Challenger Cities EP99: Bottom Up & Top Down Cultural Infrastructure with Jacquelyn West

What does a city need in order for culture to happen? Venues are the easy answer, and the least complete one.

Jacquelyn West is a cultural industries strategist based in Montréal, by way of Toronto, where she spent much of her career working with artists, festivals and creative organisations. She watched the same cycle run several times over: artists move into a cheap neighbourhood, the neighbourhood becomes desirable, and the people who made it desirable can no longer afford to be there.

In this episode she and Iain Montgomery get into the parts of cultural infrastructure that rarely make a capital plan. Affordable creative workspace and production capacity. Third spaces where nobody has to buy anything. And governance, which decides whether any of the rest of it works.

They also get into the money. Jacquelyn explains why the financing system produces the same four ground-floor tenants in every new podium, and what Toronto learned when it compelled developers to fund public art without building any stewardship around the requirement.

Topics include the professionalisation of placemaking, where bottom up meets top down, Esplanade Tranquille as a third space that works, Montréal's idea of cohabitation in public space, why "play" is a hard word to fund, and how cycling infrastructure expands the cultural catchment of a city.

05:20 — What cultural infrastructure actually includes

07:52 — Culture needs places to be made, seen and belong

10:07 — Why the building is rarely the whole answer

14:26 — Placemaking, professionalised

18:06 — Where bottom up meets top down

22:41 — Empty community centres and overwhelmed small ones

36:07 — Culture as an infrastructure advantage