Culture, economy, policy: trends and developments.

The important nexus between culture and economy is by no means a recent development nor a novel inclusion on the social science agenda. As Harvey pointed out in his foreword to Zukin's (1988) Loft Living, the artist, as one `representative' of the cultural class, has always shared a position in the market system, whether as artisans or as ``cultural producers working to the command of hegemonic class interest''. In the last two to three decades, in the US and more lately, in western Europe, cultural activities have become increasingly signi®cant in the economic regeneration strategies in many cities. Geographers, however, have been slow to analyse this integration of the cultural and economic in explicit terms, and it is only in recent years that a reworked cultural geography (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987; Kong, 1997) and a ``new'' economic geography (Thrift and Olds, 1996) has considered the constitutive role played by culture in economic development and the way in which economic forces are in fact culturally encoded (see Ley, 1996 and the other papers in the special issue of Urban Geography, 1996). Often, this relationship between the cultural and economic is facilitated, enhanced or hampered by policy. Yet, as in the idealist tradition, many more state cultural policies have been based on the notion of culture as a realm separate from, and often in opposition to, the realm of material production and economic activity than is explicitly acknowledged (Shuker, 1994, p. 54). The ®ve papers that follow deal with various dimensions of culture, economy and policy from a number of distinct geographical, economic and socio-political contexts. As a prelude and backdrop to these speci®c discussions, I will provide in this introductory review, the historical context within which to cast the ®ve contributorsO contemporary discussions. Speci®cally, I will outline the trends and developments in the nexus between culture, economy and policy, drawn primarily from the literature that exists on the experiences in the West. I will begin by taking the reader through some attempts at characterising the relationships between culture, economy and policy as the world enters the 21st century, followed by an overview of how cultural economic policies have developed from the 1950s onwards, particularly in the West. I will then provide an overview of the papers to follow, highlighting the common areas of analyses and the distinctive contributions to the literature on culture, economy and policy.