Creative placemaking and the cultural projectariat: Artistic work in the wake of Hull City of Culture 2017

Abstract

Cultural work attracts much sociological interest and is often seen as typifying ‘precarity’. However, this scholarship rarely examines how ‘placemaking’ policy interventions affect the concrete conditions of cultural work. We study a major recent public/private policy intervention in the United Kingdom: Hull City of Culture 2017. This intervention embodied a multifaceted set of policy logics, combining the desire to boost arts participation, with a market-facing imperative to bolster the city’s ‘brand’. We examine what happened to the city’s ‘cultural projectariat’ (meaning those workers whose career depends on assembling sequences of discrete, time-limited funded cultural projects) during this event. The influx of funds created opportunities for good-quality work, but specific sources of insecurity persisted and in certain respects intensified: including the need for significant unpaid work and permanent competition for resources. City of Culture’s nature as a market-oriented ‘placemaking’ intervention limits its capacity to ameliorate the conditions of cultural work, which has to be conceived as a policy end in itself if conditions of the cultural projectariat are to be improved.

Artistic work intermediaries as industrial relations institutions: The case of musicians

“…Cultural work intermediaries are so important in music because the employment relationship is not a common way of organizing transactions and the standard toolbox of institutional analysis is inadequate. In this sense, our insights regarding intermediaries as industrial relations actors are highly applicable to other labour markets in arts and cultural sectors – a growing topic of interest in industrial relations scholarship (Barré et al, 2018; Friedman, 2014; Umney and Symon, 2019). However, there are also important common themes between our research and that in other sectors where labour law and collective bargaining are similarly weak, and where cultural and social capital play an important role in shaping market conditions.…”

The cultural politics of civic pride through Hull UK City of Culture 2017

“…Sociological research of Hull's cultural sector would make a useful contribution to understanding the longer-term impacts of CMEs on smaller cities and towns, especially now that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has changed the criteria to encourage clusters of smaller places to bid for the UKCoC title (DCMS, 2021). This is of value to places like Hull, where being part of a relatively small cultural ecosystem (Umney and Symon, 2019) raises questions around currencies of trust, knowledge sharing and “speaking out” – especially over time – when some key decision makers have been in post for decades.…”

How state influence on project work organization both drives and mitigates gendered precarity in cultural and creative industries

“…Gendered access to the precarious project work which is core to CCIs is well‐established both empirically and theoretically. This article focuses on lesser‐researched dimensions of this access, signalled by study data and literature on the relevance to CCI employment of industry policy ecologies and the organization of project work more broadly (Coles & MacNeill, 2017; Greer et al., 2019; Umney & Symon, 2020). The article asked, how do state influences on the organization of project work affect gendered precarity in CCIs?…”

“…Umney and Symon (2020, p. 4), in their analysis of the UK ‘City of Culture’ scheme, draw on Greer et al.’s (2019) argument that relationships between funding sources and those funded are ‘a determining factor on the extent of “projectarian” insecurity in a given case’. They call for research into the effects of policy and funding interventions on the extent of precarity in cultural project work.…”