Page 11 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 5

defined by the Scottish Office as ‘multiply deprived’. So nearly all the workers I
spoke to were in projects with place-based remits, and nearly all were located in
Edinburgh’s peripheral housing estates.
Whichever definition of ‘community’ used in the discourse of community arts
—place—or identity-based—deployment of the term ‘community’ in this
discourse produces a boundary which distinguishes between members and non-
members of a ‘community’. A recent study, for example, suggests that one role of
the arts in relation to ‘communities of interest’ is the development of
‘communication with an insight into an outside world’ (Clinton, 1993:21, my
emphasis). Community arts workers in Edinburgh persistently describe people,
processes and institutions as either in a particular community or outwith it,
regardless of whether they are working with a ‘community’ of interest or in a
spatially delimited ‘community’. ‘Community’ in this context produces a sense of
insiders and outsiders, and this means that ‘communities’ are discursively
imagined as bounded entities.
However, I want to argue that this language of inside and outside ‘community’
does not necessarily depend on an essentializing definition of ‘community’
identity. The following sections attempt to specify the spatialities through which
community arts workers in Edinburgh understand ‘community’. I want to argue
that they work with two rather different interpretations of ‘community’, each of
which is structured by a different kind of space but performs a similar kind of
critical anti-essentializing. The conclusion explores in more detail some of the
implications of this doubled discursive construction for thinking about the
politics of ‘community’.

The spatiality of power
It has been suggested that community arts projects in Scotland have retained
more of the radical edge which characterized the early community arts movement
than have projects in England (Brinson, 1992). Certainly, community arts
workers in Edinburgh have an elaborate understanding of power. Power is
oppressive, it is located in a large number of institutions (whether named
specifically or generically), and it is exercised through a wide range of
processes. This is thus an understanding of power as instrumental, and a
recurring theme in their discussions of power is the way the shape of the city of
Edinburgh has been moulded by it. For example, a youth video worker described
Edinburgh’s postwar rehousing schemes as follows:

The way a lot of these places were created where folk were shifted out so
that people from Newhaven and Leith were shifted out to Pilton, um…or
people from the Southside were shifted out to Craigmillar.

Power is understood as acting upon less powerful people, moving them out from
central areas to new housing estates on the outskirts of the city, in Pilton,