Community development and the arts: Sustaining the democratic imagination in lean and mean times

Abstract

This paper argues for a more expressive and expansive understanding of culture, citizenship and democracy. It seeks to reaffirm the importance of imagination, creativity and emotion in sustaining and enriching community development, particularly given the inexorable rise of a managerialist and programmatic culture of practice. Community development should have an intrinsic interest in the fostering of a democratic culture within and between communities and between communities and state institutions. In practice, however, democracy often becomes treated as a ‘deliverable’, and community participation is filtered through prescribed and institutionalized relationships. In the context of funding retrenchment and public sector cutbacks, democracy and participation can simply become codewords for neoliberal hegemony. Against this, we argue that the concept of democracy must be reclaimed as an active social, political and cultural process through which change occurs in different contexts and spaces by means of subversion, opposition and resistance as much as by participation and consent. In this regard the arts have much to offer community development, but the relationship should also be a reciprocal one. The arts can be drawn upon to justify particular kinds of social and cultural exclusion, particularly when creativity becomes monetized and subject to market incursions. There are also parallels between the pressures community arts projects experience to demonstrate results and relevance, and those experienced by community development projects. Therefore, this paper considers dialectical tendencies in both community development and the arts. We argue for a more symbiotic engagement between these fields, and by using the term ‘democratic imagination’ we hope to enliven what can otherwise become a deadly culture of instrumentalism in both. By highlighting the concepts of cultural democracy and cultural resistance this paper explores the potential for a more nuanced and less institutionally fixated vision of cultural practice. Cultural democracy acknowledges the centrality of creativity to human experience and emphasizes that citizens be actively supported to engage in the production, consumption and distribution of the arts. Cultural resistance theories recognize that cultural and political expression can occur beyond the radar of mainstream community development and arts practice. Resistance is too easily dismissed as atomized and trivial, and we suggest that practitioners give it more committed attention in order to better understand the issues, identities and ideas that animate communities. Finally, we consider the creative potential of ‘consumption’ which is often dismissed as a degraded form of cultural engagement. In so doing, we challenge some of the underlying assumptions regarding the apathy and passivity of communities that serve to rationalize policy and practice interventions in the current context.