The Right to the Creative City: Interdependencies in Arts and Cultural Ecosystems

The paper discusses the concept of interdependencies in cultural ecology as a theoretical tool to shed new light on emerging inequalities and power tensions in arts and cultural production in urban areas and regions. The aim of the paper is to offer a theoretical lens that is useful for exploring socio-economic inequalities related to the agency of cultural workers, and ultimately to contribute to a discussion on the right to the (creative) city in a (post-)crisis context.

The "arts and cultural ecology" is defined by Markusen et al. as the complex interdependencies that shape the demand for and production of arts and cultural offerings. More recently, the concept of cultural ecosystem has been used by many authors to acknowledge the interplay of all subjects involved in cultural production, provision and consumption, without reifying conceptual boundaries between groups.

After a comparison with other theoretical conceptualisations such as fields, scenes, assemblages and others, the paper mobilises the idea of interdependencies to analyse power tensions in three very distant areas of cultural production: the contemporary art system in Milan, the fashion industry in Italy, and cultural production in Lombardy. In each of these areas, the paper explores interdependencies between subsystems that have rarely been considered together: independent spaces for contemporary art and art institutions, symbolic and material production in the fashion industry, and the digital and physical spaces for culture.

It is shown that the concept of interdependence allows for the observation of power tensions between actors, starting from the exploration of available resources, negotiation mechanisms, conflicts, cooperation and interactions embedded in specific urban contexts.