Co-governance of the ‘creative city’: Bringing lived experience to the governance of culture in Sheffield

Abstract

Different understandings of what culture offers cities are reflected in its governance. Focusing on Sheffield, we apply a conceptual framework to reveal how the varied claims made for culture and associated forms of governance intersect and diverge. The governance gaps revealed generate lessons about how to link hierarchical culture governance with the lived experience of a city’s cultural and creative workers, vital cultural producers who engage in self-governance, whilst asserting city government’s stewardship of these processes in its role of caring for place. By linking culture governance to the everyday, the research refines oppositions – between formal and informal, production and consumption and co-option and contestation – to highlight the need for an active, inclusive form of co-governance that better supports cultural producers, in place.

Introduction

The reconfiguration of urban governance around economic growth spurred efforts to capitalise on cities as nexuses for creativity, with culture enrolled into ‘creative city’ discourses in the UK and internationally. The turn towards ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ as vehicles for post-industrial economic regeneration and growth focused on cultural consumption to the neglect of production and the role played by cultural and creative workers (CCWs) in the economic and social organisation of the city. Critiques of the gentrification, inequality and precarity resulting from the neoliberal urbanism with which creative city strategies are linked are well established (Oakley and Ward, 2018; Peck, 2005). Scholarship since has identified the potentialities of moving beyond a dichotomous co-optation by or contestation of the creative city to better understand the interdependencies of a city’s cultural economy and the need for more inclusive forms of urban culture governance (Banks and O’Connor, 2017). The Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on CCWs (de Peuter et al., 2023; England, 2024; Tanghetti et al., 2022) brought stark attention to the imperative of aligning culture governance with lived experience.

In response, we consider a city’s culture governance to be the complex set of relations within and between formal cultural institutions and informal associative structures to yield a more nuanced understanding that incorporates everyday practices and lived experiences (Barnett et al., 2020; Beveridge and Koch, 2019; Mould, 2019). We develop a dual conceptual framework of logics deployed for culture and of associated forms of culture governance, applied to Sheffield, England. Sheffield is a fruitful empirical focus given its shifts from ‘local socialism’ to creative city and culture-led regeneration strategies, of relevance internationally and to other, regional ‘Core Cities’ ¹ in the UK in the context of a national ‘levelling up’ policy agenda (Tomaney and Pike, 2020). The city is estimated to have about 16,000 CCWs, freelance or self-employed individuals in the culture sector, making up 9% of its workforce (Sheffield City Council, 2024: 12).

We apply our framework to analyse how the intersecting logics for culture are deployed, and the relations within and between different forms of culture governance in the city – focused on its CCWs, principal cultural institutions and cultural intermediaries, as well as the city council. Data to furnish a grounded understanding of Sheffield’s culture governance combine secondary documentary sources (policies, reports and websites of governance actors) with 15 in-depth interviews conducted in 2021. Interviewees comprised key individuals from the organisations making up the city’s culture governance: five city council and one regional combined authority officer; an elected member; three private sector representatives; senior managers in four culture organisations (two theatres, a heritage asset and a community-based arts organisation); and the creative workers’ membership organisation. Using a semi-structured interview guide, participants were asked to reflect on Sheffield’s culture governance, their or their organisation’s role and relationships within it and how it could be improved. Interviews, conducted with ethical approval and informed consent, were recorded and transcribed for thematic analysis, undertaken using an analytical framework of the logics deployed for culture as deductive codes and subsequently refined with inductive coding.

Interpreting the interviews reveals how the governance of culture is produced and implemented in place, enabling interrogation of how the intersecting logics for culture are deployed and enacted. Our analysis draws out tensions between rationales for culture that recognise its intrinsic and political as well as instrumental, economic value. A cleavage is evident between the city’s CCWs (and their more informal, associative governance) and the larger cultural organisations (and the formal institutions of culture governance) that benefit most from public support, a division we refine by bringing an understanding of everyday practices and experiences to highlight the interdependencies of the city’s cultural production. The analysis confirms the value of a broadened understanding of culture governance. Practitioners can better understand the complexity and fragility of the cultural sector in particular places and how better to support it in realising value across competing logics. Academic elaboration of such cases speaks across polarised debates, adding nuance to aid understanding and envisage alternatives. We conclude by making recommendations for a more inclusive form of culture co-governance in Sheffield of relevance to other creative cities, which links hierarchical and (supported) self-governance forms, bringing everyday lived experience to the governance of cultural production whilst asserting the role of city government as steward of these processes.

Logics and forms of city culture governance

Our conceptual framework combines understandings of the different logics for culture in cities with different modes of its governance. It therefore moves beyond the confines of the ‘creative city’ model and its critique as a top-down prescription wedded to the economic imperatives of neoliberal urbanism that elides interdependencies, to provide a nuanced appreciation of how culture is understood and governed in cities (Borén and Young, 2013; Grodach, 2013).

Scholarship furnishes three broad sets of logics asserted for the role of culture in cities. The first derives from claims about culture’s intrinsic value and importance for social inclusion; the second derives from its role in regeneration and economic development; and the third derives from its political potentialities. The second set of economically instrumental logics aligns with creative city strategies that work ‘with the grain of extant neoliberal development agendas, framed around interurban competition, gentrification, middle-class consumption, and place-marketing’ (Peck, 2005: 740). The third set of political logics includes those which posit scope for a radical ‘subversive creativity’ (Mould, 2019), establishing a dichotomy of CCWs’ co-optation by or opposition to culture’s enrolment into the dominant strategies perceived as pursued by city governance elites. But we extend our framework to include forms of ‘urban everyday politics’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2019) drawn from an appreciation of the actualities of lived experience and practice and their potentials in relation to, and beyond, these strategies.

Relatedly, we contribute to scholarship that recognises that culture is ‘stuck with traditional frameworks for governance and support that have failed to properly engage with a wide range of constituencies … and fail to grasp the lived realities’ (de Bernard et al., 2022: 346). Ecological approaches to conceptualise culture in cities recognise the interdependencies between different domains of practice, such as that of major cultural institutions and CCWs’ everyday practices, or between cultural production and consumption (Potts et al., 2008). Rather than creative city strategies’ reductive tendency to treat culture as consumer amenities for economic growth, ecological conceptions bring CCWs’ characteristics, such as their very high levels of self-employment, and their needs, vital to informing interventions, to the fore (Markusen, 2006). Ecological approaches therefore encapsulate relations between different kinds of actors that operate according to intersecting or divergent logics for culture. This understanding frames our focus on how culture is governed in the city as it highlights that there are different forms of governance in operation, enabling us to consider the relationships and gaps or exclusions within and between these governance forms.

We draw from Kooiman’s (2003) threefold typology of different governance modes – hierarchical governance, self-governance and co-governance – to differentiate forms of culture governance (Lange, 2011). Hierarchical governance refers to top-down, more formalised practices, likely involving local state and other governance elites such as major cultural institutions in the city; self-governance refers to bottom-up, more informal, CCW collective practices to support themselves and to perhaps advocate for support or contest the activities stemming from governance elites; whereas co-governance denotes more or less institutionalised forms of co-operation between these different modes of governance. Our approach thus refines understandings of a singular culture governance gap between those formally engaged in governing culture and those engaged in cultural practices as CCWs, to incorporate the more informal, everyday governance practices in which CCWs may be engaged, as well as considering how different forms of governance do or should intersect and co-operate as and when needed.

In the following analysis we deploy this framework to understand the combination of logics deployed in Sheffield and how this is enacted in practice by the city’s different forms of culture governance – two of which are formal and which combined represent the hierarchical mode of governance, and one of which is informal and represents self-governance. In examining the logics in practice, our research affirms the tensions between economic and socio-cultural imperatives: between the economic, ‘top-down’ logics of the creative city and the inclusive, ‘bottom-up’ logics of the everyday city. But our nuanced approach underpins consideration of how a city’s governance forms and their relationships could better accommodate the interdependencies and ways of working needed to develop a more inclusive, responsive and legitimate co-governance of culture, stewarded by city government.

Intrinsic, public value logics and government

These logics for culture encompass social imperatives of inclusion and participation and recognise culture’s inherent value as an end in itself (Belfiore, 2002; Pratt, 2010). They are most evident during Sheffield’s 1980s’ tenure at the vanguard of ‘local socialism’ as capital of the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’, wherein governance in the sense of determining and delivering policy is actually provided by government at the local level. Examples include the municipal Red Tape recording studio (1986, ongoing as a training provider) and the Anvil Civic Cinema (1983–1990) which promoted local filmmakers. The comments made by the Council’s Director of Arts at the cinema’s opening embody these public value logics for culture: ‘a cinema for the 80s needed, we felt, to be a cinema for the public, not in a reach me down way, but in true egalitarian spirit … both popular and experimental, entertaining and educational, accessible and stylish’ (Spalding, 1983, cited in Wilson, 2021). But in contrast to efforts elsewhere, notably those of the Greater London Council (GLC), Sheffield’s local socialism is regarded as not that radical as it remained local state-centred and was cautiously implemented (Beveridge and Cochrane, 2023). ‘Class politics and old left concerns’ (Payling, 2014: 602) dominated over new forms of identity politics, with prioritisation of sport as ‘working-class culture’ in subsequent regeneration strategies. The stated aim of the Council’s Department for Employment and Economic Development was ‘to liberate the resources of the local state and put them at the service of the working class movement [as well as] the women’s movement and community based movements’ (Critical Social Policy, 1983: 83), hinting at co-governance. But its actual, hierarchical work within its remit of stimulating new investment, new kinds of employment and diverse job opportunities (Digaetano and Lawless, 1999) – as expressed in creation of the city’s cultural quarter (Moss, 2002) – did not realise co-governance and indeed laid the groundwork for subsequent creative city strategies with very different ideological underpinnings.

Intrinsic value logics are now most obviously invoked in public support for the city’s formal cultural institutions and their community outreach activities; in rationales for seeking cultural designations, such as the UK’s City of Culture, for which Sheffield unsuccessfully bid in 2010; as well as in justifications for support of ‘local non-economic community production’ (Mould and Comunian, 2015) which recognise culture’s value in community development (Grodach, 2013). These logics remind us that city government has agency in delivering public value, or what citizens ‘care about’ (Barnett et al., 2022; Healey, 2018; Pill, 2024), and recognises the non-economic importance of culture (Rex, 2020). In their agency, city governments express a range of different values and logics for culture, mediating and variegating neoliberal urbanism.

But in Sheffield the city council has not directly engaged in cultural provision since its 1980s municipal experiments, with its museums, art galleries and theatres now constituted as independent trusts. The museum and theatre trusts’ designations as national portfolio organisations (NPOs) mean they receive Arts Council England (n.d.) funding as ‘leaders in their areas, with a collective responsibility to protect and develop our national arts and cultural ecology’. But they are also subject to entrepreneurial expectations to generate income (Barnett et al., 2022; Rex, 2020), as one of Sheffield’s NPOs explained: ‘We’ve been encouraged to be more resilient … to generate income from food and drink, hosting conferences, weddings, diversifying our income streams in essence and to be less reliant on the public purse’ (cultural organisation). Interviews with city council and major culture organisation governance actors evidenced the combination of economic with ‘comforting (and desirable)’ (Banks and O’Connor, 2017: 645) public value logics, such as the need to engage across the city’s socio-spatial divides. A council member stressed that the city’s cultural assets should ‘have something to offer everybody across the city’, whilst a venue manager stressed the importance of ‘ensuring that our work is accessible in every sense of accessibility from physical access to diversity and audience reach’. Some expressed the social benefits of culture and how it ‘makes a difference to people’s lives … to peace of mind, mental health, people’s health and wellbeing’, but went on to reassert economic logics: ‘more importantly, it creates jobs and keeps the pounds within the locality’ (culture organisation).

Several public and private actors linked the until-recent lack of emphasis on culture, along with the city not advocating for place nor making demands of central government, with why the city had ‘missed out’ on funding and opportunities, with a council officer explaining that ‘Sheffield isn’t good at shouting loudly about itself, and having the right connections nationally, particularly with Westminster’. Several cited University of Sheffield-commissioned research (Chamberlain and Morris, 2021) that identified significant, long-standing regional disparities in public culture funding, significantly lower in the Sheffield city region than national averages and equivalent city regions, prompting the ‘need to say we deserve the same as everybody else’ (council officer). Private actors wanted greater effort to gain more NPOs and thus a greater share of national arts funding. But in questioning this ambition, others alluded to understandings of culture beyond those embodied in formal, cultural institutions: ‘one of our success measures is how many NPOs we’ve got in the city … [they are] obsessed by the numbers’ (major venue).

Economically instrumental logics and hierarchical governance

Claims that culture-led regeneration and ‘flagship’ cultural institution development foster economic development through attracting visitors, capital and auxiliary benefits via clustering effects are core to dominant understandings of culture’s role in cities, and were palpable in Sheffield. These property-led strategies may ostensibly promote cultural production but are critiqued for their focus on the consumption of ‘experiences’, associated retail and the visitor economy, commodifying culture (Harvey, 2002). Sheffield pioneered cultural quarters (Moss, 2002), now a common spatial expression of these logics, wherein cultural production is emphasised via ‘incubators’, studios and ‘makerspaces’, with critique centring on the precarity and subsistence of the employment that results (Kratke, 2012; Mould, 2015; Peck, 2005).

These logics are encapsulated in the ‘creative city’ idea (Landry, 2000), augmented by Florida’s (2004) assertion that a city’s economic success relies on its ability to attract groupings of the ‘creative class’. The success of the creative city conception is credited in part to how readily it conforms with neoliberal economic development strategies (Peck, 2011), despite critiques related to the gentrification, inequality, precarity and questionable returns on public investment that result (Oakley and Ward, 2018). That the assumptions asserted by this policy orthodoxy lack interrogation gives the creative city a ‘panacea status’ (Evans, 2009: 1004), leading to dilemmas around the approach destroying the ‘characteristics they are seeking to nourish, create and even commodify’ (Ross, 2017: 32) whilst not focusing on the needs of local ‘talent’ or on understanding their contributions to the city’s economy and socio-cultural life (Comunian, 2011; Comunian and Mould, 2014; Tanghetti et al., 2022).

Sheffield by the late 1980s had concertedly started to adopt a neoliberal pro-growth model (Digaetano and Lawless, 1999). The council’s cultural emphasis remained aligned with ‘old left’ class-based assumptions (Payling, 2014), centring sport. The city hosted the World Student Games in 1991, which formed the basis of the sports-led regeneration of the Lower Don Valley and later prioritisation of the sports science and technology sector. One form of cultural production, the city’s music scene, flourished through the 1990s and was incorporated, as in Manchester, into entrepreneurial city strategies (Banks and O’Connor, 2017), though attempts to harness music to culture-led regeneration faltered with closure of a flagship development, the National Centre for Popular Music, after two years (Hatherley, 2011).

By the 2000s, culture had more fully blended with property-led regeneration. The Sheffield One urban regeneration company sought to create ‘a city centre recognized as a place for learning, culture, retail, leisure and living’ (Winkler, 2007), with projects including a gallery and the redevelopment of City Hall as a music venue. The bundling of sport with culture remained, with the City Strategy for 2005–2010 describing an ambition to become ‘an exceptional cultural and sporting city’ (Winkler, 2007). The city council pursued partnerships with private sector and other city actors, including its universities, driven by the requirements of central government and European regeneration funding and increased emphasis on ‘knowledge-based regional clusters’ including the creative industries (Winkler, 2007). In 2007, the agency Creative Sheffield was established to ‘substantially enhance Sheffield’s capacity to develop and deliver economic strategy’ (Clark et al., 2010: 53). Now back in house as Marketing Sheffield, under the aegis of the city’s Directorate of Economic Development and Culture, its role description neatly condenses economically instrumental logics: ‘leadership of the city’s place brand, promoting Sheffield externally in the areas of Trade (Business), Talent (attraction, retention and development), and Tourism (business and leisure visitors)’ (Marketing Sheffield, n.d.). Culture remains enrolled into the city’s centre-focused regeneration strategies, with plans for the Castlegate site including an events space, and development of an events hub and live music venue as part of the regeneration of its high street, Fargate. The imperatives to pursue such entrepreneurial strategies have been augmented under austerity localism – the downloading of risks and responsibilities to local government and drastic cuts to their budgets since 2010 (Peck, 2012) – heightening the dominance of instrumental economic logics for culture.

Governance actors agreed that until recently culture had not been a strategic priority for the city council, nor a political priority for elected members who had preferred to champion sport given longstanding class-based associations of culture as ‘people from [wealthy area] going to the Crucible [theatre]’ (council officer). But they generally agreed that culture’s economic importance was now understood, citing research into culture’s economic benefits in the city region (Chamberlain Walker Ltd, 2020):

Over the last five years as well culture and arts always felt like probably it was separate and we’ve really brought it into the economic sphere and recognised its value in terms of marketing place, particularly as a city, the role it plays in the city centre. (City council officer)

Culture’s role in place-marketing, described in terms of city centre vibrancy, tourism and the experience economy, emphasises cultural consumption over production, with a council officer explaining that ‘Sheffield’s culture … it’s a differentiator, it brings people to the city’. Floridean notions of talent attraction were clear, with a council member asserting that ‘you can’t bring jobs into the city without paying attention to the cultural side’. Private sector actors agreed, perceiving culture and its role in place-making as key to attracting investment, while alluding to the power of ‘fast policy’ prescriptions in comparing Sheffield to other cities:

People in property, people in investments, people who do infrastructure, people who create places, or place-making, are very interested in culture. We see this in London, Manchester, Birmingham, and we’re trying to create this nexus in Sheffield where culture has got a very important role to play in how we create place and attract investment. (Private sector)

The causal logics by which culture can engender place-making and attract investment were not interrogated, with private sector actors affirming the dominance of cultural consumption: ‘if we want to get regeneration working, it’s about culture to create and stimulate demand’. Culture’s ‘panacea status’ (Evans, 2009: 1004) was indicated in its listing as part of the recipe for regeneration –‘heritage, culture, innovation, tech, residential’– accompanied by expectations that it can ‘animate spaces’ and attract people to ‘experiences’ in the city centre, where the pandemic had accelerated diminishment of the retail offer. This understanding was echoed by a city council officer:

The importance of this sector, culture, events, artists coming out of the pandemic is going to be absolutely critical. To try and grow back that hospitality vibrancy in the city centre we’re going to have to throw everything at it and we’re going to need [CCWs] to help us put on events, animate spaces, do new, special, more than we’ve done before to bring back confidence. (City council officer)

These logics are espoused by actors engaged in two overlapping networks – the Sheffield Culture Consortium and the Culture Collective – which correspond to our framework’s hierarchical form of governance, or top-down, more formalised practices involving local state and other governance elites such as major cultural institutions. Of note is that the city council has not placed itself in a central, co-ordinating role within the city’s hierarchical culture governance, in contrast to its 1980s municipalist experiments. The council’s decentred, light-touch approach to culture was explained in the following terms:

Culture was outsourced a bit to the Culture Consortium by the city council, and in some ways that was with good reason. That was kind of saying: ‘The sector ought to be able to lead itself or have a strategic role directing itself’. It’s quite paternalistic to think that you have a Director of Culture sat in the town hall telling everybody how to do culture. I mean, that’s both quite patronising and it’s a very non-Sheffield way of doing things. (City council officer)

The Consortium is regarded as the city’s ‘main vehicle’ for culture governance, created in 2012 following the city’s unsuccessful bid to become the UK’s first City of Culture. It comprises the city’s 10 main cultural organisations – the trusts, a cinema, galleries and music venues, an events organisation and both city universities – with one Council officer providing staff support. Its stated aims foreground inclusive logics, broadening economic accounts of culture’s role whilst reiterating the emphasis on boosting Sheffield’s profile:

For people: for the widest and most diverse possible audiences and participants in culture; For creative practitioners: for Sheffield to be a great and inclusive place for a creative career; For infrastructure: for Sheffield to have the facilities, venues and infrastructure needed for a thriving cultural city; For influence: for Sheffield’s profile regionally, nationally and internationally to reflect our dynamic, diverse city. (Sheffield Culture Consortium, 2017: 20)

The Culture Collective was created in response to the recommendation of the Cultural Cities Enquiry (2019: 1) that compacts develop ‘plans to bring in higher levels of investment, make best use of cultural property assets and attract a full range of diverse talent’. Membership overlaps with the Consortium but includes private sector representation and – uniquely amongst cultural compacts countrywide – property interests in the form of the Sheffield Property Association. Floridean economic logics dominate, tempered by those of inclusion, in its strategy to ‘place culture at the heart of a strong, vibrant and inclusive city’ (Sheffield Culture Collective, n.d.) whilst reasserting culture’s perceived economic role in the visitor economy and development of the long-favoured space of the city centre, demonstrating how non-economic rationales tend to be subsumed in case-making for culture (Banks and O’Connor, 2017).

Commenting on both, interviewees critiqued the ‘Sheffield way’ of doing culture governance, with a private actor describing ‘lots of well-meaning people and groups that set things up and it’s not always joined up’, whilst a regional authority officer bemoaned the lack of resource and capacity:

It’s not governance because it doesn’t tie into anything big that’s spending money or making decisions … it’s just let’s get together and make things better with what we’ve got … there’s still a big gap on governance … my take on the Cultural Collective and the Cultural Consortium – brilliant, but they’re all people with day jobs … there’s no resource, no capacity … in the city council, there’s one officer. (Regional authority officer)

Such recognition of governance gaps reflects how the city council has decentred itself from formal culture governance but also highlights that the University of Sheffield has played a key role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ (Jakob and van Heur, 2015). This can be inferred from interviewees citing university-commissioned research into public culture funding. But a variety of interviewees also specifically acknowledged the university’s role in filling a leadership void created by the council. A private sector actor lauded the university’s role in gaining national regeneration funding for the city centre. A regional authority officer recognised how the university provided capacity for the culture sector in the city:

Capacity is so important … to write a bid … capacity then enables the sector to be stronger and advocate for itself … Where is the capacity to help with all that, with communications and marketing, advocacy and engagement? … [The] team in the university have filled that gap. (Regional authority officer)

Radical and everyday political logics and self-governance

Our final set of logics draws from and refines Mould’s response to the familiar critique that creative city policies ‘promote and valorise economic production and profit-making’ (Mould, 2015: 17) as embodied in economically instrumental logics for culture. Mould (2019) differentiates such competitiveness-orientated creativity from the ‘subversive creativity’ that arises in reaction and resistance to it – thus establishing a dichotomy of CCWs’ co-optation by or opposition to creative city strategies (Borén and Young, 2017). To move beyond this dichotomy we include everyday, collective practices through which alternatives are enacted despite rather than in reaction to dominant, economically instrumental logics. Therefore, in contrast to Mould’s radical conception, those engaged may be ambivalent about contestation but are concerned with ‘the creation of new spaces of action and processes of individual and collective reproduction’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2019: 151). Such practices are not about being activist per se but are about trying to change the conditions of daily life in light of lived experiences. We recognise that creative city discourses in turn can seek to ‘hijack’ everyday and radical practices as part of city branding (Mayer, 2013: 12). But key to our conceptualisation is how Mayer (2013: 7) groups relationships with neoliberal urbanism’s instrumental use of culture, contrasting those who are excluded with those who are alienated. The latter grouping aligns with Sheffield’s CCWs as they are linked with and, to differing degrees, reliant upon the city’s cultural economy, particularly as embodied in its major cultural institutions, even as their contributions and needs are not understood nor met.

Our research revealed that in distinguishing formal from informal forms of culture governance – the latter perceived by most as uniquely grassroots-driven – most interviewees alluded to the everyday logics of culture. A Council officer described this ‘bottom-up structure of activity’ as comprising ‘loads and loads of people just getting on and doing things themselves. The DIY culture for Sheffield is so important’. Some interpreted this as providing resilience: ‘it’s a very Sheffield thing to kind of go, “Well, no one’s actually going to help us, so we’ll just get on and sort it ourselves’” (city council officer). A creative worker agreed, explaining that ‘Sheffield has always been a really vibrant and fantastic city for culture … mainly on a DIY level’. Here the ‘subversive creativity’ element of our conception of political understandings of the logics of culture was stressed: ‘people really love the DIY gritty underground subversive, “We don’t have to answer to any government official, we can do what we want”’. But the mutual interdependence of CCWs with the city’s major cultural institutions in cultural production – as alienated, not excluded (Mayer, 2013) – is underplayed in this oppositional conception. In stark contrast, private sector actors considered CCWs reductively in relation to an extreme expression of instrumental economic logics, financialising culture, with one explaining that ‘the best thing we can do is figure out how we grow our economy, so that when somebody comes up with a creative output, it perhaps commands a greater financial value’. This positions CCWs solely in terms of how they can benefit from the ‘trickle down’ of economic growth rather than considering them as vital cultural producers within the city’s cultural economy.

Political logics for culture align with the self-governance of our culture governance framework, referring to bottom-up, more informal, CCW collective practices to support themselves and perhaps advocate for change or contest the activities stemming from governance elites (Kooiman, 2003). The self-governance form is most clearly embodied in the Creative Guild, a largely self-funded 850-strong membership organisation for the city’s disparate range of CCWs. A member described it as a freelancers’ community in which ‘they have peers and colleagues that they can call upon for help, for support, for company, for solidarity’. In turn, the Guild provided the strongest expression of political logics’ radical potentialities with its timebanking scheme. Timebanking, under which everyone’s labour is of equivalent value –‘one hour equals one hour’– and wherein members can exchange one hour of voluntary work for an hour of assistance from another member, exemplifies an ‘alternative urban system of the everyday’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2019). Here the Guild, as an associative network, uses reciprocal exchange as a form of support and solidarity for its precarious members, explained in terms of seeking to valorise volunteer labour:

There is so much free labour occurring in the sector … we wanted to put a value on it … adding a layer to the economy so that people stopped working for free because so much free labour kind of devalues people’s skills and also people’s confidence because they begin to feel like their skills aren’t worth charging for. (CCW organisation)

But other logics are wrapped into the Guild’s existence and practices. It was established in 2015 with the assistance of the formal Consortium, using an ACE grant, with the primary aim of raising the status and collective voice of the ‘grassroots’ in relation to formal culture governance, rather than engaging in self-governance per se. This signals that the city’s formal culture governance recognises the importance of CCWs to its cultural economy. However, a council officer’s description of the Guild as ‘a bit of gold dust’ that demonstrates the benefits of low-cost support for CCWs also can be interpreted as acceptance of their precarity, a situation exacerbated by austerity localism’s encouragement of laissez-faire self-help due to the especially drastic decline in local government support for arts and culture (Pill and Guarneros-Meza, 2020; Wills, 2020). The Guild therefore exemplifies how logics for culture intersect and diverge in the city. It provides an alternative to creative city strategies (as envisaged by ‘subversive creativity’) and helps in collective reproduction (everyday political logics), but it can also aid realisation of practices of marginalised self-help by the ‘alienated’ which stem from and support the continued dominance of economically instrumental logics.

Despite these critiques, Sheffield provides lessons for elsewhere in how its hierarchical governance has supported the self-governance of CCWs as embodied in the Guild. In turn, the presence of both forms signals potential for realisation of the third form of culture governance – co-governance – comprising forms of co-operation between self- and hierarchical culture governance that would bring everyday, lived experience into governance deliberations. Guild members saw potential for it to represent their interests to governance elites, including the cultural institutions that contract them on a freelance basis, and thus its scope to act as translator between the ‘different professional languages and the mundane everyday practices of policymakers and creative producers’ (Borén and Young, 2017: 24). But members also recognised that the Guild lacked ‘external reach’, affirming the gulf between the governance modes of Sheffield’s large cultural organisations and its CCWs. Realisation of co-governance depends on links both ways to develop a shared understanding of the role and needs of the city’s CCWs and the supports required to meet these, including sustained support for self-governance. We expand on these themes to inform our recommendations for city culture governance.

Realising co-governance

Our research affirmed the separation in practice between the city’s CCWs and its hierarchical culture governance, including the major cultural institutions which do, as one explained, ‘rely on freelancers, a huge number’. In turn, consistent support for this ‘alienated’ grouping and their own, associative form of self-governance were lacking. Tensions were recognised particularly related to resource distribution:

I think what happens in Sheffield because there’s so little support available, it gets sucked up by bigger organisations, and quite rightly because they are vital and important for the city, but then I think it creates a kind of ‘us and them’ attitude and some bitterness … I think that’s what the Guild was set up to try and help, but we can’t really help that much without resources. (CCW organisation)

Even as CCWs may revel in their ‘subversive creativity’ and engage in ‘hidden’ forms of everyday self-help such as timebanking (Mould et al., 2014), they are essential cultural producers within the city’s cultural economy. During the pandemic, the University of Sheffield’s role as cultural intermediary proved key in bringing the lived experiences of CCWs into formal governance deliberations to inform local interventions, filling a knowledge gap but also redressing a welfare gap (Dent et al., 2024: 562). It did so by conducting research that constituted a live evidence base. Repeated surveys of CCWs revealed the dramatic decline in their work, loss of income and their reliance on multiple jobs as facilitators, teachers, technicians and performers across Sheffield’s cultural venues (Price and Curwen, 2022). The analysis demonstrated CCWs’ particular vulnerability due to their dependence on locked-down venues whilst ineligible for national job retention and income support schemes. It also evidenced how support needs were not being met, an example being that eligible CCWs were not aware of training courses in digital and business skills, signalling ineffective communication with this ‘alienated’ grouping. Many reported they were pursuing other types of work, flagging a loss of talent.

Governance actors, notably city council officers, cited the research as helping them understand that ‘the freelance sector is very vulnerable. There’s been a lot of hardship, and yet they’re the people fuelling the sector, so how do we redress that balance?’ Its findings were used to justify city council intervention with the support of the Culture Consortium. In January 2021 a grants scheme was launched to support CCWs’ creative and business practice:

The freelancers project that [the university] put together. So as the council we’re supporting that because we recognize that the ecosystem … is fragile and hasn’t had national support during the pandemic … it’s fallen through the gaps in a lot of what’s been given out nationally. (Council officer)

In ‘doing the politics’ of culture governance, the university sought to raise understanding, bridge divisions and secure support, pointing to how Sheffield’s culture governance could better align with the everyday, lived experiences of local cultural production wherein CCWs are recognised as producers rather than merely creators of experiences for consumption in place-making and marketing strategies. But this greater understanding of interdependence did not herald an institutionalised shift to the co-operation of co-governance. In August 2022 the Creative Guild announced its closure, citing an unsustainable business model compounded by a pandemic-related decline in membership fee income and an unsuccessful bid for ACE support. Thus this source of mutual aid and support was unable to sustain, in contrast to the pandemic-prompted awakening of collective organisation identified in cities elsewhere such as Milan (Tanghetti et al., 2022). It leaves the city’s hierarchical form of culture governance without a ready linkage to its CCWs to determine needs and support, threatening the cultural economy in a city where culture-led regeneration is central to its economic strategy.

Our recommendations for city culture governance, informed by the Sheffield case, recognise the reliance on CCWs and the importance of understanding and responding to their everyday experiences and needs (England, 2024; Tanghetti et al., 2022). Active governing should be enacted through a co-governance framework rather than, as in Sheffield’s case, an over-reliance on personal relationships and the university stepping in to fill governance gaps. Realising a co-governance framework that enables co-operation between hierarchical and (supported) self-governance would provide cities with a culture governance that encapsulates the ‘alliances between private and public stakeholders [and] self-organized networks’ (Lange, 2011: 193). Rather than attempting to meld the different forms of governance, a framework for co-operation between these – which can be activated when needed – aids development of a city culture governance that ‘holds open spaces and structures’ (Gross and Wilson, 2019: 4) to be more inclusive and responsive in governing cultural production whilst retaining their distinct roles and scope for contestation.

In Sheffield, attaining this would first involve sustained support for the Creative Guild, as an embodiment of self-governance, from actors within the hierarchical form of culture governance who should recognise that practices of self-governance require support. Its sustenance would enable the participation of CCWs in co-governance, with ‘formal’ representation on the Culture Consortium, making it more responsive and legitimate in formulating ‘policy from below’ (England, 2024; Tanghetti et al., 2022). As (resourced) self-governance, the Guild would also ease enactment of everyday political practices of care and mutual aid (Dent et al., 2024; de Peuter et al., 2023). Resourcing should take the form of a no-strings grant rather than managerial contract, as the Guild needs to support CCWs’ collective actions which may at times seek to contest the activities of hierarchical governance.

Secondly, the city council needs to reposition itself within the city’s culture governance. During the pandemic it was recentred despite its ‘light touch’ stance, engendering support for the city’s CCWs and its cultural venues in light of the university’s evidence base by devoting resource to the CCW grant scheme and to smaller cultural venues and organisations through its Business Recovery Group, as well as regularly meeting with larger cultural organisations. Other governance actors praised the council’s responsiveness at this time. Certainly ‘crises’ accentuate expectations of a governmental response (Weible et al., 2020) which can be retracted as crisis recedes. However, the research underlines the ongoing importance of city government, in Sheffield and elsewhere, taking responsibility for the stewardship of culture governance in its position as leader of place (Healey, 2018) – as envisaged in intrinsic, public value logics for culture. This entails city government consciously striving to identify and co-ordinate activities, if not directly provide them, to meet citizens’ needs, whilst redressing concerns of paternalism by overseeing – providing accountability and legitimacy to – an inclusive co-governance that also provides material and normative support for CCW self-governance (Barnett et al., 2022; Pill, 2024).

Thirdly, the research highlights the need for greater understanding of CCWs amongst those most embroiled in economically instrumental logics for culture, such as Sheffield council’s economic development team, who should be directly engaged in the city’s culture co-governance. This would assist in co-creation of more mutually rewarding and productive relationships with CCWs in efforts such as those to ‘animate spaces’ so central to city regeneration strategies, offering alternatives beyond standard prescriptions. CCWs in Sheffield welcomed the opportunities presented, despite critiques of the appropriation of cultural place-making in creative city strategies (Mayer, 2013), with one explaining:

there does need to be a different way to think about these spaces … [it] does fall very nicely to our sector … it could combine retail, but other experiences too and whether that’s creating exhibition spaces or performance spaces or something totally new. (CCW organisation)

Finally and more expansively, co-governance could engender further collaborative endeavours, such as CCW engagement in development of imaginative and inclusive ways to inform policymaking (Borén and Young, 2013), creating opportunities to identify and meet the needs of a diverse urban citizenry in terms of culture and other realms of policy.

Conclusion

Application of our dual framework of logics for and modes of culture governance refines the dichotomy of co-optation by or opposition to creative city strategies which elides the interdependencies of practice in place. Though it is easy to discern how Sheffield has adopted Floridean creative city discourses in policy documents and marketing materials, these are used in combination with more inclusive, public value logics, evidencing a complex, nuanced and locally contingent understanding beyond the logics of neoliberal urbanism which indicates city government’s agency in delivering public value as part of its place leadership (Barnett et al., 2022; Healey, 2018). In turn, we find CCWs are neither uncritical champions of the creative city nor acting in radical opposition to it (Borén and Young, 2017). As cultural producers they are linked to, albeit alienated from (Mayer, 2013), the economically instrumental, creative city strategies pursued by the city’s formal, hierarchical forms of governance whilst also engaging in their own more informal forms of self-governance as part of their everyday political practices.

The innovative framework for examining culture governance in place informs recommendations for the co-governance of culture in Sheffield and other creative cities. Herein culture governance is conceptualised as comprising formal cultural institutions, informal associative structures and the networks and forms of co-operation within and between these. Reconceptualisation relies on paying close attention to the unique experiences and contexts of particular places, the elaboration of which provides an important corrective to increasingly stale, replicated boosterism to realise a progressive and pragmatic civic collaboration that brings CCWs’ everyday practices and lived experiences to a more collective governance of cultural production, whilst asserting city government’s stewardship of these processes. This points to rich avenues for further research, involving the application and refinement of the dual framework in other cities in diverse contexts; development of conceptual and operational understandings of co-governance, which will always be riven with tensions and contradictions and should always be open to contestation and re-articulation; and paying particular attention to the role of city government in stewarding co-governance processes that democratically increase capacity to care for place (Pill, 2024) – in and beyond the realm of culture.