Culture, economy, policy: trends and developments

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Culture, economy, policy: trends and developments

Introduction
The important nexus between culture and economy is
by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion
on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in
his foreword to Zukin's (1988) Loft Living, the artist, as
one `representative' of the cultural class, has always
shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans
or as ``cultural producers working to the command
of hegemonic class interest''. In the last two to
three decades, in the US and more lately, in western
Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly
signi甤ant in the economic regeneration strategies in
many cities. Geographers, however, have been slow to
analyse this integration of the cultural and economic in
explicit terms, and it is only in recent years that a reworked
cultural geography (Cosgrove and Jackson,
1987; Kong, 1997) and a ``new'' economic geography
(Thrift and Olds, 1996) has considered the constitutive
role played by culture in economic development and the
way in which economic forces are in fact culturally encoded
(see Ley, 1996 and the other papers in the special
issue of Urban Geography, 1996). Often, this relationship
between the cultural and economic is facilitated,
enhanced or hampered by policy. Yet, as in the idealist
tradition, many more state cultural policies have been
based on the notion of culture as a realm separate from,
and often in opposition to, the realm of material production
and economic activity than is explicitly acknowledged
(Shuker, 1994, p. 54).
The 畍e papers that follow deal with various dimensions
of culture, economy and policy from a number of
distinct geographical, economic and socio-political
contexts. As a prelude and backdrop to these speci甤
discussions, I will provide in this introductory review,
the historical context within which to cast the 畍e contributors