L'Espace Politique (Jul 2020)
Culture et territoire : des recompositions mutuelles. Deux exemples de territorialisation des politiques culturelles en France et en Belgique
Abstract
The paper investigates the connections between culture and territory, based on two cultural public policies comprising a territorial approach: the public libraries (France) and the cultural centers (French-speaking Belgium). It tackles how these operators are reconfigured by their wider framework: the metropolisation in the French case, and the 2013 decree for the cultural centers in the French-speaking Belgian case. How does the territorial prospective implemented in these processes contribute to change the contents and the actions? How does it contribute to mobilize the local partners around common concerns and objectives? And how, eventually, does the cultural action resulting from these legal framework shape, in return, the territory, creating and developing the latter as a promise? The article is based on two different approaches: one from a sociology researcher and grounded on data collected during an investigation conducted in the cultural department of a French metropolis. The second is from the director of a cultural center in Brussels, analyzing the implementation of the decree from a first-hand field experience point of view. Using the concepts of hard and soft spaces (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2007 ; 2008 ; 2009 ; 2010), the study investigates the dynamics of the two institutions, in relation with their territorial actors. The analysis of each of the cases is organized following the questions mentioned above, and a summation then highlights the salient features of the comparison. Common traits between the French and the Belgian cases include: 1. The future territory as an orientation for the actions to undertake; 2. The present territory to be mobilized as an ensemble of actors; 3. A territory structured by global policies, to be adapted to each specific situation; 4. A decompartmentalized conception of culture, envisioned with mandatory connections to actors in other fields in the local territory. Dissimilarities include: 1. Object of the territorial action: populations in Belgium, collective entity in France; 2. Orientation of the action: towards the outside, to ‘attract’, in France, towards the inside, focused on those already there, in Belgium; 3. Scale and visibility of the action: prestigious and large-scale in France, modest and not necessarily impressive in Belgium; 4. Model-based action: based on an existing model in France, to be defined according to the specificities of each territory in Belgium ; 5. Territory governance: all the institutional partners must join the project, but the users are not necessarily solicited in France; the cultural centers must implement a bottom-up dynamic with the citizens and generate voluntary partnerships around their project in Belgium; 6. Vision of the globalized world: in France, the modern world is positive, filled with possibilities and advanced technologies to acquire; in Belgium, the world is a place of alienation, and cultural centers must equip citizens with tools to resist oppression. By investigating the mutual reconfigurations between culture and territory, the paper shows that these two notions are invested by representations and ideal, and that their ways of articulations convey worldviews beyond local context: views of contemporary world, views of what “development” is, views of what constitutes the “we” as able to shape its own destiny.
Keywords
