World Cities Culture Report 2012
Culture: At the heart of public policy
The inaugural World Cities Culture Report 2012, launched by the Mayor of London, explores how culture influences the future of cities. It is a celebration of world cities as crucibles of human creativity and endeavour. From ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan London to modern New York’s Broadway or Mumbai’s Bollywood, cities have been the places where culture develops and moves forward.
The Report
This report examines the cultural offer of 12 of the world’s greatest cities. It gathers evidence on 60 cultural indicators, assessing both the supply of and demand for culture, and reports on the thinking of cultural policymakers in those places. The level of detail of the cultural data collected across the cities is unprecedented, and represents the primary achievement of this research.
However, what makes the project even more valuable is its exploration of attitudes to cultural policymaking in the world cities. The potential for culture to contribute to economic and social development is understood by all the cities, but it plays out in different ways depending on the particularities of each place. Bringing an analysis of policymakers’ priorities together with the data gives a much more rounded picture of culture’s role in, and value to, world cities.
Their diversity allows them to sustain a great variety of art forms, while their dynamism – their constantly changing populations and their international connections – make the world cities hubs of new cultural ideas and knowledge, and also great centres for ‘hybridised’ art forms, created when ideas are blended together.
