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World Cities Summit Issue, Jun 2008
Cities, Culture and Happiness
Bruno S. Frey
The arts as a means to enhance individual well-being can have an impact on how culture should be encouraged by policy.
CITIES AND CULTURE
Cultural activities have always been closely related to urban living. While some manifestations of culture, such as churches or palaces, can be found in rural areas in abundance, most cultural activities have been undertaken in cities, often in the largest cities of the times. They are seen as loci of cultural diversity and inter-culturality, and therefore of cultural creativity. The concentration of culture in urban areas applies to culture understood in a broad and also in a more narrow sense. This concentration has been supported by the great increase in megacities (defined as those with a population of more than 10 million people), of which there were only two (London and New York) in 1950, while in 1994 there were already 22 such cities (of which 16 were in less developed regions). In 1950, about 30% of the world population lived in urban areas; this share is expected to rise to 60% in 2025.1
Culture in the broad sense can be defined in many different ways. It may, for example, be understood to mean an “expansion of human capabilities and choice” as defined in the UNESCO World Culture Report,2 or as a “common value system, viewpoints, conventions, rules, ways of life and practices of a certain group of people…”.3 Cities provide an intensive communication network for the meeting of minds; enable easy access to new technologies and the news media; and support creativity by facilitating the interaction of people with different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities.
Culture can also be understood in a narrower sense, namely as cultural industries comprising entertainment, the media, radio, TV, printing and publishing, design and advertising. This essay focuses on an even narrower, but generally used, definition of culture as art comprising the performing arts (theatre, opera, ballet) and the visual arts (painting, sculpture, music and the like).4-15 It seems that the relationship between cities and the arts has been somewhat neglected in scholarly research.16
A striking economic aspect of the performing arts is the economies of scale in production and consumption. In order for a ballet or opera house to be profitable, they require large audiences that are found in large cities. The larger the audience, the lower the total average costs per visitor. In other art forms such as painting or design, the economies of agglomeration consist more in the economies of scope which large cities make possible. The cross-fertilisation of ideas and the creativity produced find its most fertile ground in large numbers of people with different views, interests and backgrounds.
In view of these considerations, it is not surprising that the most important opera houses are found in major cities, often the capital city or the largest city in a country, such as in Paris (Opéra de la Bastille), Vienna (Staatsoper), London (Covent Garden), Milan (La Scala), New York (Metropolitan Opera) or Chicago (The Lyric). The same can be observed for the theatre and ballet.
Painters, sculptors and writers can work in isolated rural areas. Think of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Glenn Gould, John Hughes, Thomas Pynchon or J. D. Salinger. However, it should be noted that they often decide to do that only later in life, after having found their individual style, and after having established themselves in the art community which is based in cities. Important art movements such as impressionism and expressionism have evolved in Paris, and more recent ones emerged in New York.
Museums and art galleries are certainly possible in rural areas but the advantages of agglomeration are nevertheless strong as the most important museums are located in major cities, for example, the Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
For similar reasons, the traditional and the modern media as adduced above also tend to be concentrated in large cities. A study by Stefan Krätke on “Global Media Cities in a Worldwide Urban Network”3 analyses the distribution of 33 global media firms with 2,766 enterprise units. The most important media cities in the world turn out to be New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Munich, Berlin and Amsterdam; each of these cities is host to between 64 and 185 enterprise units and between 18 and 29 global firms. This set of major “Global Media Cities” is similar to the major cities with respect to the performing arts and museums.
This close connection between cities and culture, the arts more narrowly, has also been made evident by an initiative in the European Union to name each year a “European City of Culture” which, interestingly enough, since 1999 has been renamed “European Capital of Culture”. This was initiated in 1985 and has since received huge prominence. The first cities to carry the title were Athens (1985), Florence (1986), Amsterdam (1987), West Berlin (1988) and Paris (1989). In the year 2000, no less than nine cities were named “European Capitals of Culture”—Reykjavik, Bergen, Helsinki, Brussels, Prague, Krakow, Santiago de Compostela, Avignon and Bologna. This same idea has been taken up in other continents. There are now programmes naming “American Capitals of Culture” as well as “Arab Cultural Capitals”. Obviously, the choices made in Europe and elsewhere have only partially been based on artistic merit; of great importance is a politically “fair” distribution over space and countries. What matters in our context is that this programme identifies cities and capitals, with culture as a fundamental consideration.
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