Culture in for and as Sustainable Development

etween countries, and without interdisciplinary
co-operation they cannot essentially contribute
to the process of designing indicators.
Decisions makers, on the other hand, might
rely on measurable, tangible quantitative indicators
whilst seeing qualitative indicators as
being flawed by their perceived subjectivity.
To achieve cultural sustainability, both types
are needed, and must be combined into integrated
ways of monitoring and understanding
change, which will require new approaches
and long-term planning. There is an urgent
need for good examples that show the opportunities
of new participatory approaches
such as cultural mapping or ‘counter-mapping’,
and co-production of various sorts .
The way forward
In the light of shortcomings in existing indicators
and acknowledging the challenges facing
the development of better indicators, we
suggest the following steps to proceed.
The development of indicators that more
usefully reflect culture should be considered
as a joint learning process. This implies that
the importance of incorporating cultural assessments
in sustainability programmes
needs to be revealed to a wider range of
stakeholders, participants and researchers.
Relevant stakeholders from policy and
decision makers to researchers and practitioners,
with their different worldviews and
paradigms, should be involved in the designing
process of new indicators, and where feasible
to modify (broaden) existing ones, and
their capacities and knowledge of indicators
in the design and use of indicators should be
increased. Collaboration between the actors
at different levels and sectors is also needed
to critically reflect on the existing statistics,
taking responsibility for the costs of their
CULTURAL MAPPING AS A WAY TO INVOLVE
COMMUNITIES TO MAKE ASSESSMENTS
Cultural mapping [36] is a systematic tool to involve
communities in the identification and recording of local
cultural assets, with the implication that this knowledge
will then be used to inform collective strategies, planning
processes or other initiatives. It promises new ways of
describing, accounting for, and coming to terms with the
cultural resources (both tangible or quantitative and intangible
or qualitative) of communities and places.
Key issues in the highly interdisciplinary field of
cultural mapping include the questions of what to map,
how to map, and to what purpose the ‘findings’ should
be directed. Issues of power, resistance, alternative perspectives
and knowledge, and the question of what constitutes
important cultural elements and meanings are
situated at the centre of the field. The process of making
implicit knowledge explicit, and mobilising the symbolic
forms through which local residents understand and communicate
their sense of place, also have ethical and political
dimensions.
Cultural mapping encompasses an array of traditions
and trajectories. For example, since the turn of the
millennium the rising prominence of so-called ‘creative
industries’ internationally has meant that cultural policyrelated
mapping research has tended to focus on defining,
measuring and mapping the presence and spread of
the economic dimensions of the cultural and creative sectors.
At the local level, as culture became more integrated
within strategic development and planning initiatives,
there has been a growing number of initiatives to identify,
quantify, and geographically locate cultural assets such as
facilities, organisations, public art and heritage.
This comprises only a part of the field, however.
Cultural mapping also encompasses artistic and
counter-mapping traditions that prioritise the qualitative
and the intangible, valorise alternative perspectives,
and broaden the ways in which we understand cultural
resources within community systems, relationships, and
fields of meaningful interaction. In these ways, cultural
mapping aims to recognise and make visible the ways local
stories, practices, relationships, memories, and rituals
constitute places as meaningful locations.
An important trajectory of cultural mapping
involves the tradition of community empowerment and
counter-mapping. Counter-mapping refers to a map-making
process in which communities challenge the formal
maps, appropriate official techniques of representation,
and make their own maps. Both the alternative mapping
process itself and the visualised map that results are
viewed as acts of resistance, and in contexts of uneven
power relations can serve to articulate and promote marginalized
voices and perspectives in society.
(Nancy Duxbury)
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