School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemUNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites and Tourism: A paradoxical relationship(Routledge, 2020)Conservation and management of cultural heritage sites are characterised by several paradoxes, which also affect the tourism activities related to these sites. The World Monument Fund monitors damage to heritage buildings and sites. It identifies three major threats facing heritage sites: political conflict, climate change and tourism. The tourist is thus seen to be as damaging as war or rising sea levels. In the World Monument Fund’s (2018) list of the most endangered 25 monuments in the world, approximately one-third were diagnosed as being ‘in danger’, mainly from tourists.
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ItemArts, Culture and Country(Currency House, 2022)The past two years have been a particularly dark time for the arts in Australia. Not only are we living through a pandemic, but the federal government has shown little interest in—or understanding of—the plight of the sector and its artists. The pandemic comes on the back of seven years of continuous erosion of public assistance to the arts at the national level, with more than ninety arts organisations defunded, while funding to individual artists has been significantly reduced. Many are struggling to survive in the face of repeated lockdowns and border closures to control the pandemic. For years the arts sector has provided evidence of its economic benefits, as well as its intrinsic value to society. Yet politicians remain impervious to these arguments. Increasingly, it is ideology rather than evidence that determines government policy. In other words, support for the arts is not primarily a question of economics. It is a question of values. The pandemic has made people realise the seminal importance of the arts and culture to our national well-being, but politicians do not see them as a central part of policymaking. Arts and culture are intertwined. We need to change how we view the relationship between the two within the political framework. This monograph presents some ideas on how to do it.
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ItemCapturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square(Routledge, 2020)This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.
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ItemArchitecture, media and spaces of urban communication(Routledge, 2020)This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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ItemSpaces of Communication(Routledge, 2020)This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.
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ItemLiquid Polis and Ambient Aesthetics of Communicative Cities: An Afterword(Peter Lang, 2022)
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ItemGoing Out: Rights to the City and the Cosmos(Peter Lang, 2022)
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ItemFrom Plan to Process: The Language of Public Space Evaluation(Peter Lang, 2022)Performance appraisal is a fact of public life, a fact which is particularly relevant to the emergence of contemporary public spaces. Urban design is assessed, reviewed, measured, and evaluated throughout the lifetime of a project. However, most performance appraisal relies on a limited measure, the criteria of value or economic measures of performance, which fail to account for a fuller understanding of the social and cultural appeal and success of the project sites.