Paolo Castelnovi, March 2013

A strategic project to revive politics

How was it possible that a project for post-unification Italy devised by a small group of intellectuals, aristocrats and provincial bourgeoisie, in which Culture was assigned a fundamental political task: to build from scratch an inclusive sense of citizenship and national identity? And above all, how was it possible for this romantic and Enlightenment programme to be put into practice across the board and with continuity for several decades, with enormous investments of energy, organisation and resources of the young (and poor) secular state, gaining unanimous consensus, on the one hand with schooling, and on the other with widespread awareness of history, the arts and landscapes?

It is imperative that we seek answers to these questions today, in the face of programmatic agendas that propose, the best, with appropriate magical practices and ritual sacrifices, survival: eating, sleeping, watching TV. Today, our grandparents seem like Martians to us, who structured their strategies into an operational system, assigning a main role in them to Culture, for generations, in a country that then had a GDP comparable to today’s Third World.

Today’s condition is the result of an epochal depression: once the ideal thrust of the great project, which had been renewed in the republican foundation, is over, minimal management practices prevail in the public sector, which naturally entail destructuring, sectorial fragmentation, and thus the loss of common sense, of belonging to long-term strategies. The demolition of the original state project is produced by the neglect and sloth of two generations that no longer thought of themselves as a community planning the common good. But the process has accelerated in the last 10 years, due to the devastating rhetoric of ‘reforms’, often consisting of a malignant therapy: throwing out the dirty water strictly with children attached, activating abortive, partial procedures, without a hierarchy of reference values, ‘unaware’ of the collateral damage, now lethal for the overall management and for the positive sense that one would like to give to the term ‘change’. It is an announced drift: nationalist enthusiasm has died out, democratic enthusiasm has disappeared, we no longer have motivational scenarios. We have relied on them for four or five generations as if they were a natural habitat, where sectoral or perverse interests have also found space, which have been naturally ordered in a general scheme (fascism also thrived in that broth). When the culture broth is withdrawn, where our sense of res publica has grown, the ruins of the old structures and new hovels emerge.

So today, the crisis redeems us from apathy, forcing us to realise both the inadequacy to the times of ancient ideological architectures and the fatal weakness of recent short-term policies. It becomes compulsory to reopen the terms of programmes, laboured but integrated, necessary to overcome start-up frictions that we believed to be outdated. After the rude awakening, we are finally in the psychological conditions to get our hands on a powerful new strategy, one that has a similar capacity for political mobilisation to the illustrious previous ones, and imposes itself with a few innovative points at the top of the post-Monti (and post-Merkel Europe) agendas, which are as clogged at the functional levels, with harried actions to get out of the quarterly straits, as they are empty at the top levels, as if the key to the panoramic lift, where one looks far ahead, had been lost. And Culture dwells at the top floors. The first rule we must impose on ourselves is to bring Politics upwards and not the other way around, to adapt Culture to the bag lady roles to which it is placed in today’s electoral agendas.

In the last couple of years, someone with an economist’s eye has noticed the black hole caused by the latitude of Culture in political programmes, and has engaged in declarations and manifestos. In them, Culture is re-proposed as the leading actor capable of restoring depth and esprit de finesse to an economic policy obsessed by the double constraint of a blocked budget and the lack of accumulation to renew long-term strategies. In a country that has consumed the innovative thrusts of the traditional production system, Culture seems, at a somewhat lucid glance, to be the best agent to make the most of the rents we still have, the subject that can sustainably enhance the immense heritage of common goods, both tangible and intangible, today mostly mistreated or at least underused and in any case ideologically excluded from the vital cycles of the economy.

We need to understand why these openings risk, by coming out ‘cold’, appearing like rabbits out of cylinders, in the hands of conjurers busy distracting from the real problems.

The mistrust is only partly explained by the banal opposition of those who are unable to think about non-industrial productive resources. But on the other hand it is justified: those who know the functional plexus of Culture are aware that the cultural machine that works in society today is still the one that was set up in the late 19th century and its fascist instrumentalisation. That machine, which was successful in the first half of the 20th century, after half a century of neglect, has lost its grip on the vital ganglia of social processes: it is like finding a dusty, gorgeous old Bugatti in the barn that won’t start. And spare parts have not been made for 50 years Out of metaphor, it is not enough to say this to put Culture back at the centre of political strategies: it is necessary to undertake a demanding project of recovery, of recognising and repositioning resources, both living and patrimonial, of replanting equipment by adopting new ones if the old ones are worn out by misuse. As in any recovery, one must start with an assessment of degradation. At a comprehensive and non-sectorial glance, the effects of colossal strategic waste emerge blatantly. For example:

– the disconnect between asset management and education: the scandal of schooling (including university), which has now been placed among unproductive social services, such as health or security, is now obvious. But there is no need to measure the distance from European standards in the education sector: one must realise the specifically Italian opportunity to understand the scale of the ruin. We have lost the chance, all Italian, to make education the permanent accompaniment of the sensitivities and innovation capacities of the form, the systematic promotion of that theoretical and at the same time operational, artisanal thinking that we have accumulated over the centuries and which we now call creativity. The production of a living resource, which is the task of the school, is no longer integrated with the patrimonial, material or immaterial resource, but historically localised: this is also why the products, the acculturated young people, easily become prey to the global markets, reduced to a generic intellectual workforce that can be delocalised;

– the capillarily institutionalised but ineffective management of the tangible and intangible heritage: a sclerotic situation of the public hand is now evident, increasingly costly and inefficiently engaged in stopping and guarding rather than managing evolutionary processes, losing the possible synergies with skills traditionally widespread in communities. Without ever clarifying the evaluation criteria and rewarding good practices, trust has in any case been taken away and no investment has been made in local knowledge, in the sense of the widespread landscape, which, well accompanied, could on the contrary ensure the prevalence of respectful and attentive behaviour, as occurs in many Italian and European regions. On the other hand, too little has been invested in trade practices, in the culture of the ‘technical workshop’, which for centuries has developed the Italian capacity to absorb and rework innovations in ordinary production (from singing to design, from writing to cooking, from pure physics to dry stone walls, from cultivation practices to the philosophy of science).

But despite the long illness, the fundamentals are still there, at least for a few years. Not only has the exceptional organicity of the physical heritage not yet been completely lost, but one can bet on the possibility of basing an important segment of productive work on heritage, despite the changing cultural climate. In fact, for intangible heritage, one can still count, for a couple of decades, on the generation of those who learned without specialisation how to write and sing, how to cook and think in the abstract, how to make furniture and clothes. And how it learnt it taught it, or rather would have taught it (and could teach it) if the process of acculturation, that of production and that of management had not become so separate and rigid. So we can take up the challenge of reactivating a historically virtuous process by focusing mainly on new relational methods, promoting an alliance that binds the Italian heritage of knowledge and living sedimented with good ordinary operations, with socially qualified economic practices: strategic enterprise, competent work, widespread research, motivated training, multicultural interaction of views and practices. It is important to work on qualifications: it is not a matter of strategic pacts between knowledge and labour, between capital and innovation, but between directed and dedicated knowledge and motivated and rooted labour, between site-specific social capital and appropriate innovation.

These renewed relations, when they are successfully broken in, nourish (and are nourished by) a climate of respect between the public and private sectors, a sharing of scenarios and medium- to long-term strategies, the establishment of certain criteria for an economic and power balance, between institutions and companies, between organic programmes and local expertise, monitoring and evaluation in progress that allow routes to be maintained for medium- to long-term journeys, and the selection and satisfaction of both operators and service users.

But in order to obtain a biological niche where these relations can gain strength, it is necessary to recompose divided parts, to overcome an initial inertia, and this can only happen with a strong sign, a political rhetoric that gives vigorous form to contents that are present but by now unrecognisable and incapable of reorganising institutions, of introducing evaluative practices and of motivating enthusiasm and dedication: a 2.0 Strategy for Italian Culture, to be thought powerful precisely because of the renewed unity of art, education and widespread practices.

The formal definition of a Culture Strategy is all the more necessary as it is desirable to ‘dissolve’, at least partially, the Culture theme in territorial policies for development and quality of life. Like cocoa, 100% Culture is hostile to many palates, but properly dosed it produces the best delights. Thus, the contribution of the cultural system on the asphyxiated Italian recipe book for local development is strategic, but it must be thoroughly rethought, in the organisation of Culture in all its components, in order to succeed in triggering effective valorisation processes: for example by preparing already organised segments of work to be applied to heritage, or operational models of ‘cultural’ productions for the tourism and welfare market.

Similarly, the adjective ‘cultural’ of ‘Industries’, so dear to EU strategies, should be declined: not only the strengthening of the organised activities of the media, the web or entertainment, but the enhancement of the role of the general cultural component in the technical and operational skills of production, in the sectors of excellence of ‘Made in Italy’, where precisely the cultural reference is an underlying appeal, a sort of style that is as easy to reproduce in Italy as it is difficult outside. It is clear that the conversion of Culture, from an absolute and self-referential protagonist of an increasingly eroded micro-sector to a primary tool not only for the quality of life but also for most of the projects in the strategic sectors of the country’s development, will be arduous and strewn with excellent ruins.

It will be necessary, as always in the noblest endeavours, to ensure a good dose of humility in order to put culture at the service of other strategies, to distinguish the parts that are useful to more comprehensive projects from those that are merely ends in themselves. Not only that, but it will be necessary to demonstrate the ability to take on that instrumental role without any particular additional costs in the immediate future compared to what is already intended to be spent, overall (i.e. between all the sectors and actors involved) to manage the ordinary and promote development.

In this regard, a season of technical and operational tools must be inaugurated to remedy the terrible inability to make a considered assessment: the costs and benefits of investments, of management, of the spin-offs of each strategy are not the subject of debate or even investigation in Italy. As the recent battle over school ‘reform’ (or the costs of ‘politics’) has shown, the issue of costs, waste and rents is the subject of rhetorical formulations, of legendary constructions, but certainly not of a scientific and operational consideration that takes into account indirect, territorial and long-term effects. For the public sector, there is no culture of evaluation that allows direct experience to be connected with the overall statistical and accounting apparatus, and thus to make realistic judgements on the actual performance of services and their management. This is an aporia that runs the risk of overwhelming any strategy of innovation even with regard to Culture, and that will wreck all the sacrosanct claims of the various manifestos if the field is left open to the ideological opposition between Enemies of Waste and Advocates of the Right a…., based not on balances of resources and their productivity in terms of performance but on abstract statements.

The priorities of the strategic programme

Thus Culture was assumed as the object of primary strategies in all the country’s founding phases: the post-unification phase (to amalgamate historically and geographically separate pieces), the fascist phase (for the representation of an ideological identity), the republican phase (to give substance to collective participation in development). In all cases, Culture was presented as an organically structured machine, and assumed a role recognised as useful for the country’s policies. Today this acquired role in the political scenario has been lost, but this loss is not felt, immersed as it is in the more general catastrophe of the planning sense of the future in current opinion and of any long-term strategic logic in the criteria adopted by decision-makers. Today we realise that the crisis is radical, that we need to regain credibility for hope in the future and for political strategies in general, and in the general bewilderment we fail to see the underused resource at hand: Culture. And this blindness stems primarily from the loss of visibility and credibility of the roles that Culture can play, as a deep structure of our social system, as a complex machine that has been used before. We need to put Culture back into the toolbox of social strategies, to discuss explicitly the criteria of overall usefulness that, in any strategic programme, must guide the choice of lines of action and the resources needed to activate them. It is only by openly discussing utility, by answering the question: once I have set the goal, what do I need to achieve it?, that the cultural proposal can be removed from self-referentiality, from the moralising declaration of culture as a primary value ‘regardless’. It is only by discussing concrete strategies to improve the quality of life, and in them the potential role of culture, that we can get out of the corner into which the idiotic motto culture cannot be eaten has forced us. In order to achieve political consensus and recognition of the roles of service and instrumentality for complex strategies, we must also act on the communication side. For example, in writing manifestos (a seasonal epidemic disease) we should take care to distinguish the declaration of the ‘ontological’ properties of Culture, which almost always repeats what is defined in the Constitution, from the proposal of actions and strategies; we should avoid the unpleasant effect of vindication, of moralistic blackmail that demands as a ‘due act’ a series of complex efforts, totally unfulfilled in the last 50 years; we should give order of urgency and importance to the sequences of demands, pointing out the usefulness of public actions consequent to each of them and their operational concatenation, including economic sustainability. If we do not do this, our manifestos achieve communicative results opposite to our first objective, which is to attest the nodal function of Culture within a framework of political strategies. And it is not enough to declare the will of a group of intellectuals, we must demonstrate operational feasibility through exemplary interventions. For Culture we need to trigger a process of political rehabilitation of the same order as that which Slow food is generating for agriculture and the rural universe.

It is not easy, especially because today Culture does not exist in the common opinion and management practices of the last 30 years: it has been disintegrated into different and incommunicating pieces: the school, cultural heritage, the arts, the communication industries, which in turn have been torn into pieces (each school, each art, each type of publishing, etc.). The separateness that has even been cultivated for the individual categories of cultural activities (from dance to libraries, from contemporary art to landscape), which are now perceived both from within and without as isolated sectors, which are only related (or rather ‘lined up’) in the general frameworks of resource budgets, must be recovered. Obviously, taken one by one and not evaluated in their induced and integrated effects, the different sectors of cultural activities are included in the budget chapters on ‘unproductive expenditure’ (the first to be cut in the spending reviews that are currently furore, at least in words).

Therefore, the most urgent action is a powerful and radical strategy of integration between the aspects of the cultural sector and between these and the other sectors of management and governance of the economic and social system, in order to have an operational theatre in which to demonstrate the productivity and social utility of Culture as a whole, as a complex tool.

This line of action should be credited now, in the midst of the crisis, to show how much more can be done with the same economic and operational resources, if sectoral bodies, decision-makers, skills and energies are integrated on new programmes. In many cases, it is not a question of introducing substantial methodological innovations, but of enhancing and finally giving priority to operational and management integration processes that are often envisaged in projects but are almost never fully activated, getting bogged down in ordinary management in the face of sectoral resistance, inefficiencies in network and infrastructure aspects, and the unwillingness of decision-makers and managers to confrontation and collaboration.

But it is precisely the potential of overcoming this historical Italian handicap that makes it possible to think of a flourishing development of programmes capable of making integration processes sustainable and structured. In fact, the course to be followed is the same if we look to a less immediate horizon and more radical objectives, given that in Culture lies, hitherto underutilised, the only real reserve of energy and resources the country has, and its integration into socio-economic processes is the only structural economic enhancement programme that is within reach in this difficult global context.

The integration process that lies ahead is impressive and will occupy at least a couple of lustres, but it is important to decipher the types of concrete situations immediately, to identify the articulation of the situations that will be encountered, in order to be able to attack them, studying distinct lines of strategic action for each. It is a matter of developing operational ‘styles’ and consolidating good practices with experiments, cooperative pacts, procedural methods and diversified paths to follow, taking into account the difficulties to be overcome and the more or less collaborative history of each sector with respect to the others to be involved. Three typical situations can be schematised:

A. macro cross-sectoral relations, between Culture and other sectors of activity or government of the public res, habitually practised in other European countries and routinely placed at the basis of community programmes, but in Italy not yet recognised as a reference framework for systematic practices and procedures. The delay is enormous and specific experiments will necessarily have to be carried out. The most urgent tables to be set up are those concerning intersectoral integrations, implicit in the 2014/2020 Community programming, which must be presented as consolidated and fruitful good practices to be used systematically in projects competing for calls for proposals in the coming years.

It is now clear to everyone the importance of certain structural relationships, between:

– cultural heritage and territory, in order to fully integrate cultural resources (material and immaterial) into local development planning, making what has been tried so far with local experiments, of modest relevance, for tourism or territorial marketing a consolidated practice and developing recognised skills. This is by far the most important and potentially fruitful integration theme, because of the emergence of interest in the landscape, which synthesises all the aspects that naturally link culture and places, because of the spontaneous formation of communities of non-profit interests linked to the identity of living, and because of the crisis that the government of the territory is going through (from intermediate bodies such as the provinces and mountain communities to planning, which has been betrayed and underestimated). What is needed at the central level is a recognition of the strategic importance of this integration, for example by intervening on the Action Plan for Cohesion, which is fundamental for the relations of local projects with community programming, in which the role of Culture for urban and territorial qualification is underplayed but is never made explicit nor provided with an incisive operational instrument to collaborate with other services and instruments of local development (see Milella’s documents on this). There is also a need for a widespread service that networks the scattered experiences that are being carried out, often with much good will but in an isolated and unsustainable manner, and draws examples of good practice from them, allowing comparisons with experiences in other European countries. Through this network, a toolbox of procedural, regulatory and contractual innovations should be circulated, as well as new-generation design solutions, professional figures and public-private agreements for the operational integration of diffuse cultural aspects and historical and landscape heritage assets with other territorial resources (the landscapefor.eu website is oriented in this direction).

– cultural activities and economic productivity, in order to obtain an Italian version in line with the European strategy of enhancing the industrial aspects of the design, multimedia publishing, teletext and entertainment sectors, considered as a whole as ‘Culture’. Certainly the resource of skills and creative abilities available in Italy is exceptional, but it is rather artisanal than industrial. On the other hand, in the high quality market (the most suitable for modest production sizes such as the Italians), the formal and creative component, properly cultivated and accompanied, is fundamental and inexhaustible raw material. The history of sectors such as furniture or fashion show the extraordinary potential of invention and artistic sensitivity moulded on artisan bases and applied to industrial production. A strong strategy is needed at the central level, which allocates to this fruitful integration a good slice of the resources set aside for innovative start-ups and for the productive upgrading of existing activities, not attempting to chase the media industries, but rather directing selected creative and artistic capacities to qualifying activities with high product quality and technology, including but not limited to the media. There is also a need for widespread action to train the skills necessary for these professional activities, on the one hand by pushing schools to innovate profoundly in the ways and contents of training courses of all kinds, by including the enhancement of formal sensibilities in any type of study, as well as inventing new study and experience paths, the new ‘workshops’, to make room for professionalising training of excellence. On the other hand, it is necessary to flush out the artistic ambitions that animate the countless participants in associations and clubs, to select hard so as to be able to facilitate those who deserve and above all are willing to try their hand at a productive role, in which art and craftsmanship are powerfully intertwined and predisposed to the relationship with the productive needs of industry.

– widespread culture and services for the quality of life, to improve the effectiveness of services and to contain costs in areas of governance of public affairs that are in urgent need of restructuring, such as city management and social inclusion processes or health and care services. These are services set up according to Enlightenment criteria, in which citizens are merely passive users, who are not required to participate, and which are now unsustainable due to the growing costs of separate management and the distance between operators (often unsupervised in their performance) and users (increasingly less empowered and increasingly demanding). If a culture of public-private cooperation that bore extraordinary fruit in the century at the turn of the 20th century has (deliberately) died out in Italy, a new generation of virtuous examples of collaboration, mostly imported from Europe, shows the potential sustainability and quality of participatory services, as is now widespread in waste management or the control and maintenance of public space. In Italy, cultural and identity aspects have been the fundamental resource for launching and implementing cooperation processes in the management of goods and services felt to be common, for example at the scale of municipalities, parishes, and party sections, but for 40 years no strategy has been in place to provide space for experimentation and initiatives in this direction. It is necessary at the central level to sanction the strategic role of the public-private relationship for the management of public affairs and to promote it starting from the networks of cultural headmasters: schools, libraries, museums, imposing a radical innovation in their management and transforming them into seats of local initiative in direct connection with municipal policies (think of the Foyers ruraux in France or the Public Libraries in Anglo-Saxon countries). In order to guarantee the valorisation of the term ‘common’ (of goods, services, the entities themselves) and to avoid drifts of elitist appropriation of public-private cooperation spaces, the norm and practice must ensure that fundamental requirements of inclusion and accessibility are respected in every project: in these respects the Libera model is very interesting. It is necessary at a widespread level to promote and give space to a season of experimentation and research that deepens the role of Culture in the health and happiness of intergenerational, social and identity relations, the use of spaces (urban, rural, natural) and relations with time (free, occupied, consumed): what has been called ‘culturally-driven’ welfare. It is a political space already teeming with initiatives, almost everywhere short-lived and highly fragmented, but which could be amalgamated and made powerful by a cultural ‘infrastructure’ that reads their common roots: using the knowledge of each person for free to improve the quality of life of others. The new ideological container ‘Smart City’ makes it possible to set in the most advanced technology the trials hitherto carried out almost clandestinely and strictly in the welfare space of the voluntary sector, and thus to open a new phase, organic and visible, of these potentially very important activities for any strategy of effective integration.

B. Innovative cross-sectoral relations for the institutional system, which to date have been completely lacking in ‘Genio pontieri’, i.e. dedicated competences and procedures for the management of common cross-sectoral working tables. For example

i. school/asset management,

ii. suburban and rural land management/artistic productions,

iii. productive enterprises/landscape management.

It is these innovative relationships that can be counted on to restore otherwise impossible budget balances. It is a question of using expertise and capital resources ‘over the counter’, raising the overall performance of each of the collaborating sectors and at the same cost.

These are results that can be pursued if, for example, schools (from kindergartens to universities) are empowered with the tasks of managing and enhancing the diffuse heritage, primarily involving the abused teaching staff and students and their families. In this way we obtain a capillary distribution of control and management functions, a bringing closer to the local communities of the sense of heritage, placing the school as an intermediate subject between the State and the municipalities, guaranteeing for the former the managerial sustainability in protection, for the latter a greater adherence, in the use of heritage, to local needs and conditions. These are actions that directly implement the effectiveness of the school’s educational tasks and awareness of the role of culture in local life and identity. Operationally, the French “gestion partagée” type of agreements can be used and the schools (which can become the collector and coordinator of local voluntary initiatives and the third sector) can be agreed with the funds used up to now (i.e. before the various cuts) for ordinary control and authorisation activities, reserving to the Superintendencies the tasks of coordinating and training teachers (fundamental in the first phase), of intervening in serious cases, and of managing investments. By accrediting such an initiative at a national level, it is easy to foresee a priority option of the Foundations and other financing bodies of the third sector in financing, on a project basis, the additional costs in the start-up phase of the system.

for ii, artistic productions (both visual and performing) are used for territorial qualification, opening an intensive season of activities and initiatives to assign recognised centrality values to hitherto neglected and ‘difficult’ places (the suburbs and the diffuse city of metropolitan areas, areas of agro-tourism take-off, settlements with productive decline, etc.). This strategic line of action has already been tried out in Europe in the Urban and Peripheries programmes of the past rounds of EU funds, with controversial and highly dissipated outcomes, but today it should be set up with different requirements:

– Systematic integration of the ‘art-territory’ action line within territorial redevelopment or urban regeneration programmes, with the formation of ad hoc management entities, on a voluntary basis and at minimum cost,

– systematic selection of ‘art producers’, identified (and paid) by verifying a commitment to a permanent contribution (of at least 5 years) according to a programme that integrates their performance and is in turn strongly integrated with the urban or territorial one. In this sense, the organisational and design experiences that are being developed in the candidate cities for European Capitals of Culture can be used, always taking into account the different context of application (not so much enhancing already very important places as making ‘non-places’ or ‘lost places’ identifiable).

for iii, the usefulness of the landscape as a qualifying resource for productive activities (not only for tourism but also for agriculture and industrial production) is experimentally verified. It is a strategic line that struggles to assert itself because it affects a historically neglected relationship: up to now, productive activity has been thought of independently of places and has, if anything, met with mistrust from control subjects: suffice it to think of the impact assessment obligation, in which it is taken for granted that every new activity harms the context to some extent.

On the contrary, the (few) productive enterprises that recognise the role of the landscape as a cultural mediator and as an identity and participatory tool (as defined in the European Convention), are considering the convenience of intervening to improve the sense of the landscape of the places of production, not only to improve the fruition quality of the territory, but for the ‘cultural’ accreditation of the products and for the added value (to the quality of life) of the work rooted in identity places. Until now, the evaluation of the convenience of improving the sense of the landscape has made inroads almost exclusively with agricultural producers who realise that they themselves are producers of the landscape in which they work, as taught by the grand strategy of Slow food. But other types of producers are approaching them: for example quarrymen, and in perspective all those who have a direct relationship with the raw materials deriving directly from the territory, for which the focus is slowly shifting from things to people, and it is realised that among the raw materials are the skills, the projects, the sense of community of workers rooted in the territory. The experimentation of projects and investments on the sense of the landscape passes through the awareness of the role that each company plays in the territory, for which every initiative of documentation of the company’s history, of contamination between archives and ‘internal’ memories and the history of the territory, of recognition of the processes of interaction between local skills and productive capacities must be favoured: a theme that historians of the territory and the landscape are only now beginning to explore.

C. relations between sectors within the Culture theme.

The separateness between the numerous segments in which the production and management of cultural services is articulated undermines the overall credibility and power of Culture as a strategic category of action. In many cases, instead of working to integrate objectives and operations, we are still consumed with discussing the false antitheses between the usual object categories (the pairs: environment/culture, architecture/landscape, performing arts/historical heritage …) and/or procedure categories (the pairs: conservation-valorisation, territorialisation-networking, communication-training, experimentation-participation, …). What is needed is a conceptual investment, of a general philosophy of culture, capable however of being translated into policies to mobilise energies and procedures and to promote actions of internal integration, ‘rearguard’ with respect to those outlined for inter-sectoral relations, but fundamental in order to be able to experience the operational force of Culture as a whole. To succeed in overcoming the querelles it is however necessary to get out of the debate of ideas and experimentally demonstrate the operational effectiveness, political credibility and sustainability of actions that exploit the integration between segments of cultural production or service. On the contrary, space should be given to interventions that are based precisely on the pair energy generated by false antitheses: for example, interventions that contextually enhance performing arts and historical heritage (e.g. in networks of theatre residencies or festivals located in sites of excellence), or those that mutually qualify environmental and cultural aspects (e.g. in the management of protected areas). But one cannot expect the strength to organically and synergistically restructure a fragmented sector to derive only from internal energies: if there were any, they would have already emerged. Therefore, a strategy of external provocations, coming from other sectors, must be developed here as well: for example, it is appropriate that the programmes of territorial qualification, urban regeneration and local development only introduce integrated lines of action of the culture sector, in which it is compulsory to propose synergic and at least ‘couple’ actions, (according to the false antitheses listed above). Even in integration strategies with respect to services and productive sectors, the project that presents integrated cultural sectors must become privileged, documenting the extent to which integration improves the expected performance, or contains costs, or achieves positive repercussions on the territory or on the overall functioning of the services. Without prejudice to the specific ways in which experiments can be launched according to the type-situations in which we move, in any case it is not enough to clear the political role of integration processes in the management of public affairs. In fact, strategic lines of action to enhance the ‘useful’ role of Culture such as those just outlined can only be activated if political and administrative inputs for new priority criteria in the decision-makers’ agendas intervene, making at least two integration methodologies prevail, for which we are terribly behind schedule and have administrative practices still littered with obstacles and resistance:

– subsidiarity between local projects, increasingly integrated, and central strategies, hitherto strictly sectoral, both at regional and ministerial level. In general, the regional or state sectoral bodies must be obliged to organise themselves to structurally support the municipalities (which in turn must be obliged to aggregate according to the size of the projects and management issues). In fact, the municipalities are the only institution constitutionally organised to integrate the sectors of public activity and manage them as a whole in order to satisfy the inhabiting community in all its infinite facets (it is no coincidence that mayors are the only political figures that still have credibility with the citizens). Even for Culture-related issues, municipalities are the institutions that are most likely to immediately open up to experiments in intersectoral integration and dialogue with the third sector, but they are not organised to deal with the network aspects and the territorial dimensions of a vast area, which are vital for the local development programmes, the enhancement of the landscape, and the sustainability of the arts projects outlined above. They require the coordination capacity constitutionally assigned to the Provinces and Regions, which however can no longer be subdivided into a plurality of interlocutors, but must contribute to the integrated projects in a way that is, precisely, integrated between the various operational directorates, by compulsorily participating, for example, in forming coordinating offices participating in the project with a single voice.

– co-planning and co-management between public and private entities, in particular non-profit entities, so far lacking reliable procedures to ensure their operational capacity, the promotion of NPW (non-profit work), the sharing of responsibilities and tasks, assigning to private entities the maximum management and reserving to the public hand the tasks of general infrastructure (information network, evaluation, performance verification, etc.) and investment (extraordinary maintenance of the heritage, professional start-ups, etc.). For culture-related issues, relations between public and private parties struggle to open up immediately to co-management experiments with the third sector, because there is a lack of regulations that guarantee the parties with respect to responsibilities and controls, that recognise in bilateral agreements the costs to be borne and the ownership of the assignments in a transparent way (and congruous with European regulations) but fiduciary and external to the tendering procedures, and that introduce monitoring as a collaborative practice and not only control.

A style for communicating

It is no coincidence that we speak of re-forms, since the distinctive elements of a project are also formal, of language. For a strategic programme, what counts is both clarity of content (importance, feasibility, expediency) and its communicative appeal. The presentation of a new strategy is in fact an opportunity to outline the reference to criteria and hierarchies of value different from the previous ones, in the conceptual sense before being political or technical. Precisely in order to allow a broad application and the triggering of an open discussion, it is important to work on the rhetorical aspect of the proposal, the terms and style used, the regularities, the method and the logical control imposed in the various steps. In the case of a strategic scenario for Culture, our proposal may be distinguished by some very important formal requirements, which may constitute its style and recognisable figure for:

a. The care taken in the description of each line of action to document contextually the aspects inherent in different levels of processing and their operational relationships:

– policies,
– programmes,
– projects,
– management procedures

This form of exposition responds to a requirement of political-technical transparency of the proposal, so that those interested in the general strategy aspects are reassured as to feasibility and sustainability by the design and procedural indications, and vice versa those who are operational and interested in the practices are enlightened as to the more overall references of the actors involved and the lines of action that, at the same time, the strategy envisages for an overall policy of good governance of the commons.

b. The rhetoric of presentation, which delineates the strategic axes as bodies that draw energy from pairs of forces that already exist but are not dynamically related, from operational segments that are today separate or even assumed to be antagonistic (culture/market, public/private, heritage protection/use, etc.). Each strategic axis has a cross-sectoral field of action, involves at least one antinomian pair of attitudes and competences and in each case involves different actors (public and private) in which each is placed in a position of service to the other. This form of exposition responds to an ‘ethical’ postulate of the proposal, whereby fruitful integration can only take place if each operational segment positions itself in terms of its relative usefulness to the needs of the other segments participating in the project.

c. The co-presence, in each strategic line, of network actions and local projects, according to the paradigm of glocal policies, which implies a simultaneous and appropriate attention both to the system of open relations (in our case at least European) and to that of integrations given by proximity relations and involvement in territorial management.