Governing the creative city: the practice, value and effectiveness of cultural intermediation

This chapter rejects the binary between top-down and bottom-up approaches to the creative city. It argues that we need to pay greater attention to the ‘grey spaces’ in the cultural urban economy, where a range of engagement practices are being undertaken by local cultural organisations under difficult circumstances. This chapter re-appropriates the vocabulary of ‘cultural intermediation’ to reveal, revalue and reassess the role of cultural organisations that operate within local contexts to bridge between formal and informal ways of understanding culture and creativity. It shows how local organisations are engaged in meaning making, market making, community making and making do under conditions of austerity. We need a more ecological approach to the creative city, in which alternative spaces, practices and norms are made visible and valued