Capital and culture : an investigation into New Labour cultural policy and the European Capital of Culture 2008

• Main Author: Connolly, Mark
• Published: Cardiff University 2007
• Subjects: 320
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.584214

This thesis is an investigation into the relationship between culture in New Labour policy and within the competition for the European Capital of Culture 2008. The study interrogates a policy paradigm which it identifies as a 'creative city/urban planning' approach to urban regeneration. It locates this approach within a wider New Labour 'Third Way' politics, in that it attempts to reconcile economic instrumentalism with a rhetorical commitment to a politics of the social. Based on elite interviews and documentary analysis, this thesis argues that this approach to urban regeneration draws on a misappropriation of the work of cultural theorist Raymond Williams. It demonstrates how this misappropriation results in an unbounded anthropological definition, whereby culture colonises all areas of economic and social life. Within this template, culture becomes a surrogate economic and social policy. This is illustrated in the case-study of Liverpool's bidding for, winning of and plans for Capital of Culture 2008. This analysis shows how culture without parameters is usurped within both a neo-liberal economic agenda, and a policy template which recasts social inequality as a personal cultural deficit. Within Liverpool's urban strategy, culture is conceived as a social and economic panacea. However, when culture comes to mean everything, it invariably means nothing. This thesis attempts to put Raymond Williams' 'vague and baggy monster' back in its theoretical cage.