Articoli taggati con ‘Cultural Development’
Enabling Culture in enabling development
This number of Tafter Journal reflects on “music”, and “music industry” as two distinct but, after all, clearly connected phenomena, by highlighting the mutual relationship between “contemporary cultural content” and “contemporary cultural industry”. Since human beings became citizens of a world bigger than them, they understood the need for production and distribution systems in order to reach any kind of goods and services. Culture makes no exception. In this sense, when we look at cultural production, both in the sense of professional production of contents and in the meaning of active consumption of culture, we should fix our attention to the fact that culture need industrial means to survive. This kind of relationship is even clearer in music production, where the organizational aspects are part of the of the production itself. This kind of relationship should be clear when we look at music market data. Focusing on a small-sized country such as Italy is, it is possible to understand it in an easier way: when we discover that, among the 20 Italian regions, two of them, and namely, Lombardy and Lazio, host the 40% of music distribution companies, the 40% of music management companies, the 37% of record labels, the 31% of music events and concert organization agencies, and, the 41% of audience expenditures, we’re not describing only the geographic distribution of music production, we’re defining where, and how, our cultural contents are developed and disseminated. We can detect the effects of this kind of geographical distribution, or, this sort of this “cultural mechanics” in both the article of this number. Clementina Casula, in her article, focuses on how artistic and cultural production are key aspects in processes of enhancement of a more inclusive and egalitarian social fabric, by discussing the results of an “empirical qualitative research on two Italian female brass bands, emerging in quite different territorial and organizational contexts, but both contributing to challenging those gender biases, prescriptions and practices still hampering women’s full participation both to music worlds and social life in general”. On the other hand, the article of Limongelli, that we’ve chosen to re-publish in this issue, reflects on the strong relationship between the rise of innovative start-ups in the music industry and the number of artists involved in the creation of cultural content addressed to niche audiences. Together, the articles could define a “connection” that should interest many territorial administrators: while most of the music consumption (not including concerts or events) is managed through online platforms, music production still remains an enabling “engine” for territorial development. This implies further several reflections in the strategic development of our cities: digital marketplaces can be today intended as one of the main distribution channels of music content, and, today, there are more and more young artists starting their careers by simply uploading their works on a social network. By promoting not only cultural active consumption, but also cultural production, territorial administrators could lead our city in reaching both, the social desired effects that culture produces, and the economic development of a “little music industry”, which could help territorial emerging artists in carrying on their passions without the need to “leave” for the “big city”. By interpreting our territories as “spots” of bigger networks, our cultural production (music production in this case, but also artistic production could be shaped in this way), could show interesting features also for the development of a production system better fitting also for the exportation of cultural goods and services. The web taught us the potentialities of networks. We just need to understand that networks work also in the “real world”.
Local Conflicts and the NO-TAP Protest
This paper is about the local conflict which emerged in Apulia, and more exactly in the province of Lecce, as a form of opposition to the major project known as TAP (Trans-Adriatic Pipeline), aimed at transporting Azeri natural gas to Italy and Northern Europe. Reflecting on the question of TAP requires first of all a theoretical background against which we may set our empirical observation. In this paper, we will try and trace images and narratives so as to identify the history and features of a movement that, although young, may be intended as a litmus test useful to understand the new and sometimes invisible cleavages that affect today’s society. By choosing the TAP case as a model of a new kind of movement, not reducible to the characteristics of the “Nimby” phenomenon, we will try and study the somewhat invisible political and economic relations, which legitimize some processes of territorial control, as well as the practices by which the state or private bodies can implement it. Although the TAP protest is just a case-study, it is quite complex. This implies that, by narrating its history and describing its characteristics, one may better understand, on the micro level, the processes that convert collective heterogeneity into an active homogeneity, and, at the macro level, the national and international strategies (both political and economic) behind this major project. This may eventually contribute to a less generic definition of local conflicts (sometimes known as territorial conflict). In modern scientific literature on territorial movements, one interesting reference is Luigi Bobbio [1]. With Bobbio, it can be said that territorial conflicts have by now outnumbered both in qualitative and quantitative terms other types of social conflicts. Moreover, Bobbio considers as a characteristic of these kind of conflicts the fact that they are no longer the output of a two-dimensional clash between the dominant and the dominated class, but are the expression of the multiple segregations that contemporary society has produced. The plurality of exclusion has paradoxically produced a flattening of society in which fear and risk tend to drive the dynamics of social action. At a first and careless analysis, Bobbio would seem to promote a depoliticized vision of society, in which class conflicts disappear to be replaced by the new tendencies of late modernity. The political scientist underlines the main characteristic of these conflicts, namely: “The common feature of these protests is the fact that they are promoted and run by ad-hoc citizens’ committees, which propose themselves as non-partisan and authentic representatives of their community. Participants often receive the support of environmental associations or political groups, but try to claim and maintain their autonomy as an expression of the territory and of those who live there.”[2] The emphasis placed by Bobbio on the aspect of self-representativeness allows us to overcome the “idealtipical” image of territorial protest as a “shapeless mass”, in which individual interests converge without any aggregate logic, as if mere action was sufficient to structure solid social networks. The fact that the participants receive support from associations and groups of autonomous individuals underlines that a foundational element of the action of local movements is a strong awareness of collective interests. This awareness is relevant in the process by which a specific territorial group defines its objectives and structures its identity. The social networks which issue from local conflict are therefore expressions of the values through and against which the movement defines its own autonomy. Multiple networked social relations are essential to any territorial conflict and represent the product of a collective choice of distinction (or of taking a position) which legitimises a collectively shared habitus. The collectively shared habitus is the key to understand the social mechanisms of action and distinction (both external and internal) that allow a group to structure its collective heterogeneity as an active homogeneity. Moreover, the single movement is never isolated, as it is the autonomous component of a network of local movements, which makes territorial vindications the integral part of a much wider conflict.
The Ministry Organization after the introduction of the recent reform
The law number 5 of 29 January 1975 instituted the Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Culturali e Ambientali[2]. Its original tasks were related to the conservation and valorization of artistic heritage and natural beauties. In 1998, the denomination of the Ministry has been changed in Ministero per I Beni e le Attività Cultural[3]i. In 2013, its denomination changed again in Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del Turismo[4] and once again, in 2018, with D.L.[5] 12 July 2018 entered into force on 13 July 2018, the Ministry came back to its previous denomination, with the transfer of the touristic competence to the Ministero delle politiche agricole, alimentari, forestali[6] This intervention is just one of the latest provisions with which, since 2004 (year of the entry into force of the Codice dei Beni Culturali), the legislator started a significative re-organization of the Ministry. Such intervention deals with both the need to adapt the Ministry to the overall provisions adopted in Italy in terms of spending review, and also with the widespread need of redesign the functional and structural organization of the Ministry in order to solve its main disfunctions and deficiencies. The MIBACT, indeed, was characterized by a substantial structural disorganization, an insufficient organigramme and the overlapping of hierarchical lines between the central and peripherical administration. These weaknesses hindered the development of proper investment and resource allocation policies, preventing an efficient management of cultural heritage. The Reform has been thus realized in order to solve the cruxes that were indicated as the main causes of a substantial inadequacy of the Ministry in interpreting and acting coherently with the Article n. 9 of the Italian Constitution referring to the safeguarding and the development of cultural heritage and of the landscape. Therefore, the reform introduced a series of legal instruments that succeeded in sparking several debates in these last 4 years, as also demonstrated by the number of legal provisions adopted in order to update and correct the Reform contents.
Big-Data to understand touristic and cultural dynamics: a fractal framework.
The Big-Data revolution has been immediately accepted in several industries, in particular the military and defense industries, by various economic and social actors, usually linked to multinational corporations, as a fresh source of innovation. In the cultural sector, these new technologies acceptance has been less common met some oppositions. These oppositions have been mainly due to a general lack of competences on the new technologies and on advanced data analysis by most of the actors in this sector. Lacking the needed competences, these actors have often been unable to grasp the opportunities that Big-Data could have opened to them. In this paper, we propose to highlight the main results and main positive effects coming out from the first stages of Big-Data utilization in the Cultural Heritage sector using a fractal model.
The Right to the city by Henry Lefebvre and tendencies to the anti-coercion of its exchange value. Reading hypothesis and analysis.
I believe that it is possible to carry on Lefebvre’s thought trying to fix the coordinates of a possible political economy of the metropolitan space, where there are some contrasting subjective regularities that restore the difference between isotopy and heteropia in the contemporaneous metropolitan paradigm. From this basic assumption, the path of the speech is turned to the synoptic observation of the control and exclusion systems of specific social classes (voluntary and spontaneous isolation, H. Lefebvre, or. 1967, tr. it. 1968); finally, assumptions can be made on how some fragments of the territory can be transformed by fractions of population, whose desires, turned into patterns, originally, conflicting with the normative-symbolic order, must be found in a series of initiatives aimed at the re-appropriation of a physical space, with an increase in subjectivity that redefines the role of space in the metropolis. Although the Right to the city takes its place between a Keynesian, Taylorist, Fordist system and the advance of a Toyotist paradigm, Lefebvre catches the origins of the socio-urban changes in conformity with the fast ratio (space compression, reduction of time with the automation of the production processes combined with the new communication and transport technologies), where several systemic strategies are simultaneously carried out to eliminate the topographic city differences; therefore, Lefebvre establishes new urban development needs in the reconversion of the capitalist pattern, with procedural effects on the territorial planning and on life in a broad sense. With the more and more new cybernetic systems and outsourcing services, the factory, the production as a theatre of struggle and social aggregator, at least in the late-capitalist West, gives way to a conflict that is increasingly centred on the space category and not on the reduction of time to the owner’s authority. In a “two-dimensional decomposition of the everyday life”, (cf. G. Cersosimo 2017, 15,) focusing on a socially organized time and a relatively free time, which is always related to the capitalist organization of production and work, the key to conflict is, nowadays, the re-appropriation of means and resources to enjoy the spare time in a society with no producers recording a clear decrease in employment, with flexible working hours and moments where it is possible to record a higher involvement of the lower classes.
