More and more cities have launched urban cultural strategies in the United Kingdom over the past decade. As a result, this has become an interesting and important area of policy innovation. In this paper the author looks at the broader context within which these strategies have emerged, looking at changes in national state policies towards the arts, changes in patterns of cultural consumption, local opposition to central government, and economic restructuring and interurban competition. The author then goes on to illustrate the ways in which these broader processes have interacted with more localised factors to shape the development of recent cultural strategies in Bristol. The paper concludes with some more general comments and criticism on cultural strategies as a whole.
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