Culture is essential infrastructure

To appreciate this total value of culture we need to move away from valuing it as a product, a sector or an industry and to recognise the enabling functions it performs in sustaining, supporting and regulating society and economy. Culture should be valued, and funded, as essential infrastructural provision. 

Seeing the big picture, capturing with a net

Culture matters in multiple ways. It is difficult to see the big picture without getting side-tracked. The significance gets lost in the cacophony of metrics and stories of change. You undervalue and undersell culture when you pick selectively, either indicators or case studies. Where most evaluation frameworks fish out isolated outcomes, to do justice to the value of culture you need a net to hold everything.

The value of culture is not unique in being difficult to pin down. Many important things are pretty nebulous in terms of measurement and accounting. A recent ONS publication speaks explicitly of ‘missing capitals’ and how investment in intangibles, such as branding and skills, may have been half of all investment over the last two decades, even though it’s invisible in the national accounts.  

What might this mean for culture?

A promising avenue is to consider culture as integral to essential infrastructural provision. Infrastructure has a connotations of large-scale, heavy and made of steel such as the rail infrastructure physically facilitating the transport of goods, services and people. 

Historically, there have been many examples of infrastructures incorporating tangible and intangible resources such as Medici’s urban ‘infrastructure’ for ruling Florence which had Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci on the books delivering ‘essential’ services. Or Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project, part of a New Deal that recruited over eight million people to work on state-funded projects, including the arts, to transform public infrastructure in the US. 

So, what is infrastructure? 

Frischmann’s Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources gives three economic criteria: being non-rivalrous in consumption (it can be used by multiple people at once); driving social demand (people want to use it); and offering services and goods. Important too is that infrastructure can create inputs into the production of other things.

This understanding of infrastructure is used, for instance, when the AHRC speaks of an arts and humanities infrastructure in the context of its efforts to grow RD&I (Research, Development and Innovation) systems; or in relation to the Social and Cultural Infrastructures programme recently launched by the British Academy. 

It is interesting to note that a policy recommendation from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy on ‘Universal Basic Infrastructure’ as part of a levelling-up agenda says ‘everybody should have access to a minimum level and standard of transport and communications networks, public services and local amenities, no matter where they live’. But where is culture in this? 

What’s the infrastructural role of culture?

The term infrastructure is having a comeback. The Levelling Up White Paper for instance uses the word 133 times. Culture gets 55 mentions, including “greater access to culture [is] needed to transform places and boost local growth”. But why?  

Reasons to include culture in infrastructural provision are both obvious and underdeveloped. To start with the former, we could take Article 27 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. 

Or we could take a utilitarian angle and emphasise the benefits. Interestingly, there’s agreement between the number crunchers and the storytellers about why culture matters: both the economists and the culturalists speak of the need to see the big picture. 

Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winner in economics, has argued that the value of culture is manifest when it comes to “the identification of our ends and the recognition of plausible and acceptable instruments to achieve those ends”. 

Unnecessarily polarised view of culture

Culture is like blood circulation, sustaining social co-ordination and keeping the economy ticking. And yet, an unnecessarily polarised view of what culture is prevents us from seeing the big picture. On this view, culture is either a selection of objects as in Matthew Arnold’s ‘best and the brightest’, consumed by the few, hence not relevant for the many; or the opposite, assumed ‘ordinary’ in the sense intended by Raymond Williams, part of lived experiences and everyday routines, so ordinary it is taken for granted and requires no support. 

Neither works for understanding the enabling functions culture performs in sustaining, supporting and regulating society and economy. The big picture accounts of value underscore the need to see the cultural economy as spanning old stuff in the museum, new forms of digital creativity, the lived experiences of street festivals and, crucially, how these are shaped by cultural values that orient how we think and what we do. 

In this expanded sense, we are back with Williams’s fundamental insight that the word culture has to be understood in two senses: “to mean a whole way of life – the common meanings; as well as to mean the arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort.” The value of culture has to reflect both. 

So what, or how would a fish decide about the value of water?

The arts, cultural sector and the creative industries are usually represented as suppliers of goods, services and experiences, but measuring just this systematically underestimates culture’s value, presenting the tip of an iceberg of its contribution to the economy and a fraction of its social value. Culture sets the mood music enabling social co-ordination and oils the gears enabling the embedding of innovation systems in the economy. This value does not show with the existing impact registers. 

Thinking of culture as infrastructure helps because it drives systemic and relational approaches to understand, measure and account for value. These models do not just track growth within siloed registers but record patterns of relationships, and not just when they are positive and incremental but also when they are damaging to the system as a whole. 

With this approach, we can see how culture’s enabling functions contribute to the creation – and destruction – of value across the whole system. These approaches are important not just because they are better suited to building a case as to why ‘the world needs creativity’ but also because they show how improvement in social well-being can be achieved through reconfiguring the relations within the system, rather than expanding the system through damaging growth. 

Seeing culture as part of essential infrastructural provision reveals a more systemic contribution of culture – the value that falls between the cracks in standard evaluation. It also helps us appreciate those elements of the ‘universal basic infrastructure’ we cannot do without if we want to survive and prosper. 

Patrycja Kaszynska is Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London. London. 
James Purnell is President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Arts London. London. 
 www.arts.ac.uk/
@PatrycjaKasz | @jimpurnell | @UAL