I am very excited to have this book land today. Already, I can sense parallels with what is happening in the UK, particularly in a rapidly gentrifying London where engineered culture is replacing the authentic culture it is evicting: Invoking cultural capital as a smokescreen.
“Summers also analyses how blackness - as a representation of diversity - is marketed to sell a progressive, “cool”, and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban centre”
‘Considering tightly controlled funding strategies, the apparent openness of the mainstream arts establishment to the cultural differences and new identities represented through Hip Hop Dance Theatre appears questionable. I suggest that developing the East Bank in London is less a process aimed at protecting cultural differences than one of assimilation, which serves the mainstream arts establishment’s imperial purposes, or ‘the cultivation of a self-promoting and self-interested narrative of the metropolis as benignly tolerant of difference’ (Harvie, 2005: 16). This notion seems prescient in relation to arguments over access, supervision and displacement implicated in the East Bank development. I believe the cultural district itself, while purported by the architects to ‘intensify the urban grain and make the stadium and park feel more special’ (Bevan, 2016), will remain an exclusive landmark of London’s elite, including its elite artistic institutions (Sadot, 2019).’
‘Increasingly, today’s cultural tourists are looking for more than just the tickbox attractions. They’re after genuine experiences that are memorable and ‘brag-able’. More and more often, they’re looking to experience distinctive, ‘local’ culture, too. Destinations like Amsterdam, Paris and New York have already recognised the pull of the ‘local’ as a distinctive tourism experience’ ( Bernard Donoghue, Chief Executive of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA), London).