This Is Me, Not My Father

When a city invests in culture, what is it really buying?

By Ibrahim Fawakherji | ArchUp

A few days ago, I wrote about a night when I fled Europe, believing that I was escaping a strike and uncertainty. But once I had calmed down and looked again at the whole scene, I realised that I had not been fleeing a stationary train. I had been fleeing something heavier and less visible: a city that seemed to lean on greatness it had inherited rather than greatness it made anew each morning. An old Arabic saying came to mind: distinction belongs not to the person who says, “That was my father,” but to the one who says, “This is me.” Honour lies not in displaying an illustrious family tree, but in adding a line to it in your own name. Cities, like people, sometimes fall into the same trap. They live on “That was my father”: their museums, their industrial glory, their distinguished design traditions. They forget that time asks not what they have inherited, but what they have to say now when they declare, “This is me.” This is my starting point for a question that sounds dry and administrative but is, at heart, existential: what value does a country or a city gain when it invests in culture?

Material value: the heaviest thing to escape

In my previous essay, I said that escaping uncertainty was easier than escaping fear itself. Today I would go further: escaping material value is harder than escaping intangible value. You can leave a meaning behind and move on. But the stone that built your glory, the factory that fed your grandparents, the style that taught the world how to design: these are emotional weights that cannot be packed in a suitcase. A city that has accumulated enormous material value over centuries clings to it like an heir clinging to a property that yields no income, refusing to sell not because it is useful, but because it bears the family name. However noble it appears, this attachment can cause a city to miss its next stage of development. Self-esteem founded on a particular history and particular events turns from an inspiring memory into a pillow that lulls it to sleep. Understood this way, culture becomes a monument before which we stand, rather than a workshop in which we work. Here begins the confusion I want to untangle: culture as an inheritance we guard, and culture as a capacity we exercise.

Real value, but plural and conditional

Because I dislike empty rhetoric about culture, I read what researchers have to say carefully and dispassionately. I found a picture more intelligent than either side’s slogans. Culture is neither a money-printing machine, as champions of the “creative industries” sometimes suggest, nor an absolute, sacred good beyond scrutiny, as people in the arts sometimes like to believe. The value a city gains from its culture is real, but it is plural, not singular: different kinds of value that cannot be compressed into a single figure called return on investment. The right question is not whether culture “pays for itself,” but which culture, in which place, for whom, over what period, and compared with which alternative use of public money. A city that treats culture solely as an economic multiplier will exaggerate some of its benefits and destroy others. A city that treats it solely as an intrinsic good will neglect the material conditions of cultural production and the public’s right to transparent accountability. Value exists, then, but a budget allocation and a new building do not automatically deliver it.

Economic value: real, modest, and often merely redistributive

Let us begin on solid ground, with money. Cultural and creative industries can drive growth through employment, innovation, and spillovers. Regional European evidence supports a positive causal relationship between cultural employment and economic growth. But the effect is uneven. “Innovative” cultural activities generate stronger growth in dense cities that benefit from agglomeration economies, while “repetitive” activities support growth in peripheral and rural areas through jobs and local demand. This alone undermines the myth of a ready-made “creative city” that can be reproduced everywhere from the same template. Nor is the evidence always optimistic. In one Latin American case, creative industries accounted for only around three per cent of formal employment, and rigorous estimates found no significant causal effect on the rest of the local economy. Creative clusters, it appeared, did not produce broad spillovers unless they reached sufficient scale and established meaningful connections with other sectors. Put plainly, simply building a creative district or attracting artists is not a reliable growth strategy. Connections, skills, and the productive structure make the difference.

Cultural tourism, sold to us as economic salvation, is not a guaranteed export base either. Heritage can attract visitors and support the economy, and World Heritage sites can improve regional economic resilience during recessions. Yet urban planning research is clear that many economic impact studies overstate the benefits. They confuse new spending with spending displaced from elsewhere, overlook public subsidies and forgone tax revenues, and rarely compare cultural investment with another public spending option. Large facilities can become expensive “white elephants,” while the city’s own residents, rather than tourists, remain the principal users of its cultural amenities. Culture’s economic value is often real, but it is frequently redistributive: it moves spending, visitors, and property values between places and groups more than it creates net new activity. Here lies the ethical danger known as “artwashing”: cultural investment becomes a lever for rising property prices that displace the poorer residents and artists who originally made the place vibrant. Gains flow to landowners, developers, and affluent consumers unless policy deliberately protects affordable space, community ownership, and existing residents.

Social value: essential, but not automatic

Then comes the value that attracts me most: social value, because it is closest to what I understand a city to mean. Community arts generate real gains: confidence, new friendships, reduced isolation, and understanding across cultures. One large survey found that more than four in five participants associated their engagement with the arts with a sense of social connection, with live music, theatre, and cinema the strongest contributors. Honesty requires me immediately to add what the researchers themselves acknowledge: much of this evidence relies on participants’ self-reports without control groups. The arts may produce more “bonding” social capital within a group than “bridging” social capital between groups. Bonds can exclude outsiders. Projects can reproduce cultural hierarchies, place additional burdens on vulnerable people, and end without sustained support. Participatory arts are not inherently egalitarian; their social value depends on facilitation, resources, and attention to who is left out. The conclusion I find convincing is balanced: culture creates precious social value, but it cannot substitute for redistribution, affordable housing, education, or services. At its best, it works alongside them, not in their place.

Cultural value: what numbers cannot say

Here I reach the heart of the matter: the value that bears culture’s own name, which an economic balance sheet cannot capture. Cultural value is aesthetic, symbolic, historical, and spiritual. It emerges through collective meaning-making. It is normative and interpretive, not simply the sum of individuals’ willingness to pay. The most important things a city gains from its culture, its identity, memory, belonging, and ability to imagine alternatives, cannot be reduced to GDP or tourism figures. I am not saying economic analysis is useless. It is a useful but partial tool. The real danger identified by critics of cultural policy is excessive economisation: the language of “industry,” “impact,” and “return” becomes so dominant that it displaces culture’s social and intrinsic value. The conditions for living cultural production weaken, cultural workers remain precarious, and the connections culture creates begin to erode. A city that invests only in what it can measure may end up with impressive statistics and an impoverished cultural environment. Here the saying returns with particular force. The city content to say “That was my father,” living on heritage measured in visitors and tickets, has turned its culture into a museum of its past. The city daring to say “This is me” funds the living artist, the emerging meaning, and the question not yet asked.

Strategic value: slow, fragile, and dependent on credibility

There remains the dimension states particularly favour: soft power. Culture is a source of attraction and influence. Cultural diplomacy is described as a third pillar of foreign policy alongside politics and economics. Nation branding can draw on heritage, the arts, language, cuisine, sport, and major events to increase a country’s visibility and support its exports and tourism. But soft power is slow, indirect, and resistant to full government control, because much of it is produced by civil society, artists, universities, and diasporas rather than ministries. Credibility is essential to its existence. Crude propaganda, hypocrisy, and narrowly instrumental cultural messages destroy precisely the attraction they seek to create. Museums themselves are diplomatic actors in their own right. They function as contact zones addressing difficult histories, migration, and Indigenous rights, building trust and legitimacy that governments cannot build because they possess a measure of independence and public credibility. The deeper lesson is to keep cultural diplomacy free and independent: funded and facilitated by the state without becoming its mouthpiece. Long-term relationships outlast short campaigns of image polishing.

How to invest so that value actually materialises

An essay that criticises without proposing anything is only half an essay. I will therefore condense the evidence into a few clear principles. First, a city must state explicitly what kind of value it seeks. Is it investing in employment, social cohesion, health, heritage preservation, artistic excellence, or international influence? Each objective requires a different instrument, time horizon, and measure. Cultural planning often fails when objectives are vague and follow-up is absent. Second, build a portfolio rather than a single star. A resilient cultural environment combines heritage preservation, affordable space for artists, community programmes, support for creative industries and skills, local cultural participation, and selective tourism. Excessive investment in iconic facilities can suffocate smaller organisations. Third, make the strategy place-based, beginning with local assets rather than an imported template. Fourth, protect equity and affordable space through explicit measures against displacement and gentrification. Fifth, safeguard the conditions of cultural work: fair pay, career development, and stable institutions, not merely measurable outputs. Sixth, use independent, plural evaluation that brings economic, social, cultural, and strategic indicators together and accounts for displacement and opportunity cost. Seventh, keep cultural diplomacy credible and independent.

Conclusion: culture is both a means and an end

I return to where I began: the night I fled, and the saying that stayed with me. The economic value of cultural investment is real but modest, geographically uneven, and partly redistributive. Its social value can be substantial, but it is not automatic and may reproduce exclusion. Its cultural value is real but resists complete measurement. Its strategic value is slow, fragile, and dependent on credibility. The strongest case for investing in culture is therefore not that it is a reliable profit machine, but that it provides infrastructure for meaning, connection, and collective problem-solving. A city gains the greatest and most defensible value when it invests in a diverse cultural environment, connects it with its broader social and urban policies, protects equity and cultural work, and evaluates it in ways that respect the plurality of its value. This is the whole difference between a city living on its father’s greatness and a city waking each morning to make something that allows it to say, confidently and without borrowing another’s identity, “This is me.” A great history issues no guarantee for the future. A city that made meaning yesterday is not exempt from the duty to make it today. Culture, ultimately, is not only what we inherit, but what we dare to add in our own name.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

The essay’s governing move is to convert a familiar civic aspiration — invest in culture — into a procurement question the political language around culture is specifically built to obscure: not whether culture pays for itself, but which culture, in which place, for whom, over what period, and compared with which alternative use of public money. That reframing is the analytical engine, because it exposes the two slogans the field oscillates between as equally evasive, the creative-industries claim that culture is a money-printing machine and the arts claim that culture is a sacred good beyond scrutiny, and insists instead that value is plural and conditional, never delivered automatically by a budget line and a new building. The most structurally precise contribution is the recognition that culture’s economic value is frequently redistributive rather than generative — moving spending, visitors, and property values between places and groups more than creating net new activity — which names the mechanism this archive traced in Battersea and Cuckoo City Urbanism: the artwashing lever by which cultural investment raises property prices that displace the poorer residents and artists who originally made the place vibrant, with gains flowing to landowners and developers unless policy deliberately protects the existing community. The deeper indictment is the warning against excessive economisation, that the language of industry, impact, and return can grow so dominant it displaces the social and intrinsic value it claims to measure, leaving a city with impressive statistics and an impoverished cultural environment — the same optimization-of-the-measurable crowding out the unmeasurable that this archive examined in The Discipline That Optimizes the Given. Where the piece is strongest is its refusal of the white-elephant monument in favor of a portfolio and a place-based strategy that safeguards the precarious conditions of cultural work itself, which connects to the liability structure this archive has documented throughout: the iconic facility is funded and photographed while the living artist and the affordable space are left unprotected, the city content to say “that was my father” having turned its culture into a museum of its past, legible in visitor counts and ticket receipts precisely because those are the figures a budget can show, while the value that bears culture’s own name — identity, memory, the question not yet asked — resists the measurement the governance was built to perform.

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