What are cultural centers for? This book offers a unique and dynamic guide to managing these organizations, and the challenge of reconciling cultural aims with business success. Drawing on research and practice, it provides case-based insights into common managerial problems and their solutions. Although international research demonstrates that culture has positive economic impact and many cultural institutions are multimillion dollar institutions, there has been little research on how cultural centers are managed to combine cultural and economic impact. Due to the diversity of their missions and purpose, cultural centers in Europe often struggle to find business success. By drawing on recent cases from Finland and Sweden, and focusing on the challenges that face both managers and organizations, this book explores the incentives that underpin the foundation of cultural centers, and what is needed to make them a success. By defining the complex challenges that face cultural centers, this book enables managers to move beyond administrating an organization to becoming cultural entrepreneurs, turning good ideas into good business. In this underresearched area, this book will be essential reading for researchers, policy makers and managers working in cultural centers and museum management.

A study of public recreation space and how urban developers can encourage ethnic diversity through planning that supports multiculturalism. Urban parks such as New York City’s Central Park provide vital public spaces where city dwellers of all races and classes can mingle safely while enjoying a variety of recreations. By coming together in these relaxed settings, different groups become comfortable with each other, thereby strengthening their communities and the democratic fabric of society. But just the opposite happens when, by design or in ignorance, parks are made inhospitable to certain groups of people. This pathfinding book argues that cultural diversity should be a key goal in designing and maintaining urban parks. Using case studies of New York City’s Prospect Park, Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park, and Jacob Riis Park in the Gateway National Recreation Area, as well as New York’s Ellis Island Bridge Proposal and Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park, the authors identify specific ways to promote, maintain, and manage cultural diversity in urban parks. They also uncover the factors that can limit park use, including historical interpretive materials that ignore the contributions of different ethnic groups, high entrance or access fees, park usage rules that restrict ethnic activities, and park “restorations” that focus only on historical or aesthetic values. With the wealth of data in this book, urban planners, park professionals, and all concerned citizens will have the tools to create and maintain public parks that serve the needs and interests of all the public.

Presenting both the need for – and difficulty of – introducing effective cultural resource management (CRM) in the region, ‘Rethinking Cultural Resource Management’ in Southeast Asia explores the challenges facing efforts to protect Southeast Asia’s indigenous cultures and archaeological sites from the ravages of tourism and economic development. Recognising the inapplicability of Euro-American solutions to this part of the world, the essays of this volume investigate their own set of region-specific CRM strategies, and acknowledge both the necessity and possibility of mediating between the conflicting interests of short-term profitability and long-term sustainability.

Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.

This book discusses the role of digital technologies in the growth and development of cultural organizations and the creative sector. It includes contributions by authoritative scholars who address this topic through different perspectives, methodologies and approaches. The first part of the volume focusses on theoretical contributions that identify the main transformations caused by the digital revolution, the use of data, outlining new possible analytic frameworks and future lines of research. The second part of the volume presents empirical contributions applied to different fields in the study of the cultural and creative sectors. These range from analyses of traditional cultural organizations such as museums, the evolution of trajectories in the fashion industry, techno-creative communities, digital services for tourism, to cultural and creative industries and wealth and creative work. This edited volume will be of great value to scholars in the fields of Economics and Management including Economic Geography and Economic Development. Students and researchers interested in learning more about new technologies and their impact on cultural and creative sectors will also benefit from this book. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

Traditionally, relations between Europe and Asia have been studied in a hegemonic perspective, with Europe as the dominant political and economic centre. This book focuses on cultural exchange between different European and Asian civilizations, with the r

For the past half century, intellectuals and other critics have lamented America s descent into a therapeutic cultureor in Christopher Lasch s lasting phrase, a culture of narcissism. But is that the case? The essays in this collection take a fresh look at therapeutic culture and its critiques. Rather than a cesspool of self-involvement, therapeutic culture may instead be a productive and meaningful way that people negotiate with issues of culture, society, race, gender, and identity. Most important, the editors and contributors grapple with the historically and socially constructed nature of therapeutic culture and its influence. With its dazzling array of contributors and perspectives, this is a book worth getting off the couch for."