By-Roads and Hidden Treasures: Mapping Cultural Assets in Regional Australia

By-roads and hidden treasures: mapping cultural assets in regional Australia, edited by Paul Ashton, Chris Gibson, and Ross Gibson, Crawley, Western Australia, UWA Publishing, 2015, vi + 220 pp., US$39.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-7425-8624-3 By-roads and Hidden Treasures begins with a deceptively complex research question: "how can we best map regional culture in contemporary Australia so that we can assess that culture's value?" (p. 3). This inquiry began with the Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia project, which combined a collaboration of universities, local governments, and community actors, as well as scholars studying locality, political economy, culture, and place-based community politics. While the book complicates as many questions as it resolves, it nonetheless provides useful guidance for scholars, cultural planners, policymakers, and political actors. The book provides a flexible roadmap for how to assess, engage, and support local communities' "cultural assets" in a manner appropriate to places of marginality, exclusion, and conventionally unrecognized vibrancy. The collection proves timely. As Ross Gibson explains, this is "a time in national and global history when the most basic precepts in planning, governance, and cultural geography [are] being interrogated" (p. 1). The shift in Global North nation-states like Australia toward postindustrial economies has put "culture" in a double bind. On the one hand, immaterial things like knowledge are increasingly commodified, yet, on the other, conventional systems of valuation have been thrown into doubt. The collection does not theorize these transnational processes, but rather asks how "the local" has responded. Offering important insights for cultural geographers, these authors rethink conventional conceptions of "the local", culture, value, and place, though scale remains less richly theorized. For instance, Deborah Stevenson reframes "culture" as a way of life, challenging cultural planners' conventional focus on "the arts". She also reappropriates "creativity" from its conscription by Richard Florida's "creative class" and the "creative industries", in which "economic ends are dominant" (p. 102). Andrew Warren and Rob Evitt explore how young Indigenous hip-hop artists practice place through the ways they negotiate their marginalization. "Place is crucial" for them as a source, mediator, and product of their music (p. 137). Place is relational and hybrid for these artists, emerging at the intersection of local politics and transnational black hip-hop solidarity. While others describe "place" as "sites" of creativity (e.g., see Gibson, Warren, and Gallan's chapter), Emily Potter describes the "shadow places" that haunt Australian landscapes. Drawing on the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2008), Potter argues that "[e]very place has in its composition the imprint of other places" (p. 83). This "web of responsibility" implicates both the centers and the margins (p. 84). This ethos seems vital given, on the one hand, Australia's (post)colonial legacies of marginalizing Indigenous folks, often through planning policies, and, on the other, neoliberal place-making that centers "culture" as consumption. …