Page 12 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

6 CULTURAL STUDIES

Craigmillar, Muirhouse or Wester Hailes. Power is thus seen as producing a
particular urban geography, and, in the analysis of community arts workers, its
spatiality has several dimensions. My discussion will begin with these because
one of the community arts workers’ interpretations of ‘community’ is placed in
this particular power-produced space.
The first dimension of the spatiality of power is a zonality. Powerful
institutions are understood as producing a territory divided into a centre and a
margin. Several workers commented on the marginalization of workingclass
people in the city, describing the modelling of Edinburgh’s built environment as
an act of socio-spatial segregation. The youth video worker, for example,
described the District Council’s postwar rehousing schemes further: ‘having
moved all the poor people out they were then in a position to start making [the
city centre] nice for rich people to live in and er that’s very much what
happened.’ This territorialization occurs because power is understood as dividing
the social into the acceptable and the unacceptable. One community arts
practitioner in a project working with people with disabilities described British
society as structured by ‘the culture of the, the one is more important than the
other, and I think that, that we should start looking at how this society functions,
it is either one or the other’. This analysis of the social as divided then enabled
him to locate the people he worked with as marginalized; he commented that ‘the
context in which [they] live…is mostly isolated, and outwith mainstream
society, whatever that means’. All workers, whether they work in places defined
by their location or with people defined by their ‘interest’, positioned those they
work with as marginal to Edinburgh’s centre of power. Community arts workers
also comment on the way the arts and mass media are located in what one
described as this segregated ‘cultural terrain’. An arts worker in Pilton argued
that:

there’s been a sort of hijacking that’s gone on, [art]’s been hijacked by the
middle classes sort of about the, I don’t know when, but probably about the
1920s or something like that, let’s just say, and y’know people see it as a
preserve of the middle classes…people thought ‘art’, that’s where the posh
folk, it’s not for the likes of us’, well I don’t agree with that, and I think
there’s been fault on both, and I say both sides, say middle class, working
class, it’s been fault on both sides, and there’s been terrible assumptions
made by both camps and I don’t hold with those assumptions.

The social then is divided into two: into two camps or two sides, a core and an
edge, by power, and resources are then allocated accordingly.

Council’s saying ‘oh well we’ll shift money round from community art to
disability art’, and then ultimately it will be shifted from disability art back
to community art, and that’s kinda, that’s how the money’s shifted, it’s
around those edges. Scottish Chamber Orchestra gets more money,