Cultural-Smart City: Establishing New Data-informed Practices to Plan Culture in Cities

Abstract

The idea of the Creative City has encouraged planners to develop cultural policies to support creative economies, city branding, urban identity and urban quality. On the other side, the concept of Smart City introduced the possibility to create, collect and analyse data to inform decisions on cities. The two city agendas overlap in different ways, creating a Smart cultural city nexus, that propose similar goals and mixed methodologies, like the possibility to inform planning processes with big data-based technologies. In line with this direction, we introduced conceptual and methodological tools: The first tool is the definition of Hybrid Art Spaces, the second tool is the Singapore Art Maps (SAM), which uses social media data to locate art venues in cities (Tomarchio et al. 2016); the third tool is the Social Media Art Model, which establishes a relationship between social media production and art venues features. While these tools have already shown interesting analytics outcomes (Tomarchio et al. 2016), it is important to validate their utility among practitioners and to set protocols of practices. This paper presents results from semi-structured interviews and a focus group, as a first step towards assessing the usefulness of our three tools for cultural planning practice.