes the ‘outbreak’ situation from which the current observed state of things has evolved. The Alpha map shows only one focus of activity around the main town of Skövde. The other two vertices of the basic urban triangle which concentrates most of the activities, namely Skara and Falköping, fall outside the area of

Discussion

From our TWC analysis, we have seen that the dynamics of a possible culture-led development trajectory for Skaraborg, despite the promising enlargement of the area of highest cultural vibrancy across most of the sub-region’s main towns, is likely to be a ‘flare’, i.e., to be short-lived with a return to the old, mono-centric status quo around the main town of Skövde. The reason has become apparent by carrying out the AutoCM analysis that has enabled us to build the MST for the Skaraborg

Conclusions

Our analysis has shown that, by making use of a sophisticated analytical toolbox that builds on methods and techniques from the sciences of complexity, it is possible to derive new, profound insights that allow us to better understand under what conditions local economies can successfully embark in new trajectories of culture-driven local development.

Most cultural policy design nowadays relies on a very modest empirical basis in analyzing and assessing alternative policy choices [34], and most

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Massimo Buscema: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Guido Ferilli: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Christer Gustafsson: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Pier Luigi Sacco:

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

Funding from the Region Västra Götaland, Sweden Culture Secretariat is gratefully acknowledged.

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