MAPPING CULTURE

10. CONCLUSION
This report offers a detailed and flexible resource to inform the development of the
City of Sydney’s cultural infrastructure. It is, therefore, primarily intended to function
as foundational information for the continued construction and refinement of the
City’s cultural policy. Section 9 above has outlined a series of recommendations drawn
from the present project and suggested ways in which future cultural mapping
research can consolidate and extend the substantial work conducted to date.
This Conclusion also briefly engages with conceptual issues that provide further
guidance for cultural infrastructure development. In the process of designing and
conducting this research, the team grappled with several key issues relating to what
constitutes culture, how it can be classified, and precisely what can be mapped. It was
also concerned with what counts as cultural infrastructure, and, especially, the
relationship between venues and other infrastructural forms.
The research worked specifically with two dimensions of cultural infrastructure - the
spatial and the relational. It drew from the City’s Cultural Policy and Action Plan the
series of spatial types that framed the classification system and then articulated them
with the elements of the value chain within a framework that helps overcome the
limitations imposed by attaching a label to a fixed space. This is one useful way of
dealing with the problem of dynamism and complexity that ‘snapshot’,
one-dimensional mapping cannot overcome. ‘Cultural complexity’ requires a
corresponding ‘cultural intelligence’ (Ang, 2011) to enable effective interventions in a
field that is subject to constant change.
For example, when developing the City of Sydney’s (2013a) after-dark policy OPEN
Sydney: Future Directions for Sydney at Night. Strategy and Action Plan 2013-2030 , it was
necessary to redress the tendency towards ‘venue centrism’ that is preoccupied with
the concentration and management of licensed venues at the expense of
understanding the dynamic flow of people and activities across the cityscape
(Bavinton, 2011; Rowe and Bavinton, 2011). This report, similarly, has offered a more
complex picture of space, use, activity and cultural relationships than is typical of
many mapping exercises.
In drawing on various cultural models and approaches from across the world, this
Mapping Culture report has embraced the multi-faceted nature of cultural space and
practice, registering the importance of taking into account new developments that will
inevitably disrupt spatial classifications and infrastructural functions (for example,
multiple, overlapping uses and digital cultures). It has carefully attended to
representations of the cultural present at both meso and micro levels, while preparing
the ground for replicating and advancing the research, and elaborating upon its
classificatory schemes and methodological instruments. In pointing to several
126