Abstract
This introductory overview outlines the conceptual and contextual basis for the Special Issue “Culture as Foundational”. It first locates the need for a new, more radical approach to cultural policy, noting how the economic imaginary of neoliberalism is currently being generally contested, but that culture is barely included in these endeavours. The article then outlines the work around foundational liveability and suggests ways in which cultural policy might align with this approach. In particular, it explores the idea of cultural infrastructure, noting that it needs to be conceptually distinguished from the social infrastructure, which in turn is part of a distinction between culture as a “realised signifying system” and the anthropological notion of culture as a “way of life.” It explores the idea of cultural infrastructure as a system of public goods and some current debates around this. The article suggests that cultural infrastructure and related public goods are required to provide the resources and capabilities to realise the fundamental human right to full participation in the cultural life of the community, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The article also suggests that the idea of public goods needs to be understood in its normative sense as a public good and that both of these are applicable to the small-scale commercial field of culture, or “everyday” economy. Intervening in this local cultural ecosystem should seek the public good by using a range of policy tools. Finally, we suggest that the other side of public goods are “public bads,” and these are currently represented by the intrusions of “platform capitalism” into all areas of culture as a signifying system and as a way of life. Recognition of these public bids is urgent but beyond the capabilities of the standard creative economy policy settings. We need a radically new cultural imaginary.
Keywords
Introduction
Cultural policy is in deep crisis. The dominant paradigm of the last 25 years – “creative economy” – has failed. Strip out software and industrial design and the statistics show a relatively small, slow growth sector, kept afloat by advertising, design, and marketing. Not only have working conditions – pay, precarity, professional status – worsened, but public investment in culture continues to decline (Polivtseva, 2026), and shifted to tax credits (UNESCO, 2026). Creative arts and humanities subjects are being cut from schools and universities, while, in the United Kingdom, a huge chunk of higher education research money has been repurposed for various CCI-related R&D ventures (BOP Consulting, 2024). A sprawling network of publicly financed creative industry clusters, think-tanks, government institutions, and advocacy bodies now sits atop a cultural sector at breaking point (Behr, 2026). Those that fall outside the “industry” rubric are forced to show contribution to growth, well-being, and productivity through an arcane set of well-being metrics that would not be out of place in a 16th-century astrologer’s almanac (Sagger et al., 2021). A combination of creative industries’ techno-optimism and the relentless metricisation of value, driven by neoliberal public policy frameworks, has hollowed out our cultural imaginary, leaving it fragile and lacking all confidence.
Since the 1980s, culture has been repositioned as a consumption good for individual consumers (one of neoliberalism’s first privatisations), with public funding kept afloat by arguments for “market failure,” the public stepping in where the market can’t provide. Culture has been forced to advocate for what it can deliver to some other government agenda, proffering weak quid pro quo deals to those with the big budgets (Kaszynska, 2025). These are mainly about economic development of various kinds, but also social cohesion, crime reduction, mental health, and so on. As a recent So, it appears that the growing trend of promoting culture as a means to achieve non-cultural objectives does not help to anchor culture as an autonomous and equal player at the policy level, nor does it lead to the proportionately increasing support to the cultural sector. (Culture Action Europe, 2024: 35)
Framing this special issue is the call for a radical repositioning of culture as a core area of public policy, alongside health, education, social services, and essential infrastructure, rather than a market-based consumer services sector. Culture is a constitutive element of the social foundations and cannot be simply dismissed as a second-order luxury nor “merely” an epiphenomenal element of the ideological superstructure. Culture is essential to social reproduction, liveability, and citizenship (O’Connor, 2024).
In what follows, we sketch out some of the implications of this radical re-imagining of culture as foundational. We focus on work coming out of the “Foundational Economy Collective” (FEC), 1 with related concepts of cultural infrastructure and public goods (and “bads”). But we start by outlining the global “conjuncture” (Hall, 1988), with its ever-deepening volatility, and how this forms a background to our approach to foundational culture.
Culture: a new imaginary?
There is a general sense, across the political spectrum, that the dominant economic imaginary of the last 40 years – neoliberalism – is in rapid decline. The “fracturing” of the global economy (Wolf, 2025) and the new mercantilism personified by Trump; the “rupture” of the “rules based international order” in favour of transactional realpolitik; the rise of state-led industrial strategies and new forms of “political capitalism” (Riley and Brenner, 2025 ); the emergence of a state-centric China as a globally dominant economic powerhouse (Alami and Dixon, 2024) – all these point to, if not a new world order, then at least a definitive dissolution of the old one. Domestically, a long process of “secular stagnation” (slow wage growth, flatlining GDP, stalled productivity) sits alongside an accelerating inequality (Riley and Brenner, 2025). The middle classes of the “political West” have seen a significant decline in purchasing power and social status (Milanovic, 2025), increasingly discovering what those at the bottom have known for some time, that hard work does not necessarily mean that things will get better in the future (Zickgraf, 2026).
The fallout from the global financial crisis (GFC) inaugurated a new period of political volatility, where Colin Crouch’s “post-democracy,” in which a technocratic state no longer seemed to represent social interests organised in political parties, left what Peter Mair called a “void” (Crouch, 2004; Mair, 2013). Into this void flowed new forms of “populist” politics, of both left and right (often with elements of both). This political volatility, sweeping across Europe and the United States, as well as parts of the global south, involving new, radical forms of political mobilisation, rattled the de-politicised technocratic centre that had emerged victorious from the Cold War (Bevins, 2023; Borriello and Jäger, 2023). The pandemic seemed to halt this, Biden’s re-election (and others, such as Macron in France, Lulu in Brazil, Albanese in Australia), re-asserting the liberal centre. But the rise and rise of the far right in Europe, and in South America, coupled with Trump 2.0, suggests that “the end of the end of history” is well and truly with us (Hochuli et al., 2021).
Neoliberalism, as a broad descriptor of the economic and social imaginary established between the end of the 1980s and the GFC (or perhaps Trump’s first election victory), is certainly dead in that form among the political elite. Although, as is inevitable with such a dominant imaginary, it can still be found alive and well among the institutions and personnel that were formed in its wake. But it is not at all clear as to What Next? On the right – now with a global reach (Abrahamsen et al., 2024) – the project is to move towards a “post-liberal world.” For some that is framed in reactionary fashion – Murray Rothbard’s “repeal the 20th century” (Ganz, 2024) – for others as an authoritarian techno-optimist accelerationism (Andreessen, 2023) These two have combined in an onslaught on liberal and social democratic institutions and norms with such a vehemence as to recall – if not directly reinstate – the Fascism of the inter-war years. What appears to be emerging is some form of overly authoritarian neoliberalism, led by a nativist, sovereign nation-state – a “national market liberalism” (Milanovic, 2025) or “neoliberalism plus . . . of more brittle, assertive and arbitrary states” (Marginson, 2026: xix).
The left, occupying the political space to the other side of the “sclerotic centre” (Wanga, 2026), has found it difficult to respond to this situation. We have seen a widespread repudiation of neoclassical economics, with its efficiency maximising sovereign individuals and the dis-embedding of the economy from any broader judgement of social good, other than GDP growth. There has been a re-assertion of the social and communal, and “the common good” (Mazzucato, 2026), especially visible in the Covid-19 pandemic, when it seemed, if only briefly, that some long-dormant social democratic state had reawakened. In parallel with this, the failures of business-as-usual in combatting climate change through market mechanisms were linked to the rampant social inequality and disruption caused by these same “market-first” policies (Christophers, 2024). As the fallout from the GFC seemed to indicate, these “markets” had become more about financialisation, asset-sweating, rent seeking, and extraction than efficient allocation of investment to actual production (Tooze, 2018).
In response, versions of the “green new deal,” in the United States, European Union (EU), the United Kingdom, and Australia, imagined state-directed investment in a decarbonising economy, hoping that these new green jobs might, through a “just transition,” revive those communities left behind by the deindustrialisation of the neoliberal ascendancy. But as yet, despite occasional optimistic signs, working-class
Long noticeable has been the absence of art and culture from these progressive re-imaginings. The various “green new deals” focused on investment in the industrial production of renewables along with material and social infrastructure. They did not mention culture (O’Connor, 2022), despite the highly visible role of art and culture in the New Deal of the 1930s, or the namesake original of the EU’s “New European Bauhaus.” So too, the more active role envisaged for the “green entrepreneurial state” in these projects has rarely encompassed cultural policy (Mazzucato, 2021). The absence of culture from the writing of heterodox economists such as Kate Raworth (2028), whose “doughnut” model was based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is quite stark – though perhaps unsurprising, as the SDGs also excluded culture (O’Connor, 2025b, this issue). This despite the claims by UNESCO and the EU, widely shared within the cultural sector, that, with a few eco-tweaks, the creative industries were “clean” (at least until the recent arrival of AI data centres) and thus eminently suitable for boosting competitiveness, innovation, and “sustainable development” (O’Connor, this issue). The failure of these kinds of arguments, as evinced by the ongoing marginalisation and defunding of culture, has seen a shift towards culture as a kind of behavioural technology, with Mazzucato (2025; Mazzucato et al., 2025) recently claiming that culture can help actively shape economic growth, aligning it with sustainability and “the common good,” though these seem mainly motivational, a “we are all in this together” team building exercise (O’Connor, 2025a).
Otherwise, culture is held to promote social cohesion and a sense of place and, especially in the EU, to help protect democratic values against foreign authoritarian governments and their populist allies (Polivtseva, 2026). However, it is not clear how this is to be achieved, when actual “culture wars” are being waged by the right, and nativist symbols of identity, belonging, and the “common good” are being used against the “metropolitan elites” – explicitly targeting the very cultural institutions being held up as democratic bulwarks. More fundamentally, it is not clear how culture can be used to establish a sense of community and democratic citizenship when the social foundations themselves are being undercut by the ongoing ravages of austerity, welfare cuts, privatisation of services, precarious employment (now being extended to the credentialed professional class thanks to AI), housing and cost of living inflation, and a growing crisis of meaning and isolation Durkheim would call “anomie.” All are to be tackled by culture while fixing the leaking roof.
In discussing the political upsurge of the post-GFC period, commentators (Milburn, 2019; Bevins, 2023) have shown how these “populist” left movements looked back to the “flat” and “prefigurative” social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and they can in many ways be seen as heirs of the post-’68 cultural left. Most of these movements involved younger, urban populations, with a high representation of students, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), media, academics, and “creatives.” While there were few explicit demands around art and culture, these formed the warp and weft of this youthful “creative milieu.” What became clear, from the outside at least, was that the youthful democratic creativity being thrust against the oppressive ruling elites involved a mobilisation of a particular habitus of a particular class (Bevins, 2023).
A Bourdieusian-inspired antagonism to “elite” culture had long been central to the appeal of the creative industries, which conflated “grass roots” and commercial culture in a popular-democratic challenge to sanctified cultural forms and institutions. Yet, at the same time as the creative class was becoming more precarious and radicalised, a chasm was opening between them and the “uncreative class,” the “left-behind” working-class communities who never went to university. This parallels the wider realignment of social democratic parties away from the working class towards the “virtue-hoarders” of the “professional managerial class” (Liu, 2021) and college-educated, “Brahmins” (Piketty, 2020) in the period from Brexit to Trump 2.0. As a consequence, right-wing populist anti-elitism very much targets (especially metropolitan) art and culture, and the creative class, which they see as its beneficiaries.
Left of centre, cognisant of the links between culture and gentrification, there has been an increased foregrounding of the local and communal, in terms of ecological sustainability, a focus on essential needs rather than ever-expanding desires, and a commitment to “left-behind places” and the communities devastated by neoliberal globalisation. The community arts movement’s long-standing distrust of “elite culture” has aligned with the rejection of the creative industries, seen as a driver of gentrification, upmarket consumption, “hipsterism,” and cultural tourism, and often figured (not unreasonably) as neoliberal extraction economies. In parallel, for those concerned with the provision of de-commodified basic needs, the creative industries are inessential luxuries at best and agents of an ecologically catastrophic consumerism at worst. Culture mainly falls between these two. Theorists of need barely include culture (Doyal and Gough, 1984 cf. O’Connor, 2022), and de-growth theorists have a strong disdain for commercial popular culture, often recalling tropes from a pre-cultural studies past (Banks, 2023).
A recent return to a “new municipal” politics (Thompson, 2020; Brown and Jones, 2021), in which post-neoliberal forms of economic and social development are sought, provides much more scope for investment in local culture, but as Banks and Oakley (2025) argue, this connection has rarely been made. It is as if the focus on basic needs chases out culture. Even when local government evinces some willingness to re-imagine the role of culture, most public spending is caught within the cogs of new public management, where Return on Investment, cost–benefit, and economic impact rule the roost (Gilmore et al., this issue; Kaszynska, 2024a). CCI policies continue to shift public investment away from public culture towards creative industries, often via tax credits, while subjecting what remains to the forms of intense, often punitive scrutiny reserved for the recipients of social welfare payments (Campaign for the Arts, 2024).
On the other hand, many artists and cultural organisations have embraced the shift to the social, the communal, and the participatory, as they have various forms of climate activism. Some seek a kind of post-capitalist prefiguration at the local level, looking to new forms of “commoning” and community economics (Bertacchini et al., 2012; Rose, 2020). However, in attempting to return culture to the social, it is often hard to see how they differ, where social policy ends and cultural policy starts. For some, this interchangeability does not matter; we shall argue that it does.
One promising route has been to look at cultural infrastructure as a way of re-inserting culture within the social foundations and positively asserting culture as a public good (Bain and Podmore, 2024). This is an approach we take in this article, and across the special issue more generally, but it requires some clear specification if it is to have critical potential beyond an “infrastructural turn” buzzword.
Our approach has benefitted from an extensive engagement with the work of Manchester-based FEC, allowing social and cultural infrastructure to be framed in a wider political economic context. Over last 15 years, they have focused on how we can “re-embed” the economy in the social, to make it work for the social good, rather than as a generator of abstracted GDP growth. Their “zonal” model of the economy emphasised the importance of material infrastructures (roads, water, fibre-optics) and the provision of health, education, social services, public administration, much of whose early forms were developed in the 19th century and especially after 1945. This “foundational economy” was coupled with a strong local “everyday” economy of retail, personal services, recreation, and so on. These foundations are crucial to ensuring the collective material security that a healthy democracy requires. The fully capitalist “transactional economy” is only one part of the overall economic field (FEC, 2018; Gilmore, this issue; O’Connor, 2024).
This moves social and material infrastructure away from being a quasi-technical question and frames it as an essential foundation of an equitable, decent democratic polity. While culture was absent from the FEC’s earlier work, since the pandemic, there has been a much stronger focus on the role of the cultural infrastructure, and more recently, there has been a further interrogation of the role of culture via collaboration with many authors in this issue (Calafati et al., 2026). Here, the value of cultural infrastructure is derived from the basic human right to full participation in the collective cultural life of the community, and it helps secure the resources by which this right can be fully exercised. This right is part of a commitment to democratic citizenship conceived positively as an active exercise of the capability that allows citizens to live “the lives they have reason to value” (Sen, 1999: 18). If culture is to be repositioned as a foundational public policy good, then we must reverse the cultural policy settings of the last 25 years. Ultimately, for us, culture’s absence from a radical politics hampers our ability to engage in the radical acts of re-imagination we require to create a liveable, human world.
The cultural and the social
The move to re-embed culture in the social is by no means new. With roots in the community arts movement, it speaks to prising art out of the museums, galleries, and concert halls and relocating it in everyday life, encouraging a more active and democratic participation. While broadly agreeing with this, our caveats are, first, that these (especially public) institutions are important nonetheless, rather than being zero-sum; and second, that such a redistribution cannot thereby “heal” a societal rift between art and society that began with the rise of modernity in the West. A third caveat is that this redistribution or relocation is not adequately described by renaming “art” as “culture,” with the latter as democratic and the former somehow elitist.
For example, in a recent report, commissioned by an international federation of arts councils, Maru Mormina (2024) rejects “narrow” notions of culture, that foreground “cultural expressions . . . such as music, literature or visual arts” (p. 20) and adopts an anthropological definition of culture. Citing T.S. Eliot (seemingly oblivious to his religious conservatism), she argues “that treating culture as a separable part of society is impossible because culture is tied to the society that has produced it” (p. 21). Culture is an “irreducible social good” (Taylor, 1995), produced and enjoyed collectively, “a feature of society . . . and valuable to society as a whole.” We need to recognise, she argues, “the inherently social nature of culture and the intrinsically cultural nature of society” (Mormina, 21).
The Bennett Institute also, seeking a workable definition of cultural infrastructure, make a similar point, using Raymond Williams’ well-known distinction between culture as “whole way of life” and culture as a narrower “arts and learning – the special processes of discovery and creative effort” (Alexandrova et al., 2024: 15). The latter is “the most dominant notion amongst cultural policymakers, with ‘culture’ typically considered in relation to the arts and heritage ‘sectors’ of the economy.” They seek to go beyond this “narrower” definition of culture, with its “bias towards a privileged set of artistic and ‘high’ cultural forms and mediums,” towards a wider recognition of “the resources, networks and spaces which are integral to the cultural lives of communities and places” (Alexandrova et al., 2024: 15). For the Bennett Institute, treating both social and cultural infrastructure as a “unified category will enable improved policymaking in this area”. (Bennett Institute, 2025:12).
One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, even the most hardened
The confusion is not just theoretical but dissolves culture as a distinct area of policy.
Cultural policy, argues Mormina, should be about more than “simple provision and access to cultural resources” and aim at “supporting the whole network or system of institutions (political, legal, social, and economic structures, civil society, the family and so on) that exist in dynamic relation to one another and provide the milieu for social relationships” (p. 24). That is, a “whole of government approach” to guarantee equal social opportunities in which “cultural capabilities can flourish, and a diversity of cultural activities can find expression” (p. 24).
We suggest, on the contrary, that seeing culture as part of society does not mean it needs to be dissolved as a separate policy area. Given that all aspects of our lives contribute in some way to our ongoing health and learning, does that mean health and education policy should be similarly dissolved? We know how important sanitation and good housing are for public health, but would we then merge water, sewerage, or urban planning into the health department? (Eltham and O’Connor, 2024). While health and education are clearly embedded in the social, and like culture, are multiply connected to other policy areas, they have evolved complex institutional apparatuses without which modern health and education services could not be delivered. Dismissing cultural policy for its focus on the “simple provision and access to cultural resources” at a time when these are being systemically defunded across the globe is less than helpful. It is a sign of the parlous standing of cultural policy that a report commissioned by an international arts body can recommend that it focuses on “care homes and prisons” while the “narrow” world of art, music, and literature can, presumably, be left to its own devices.
The Bennett Institute is right to focus on “the resources, networks and spaces which are integral to the cultural lives of communities and places” but not, thereby, to dissolve the specificity of culture into an anthropological everyday life. We might want to open up cultural policy beyond a constricted definition of “creative economy sectors” or of what counts as “art,” but we should be highly suspicious of a concern to move away from “artistic and ‘high’ cultural forms and mediums” per se. By directly equating art with elitism (“high”), it suggests a concern that anthropological culture is democratic, when it is simply the dissolution of a whole field of cultural “forms and mediums” into an undifferentiated social life.
For the Bennett Institute (2025), a library, “might serve as a source of educational resources (cultural) as well as a community meeting point (social). A local pub hosting weekly quiz nights can act as a space both for entertainment (cultural) and for fostering community bonds (social)” p.10. While this is clearly true at one level, conceptually we need to keep them distinct. Otherwise, we collapse the distinction between social and cultural, and “collective meaning making and symbolic representation” become available across the social infrastructure in an undifferentiated fashion (BI, 2025: 12). They therefore suggest hairdressers and barbers are as much part of community culture as a community arts organisation. While sympathetic to this social embedding, we have to make the specific value of art and culture to individuals and society explicit. Otherwise, there is a real danger we will escape the frying pan of “creative economy” only to land in the fire of culture as social policy.
Cultural policy does not “own” anthropological culture (O’Connor, this issue). Once culture is seen as co-terminus with social life, cultural policy inevitably takes a back seat to economic, social, urban, and environmental policy. Policies aimed at changing “whole ways of life” rarely use culture – economics, urban planning, and algorithms do a more thorough job. The seemingly democratic shift from a narrow view of art to a capacious anthropological culture ends not by embedding culture but erasing its specificity. Art and culture as a “realised signifying system” was separated out from other social processes (economy, law, administration, politics) in the 18th century, and no amount of community art-work can put this back together. The task rather is to make sure that participation in this sphere of art and culture is made democratic, not dissolving that culture into hairdressers and prisons.
For our purposes here, the term “culture” refers to the narrow definition of culture as commonly understood within the phrase “art and culture.” As such, culture for us is a particularly affective, aesthetic (related to the senses), imaginative, and embodied symbolic space of collective communication and meaning making. Images and sounds, movements and rhythms, and forms of poetic language speak to us about our place in the world. They allow a form of collective meaning making, a distinct mode of symbolic knowledge not available to rational discourse, providing an indispensable, if sometimes opaque, contribution to our shared social life. The transformative ideals we place on culture relate to the creative freedom we experience through the capacity to enjoy, engage, participate, make, experience, critique, and celebrate art and culture.
The right to a full participation in culture is more than a right to individualised “creative expression,” and it is more than “social bonding” or “identity formation,” important as these are. Culture is a site of collective meaning making involving the free exercise of the imagination. This means video games, TV shows, films, radio, podcasts, live music, recorded music, theatre, performance, books, magazines, dance, paintings, sculpture, blogs, galleries, museums, festivals, record shops, TikTok – the whole gamut of contemporary arts and culture. We absolutely agree that “art and culture” is an “irreducibly social good,” unthinkable outside shared conventions, understandings, forms of practice, and expectations and which are open and contestable. But reducing culture completely to the social avoids the fact that art and culture does not just happen, nor does participation happen spontaneously.
If culture is a right, according to article 27i of the 1948
To participate fully in the cultural life of the community is to participate, explicitly or implicitly, in an ongoing public conversation. It is via this conversation of art and culture that our shared values are examined, questioned, celebrated, and deepened. This is not the only conversation we have but it is indispensable. It is not substitutable by a general social policy discussion no matter how diverse and equitable. No equitable cultural policy can exist in an unjust society. But to give over that cultural policy entirely to social policy would not necessarily end social injustice, which depends on a range of economic, social, and political agendas, nor would it provide for the specifically cultural infrastructures that an equitable cultural life entails. So too, stepping over the political economy of art and culture, leaving cultural commodities to their own devices in order to embrace culture as a “way of life,” would be catastrophic. Art and culture is “irreducibly social,” but does not happen of its own accord. It needs the highest political care if we are to avoid what Bernard Stiegler (2015) called our “symbolic misery,” the total reduction of art and culture to an industrial process. That requires our deliberative and collective action.
Cultural infrastructure as public goods
Since the pandemic, where lockdowns increased focus on the qualities of immediate place, the FEC have focused on “liveability,” a more qualitative, fine-grained attempt to understand “where systems meet people” (Calafati et al., 2023). As such, in addition to the two “pillars” of disposable household income and foundational services and material infrastructure, they introduce a third pillar of “social infrastructure,” which refers to spaces of “social interaction, physical recreation, and creative expression” (p. 12).
The erosion of society’s material infrastructure has become increasingly obvious, as lack of public investment and privatised corporate extraction over many years has begun to bite. Social infrastructure too has also come under intense pressure. This comes with a hollowing out of democracy, as societal interests can no longer represent themselves effectively within the state, bringing a compensatory tendency to hyper-politics – rapid, unstable unpredictable upsurges of activity, followed by slump and withdrawal (Jäger, 2023). It is this latter that has begun to alert policy elites to the need for some kind of investment in the social, and not just the material, infrastructures in which these volatile political forces are nurtured. If interventions of this sort can easily be seen as band-aid amelioration without getting to the neoliberal roots of the problem, it is also the case that a disrupted social infrastructure, the ontological insecurity of precarious work, and threadbare social services make collective and progressive action harder to mobilise.
In the United Kingdom, the Bennett Institute has been trying to identify those physical spaces which “facilitate regular interactions between diverse sections of a community, and where meaningful relationships, new forms of trust and feelings of reciprocity grow among local people.” These physical spaces “may be public and free to use, such as libraries, parks and youth centres, or they may be provided in commercial spaces, for instance pubs, cafés and restaurants” (Kelsey and Kenny, 2021: 11; cf. Klinenberg, 2018). They also want to expand the notion of infrastructure beyond these tangible assets, to the intangible assets such as neighbourhood support networks or community groups that help connect people and strengthen social ties (BI, 2025).
As we suggested above, and acknowledging the permeability of social and cultural life, very specific kinds of infrastructure are required to sustain the cultural life of the communities. Many of these need to be supplied as “public goods.” “Public goods” is a “thick” concept that can only be fully elucidated through its complex history (Meyrick, this issue). Responding to UNESCO’s recent adoption of the concept (O’Connor, this issue), Mormina (2024) dismisses “public goods” as irredeemably narrow and antithetical to the idea of an “irreducibly social good.” She uses the neoclassical economic definition, known as “welfare economics” (cf. Kaszynska, 2024a), in which goods that are non-excludable and non-rivalrous make it difficult to charge money, a “market failure” which usually means the state has to step in. Mormina (2024) accepts this narrow definition, seeing any discussion of public goods as entirely about “market dynamics” and the “supply and demand” of culture, as a resource that must be provided to and consumed by individuals, and as such exists independently of them, and whose value can be understood or measured solely in terms of aggregated individual benefits. Yet, such public good framing with its individualistic view of value does not fully capture the complex social and collective dimension of culture. (p. 21)
We do not disagree with this, just the consequences she draws from it. This framing of culture as an individual utility good whose benefits to society are merely the aggregation of these individual goods stands at the very foundation of neoliberal cultural policy. In this frame, art and culture are private consumption goods, whose utility is decided and enjoyed by individuals, the exception being when there has been “market failure,” and the state needs to step in. Welfare economics sees public goods as a negative. Their deviation from market-led supply and demand was less than optimal, a regrettable necessity brought on by the inherent difficulty of charging for a particular type of good. The state stepped in because they could not be made to pay. If a means could be found to make them profitable – the history of the last 40 years is how capital has annexed whole swathes of public sector goods in ways that were once unthinkable – then they would be returned to the private sector (Davies, 2024a).
But this is not the only possible approach to public goods. Scholars working in material infrastructures, concerned with the consequences of systemic underinvestment and deterioration in the face of new challenges, have taken a more positive view of the idea of public goods. Deb Chachra (2023), an engineering professor, defines infrastructure as “everything we don’t have to think about,” pointing to a degree of invisibility and thus “taken-for-granted.” But it does need looking after (Davies, 2024b). Like Ernest Hemingway’s bankruptcy, infrastructure erodes slowly, then quickly. For Chachra and Bret Frischmann (2012), infrastructures deliver public goods, defined as “non-excludable” and “non-rivalrous,” meaning all can use them and do so without diminishing their utility for others. Non-excludable here is not a negative impediment to “market-first” principles but a positive impediment. Infrastructures provide collective benefits and are best delivered outside the narrow profit motive. And as collective projects, they ought to be subject to democratic oversight and decision-making. Frischmann (2012) wants to connect infrastructure with the “
Following Bain and Podmore (2024), we see cultural infrastructure as incorporating buildings, facilities, spaces, practices, funding and legal frameworks, personal, professional and institutional networks, social media sites, and digital platforms. For something to be deemed “infrastructure” would mean it would be primarily intended to facilitate the production of other goods and services (as in an electric grid), and it would produce significant externalities or spillovers (effects on third parties who are not directly involved, for instance, a clean water distribution infrastructure benefits not only those who drink it but also public health at large). As a provider of “public goods,” we would argue that such infrastructure is best provided by a public sector (however organised) and that such public goods should be conceived, democratically, as non-rivalrous – that is, can be used by multiple people without detriment or significant depletion. Indeed, the Bennett Institute, (2025) incorporate such characteristics into their definition of social and cultural infrastructure as enduring, accessible, and available (open to all), enabling (facilitating a wide range of activities valued by people), and non-rival (cf. Kaszynska, 2024b, 2025; Star-Leigh, 1999).
Infrastructures are inherently collective; the aim is to add as many users as possible. They should be accessible to all, whose multiple use enhances rather than diminishes the use by all the others. Infrastructures are highly synergistic (the more people use it, the better), and it’s impossible to guess fully what new activities it might stimulate, what it creates down the line, out of sight. A well-functioning public transport system, for example, may bring, via enhanced mobilities, encounters, and exchanges, a whole range of hitherto unforeseen activities into being. As with material or “traditional” infrastructures, social and cultural infrastructures enable a wider human flourishing (Kaszynska, 2025). Infrastructures require high levels of initial investment and are expected to function, “permanently or on a recurring basis,” and thus can be seen as a “tangible or intangible asset that has value accumulated over time” (BI, 2025: 14). These “spillovers” or “externalities” are often felt in the future, intergenerationally, and hard to identify and isolate. They are real, nonetheless. We might say it is a form of trust in the public, manifesting a faith in future generations.
Social infrastructure provides a range of public goods that enable human flourishing, and this can also be applied to the specific “narrow” field of cultural policy without thereby re-affirming neoclassical economics’ methodological individualism and the normativity hidden under its “objective” scientific framing. As with other policy areas, cultural infrastructure is best provided as a public good. The social benefit is not an aggregation of individual private benefits, but is a positive collective good, in which the participation of each one enhances the overall benefit to all. That is, they are not state-provided “goods” delivered to individuals, but in their very collective nature sustain community and connectivity: a public. State-funded culture is provided non-exclusively to all citizens, not because it is difficult to make them pay, but as an explicitly social good.
This means not just access to diverse forms of cultural consumption but to production too. This active participation is what Mark Banks (2017) calls “contributive justice,” the right of all to actively make or “do” culture in some way. This requires a range of cultural public goods, tangible and intangible, starting with education, in its widest and deepest sense. This would involve not only the skills and craft of creative making but exposure to diverse historical and contemporary cultural works and forms of artistic practice. It would require a broad, accessible public cultural life, allowing participation in those multiple conversations through which knowledge and judgement are developed and exercised. It would include access to diverse physical spaces of cultural practice (rehearsal, dance, performance, making, recording, coding), to related sources of craft, making and expertise, and to some project funding. Infrastructure as a cultural public good would include institutions of education and training, preserving, exhibiting, and performing; cultural services such as libraries (with their multiple forms of material resources), workspaces, archives, print, and coding; small-scale grants and project funding; legal and regulatory basics; accessible public media; and so on (Bain and Podmore, 2024).
Cultural infrastructure and cultural capabilities, as public goods, are the resources required for the exercise of cultural rights. Equally, as the FEC make clear in their critique of a singular focus on the social infrastructure (Calafati et al., 2023), any cultural infrastructure also needs the two other pillars of a functioning welfare state and adequate levels of disposable household income, providing that “modicum of welfare and security” essential to Marshall’s (1963) social citizenship, now conspicuous by its increasing absence.
The positive collective benefit that these goods bring has been articulated in several different political traditions. Mariana Mazzucato (2024) highlights the normative dimension contained in the idea of public goods, inevitably implying a public
Public good(s) in the private sector
As we suggested above, “public good” applies not just to state-funded cultural infrastructure and related public goods, but also what the FEC call the small-scale “everyday economy.” Those elements of the cultural infrastructure that take place not just in spaces that “may be public and free to use, such as libraries, parks and youth centres,” but may also “be provided in commercial spaces, for instance pubs, cafés and restaurants” (Kelsey and Kenny, 2021: 11). This “everyday economy” can also be identified for culture, though it’s fuzzy as hell. Often presented as “the market,” at the local level, it is far more like Fernand Braudel’s “embedded markets,” or Edward Thompson’s “moral economy,” than Hayek’s efficiently humming, calculating machine. Small-scale, everyday cultural life is a mish-mash of gift economies, sacrificial labour, sole traders, small businesses, real and de facto co-ops, hand-to-mouth cash flows, gig and portfolio work, and businesses hanging on by their fingernails and seat-of-the-pants. In short, all that which provides our cities with “vibrancy,” which interlaces with and enhances the social infrastructure, where artistic innovation happens, and animates the ecologies within which that aesthetic, ethical, and political conversation that is art and culture takes place.
It may be straightforward to equate public goods with state-subsidised goods, but the concept also covers the regulations, capacity building, legal frameworks, and the overall “political license” within which the private sector operates (Bain and Podmore, 2024; Kaul, 2016; Frischmann, 2012). Markets rely on a whole legal-regulatory infrastructure, and as Michel Callon (1998) and others have shown, they need to be created and shaped. Hayek himself suggested they could only work within a prior framework of shared values (Slobodian, 2018), and, as Marianna Mazzucato (2024) has it, they can be “tilted,” by concerted state action, towards the public good outcomes we want them to deliver.
That culture should be free from excessive government interference, have its autonomy, be annoying, make noise, and is crucial for any open and progressive view of culture. Hence, the importance of the “everyday” economy of small and medium cultural businesses, co-ops and collectives, associations, semi-formal social networks – the clusters and milieu of the current policy imaginary – which produce the public goods of a multifaceted, rumbunctious culture. They do so most visibly in their immediate vicinity – vibrant cities, flourishing cultural events and spaces, strengthened communities, democratic contestation, artistic innovation. As the criticism of the “creative city” concept has shown, these public goods – conceptualised as “externalities” – are very easily captured by private capital (real estate, hospitality, retail, universities), unless some concerted public countervailing intervention is made. Attempts by (usually) local government to retain (some of) these public goods for the public are also a form of public goods. These actions include insisting on open public spaces and access, percent for art, contributions to local cultural facilities and events, property trusts, and other such mitigations of the rampant property market (Banks and Oakley, 2025; Gilmore and Burnhill-Maier, 2025).
However, the question of how to retain these public goods produced by the everyday economy of culture also relates to the capacity and sustainability of the local cultural ecosystem itself. As we know, pressures on cultural sector pay and conditions, on working and living spaces, on small music and performances venues, on bookstores and galleries, on conditions of access to production software and distribution platforms – all these are making small-scale cultural producers as endangered as insects on an agri-business megafarm. Here, there are options for public good interventions around creative spaces, night-time entertainment zones, community trusts, co-operatives, rent controls, forms of basic income for artists, shared purchase options, and many others.
Over and above the local “everyday,” though deeply permeable with it, are those cultural sectors that have long been in complex symbiosis with the fully commercial transactional economy. There are now serious concerns about the sustainability of independent media and publishing, the music industry ecology, the dwindling space for independent games, for TV and film production, and small-scale fashion and publishing. Their survival is absolutely not guaranteed, and, if we want to retain these, it will require concerted action in the form of state-level regulations, quotas, price controls, low-interest public investment, and so on, plus a major investment in the public cultural infrastructure, including state “broadcasters,” as counterweight to predatory private corporations.
The “private” cultural sector, whose care is so often hived off to a “CCI” agenda hosted by the local economic development agency, thus also produces public cultural goods, and far more extensively than those directly funded by government. For Mormina, the commodification of culture is incompatible with the idea of a social or even a public good.
Cultural expressions (such as music, literature, or visual arts) often highlight aspects of culture that can be easily commodified and marketed to global audiences . . . Commodification upends the non-excludability of culture by turning it from a public good into a club good, that is, a good accessible only to those who can pay.(21)
The issue of payment for public goods is a complex one (Frischmann, 2012), but we all pay for public transport without it thereby being seen as a “club good.” In the context of cultural consumption, being able to “exclude” people, and thus get them to pay, is paramount. If you can’t exclude, then you can’t charge money. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and we have little sympathy with those who see “commodification” per se as the core problem. Nancy Frazer (2022) suggests that, in socialism, between the basic social foundations and the large-scale industrial production, there is a role for the market. And these parts of culture fall squarely within that space. How to “exclude,” to put people behind a turnstile so they are obliged to pay, or to create discreet commodities capable of being purchased, or an intellectual property demanding pay-per-use, requires a business model. Finding a way to “monetise,” at the same time, somehow keep the artistic vision “real,” is a challenge with which most cultural practitioners are all too familiar.
These complex challenges have long been known in the political economy of culture (Garnham, 2000; Caves, 2000; Hesmondhalgh, 2018), but a salient aspect for us is their need to make commodities pay before their inevitable tendency to become public goods wins out. Cultural goods are not used up by private consumption. Privately produced cultural goods gradually leak out, get hacked, shared, copied, pirated, put in libraries and on school reading lists, bought by museums, run out of copyright, and streamed on TV. Cultural goods are “irreducibly social goods” in two senses. Their production is inconceivable without the accumulated knowledge of all previous productions; they are a kind of specialised language, which must be learned and practised within these complex public–private ecosystems. And they contribute in turn to that shared language, that ferociously complex and multifaceted public conversation which is art and culture.
How we manage this is a difficult, complex question with no easy answers. This is – or should be – the primary role of cultural policy, to find ways of sustaining and expanding the production of and participation in culture by the widest possible range of people. The question of culture as a public good is about the right to full participation at one end, and at the other, about how to ensure the continued functioning of the interconnected public and private system of art and culture.
These public goods are – and should be – politically contestable, as the question of what gets valued, and by whom, is of course an intensely political question, and never more so than in a society of growing polarisation and inequalities. We should not try to sidestep this issue by dismissing art and culture as narrow, individualised, commodified, and embracing some more equal, just realm of “the social.” This only shifts the political question elsewhere. Moreover, these “privately” produced cultures can feel as much like public goods as those provided by the state. Indeed, as Kate Oakley shows in this issue with regard to football, the problems are exacerbated when we do not value them as public goods, allowing their socially produced value to be completely captured by private interests.
Facing public bads
The task not only involves redefining culture as a public good, but also confronting some serious public “bads.” By that I mean all those forces that threaten to enclose, monopolise, or thwart the contribution of art and culture to the public good. This too has a long history, involving states, markets, monopoly capital, and technologies in complex ways. It forms part of the history of culture over the last 250 years, at least.
Currently, the immediate public bad is the ongoing capture of art and culture by global corporations, whose control of access to market, distribution technologies, and multiple forms of intellectual property, as well as the creeping domination of philanthropy within state-financed culture, is now well underway. Indeed, as some authors have pointed out, these are no longer markets in any accepted sense of that term, more like “enclosures” (Rikap et al., 2025; Varoufakis, 2023). Six out of the top ten global corporations deal in the distribution, and often production of art and culture, and their impact on the ecology of cultural production across the globe has been profound (Doctorow and Giblin, 2022). For the economic development officers in the CCI departments, this is about navigating the shifting horizon of threat/opportunity in an endlessly disrupted world. Its deleterious impact on the very possibility of art and culture as a public good in a democratic world is not in its remit. Nor is the way in which this closes the horizon of the future (Olma, this issue). The permeability of art and culture to the wider culture is underlined negatively when we see how platform capitalism has annexed much of the very lifeworld out of which art and culture grow (Habermas, 2024). Its algorithmic capture of expressed preferences, the technological expression of aggregated individual choice, aims to reduce the conversation of art and culture to endless distraction and repetitive addiction. With the rapid, unregulated upsurge of large language model computing (“artificial intelligence”), what Karl Marx called “the general intellect,” the common accumulated stock of civilisational knowledge, has now been given over, just like that, to a group of sociopathic tech bros in Northern California. As Jeremy Gilbert (2024) suggested, ultimately, there can be little question that platformisation is today the key social, technical and institutional logic affecting the everyday experience of billions of people, and the ways in which they relate to each other, conceptualise themselves and even manage or express their most intimate emotions. (p. 4)
However, we wish to explore the relationship between the “art and culture” and the wider anthropological culture, and the ways in which both are being effectively privatised must give considerable cause for concern.
Conclusion
Brian Eno (2015) described culture as “a set of collective rituals that we’re all engaged with . . . everyone, . . . all the people actually in the community, everybody – has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture. And which somehow keeps us coherent, keeps us together.” How do we sustain the ongoing possibility of this collective, “fantastic conversation,” in all its rumbunctious multifacetedness? One in which our symbolic, aesthetic, or metaphorical understanding of the world, already visible thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet Cave in France, seventeen thousand years ago in Balanggarra Country in the north-east Kimberley, Australia, or three thousand years ago in Homeric Greece, can continue to evolve.
We currently look on powerless, at the wholesale slashing of culture budgets in North and (parts of) South America, across the United Kingdom, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere. As state broadcasting and public cultural policy are whittled down, or made a direct arm of politics. As art and culture are cut from education, or made prohibitively expensive, effectively privatising whatever remains of the system of public goods. As the commercial sector is handed over to the platform companies. The “fourth estate” (Fenton, 2009), national television and screen ecosystems, games, films, festivals, books, theatre, and live music venues, are all under immense stress, threatening to atrophy in some instances. Local ecosystems are undermined as any public value they produce – the liveliness, diversity, and obscure wonder that help make life worth living – is captured by real estate, hospitality, platform companies, upmarket retail, and corporatised universities.
Recently, Patrycja Kaszynska (2024a) suggested that “the value of culture is a long-standing area of theoretical discussion and argumentation whose complexities – and, at times, contradictions – render it unruly for the purposes of decision-making” (p. 5). Given our current predicament, and the ways in which exchanges between state and civil society have been subverted by powerful lobbies, the short-term interests of professional politicians uncoupled from any societal interests, and the growing power of oligarchy and “philanthropy,” then “unruly” is precisely the order of the day. It is the systemic evisceration of the value of culture, part of the flattening of human experience,and the historical medium in which this experience comes into being and is examined (Meyrick, this issue), that needs to be challenged. And that now cannot come from within an actually existing cultural policy.
In this issue, we talk about securing the foundations of our social and cultural life, and this is crucial. But we are also talking about the regeneration, reinvention, and re-imagining of that social and cultural life. Some of this will eventually require laborious cultural policy work, but right now it demands radical acts of the imagination to keep the possibility of a different future open. In this issue, Abigail Gilmore and colleagues closely interrogate the imbrication of metrics and statistical methods in the politics of cultural infrastructure. Kate Oakley analyses the latest step in the corporate enclosure of the English Premier League as a once-popular public good. Sebastian Olma takes us back to Mark Fisher’s “popular modernism” as a way of reopening our cultural futures. Julian Meyrick goes back to Hannah Arendt’s “public realm” to explore the consequences of its systemic privatisation and diminution in policy discourse. Finally, Justin O’Connor looks at global cultural policy, already in disarray before the subsequent onslaught under Trump 2.0.
We speak of regeneration and re-imagining at a moment when we are faced by a Hobbesian right, a sclerotic centre and a left which is in disarray. If culture is to be part of the solution to this, then we need hard thinking. As Perry Anderson (2025) writes, Today we are still in a situation where a single dominant ideology rules the greater part of the world. Resistance and dissent are far from dead, but they continue to lack systematic, uncompromising articulation. None will come, experience suggests, from feeble adjustment or euphemistic accommodation to the existing order of things. What is needed instead, and will not arrive overnight, is an entirely different spirit – an unflinching and where necessary caustic analysis of the world as it is, without concession to the arrogant claims of the Right, the conformist myths of the Centre, or the
For too long, cultural policy has tended towards administration and leaned away from politics. That time is over.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.