PERSPECTIVES Cultural Commons and Social Wellbeing

fuel, household goods and services, transport, personal goods and services, and opportunity for social and cultural participation.

At the same time, researchers have developed an impressive base of evidence supporting Self Determination Theory9, which argues that people are most motivated by intrinsic things - such as having the capability to do things for themselves, having autonomy to make decisions that matter to their lives, and feeling positively related to other people.

Those championing cultural commons need to be sensitive to the fact that people who do not have enough material resources are less likely to have the capability to engage in cultural activity. Severe deprivation is likely to rob people of even the ability to appreciate passively a cultural experience. Cultural commons need to empower people, in peer networks, to be creative for themselves. Human beings prefer to be active doers rather than passive recipients.

Homo sapiens evolved for over one hundred millenniums in small, close-knit social groups. The transition to postmodern life has been for many too abrupt, too brutal. It is no wonder that mental illnesses - depression, anxiety and addiction - are the fastest growing health problems of the developed world. Yet a social science of human wellbeing can help us to understand our limits, and to rediscover our strengths.

As the world begins to recognise the yawning chasm between western TV lifestyles and the actual material resources the Earth can provide, there will be greater demand for authentic cultural experiences rather than throwaway consumer products. Cultural commons have the potential to be a sustainable source of sustenance for people’s hearts in an era of constrained global resources. They can go deep and provide spaces and moments within which people can find deeper kinship and solidarity with one another, as part of a global movement for human flourishing.

Cultural Commoning and Civic Conversation

Denis Stewart

“..in the shorter run, which is the run of everyday life, a civilisation is irrigated and sustained by its common interchange of ordinary intelligence”. Clive James (2007)10

This article has its origins in my experience of participating in an exploration - initiated by Voluntary Arts with others - of ‘our cultural commons’ as a way of thinking about local creative cultural activity and how this can be grown and sustained. The article is in two parts. The first part suggests ways of thinking about ‘culture’, ‘commons’ and, therefore, ‘cultural commons’. The second part shares some perspectives on conversation and its crucial role in a cultural commons.

In recent years there has been growing interest in ‘the commons’, not least as part of people’s search for viable and ethical alternatives to current economic and social paradigms. Much has been, and is being, spoken and written on the subject. Prominent in this extensive discourse are concepts and practices related to/rooted in people making common cause – people of diverse character and capability who hold in common a set of values, a sense of human kinship, and a commitment to making a difference and shaping a place for the common good.11

One insight which I find especially helpful in thinking about the commons is expressed in David Bollier’s comment that “the commons is an active, living process. It is less a noun than a verb because it is about the social practices of commoning”.12 There is no commons without commoning.

Turning to cultural commons, it is worth considering for a moment the various meanings of the ‘cultural’ descriptor.

In its broadest sense, culture can be described, for example, as “the total set of beliefs, customs or way of life of particular groups”.13 At the other extreme, the word is used in very narrow ways as if it were the same thing as ‘the arts’. Between these ends of a spectrum of meanings, it is helpful to see ‘culture’ as denoting an aspect of human society that includes ‘the arts’ (visual, musical, performing, etc), but also other manifestations of human creativity, such as intellectual accomplishments –

in sciences, philosophy, humanities - the processes and products of design - in technology, engineering, architecture - and the practical crafts of making, agriculture, horticulture, and so on.

But culture is not just a collection of customs, conventions, practices and accomplishments. It is, first and foremost, an active process, with which people engage, and which shapes and is shaped by the context in which other practices - social, political and economic – take place. It is about people being creators as well as consumers of cultural artefacts and experiences.

Participating in culture as a process through diverse forms of culturally creative activity is something that many people love to do - and everyone has the inner potential to do - not just privately but in a civic space. When people ‘do culture’ in collaborative association with others, they are engaging in a form of civic participation. They are being creative citizens whose caring about the common good finds expression in their working together creatively to make things happen. Such cooperatively creative acts - often small, always significant - are what cultural commoning is about. And people engaging in conversation is at the core of this process.

There are several ways in which conversation is a crucial part of cultural commoning. First, conversation - the marvellous process of people talking, listening and learning together - is in itself a culturally creative act. Consider for a moment the root meanings of the English words ‘con-vers-ing’ and ‘con-vers-ation’. Vers means ‘turn’. From vers we also get the word ‘verse’ - a line or row of writing; a furrow. The metaphor is of ploughing, of turning over earth to form a furrow, of turning from one row to another. So, in the course of conversation, the people participating can be said to be ‘ploughing together’, working cooperatively on the same ground. And ploughing is a cultivating action, a deeply transformative culturing process.

In practice, conversation can be a precursor, a sort of parent, of creative cultural commoning. Much of the work that Voluntary Arts Ireland is doing, in partnership with local authorities and others, involves the simple act of inviting people in a locality to come together to share stories and perspectives on creative cultural activity in and around that place.14 Convening conversational gatherings of citizens enables connecting between people and learning from and with others.15 And it can encourage those participating to see that they are already/can become ‘creative citizens’ who can initiate new culturally creative action in the civic space. Furthermore, participating in conversation with others is an essential and intensely practical part of the collective creativity that happens as a group of creative citizens imagines new possibilities and works towards realising those imaginings. As one thinker has expressed it, “conversation is a cooperative activity, not just a series of beautifully manicured statements”16. Conversation, that goes beyond the cosmetic, changes things. It helps to make a difference.

In summary, people being in conversation with each other, learning and creating together, is essential to the purposes and processes of cultural commoning. It helps to prompt participation. It helps people to discover a ‘wise initiative’17 that they can take on and perceive a shared sense of purpose. It helps to cultivate and sustain commitment along the way. And conversing with others co-creatively fosters a sense of practical hope in the face of life’s challenges. As David Fleming put it, “people talk to each other and start to believe they can work things out for themselves”.18

There are hints of a heartening vision here, glimpses of grounds for being hopeful in the midst of our contemporary world’s despairing tendencies. As much as ever before, our world needs the nourishing, civilising influence of what Clive James calls, with customary eloquence, the “common interchange of ordinary intelligence”. Cultural commoning and the co-creatively civic conversation at its heart are forms of that common interchange, enabling emergence of the extraordinary from the ordinary and the ethically excellent from the everyday.

Creating

Caring C R EATIV E C ITIZE N S Cultural Connecting M AKING CO M MON CAU S ECommoning

Cooperating

Conversing

Parks as Commons

Abigail Gilmore

I became interested in thinking about ‘the commons’ in relation to cultural policy through my involvement in the project, Understanding Everyday Participation - Articulating Cultural Values19 and, more specifically, in relation to how participants in this research expressed their relationships with parks and open green spaces. The project has been investigating the practices and values of ‘everyday participation’ and the ways in which individuals and communities’ participation helps structure and shape their lives and their relationships to local governance and local place. Through mixed methods of enquiry, it aims to re-evaluate radically the value of cultural participation from the perspectives of participants rather than the perspectives policy-makers or institutions. The intention is to resist a common ‘deficit model’, and to present the means for more culturally democratic management of and access to resources.

Analysing transcripts from household interviews and drama-based workshops with young people in North Manchester and East Salford, it soon became clear that parks are spaces that express a breadth of different values within the localities they are based. Parks appear to have more salience to people’s everyday lives than the types of assets and amenities we normally associate with cultural participation and value - such as theatres, museums and galleries. The uses to which public parks are put by these participants in our research participants, the values that were attached to their use (and their avoidance), are multi-form and multiple. People use parks with families and friends, in facilitated sports and recreation, for access to nature, to play and to day-dream, spend-time on one’s own, or save time through taking transversal routes to other activities. Parks and green spaces in the city are not just a central part of everyday cultural participation, but also mark time and generate value through their part in people’s memories of childhood days, as well as through the value they connote to their existing neighbourhoods.20

These finding suggested to me Linebaugh’s description of the commons21 as that which is constituted through participation, as the gerund of ‘commoning’ rather than the fixed asset of space. People bring their own values, meanings and resources to their participation in parks, and in doing so generate further value for their neighbourhoods and communities. “The activity of commoning is conducted through labor [sic] with other resources; it does not make a division between ‘labor’ and ‘natural resources’. On the contrary it is labor which creates something as a resource,

and it is by the resources that the collectivity of labour comes to pass”.

However, the commons are not neutral spaces or empty vessels waiting to be filled. As places where many different communities share public space, parks act as contact zones22 and can exacerbate both social cohesion and conflict. On the one hand, they provide opportunities for encounters, the formation of social networks, intercultural integration and the articulation of both public and private concerns. On the other hand, they can also highlight tensions between different social groups and are vulnerable to exploitation from commercial use which may privilege private capital over public value, e.g. when festivals take over parks temporarily but change their use permanently; or when space becomes branded by private interests through sponsorship23. Furthermore, public parks are under threat in the UK, as austerity measures are forcing the local authorities that own and maintain them to look at other income models or face the closure or sale of parkland: over 90% of park-keepers predict budget cuts, and 40% are expecting their parks to significantly decline as a result.24 As common-pool resources, distinct from common-pool property - since they are not statutory services which local authorities are dutybound to keep open and so are not truly owned by the public - they face enclosure.

The public park has its roots partly in the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th century. Our archival research on the establishment of public parks in Manchester and Salford, the first municipal parks in the country, has revealed that the history of these ‘green lungs’ is intertwined with debates over the moral and physical health of the newly urbanised poor, and that campaigning for accessibility for spaces for ‘public walks’ resulted from the taking over of common land as an economic as well as physical resource.25 Previously the private spaces of the elite, symbolic of their wealth and power,26 parks came to be adopted by local public corporations as central devices within urban cultural strategies. These cultural policies included the encouragement of ‘rational recreation’ and public promenading (promoting the adoption of behaviours displayed by the ‘better classes’), the housing of new art museums and temporary exhibition spaces, and the promotion of live music economies and propagation of cultural tastes through bandstand concerts subsidised by Park Committees. Parks were at least as important as the new museums and library reading rooms of the day, as spaces for regulation and governance of the public body, for introducing proper behaviour and cultural education to the working classes and distracting them from less savoury forms of entertainment, such as music halls. Arguably, parks still maintain this function in urban cultural policy, and they do this particularly well because of their mass appeal and through the spaces they offer for everyday cultural participation.