Abstract

Cultural planning is a strategic approach to city building and reimaging, and community cultural development that, at its most modest, involves establishing arts precincts and nurturing local creativity. More ambitiously, it often also includes supporting a ‘creative cities’ agenda, repositioning and expanding the arts as the ‘creative’ or ‘cultural industries’, and advocating a range of initiatives to attract and satisfy footloose capital and the so-called ‘creative class’. It would be misleading to represent cultural planning as a cohesive body of thought or set of policy interventions and, indeed, the name is not even universally used. Nevertheless, it is the case that worldwide since the late 1970s and early 1980s there have been various attempts by local governments to use the arts and cultural resources strategically in the development of precincts, cities and regions and the term cultural planning is often used generically to refer to such approaches (Evans 2001).