Arts, Culture and the Global City

The primary focus of this course will be on urban cultural planning, with a focus on critically
interrogating the recent popularity of “creative placemaking.”

This focus will be contextualised within a wider exploration of the arts and its urban environment,
through an entanglement of actors. Key questions include:

• How have the arts and culture emerged as an urban planning and development target in cities across the globe?
• What are the shared global strategies and what is unique in the purposes, practices and outcomes of urban cultural planning in Singapore?
• What is the place of the arts in community based urban development today?
• What is the relationship - and disconnects - between cultural planning efforts and the on-the-ground life and needs of arts and cultural activities?
• How can artists, planners and community development practitioners employ the arts to promote positive and inclusive change while addressing the agency of those they address?

Students who complete this course should acquire the following course-specific skills :

• A critical understanding of the development of cultural planning approaches globally, with the ability to highlight central assumptions, global trends and practices, and local peculiarities
• A sound grasp of the major scholarly approaches to, and debates on, urban cultural planning and urban cultural economies, and the ability to contextualise them in relation to specific instances and case studies
• A critical ability to question the role of the arts in urban regeneration and revitalisation, and the consequences and repercussions
• An inter-disciplinary comprehension of the use of the arts for global urban competitiveness, such as biennales, cultural districts and blockbusters, and how they relate to different spaces and communities