UNESCO and the Making of Urban Cultures Deborah Stevenson (WSU, Sydney)
The arts operate within a nexus of cultural policies with those of local and national governments historically being the most influential. Increasingly, though, supra-state bodies, including the European Union and UNESCO, have also been active in developing programmes and funding initiatives intended to support cultural activity. As part of a major study examining the role of UNESCO as a global cultural policy operative particularly through programmes associated with the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, this paper is interested in the ways in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network is becoming entangled in the tension between city imagining and sustainable development. It suggests that the move to affiliate the UCCN with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals poses a number of challenges for the UCCN and its member cities, not least of which is determining what sustainability might mean to networks of cities formed to support and showcase creativity and local cultures.
Biographical Note
Deborah Stevenson is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Her research interests are in arts and cultural policy, cities and urban life, and the role of gender in shaping creative practice and cultural consumption. She has published widely on these topics including nine authored/edited books and her latest monograph Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value and the Social is due to be published in 2020 by Edward Elgar. Professor Stevenson sits on the editorial boards of leading journals including the International Journal of Cultural Policy and is an editor of the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. Her recent funded projects include a major study of arts practice in Sydney; a national investigation of cultural taste and consumption in Australia; and an examination of UNESCO’s role in shaping local and national cultural policy.
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