So how can these conceptual connections and shared historical origins help us to imagine and create more equitable and culturally democratic policies? From my perspective they remind us that policies for arts and cultural participation should be not just about provision of public cultural spaces or about audience development in the educative sense. These policies should consider how participation in cultural commoning brings the capitals, norms and values of the participants together as common-pool resources. As debates about free museums policies and their visitor demographies suggest, it is not so simple as “build it” or “make it free” and all will come. Commons are made. They can also be enclosed, so that those who do not identify with these attributes or who do not have the same capitals, are left outside or excluded. Commons are also threatened by private interests. Rees Leahy argues, for example, that the cultural policy efficacy of museums is related to tensions between the governance of bodies of work - collections - and the production of social bodies.27 And so generating public good and social improvement through museum participation is always in tension with the protection and curating of works of art. Parks remind us how the everyday negotiation of shared spaces is important and valuable to both people and places, and that public policies should promote forms of participation valued by all. The next stage in the history of their role in urban cultural policy must see a shift to statutory duty of maintaining access to these common-pool resources and protecting them from private enclosure.
The People’s Parish - Singing Our Own Song David Francis and Mairi McFadyen
TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland) is an organisation which brings together the main traditional art forms of music, dance and storytelling, and seeks to position them as a resource for contemporary life and creativity. TRACS is in the early stages of a major project, The People’s Parish, which aims to enable people to shape and share the story of their own community, and to find meaning in it by combining local stories and traditions with local creative voices. Our starting point is acknowledgement that the world is in a state of profound crisis but that, by digging where we stand - echoing a guiding principle of cultural commoning that our cultural life first and last is local - we have the means to start addressing that crisis. Our vision is of a revived and enriched civic life, with flourishing communities, characterised by their members’ sense of well-being, good health, civic engagement, radical democracy, social justice (equitable distribution of wealth, power and privilege), and respectful relationships with nature and each other.28 We envisage communities bound together by a sense of place; by a connection with what makes a place different from another – local details, landmarks, geology and geography, resources (the natural dimension); by a connection with the ‘layering’ of a place – of what has happened in the place before the present day and how the resonances of past events persist into the present (the cultural or human dimension). As a recent study put it: “The nature of inequality, distinctive histories and our individual experience intersect in the stories that grow up around places. Those narratives of place in turn shape our responses to individuals in those places”.29 The renewal of the social and civic fabric is both goal and means. And it is urgent. In order to flourish in the present and in the future, communities also need a relationship with their past, their collective memory. It is our contention that two of the chief ills of our time are alienation and loss of meaning. Culture, nature and society constitute the lifeworld of the individual, which he or she interprets to find meaning. Meaning - its assignation, communication and interpretation - is the central element of culture, the product of individual minds responding to and navigating reality. A community is any group capable of sharing meanings.
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