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Chapter 13 | Michel de la Durantaye (continued) It must be emphasized that in Québec the number of municipal cultural policies has multiplied by 14 between 1990 and 2001. This is a significant development. This Québec phenomenon depends on a unique way of seeing the world, where the development of a community is a priority, using culture and democratization as tools for carrying out that development. The municipal cultural policies in Québec are mainly phenomena of urban life and modernity (De la Durantaye, 1999). These cultural policies are meant in the first place for young people, those under 18 years of age, and also for families. They are connected to education and shaping future users. The target audience of these cultural policies are first the citizens of the municipality. Cultural policy is seen as an important step in the development of citizenship, a well advanced degree of citizenship, including the attitude of solidarity that underlies it. The idea that social cohesion is derived notably from the quality of cultural coherence seems to lay itself down more and more, especially at the municipal level. This cultural coherence is a kind of fruit of a balanced relationship between local and regional cultural participation, what the people do, and the perceptions citizens have of what the quality of life is in the territory they belong to shows up in their daily lives. In other words, social exclusion and cultural exclusion go together. To succeed in reaching social and cultural inclusion, cultural islands and ghettos have to be avoided. It is in fact modern urban life that can give the territory that identity and can favour its inclusion. In the context of globalization, metropolitan areas and capital cities turn themselves toward cultural and artistic import and export. They leave to peripheries and isolated cities complementary roles, more domestic, in the diffusion, animation and promotion of culture. It seems that a hierarchy of cultural functions is unfolding through the marketing of cultural goods and services. But that dualism: the proximity of cultural services versus cultural services whose direction is the world or the “nation,” that duality of global/national and local, is fragmenting cultural development in general in a given territory and makes relatively trite the cultural development of cities. A better integration between these levels would lead to a better social cohesion. These changing situations call for a re-definition of public services in general, and the provision of arts and culture in particular, at the municipal level, inasmuch as these administrations are seen, geographically and politically, as places that supply a number of front line services to local communities that are more and more pluralistic and heterogeneous, whose cultural needs and interests are more and more diversified. references
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