At the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Toronto. Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 9:30 a.m.
I would like to thank the Canadian Commission for UNESCO for inviting me to contribute to this discussion.
I will now do some thinking out loud about cultural citizenship, a concept that has been growing in importance as various movements around the world have been converging towards a better definition of culture that would incorporate the concept of sustainable development. I would like to speak about this from a theoretical standpoint, and would be happy to give more examples in the course of our discussions. For the time being, all I would like to do is simply “set the table.”
The idea of cultural citizenship was first raised by sociologist and cultural studies pioneer Raymond William, when he was discussing aright of access to culture that would provide all citizens with cultural tools in a process involving institutions that would promote cultural fulfilment and expression for the greatest number of people. Considerations of cultural citizenship often revolve around the relationships between citizens and the institutions that give them access to culture.
As it happens, my interest was initially elicited by the school of thought on cultural citizenship that surfaced in the 1980s in Latin America through writers like Manuel Rosaldo, who spoke of cultural citizenship as a way of describing citizen initiatives that focused on expressing, demanding and negotiating for liveable cultural spaces in areas of relative poverty and alienation.
These thinkers associated cultural citizenship with making people more autonomous and accountable, with a direct exercise of the power to decide and change things, and with a reconfiguration of social power relationships from the bottom up. I am interested in this line of thought because it is part of a completely new way of approaching cultural citizenship.
One well-documented example of the strength and scope of such a concrete reconfiguration of power relationships is the one implemented in Porto Alegre in Brazil following the election of the Workers’ Party in 1989. At the time, the city was falling apart and bankrupt, and public utilities only served the central core (10% of the city’s area). Fourteen years later, the literacy rate had risen to 98%, 100% of the population had access to drinking water and electricity, the sewer system covered 92% of the city, and 1,800 buses criss-crossed the city’s 470 km2. This radical transformation came about as a result of the introduction of a participatory democracy that has served as an example for others ever since.
In 2003, 700,000 residents of Porto Alegre took part in processes and discussions on education, economic development and culture. I raise the example of Porto Alegre not as a model to be copied, but as one of the sources of inspiration that had a major impact on the direction taken by the organization called Culture Montreal, of which I have been the elected president since its establishment in 2002.
Closer to home, researchers like Christian Poirier of the INRS (a Quebec scientific research institute) continually refer to the cultural citizenship concept to break free of the rather sterile adversarial dynamics between democratization (of learned culture and culture as access to works) and cultural democracy (culture as expression). For Poirier, the concept of cultural citizenship accommodates the practical aspects of cultural democracy, while going beyond them and taking them to a sociological and perhaps even a political level.
Poirier therefore argues that cultural citizenship can be conceived as a fourth phase in the evolution of the concept of citizenship, after phase (1) civil rights (the 18th century in England), (2) political rights (19th century) and (3) social rights (20th century).
According to Poirier, cultural citizenship:
- [it] assumes that individuals secure appropriate means of cultural creation, production, dissemination and consumption. Individuals are thus no longer considered “consumers”, but rather as active and intelligent creators and disseminators.
- [it] adopts a perspective that works from the bottom up – from citizens to institutions.
- [it] is a substantial citizenship, differentiated to suit the identities of each person and of the groups to which they belong.
- [it] contributes to personal identity building as well as to encounters and interactions with others; it makes way for dialogue.
- [it] is open to the public and the political spheres.
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- [it] factors in political transformations, with politics including not only governments and political parties, but more broadly, citizens and new intermediaries like associations and interest groups – in other words, an organized civil society that is able to achieve cultural and political governance.
- [it] encourages alternative groups or those marginalized by mainstream culture to express themselves, opens up new cultural and political spaces, and leads to a proliferation of different public spaces.
- [it] gives due regard to the growing complexity of territorial scales, from the local (including neighbourhoods) to the international.
- [it] adheres to a proactive vision rather than remaining on the defensive or being “reactive”.
- [it] sees culture as a vehicle for social connection.
- [it] gives consideration to the more widespread effects (both personal and social) of culture, differentiated contexts and places, multiple reasons and motivations, different modes of cultural transmission, and a wide variety of complex definitions of culture.
The idea of cultural citizenship is very promising for the future. First and foremost, it redefines the role of the arts, culture and heritage in a context of sustainable development and even human development.
As French politician Ivan Renar wrote in an article about European culture, “[Translation] Culture must be viewed from the standpoint of human development. It transmits to future generations everything that heredity does not. It is therefore not an afterthought, an ornament, or a decoration to be worn on one’s lapel. There is no citizenship without access to knowledge, without the sharing of knowledge, or without the emergence of the ability to create that which is symbolic.”
In politics, people no longer speak straightforwardly about the recognition of cultural rights or access to culture as programmed and disseminated by institutions. The focus is now on human beings and citizens as cultural players, decision-makers and agents of creating, producing and even disseminating culture. The cultural citizenship concept has turned the spotlight on cultural participation.
As sociologist Guy Bellavance pointed out (and I quote): “[Translation] Placing an emphasis on cultural participation rather than mere attendance at cultural institutions and other venues (in which the standard emphasis is on numbers attending and box office receipts) is not so much a change in how one approaches the idea of culture as it is a change in how one views cultural action.”[1]
Cultural citizenship is clearly becoming a more concrete and palpable reality with the inroads being made by digital media, which have been preparing citizens to become players in their artistic and cultural life and giving people the cultural power previously monopolized by institutions and professionals endowed with cultural knowledge, resources and expertise. Concretely, the programming-creation-production-distribution-consumption chain has been broken by digital, thereby leading people, who had previously been passive consumers of culture with no influence over the process, to reject the assumptions underlying the consumer-culture relationship.
The idea of participation challenges the consumerist relationship to culture. It reviews the vertical cultural systems with which we are familiar and creates spaces that embody the values of the people as well as platforms that allow for interaction and creativity between economic, environmental, social and cultural fields. Likewise, cultural mediation in the arts is no longer perceived as an attempt to build bridges between works and citizens who are unfamiliar with them, but rather as a way of bringing people together around a work and having them interact with it.
The resurgence of the cultural citizenship concept also stems from growing interest in a renewal of dialogue and efforts to promote sustainable development.
It has become increasingly clear that sustainable development needs to be expressed and articulated around much more than a set of legislated prescriptions to be followed in order to avoid wasting limited and non-renewable resources. Since it has more to do with qualitative than quantitative concerns, culture can spell out and share human development issues. It can decompartmentalize issues that were previously confined to measurement and evaluation systems, and that amounted, under the guise of arguments and conclusions, to nothing more than statistics and quantified projections.
A new vision of sustainable development is needed to get the largest possible number of human beings emotionally and creatively engaged, because they are ultimately accountable for, and the beneficiaries of, an essential vast blueprint for civilization.
This blueprint needs to be developed and deployed resolutely, guided by our sharpened awareness of a vulnerable and eminently destructive economy that serves only to satisfy the boundless greed of a small number.
To underscore the importance of such a blueprint for civilization, to catch people’s imagination, and also to serve as a warning, I would like to quote a sentence from a Quebec intellectual and former assistant deputy minister of culture in Quebec (from 1978 to 1983), Noël Vallerand: “[translation] when artists, intellectuals and scientists lose touch with the masses, charlatans worm their way between them.”
So can we really express, interpret, channel and project the dreams, hopes, creativity, needs and plans of a community in all its diversity and singularity, without culture and the arts, which are precisely what not only give rise to ideation, transposition, representation, awareness, communication, dialogue, emotion, mediation and inclusion, but, above all, contribute to the gradual building of a cultural identity that has a direction, and perhaps even a destination, that can be shared?
If we take an interest in the arts, heritage and culture from the standpoint of citizens, and stop endlessly referring to the legitimate interests of the cultural sector (audiovisual, magazines, and so on), then we might well be able to succeed where we have too often failed before. Interventions that smack of being overly corporate can only strengthen the perception that we are boxed into a system modelled on business negotiations, when what we are really talking about is development and civilization.
I would like to conclude by saying that the concept of cultural citizenship can be developed further if we can avoid making it a meaningless catch-all phrase. I firmly believe that the concept can be used to launch a very wide-ranging dialogue about the future of not only the arts and culture but also of a form of human development that is not controlled by experts and interest groups, but which instead addresses all citizens directly.
Thank you.
[1] “Entretien avec Guy Bellavance : comment marquer la présence de la culture dans nos vies,” Le Devoir, 2 October 2012.
