What makes a city’s art scene vibrant? How and why are art scenes becoming so important to civic and national identity? What does a place having an “art scene” actually mean?

For Adrian Ellis, the founder of the Global Cultural Districts Network, they are both more important than ever, but also misunderstood, with governments usually thinking about capital investment in museums and institutions as a way to foster cultural development, instead of on-the-ground questions about how to nurture and attract cultural producers and consumers. “It’s not about putting buildings up,” he says about the topics his network addresses. “Everyone knows how to put up a building. It’s about governance, the animation of public spaces, the relation between tourism and the local community, things like branding, the role of anchor institutions and their responsibility for adjacent spaces – things that actually matter.”

Read the full article by Melissa Gronlund here.