New research at the Bennett Institute aims to define and measure the role and value of ‘social and cultural Infrastructure’ and develop a framework that helps understand their value and role in public life. Steph Coulter and Dimitrios Panayotopoulos-Tsiros discuss why this is important and how it impacts place-based decision-making.
The blog explores the challenges of defining ‘social and cultural infrastructure’ and how they overlap in function, often serving as community spaces that connect people and foster belonging. It emphasises the need to measure both the quantity and quality of these infrastructures, considering human capital and local context in their use and value. The authors propose developing a new framework to better capture the value of these spaces, focusing on their social role and place-based impact in communities.
In recent years, much effort has been made (here at the Bennett Institute, and elsewhere) to understand how best to measure and value non-market goods and services as well as the importance of social and cultural spaces within communities and their contribution to public life. Our nascent research project on ‘Measuring Social and Cultural Infrastructure’ brings together these two research strands to explore how the value of the UK’s ‘Social and Cultural Infrastructure’ could be measured.
This blog discusses the challenges related to using the terms ‘social and cultural infrastructure’, and summarises our approach to defining these concepts.
Social and cultural infrastructure – essentially contested concepts?
The use of the terms ‘social infrastructure’ and ‘cultural infrastructure’ has recently grown in popularity in the academic and public policy fields. However, their origins differ, and their usage has been driven by different imperatives.
In the UK, the focus on social infrastructure has been driven by post-Brexit conversations around regional inequality and the perception of decline in areas within the UK’s South-Eastern hinterlands. There is widespread recognition that austerity, COVID-19 and contemporary cost of living pressures have placed many community spaces at risk and there exists a growing body of literature that suggests this trend is detrimental to individual wellbeing, social cohesion and economic development.
Debates around cultural infrastructure have emerged from a different imperative and carry a rather different resonance. The creative turn in urban development highlighted the importance of creative industries and individuals, and its supporting infrastructure, in driving growth in 21st century cities. More recently, some cultural scholars have questioned whether newly gentrified urban areas would allow authentic and affordable cultural experiences. Those in the field cite spiralling rental costs, cultural venue closures and inadequate rehearsal space as examples of cultural infrastructure challenges that prohibit creative practices in urban areas.
Although the two concepts have emerged independently from each other, we believe that they overlap in many ways. When we speak of social and cultural infrastructure, we are often talking about the same places. For example, museums, art galleries, libraries, pubs and music venues all function as social and cultural infrastructure. Given that the concept of culture relates to the creation of shared meanings and experiences, it would seem that all cultural infrastructure is essentially social. Equally, few would argue that quintessential examples of social infrastructure, such as parks, community centres or sports facilities, don’t contribute to the cultural life of communities, even if they aren’t usually considered as exemplars of cultural infrastructure. In short, we believe that social infrastructure is inherently ‘cultural’ and cultural infrastructure is inherently ‘social’ and there is therefore little reason to approach them differently.
The infrastructure puzzle
One way that approaches to defining social and cultural infrastructure have in common is the use of the word, ‘infrastructure’. However, the literature often lacks a clear rationale for this terminology. We argue that any project measuring social and cultural infrastructure should be grounded in a coherent definition of ‘infrastructure’.
Our starting point for this definition is through the lens of economics where economists generally offer two primary perspectives.
The first approach is taxonomic and involves collecting commonly cited examples of infrastructure and separating them into distinct categories based on the function they serve (e.g., energy, rail, water). Organisations such as the National Infrastructure Commission and the Office for National Statistics, tend to employ this approach to measure and quantify the stock of existing infrastructure, concluding that transport, energy, communications, water, flood defences and waste are the most prominent examples of infrastructure. However, within such an approach, it remains unclear exactly what the common characteristics are that unify these different examples.
The second approach involves identifying a list of characteristics that determine whether an asset, structure, or institution is ‘functionally infrastructural’. Given the often-overlooked nature of social and cultural infrastructure and the need to clearly define what falls into this category, we find this approach more suitable for our purposes. Starting from the existing literature on infrastructure economics, we have developed a list of characteristics that determine whether something qualifies, in generic terms, as infrastructure:
- Long-lived asset – a long-term asset expected to be used for many years that often involves an upfront cost of investment.
- Accessible – a collective or shared asset where access is either universal or is not dependent on personal relationships or identity.
- Non-rival – usage is non-rivalrous up until the point where congestion occurs.
These characteristics capture the essence of infrastructural assets; they are capital-intensive, long-lived, accessible to all and can be used simultaneously by citizens. Such a definition encapsulates the traditional examples of infrastructure cited above but also leaves room to consider the more nebulous concept of social and cultural infrastructure.
Fostering connections
However, a further characteristic needs to be delineated in order to determine whether a given asset can be considered as a piece of social and cultural infrastructure.
What is it that ties social and cultural infrastructure together? We believe the concept of ‘connectivity’ is central here. Whilst road infrastructure connects people geographically, water infrastructure connects us to water supplies and digital infrastructure connects us to the online world, social and cultural infrastructure are those assets whose primary function is to connect us to each other and enable citizens to consume and produce culture. They are the spaces that, amongst other things, help generate a sense of belonging and an place attachment while also supporting wellbeing, self-expression, and creativity.
Moreover, whilst these assets are often overlooked in traditional analyses, they tend to become most visible in the context of failure. We have seen communities come together to protest library closures, football club bankruptcies and the commodification of green space, demonstrating the taken-for-grantedness that underpins infrastructural assets. When these spaces fail, we do not lose access to water, transport or internet connectivity, but we do lose the opportunity to connect with others within our community.
Towards measurement
The development of a coherent definition of social and cultural infrastructure is only the first step in this project. The next, more difficult, question we are probing is how best to capture the value of these spaces.
Firstly, whilst understanding the net stock of social and cultural infrastructure in a given geographical space is important, we must endeavour to understand ‘quality’ as well as ‘quantity’. Secondly, there is a real need to understand the social dimensions of infrastructure use. As anthropologists of infrastructure have long pointed out, it is people (either individually or via institutions) who determine how infrastructure is used and its effectiveness. As such, the measurement of social and cultural infrastructure cannot be complete without considering the importance of human capital, social groups, associations, and other actors that enable the infrastructure to function. Secondly, there are questions of scale. What qualifies as social and cultural infrastructure will depend on the scale at which one measures it. For example, a historic monument may be an ignored eye-sore in one place but could be considered a source of local pride and a key meeting place in another. In this sense, measurement frameworks for social and cultural infrastructure must be place-based and account for spaces that animate community life across the country.
It is these questions that will animate our thinking as we move to the second phase of our research project where we will develop and test a new measurement framework of social and cultural infrastructure.
The measuring social and cultural infrastructure project is funded by The British Academy and forms part of their programme of work on social and cultural infrastructure. This blog is an independent output published by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
