Above photo: Antenna/UnSplash.
It’s important to recognize the cultural underpinnings of housing, education, economic development, and other sectors.
And use them to inform our decision-making.
This is an adapted excerpt from “Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life,” edited By Tom Borrup and Andrew Zitcer. It provides an overview of place-based strategies shared in the book. Other sections of the book address creative work in the arenas of civic processes, learning environments, and aesthetic strategies. This excerpt is published here with permission.
Culture, unlike democracy, is self-propelled and self-propagating: it is persistent, in ways that democracy strives to be; it is effusive in ways that democracy should be; it is practical, as democracy must always be; and it is critical, in ways democracy is too often not. In these ways, culture’s strength and importance to civic life is that it runs through everything; it is the warp to democracy’s weft. The growing recognition of Indigenous wisdom about place and its management are important to acknowledge in any discussion of place-based work. The “new” ideas of regenerative and permaculture agriculture can draw a lineage to Indigenous wisdom, for example. Regeneration of democracy, and permaculture-like practices in its stewardship, remind us that democracy has had an Indigenous lineage well before the misattribution of its birth date as the American revolution or even 5th century BCE Athens.
Democracy, the value and its practice, requires constant nurturing, widespread participation, regular renewal, visible processes, and meaningful outcomes. It is not a given nor a natural state of human affairs. Creative practice is one mechanism for this social embodiment of democracy, just as its dark twin, civic deviousness, can be for society’s authoritarian impulses.
Creative practice runs in our family and in our community along culture’s warp, interwoven with democratic values manifest in community gardens, affordable housing, historic preservation, community organizing, economic development, sustainability, politics and policy, and arts like performance, poetry, and film. This path guides us through the four chapters in the place-based actions section of this book as they describe creative practices in four communities where democracy and culture are woven into beautiful tapestries.
Culture is reflected in all democratic practices. Sometimes, it manifests expressly as artistic practice that is a surrogate for a democratic one, as in the examples of the Lake Street Arts in Minneapolis and Creative Recovery in Australia, in which cases dramatic upheaval disrupted the routine functioning of democratic processes. The examples in West Philadelphia and north-west Victoria in Australia highlight creative activity or culturally-resonant symbols that anchor the gathering, aligning, and mobilizing effects necessary to a thriving democracy.
In West Philly, we tap into the conversation that witnessed a patient insistence on widening the circle of influence around the idea for a Writers Room in the community. As the initial project, the Writers Room, responded to the hopes and dreams of more and more people in the neighborhood, it evolved into the Second Story Collective, a working model for “shared living space and shared stories (that) can create a foundation for meaningful cohabitation and community-building and preservation — that the right housing innovations can address affordability and equity at the same time.” Community-based creative practices that guided the evolution of the Writers Room into the Second Story Collective are powerful examples of the persuasive democracy, where the work of dreaming and designing together persuades more to the causes of equity and justice in civic life.
Pangea World Theater and the community surrounding Lake Street in Minneapolis are located at the epicenter of the uprising in response to the George Floyd murder. Meena Natarajan, co-artistic and executive director of Pangea World Theater, describes four dimensions of their creative practice and its influence on shaping a series of art interventions across from the police station that was the focal point of the 2020 uprising: collective power, preparing the ground, politics of space and time, and transformation. The core assertion is that “Art and performance that is rooted in these cross-cultural relationships can model pathways to strengthen the arts as a vital space for racial, gender-based and economic equity.” This effusive democracy claims space in race, gender, and economic life pushing it well beyond its most common association with the political realm.
Democracy happens in all the places where ideas, beliefs and values are manifested. The greatest triumphs and failures of democratic values have occurred over the contestation of power in place and over place. It is the link between who and what and for whom and for what we build and create. In north-west Victoria, abandoned grain silos are utilized to reflect a contemporary version of a town “commons” through “the combination of practice, process, and outcome that actively embraces large-scale community participation and co-creation, as well as smaller scale artistic interventions in community life” that the authors of one chapter call “democratic spectacle.” This case study describes a creative project in which its creation processes are designed to serve an artistic and democratic goal. This insistent democracy imagines a richly layered civic life where democratic processes are embedded and made visible throughout, including acknowledgment of the grain silos as symbols of a colonial and contemporary anti-Indigenous agenda.
Seeking resilience is a growing priority among communities and public and private institutions alike. There’s also a compelling case for building in arts and cultural approaches to disaster and emergency response planning. This work shows the possibility that creative recovery projects can directly inform and make more equitable and just ‘non-creative recovery’ projects while also highlighting the transformative and transformable nature of creative recovery efforts; indeed the recovery efforts themselves are resilient!
These diverse perspectives only begin to touch on the range of diverse cultural practices found in different social contexts. These authors suggest that considering community in cultural terms makes it much easier to understand them. For example, in most Western contexts, the focus tends to be on the individual and/or individuals; an individual is the unit of analysis or concern. Whereas in large parts of non-Western societies, it is the community that is most often considered as the basic social unit. In these divisive times, it is heartening to learn of the evolution towards recognizing and operationalizing the community as the basic social unit in these four examples.
For over two decades, in places as different and similar as Boston and Oakland, and as far flung yet so close as Taiwan and Japan, we have practiced community development as a form of creative expression. Jeremy’s experiences are grounded in a close and cultural reading of the practice of community development by and for the Asian American community in two different cultural and identity-based community development corporations, the Asian Community Development Corporation in Boston and the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation in Oakland. But this could also be described as a myopia that helped him to recognize the cultural in every community’s development.
Practices that are grounded in culture have a particular value in advancing an equitable and just democracy and resilient and regenerative civic life. For example, while it is common to equate democracy with the act of voting, simply adding up how many individuals prefer one solution over another often does achieve real workable solutions in a community setting. Countering this simplistic notion of democracy can be found in the story of a profound intergenerational community’s self-help action that created the Siyuan Castle Story Hall, as documented by John, founder and chairperson of the National Taiwan University Building and Planning Research Foundation, who writes: “We switched gears and relied on repetitive story-telling rather than counting individual heads to get closer to the whole picture, avoiding splitting the community into majority and minority voices, and thereby holding the community together.”
Place-based practices, learning environments, community-based aesthetics, and civic processes represent the fabric of civic life that artists, culture bearers, and community members weave. And this is related to how we understand democracy. By weaving culture and creativity into forms of social organization, i.e., a democracy, we come around to “community as the basic social unit,” and “collective and creative actions” as the core necessary capabilities. And these address the rights of community members to participate in decision-making, that each has a voice and a role in contributing to decisions made.
The specific methods and procedures for this voice and role to take place require cultural input to be efficacious. In an urban diverse community, the procedures could be quite different from a rural tight-knit traditional community, or from a Native Indigenous community. Neither one is more or less democratic than the other, but in order to move from participation to influence, the unique nature of these procedures must be grasped. Different forms of democratic participation around the world rely on storytelling as well; Town Hall meeting governance in Massachusetts and parliamentary government in the U.K. and Europe are two examples.
In our work, we have used role-playing, story-telling, scenario-writing, collage making, spatial patterns, etc., as instruments in facilitating participation processes. A longitudinal, randomized trial of storytelling and perspective-taking by researcher Ayesha McAdams-Mahmoud, ScD, MPH found that these practices generate statistically significantly steeper decreases in social prejudice, increased institutional trust, and more equitable and trusting conversations.
One of the enlightening aspects of community participation is the energizing effects of the process over the end result. And as important, this energizing effect can lead to more impactful end results even when the end result is unpredictable until it emerges. When a physical form finally emerges, it is a full representation of the collective efforts of the community. As designers, this is what we have called “community aesthetics” or “Democratic aesthetics,” which becomes distinctive and characteristic of the community.
The full integration of democracy and creative practice can lead to a weaving of culture into civic life at the most systematic levels of policy and social infrastructure. A Culture-in-All-Policies approach, akin to the “Health-in-All-Policies” movement, can provide a comprehensive approach that recognizes the cultural underpinnings of housing, education, economic development, and other sectors. Without creative practice, we are knitting a single strand of democracy with the very real risk of a small snag or catch turning into a catastrophic unraveling. When we weave culture and creative practice into civic life we reinforce democracy like the strength, utility, and beauty of an expertly woven fabric.