What are new cultural centers, the vanguard of cultural transformation

by Bertram Niessen

This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with cheFare

Initially published on: October 17, 2019

HEX #FF50FF - Because it is eye-catching, and in some cases it is essential to take the risk of being looked at.

The new cultural centers are meeting places for networks, communities and organizations born in response to the economic crisis of 2008. They carry out collaborative cultural practices based on participation and activism, in cities and countryside, in the South as in the North, creating spaces for exchange. ​

The new cultural centers are makerspaces, experimental libraries, regenerated venues, community hubs and artist residencies: they are fundamental strongholds for experimenting with languages, civic passions and grassroots activism. They are traversed by hundreds of thousands of people, yet they remain a world that is partly little known, little studied and little told. 

Since 2012, cheFare has been mapping, connecting and giving voice to the protagonists of cultural transformation in Italy and abroad. It first did so with the eponymous call and then, alongside an ongoing editorial activity, through the production of collaborative cultural projects at local, national and international levels. ​

Over these years of activity, cheFare has analyzed thousands of innovative cultural projects from all over Italy, taken part in hundreds of meetings, published three books and more than a thousand articles on cultural transformation, organized collaborative paths online and offline involving thousands of people, and participated in an increasing number of steering tables with both institutional and “grassroots” stakeholders. ​

An area of practices that aspires to transcend boundaries

Depending on the humus from which they arose and the practices they crossed, the worlds we cross are known by various names chosen by convention, fashion, communicative necessity, or theoretical vision. Cultural innovation. Culturally based social innovation. Cultural activism. Generative social innovation. Collaborative culture. Culture in transformation. Culture from below.

While placing the focus on slightly different accents, each of these labels always points to the same area of meaning in which culture opens up new spaces for citizenship by pursuing the participation of individuals, groups, organizations and institutions in the cultural and political life of society.

It is an area of practices that strives to transcend the boundaries between different worlds, building bridges between environments that normally do not speak to one another and seeking unprecedented ways to translate languages, styles and contents. ​

The forms it encompasses are precise and situated. It is a fragmented landscape made up of cultural associations, social enterprises, cooperatives, foundations, committees and informal groups. Whatever shapes they take, it is now clear that communities, networks and organizations are increasingly organizing around what can be called “new cultural centers.” The adjective “new” carries a very specific chronological connotation. ​

Cultural spaces of the 20th century

During the second half of the 20th century, the spaces for consuming and producing cultural goods and services were characterized by fairly defined organizational, spatial, economic and governance trends. ​

On one hand, there was a concentration in official institutions such as universities, museums, exhibition centers and research centers. They were, and still are, recognized cultural hubs that engage with the leading actors of cultural governance: galleries, publishing houses, large libraries, radio and TV programs, the cultural pages of newspapers, etc. ​

Another strand, of course, concerned the venues for works produced by the cultural industries. Cinemas, concert halls, bookstores, libraries and small museums not only served as the “last mile” of widespread distribution networks but also often became territorial platforms for discussion and critique within a broader framework of inventing and strengthening the public sphere. ​

A third line was the multitude of small public or private territorial outposts linked to associations, welfare, intermediary bodies, religious denominations or political parties. Often tenaciously autonomous yet simultaneously united in networks and confederations, associations and clubs for decades formed the capillary interface between large nodes of political and civil life and small local centers. ​

This is an intentionally coarse and imperfect subdivision that mixes different planes, most obviously, the public/private distinction. But it can be useful to remember that it is especially on the margins of those worlds, and at their intersections, that throughout the 20th century the riches of lived culture in the territories emerged, with its specificities, contradictions and capacity to build bonds. ​

The outcome of these three development lines was, for a long time, a landscape with relatively stable features: the spatial typologies and conventions in organizing volumes and areas; the forms of cultural offer; the horizontal (territorial) networks and the vertical second-tier supply chains in which they were inserted; the professional figures they generated—whose biographies were tendentially anchored to more stable paths in public institutions or cultural industries; the relative separation between professionals, amateurs and spectators; and the territorial governance systems, which remained stable for much of the second half of the 20th century. ​

The shift from Fordist to post-Fordist organization of territories implied a spatial, social, productive and cultural reorganization of all types of spaces, including those dedicated to culture. This transformation affected both metropolises and medium-sized cities and, by rebound, even the most rural and remote places. ​

The Social Centers constituted a fourth form of cultural space in the 20th century, anticipating what would come later

The first actors who were able to productively insert themselves into this urban transformation were part of the Social Center movement of the mid-1990s. Heirs to the '68-77 season of political movements and the Circles of the Youth Proletariat, they had experimented with novel forms of constructing sub-cultural offerings during the ebb and flow of the 1980s and then came into more articulate play in '89-90 with La Pantera.

When hundreds of local administrations became administratively, politically and judicially stalled in the transition from the First to the Second Republic, the collectives animating the Social Centers occupied hundreds of vacant buildings across the peninsula. For over ten years they established a parallel network for producing, consuming and distributing cultural goods and services that involved millions of people. In many respects, the Social Centers constituted a fourth form of cultural space of the 20th century, anticipating what would come next. ​

The new cultural centers

With the new phase of retrenchment that began in the mid-2000s and the economic and social crisis that started in 2007, the situation changed again. The narrowing of opportunity windows for many classical careers in research, culture and communication - slashed by constant cuts, precarious employment relationships and increasingly aging contexts - led thousands of people to experiment with new forms of organization and career. ​

This happened in a context made ever more complex by the expansion or consolidation of new technologies related to very different dimensions - from digital manufacturing to Web 2.0 - that triggered unprecedented configurations between networks, information flows, collective intelligence and territories. Territories that at the same time were made more distant from one another by the increased brain drain induced by the crisis, but also brought closer: the broadening of international experience opportunities enhanced the possibility of cross-readings between very different territorial contexts, fostering the construction of hybrid experiences and skills. ​

It was with the 2010s that experiences of social and cultural innovation began to spread throughout Italy

On another level, in the proliferation of cases of urban regeneration, the cultural dimension has often been defined as one of the key assets; while in many cases these have been mainly cosmetic operations - driven by the mirages of the creative class as a driver of development and urban marketing as a real possibility of building unambiguous narratives of cities - in others there has been the possibility of building real experiments for cultural networks, organizations and communities.

It is in the 2010s that experiences of social and cultural innovation began to spread throughout Italy through the combined action of grassroots practices, the push of public administrations, the innovation of traditional cooperative networks and attempts to renew various types of traditional institutions, from museums to libraries. ​

The result of all these transformative lines was the emergence of a great variety of new cultural spaces, variously defined as “independent cultural spaces,” “new cultural centers,” “multifunctional cultural spaces,” “next-generation cultural centers,” etc. We prefer to call them “new cultural centers.” ​

By this term we mean hybrid spaces born in relatively recent years that produce and distribute culture in peculiar forms that set them apart from traditional cultural institutions. ​

They are characterized in whole or in part by the following elements:

Their medium-small scale distinguishes them from larger entities - born within large-scale urban regeneration operations - that obey different logics and economies; ​

The presence of varied environments offering heterogeneous functions such as libraries, bookstores, bars, restaurants, meeting rooms, workshop spaces, laboratories for different purposes (shared craft, digital fabrication, …), concert halls, screening rooms, exhibition spaces, rehearsal rooms, theatrical spaces; ​

Given their necessarily situated nature, depending on the contexts in which they operate they investigate the contemporary through the most disparate forms and practices: artist residencies; digital manufacturing labs; public or participatory art projects; performing arts festivals; seminars and panels; film forums; theatrical performances; concerts; parties; DJ sets; community management of cultural heritage; festivals; book and magazine presentations; exhibitions; ​

They tend to blend different audiences, which in some cases merely brush against one another and in others begin to meet and hybridize; ​

They experiment with innovative economic sustainability models, seeking to recombine opportunities emerging from the mosaic of functions and from territorial assets; ​

They often become hubs for innovative languages; ​

They show a tendency toward internationalization, given the high circulation of professionals and cultural objects; ​

They are capable of activating processes of social cohesion and inclusion in the territories where they operate; ​

In some cases, they enable generative or attractive functions for youth entrepreneurship and for the Cultural and Creative Industries. ​

These characteristics do not necessarily make them an “other” entity compared to the cultural venues of the late 20th and early 21st century. It makes more sense to consider them as one of the possible mutations of official cultural institutions, cultural consumption venues, clubs and social centers. ​

This is because the new cultural centers are the meeting point of crucial transformative impulses in the cultural and civic ecosystems, developing in constant - complementary and situated - dialogue and conflict with their territories. They respond to calls for de-standardization of cultural production and consumption, fostering the multiplication of opportunities and providing occasions to build new cultural, social and economic bonds where cohesion is potentially at risk in the face of contemporary complexity. ​

Principals of civic innovation in the face of the complexities of new demographics, new cross-cultural landscapes, new needs, and new desires

Not only because - in the North as in the South, in the suburbs of big cities as in inland areas - they are partners or promoters of social innovation and subsidiary welfare experiments. But especially because they constitute civic innovation strongholds in the face of the complexities of new demographics, new intercultural landscapes, new needs and new desires. In doing so, they develop visions and operational hypotheses to respond to the thinning of social bonds and the crisis of politics. ​

It is precisely this, perhaps more than anything else, that sets them apart in practice from the saccharine utopia of “cohesion at all costs” places. In industrial areas undergoing regeneration, for example, they are increasingly the benchmark for genuine meaning-making beyond the mere rhetoric of renewal: sometimes promoters, in other cases fig leaves, and in still others protagonists in unveiling logics alien to those of the social and cultural spheres. ​

It is on this front, perhaps even more than on the others, that they challenge territorial governances, conflictually articulating demands for new political and administrative solutions for culture, whether these are innovative public-private arrangements, regularization of occupations, municipal regulations on commons or micro-bureaucratic innovations of various kinds. ​

Some observers focus especially on the fact that, in the more tertiarized contexts, they have a close interaction with the realm of cultural innovation—understood as the set of economic and organizational practices responding to new demands from the Cultural and Creative Industries: from technological applications for museum innovation to crowdfunding for culture, passing through co-working tied to new cultural professions and experiments in audience engagement and development. ​

It is not only a matter of cultural consumption. It is a matter of passions.

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Beyond strictly technical issues, perhaps the most important point is that the new cultural centers act as platforms for experimenting with and circulating new languages, new visions and new contents. They are increasingly cultural transfer agencies between what happens “elsewhere” and “around the corner,” where “elsewhere” can be, in turn, great cultural capitals, digital spaces, places of origin of migratory flows, other centers, other suburbs. ​

It is not just a matter of cultural consumption. It is, above all, a matter of passions. In years when society seems to contract under the weight of uncertainty, anomie and the inability to glimpse the immediate future, the new cultural centers are more and more the alchemical crucibles in which to attempt to forge the meaning of the contemporary. ​