In my previous post, I made the case for why every city needs a cultural strategy — not as an add-on to civic planning, but as a foundational pillar alongside housing, transport, and public health. If you agree that culture is infrastructure, the natural next question is: how do you actually build one?
Cultural strategies fail not because cities lack passion for the arts, but because they lack a disciplined, inclusive, and genuinely integrated process. Over the course of my career leading orchestras in Seattle, Glasgow, and New York, and working closely with city governments, arts agencies, and community organizations, I have seen what works and what doesn't. Here is the framework I believe in.
Step 1: Map What Already Exists
Before any strategy can be written, a city must see itself clearly. That means conducting a rigorous and honest inventory of existing cultural assets and not just the obvious ones.
Formal institutions matter: concert halls, museums, libraries, galleries, community arts centers. But so do informal ones: street muralists, neighborhood storytelling traditions, immigrant cultural associations, youth dance collectives, oral history keepers, independent bookshops. A strategy that maps only the buildings misses the soul of a city's cultural life.
Asset-mapping at this stage should be genuinely participatory. Community knowledge, from residents, artists, faith leaders, and educators, is as valuable as any official database. The goal is not simply to list what exists, but to understand where cultural life is thriving organically, where it is at risk, and where it is absent entirely.
This step takes time. Do not rush it.
Step 2: Engage the Community — Genuinely
There is a version of community engagement that is theater: a few town halls with the usual suspects, a brief online survey, a box ticked. That is not what I mean.
Real engagement is uncomfortable, because it surfaces difference. It requires going to communities rather than asking them to come to you. It means hosting listening sessions in neighborhoods that have historically been excluded from cultural planning, creating space for Indigenous voices, youth perspectives, immigrant communities, and artists with disabilities to be heard — not as representatives of a category, but as full participants in shaping a shared vision.
I have seen what happens when this is done well. In Seattle, conversations that began as consultations evolved into genuine partnerships, producing ideas and priorities that no planning committee would have generated on its own. The strategy that emerges from real engagement is not only more equitable — it is more resilient, because it has broader ownership.
This step is also where trust is built or broken. Communities know when they are being listened to and when they are being managed.
Step 3: Identify Themes and Priorities
Once you have mapped your assets and listened deeply, patterns will emerge. Communities will articulate what they value most — whether that is the preservation of cultural identity, better access to affordable creative space, intergenerational exchange, visibility for underrepresented histories, or economic opportunity for local artists.
These themes become the compass for everything that follows. They answer the most fundamental question a cultural strategy must address: what does this community want culture to do for them?
Resist the temptation to impose themes from outside — from best practices in other cities, from funder priorities, from political agendas. A strategy anchored in locally generated values will have a credibility and staying power that no imported framework can match.
Step 4: Align with Broader City Policy
Culture does not exist in isolation. A cultural strategy that lives only in the arts office is already vulnerable — to budget cuts, to political shifts, to the perception that it is a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have.
The most durable cultural strategies I have encountered are those woven into the broader fabric of city policy. They connect explicitly to economic development plans: recognizing that arts districts, film festivals, craft markets, and creative industries generate employment and attract investment. They align with equity and housing strategies: acknowledging that artists need affordable space to create and that cultural programming can be a powerful tool for neighborhood revitalization. They engage with climate and sustainability goals: supporting green event infrastructure, carbon-conscious touring, and arts-led environmental education.
This requires building relationships across city departments, not just with arts councils, but with planning, housing, economic development, health, and parks. Culture must earn a seat at the table by demonstrating its relevance to every chair in the room.
Step 5: Develop Actionable Goals
A cultural strategy that does not specify what will actually happen is not a strategy it is a vision statement. Both have value, but they are not the same thing.
Actionable goals must be concrete: what will be done, by whom, by when, and with what resources. They should operate across three time horizons: short-term wins that build momentum, medium-term investments that develop capacity, and long-term commitments that transform systems.
Responsible parties must be named. Funding must be identified or explicitly noted as a gap to be closed. Timelines must be realistic enough to be honored. Nothing destroys trust in a cultural strategy faster than a document full of aspirations that produces no discernible change.
This is where political will becomes decisive. Plans require money. Governments must be willing to allocate it.
Step 6: Build in Evaluation from the Start
Too many cultural strategies end their useful lives on a shelf. They are published with fanfare, implemented partially, and then quietly superseded by the next administration's priorities. Evaluation frameworks are the antidote.
Success in culture resists simple measurement and that is a feature, not a bug. We should resist the temptation to reduce cultural impact to visitor numbers and revenue figures alone. Yes, quantitative metrics matter: funding secured, artists employed, audiences reached, spaces activated. But qualitative evidence matters too: community testimony, artist feedback, shifts in civic identity and belonging.
The best evaluation frameworks are built in conversation with the communities the strategy is meant to serve. They ask: are we achieving what we set out to achieve? Are the right people benefiting? What have we learned that should change our approach?
A strategy that cannot answer these questions honestly is not a living document, it is a monument to good intentions.
Together, these six steps do not guarantee a perfect cultural strategy. Nothing does. But they create the conditions under which something genuine can be built: a plan that reflects a community's true cultural landscape, earns broad ownership, connects meaningfully to how a city actually functions, and remains accountable to the people it is meant to serve.
In my final post in this series, I will offer some closing reflections on what it means to treat culture not as a fixed plan, but as a living, evolving framework, and why the cities that do so will be better prepared for the future.
The views and opinions expressed in on this website are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any current or former employer, organization, board, or affiliated institution.
