‘It is not only an artist village, it is much more than that’1. The binding and dividing effects of the arts on a community

Abstract

The value of ‘the arts’ in community development is increasingly being recognized. This paper contributes to emerging insights on the various impacts of the arts on communities by highlighting when and how they can have binding and dividing effects on a community. We draw on a participatory research project conducted in Pingjum, a village in the Netherlands that hosts many cultural activities and in which many artists live. We discuss how the arts in Pingjum influence the community in the village. In our discussion, we pay attention to the sense of community that the arts generate, the meeting opportunities they provide and how the community is engaged by some artists. Our study shows that the influence of the arts is context-dependent, with the arts having both binding and dividing effects on the community in Pingjum. In terms of the value of the arts for community development, we emphasize three key issues: that the arts (i) do not have only advantages for a community; (ii) do not engage the entire community; and (iii) could potentially contribute to community fragmentation. Given these issues, we argue that the arts should be considered as one of several supportive means in community development processes. Ideally, they are integrated into a wider community development strategy and planning, and exist alongside other associations and activities in a community. In this way, the arts can contribute to the robustness of a community and assist it in developing the capacity and resources to flourish.

Insights and Inspiration from Explorative Research into the Impacts of a Community Arts Project

“…In line with Alice's statement, not everybody among the interviewees perceived the effects of the Grutte Pier trilogy on the community of Kimswerd to the same extent. Understandably perhaps, those who were themselves actively involved in the project noted the effects, while those who were less or not at all involved mentioned the effects less often or to a lesser extent (see also Van der Vaart et al (2017) for a similar finding in a different context). In contrast to this finding though, in the case of the questionnaire responses, visitors who themselves were not actively involved in the project noted several positive effects of the project on Kimswerd.…”

“…A key lesson here is that context matters. The influence of the arts is context-dependent, with the arts, for instance, having both binding and dividing effects for different (groups of ) community members at the same time (Van der Vaart et al, 2017). On their own, the arts cannot provide the solution to communities and therefore, should be considered as one of several potential means in community development processes (Burnell, 2012;Matarasso, 2007;Van der Vaart et al, 2017).…”

Rural landscape design strategy based on deep learning model

“…The process of the CD algorithm can be divided into the following steps: the first step takes the training data as the state variables of the neurons in the visible layer; the second step combines equation ( 10) so that we can calculate the state variables of the corresponding neurons in the hidden layer; the third step uses equation (11) to solve for the binary probabilities of the neurons in the visible layer, so that we can calculate the results after the reconstruction of the visible layer. The fourth step uses the gradient descent algorithm to optimize the solution on our objective function to obtain the update equations of parameters ij w , i a and j b as:…”

The (Un)Changing Political Economy of Arts, Cultural and Community Engagement, the Creative Economy and Place-Based Development during Austere Times

“…This way of regulating and framing ACCE does inevitably 'play into the neoliberal trap that uses notions of community self-reliance as a justification for the withdrawal of state services' [7] (p. 5). Consequently, ACCE finds itself operating in a landscape ridden with 'conflicting logics and pressures' [74] (p. 127) and mediating work increasingly characterised by ephemerality, blandness, partial or whole failure, precarity and even the demise of scores of ACCE practitioners and organisations [7,13,14,69,70,75,76]. Against this background, the article picks up the overarching question posed earlier from which the two research questions presented earlier are derived.…”

“…In doing so, ACCE work provides solutions experimented with, explored by and 'developed through democratic dialogue from within communities themselves' [51]. Additionally, such work provides not only a means of expressing both an individual and collective relationship to place, but also of enhancing awareness and appreciation of its heritage [21,76,83]. On this basis, then, such work should not be construed merely as the instrumentalisation of local creative and cultural activity intended to plug the holes left by deconstructed welfare services.…”