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“Equity is the driving force. Culture is the frame. Belonging is the goal.”
Last week I attended the 2024 Othering and Belonging Conference in Oakland, California. Roberto Bedoya shared these words by Vanessa Whang about his beloved city of Oakland. Bedoya is the Cultural Affairs Manager for the City of Oakland. He was describing the Cultural Development Plan the City launched in 2018.
What is a cultural plan? “It gives voice to the idea that we all belong to each other as Oaklanders,” Mayor Libby Schaaf wrote in the introduction. It declares that a city’s “long-term artistic and cultural health” are the roots that keep it alive. Generally, a cultural plan informs how a city supports the arts in its city. The City of Oakland showed us it can also be something much more.
Before 2018, Oakland’s last cultural plan came out in 1988. Vanessa Whang was the lead consultant on the new plan. She wrote that early in the new plan’s life, they decided it needed to be more than a simple refresh. The 2018 Cultural Development Plan could go further. It could help the city reconsider and shape what culture means to Oakland today. So how did the Cultural Affairs Division do it?
building the cultural plan
In 122 pages, Vanessa Whang carefully outlined the plan and the path they took to get where they are. It started with research. They reviewed the 1988 plan, of course, and the current and past work of the Cultural Affairs Division. They met with City staff and advisors. They attended cultural events around Oakland to see how that plan matched up to reality. Through this research they launched the discovery. Facilitators began community engagement with Oakland artists and residents. They conducted surveys and hosted dialogues to learn the city’s broader cultural context. These weren’t stodgy academic events. Instead, they asked things like, “what are the best things about Oakland?” “How can the city help residents thrive in place?” They took these answers to tell a story of Oakland’s cultural life and how the city creates a sense of belonging.
developing the vision
Whang and the consultants involved began to create the new plan based on what they learned. They structured it around the tagline I opened with.
Equity is the driving force. The push to create this plan began with the understanding of city leaders. Oakland residents experience the city in different ways. Their experience depends on their income and the color of their skin. Oakland was one of the first “majority-minority” american cities. But over time, Black residents decreased in population in Oakland by 25% since 2000. White residents increased their numbers by 28%. People who identified in the census as Hispanic or Latino increased by 22%. In the same 24 years, median property values increased by 137%.
Recognizing inequalities is the heart of equity. We need to make things fair for everyone. The only way we can make unfair systems fair is to change them. That includes changing the Cultural Affairs Division of Oakland city government. Changing how they operate, how they see their charge, and what they should do next.
Culture is the frame. Culture is a way of being for every person. As Whang writes, culture is a people’s “diverse practices, expression, and creativity.” The city plays a role in ensuring that people and their cultures feel at home in the city they call home. We know the inequalities above have impacts. Different cultures are not represented equally (or even proportionally) in civic life. Even in the context of cultural affairs can the city play a role. The arts are a major vehicle to bridge cultures, which can then help create equity.
The author notes that as we do this bridging, we have to be mindful about how dominant cultures show up. We don’t want to ignore their dominance and build inequity on top of the existing inequality.
Belonging is the goal. Where are we going with all these efforts? Our destination as a city is one where every resident can feel like they belong. We have all sorts of reasons to want the people who live in a city to feel like they belong. In Oakland, with belonging as a goal, we can help people “feel a part of something greater than themselves.”
A desire for equity is what’s motivating us to act. We will use culture as the vehicle to move forward. True belonging is what it will look like when we get where we’re going.
what happened after
After a full year of work, Oakland launched its new Cultural Development Plan in the spring of 2018. They enhanced the scope of what the city considers to be cultural affairs. Their priorities had long focused on exclusively “arts” spaces. But Oakland residents explained that there are cultural spaces all around us! Cultural spaces included places that generated arts and culture. Neighborhood places didn’t exist to be cultural spaces, but residents made them so. The civic commons are public places of belonging. Think parks, libraries, even school campuses. The plan changed how they award grants that advance culture.
Even better, the City continues to build on the recommendations in the plan. Their Cultural Strategists-in-Government program could be its own blog post! This program pays community culture-builders to embed into city government and civic programs. Now in its third year, it seeks to shape the city’s culture from within.
beyond oakland
What could this look like in other cities across america? What might it look like for places to adopt Oakland’s tagline? I’ll describe what I mean and ask a few questions to get started.
Equity is the driving force. Every american city has inequity baked right in. Most cities, even young ones like Seattle, came to be in a time of legalized segregation. This created inequality that we all still feel to this day. Some of us feel the inequity and it doesn’t hurt. For others, it casts a painful shadow of othering on everything we do.
- What do we know about the inequities in our city?
- How do those inequities show up in our area’s cultural spaces?
- What investments could we make (or re-frame) to support spaces that are not part of the dominant culture’s?
Culture is the frame. A city’s residents help shape its culture and what it’s known for. They make cities feel stable, make it desirable, make it pulse with life. The phrase “keep Austin weird” began as a descriptor from someone who contributed to the scene. Over time, the local business alliance adopted the slogan to support local business. Eventually, that weirdness became a draw to new residents and investors.
- How could cities encourage investment and support for aspects of a city’s culture?
- How could that investment expand to include the culture of newcomers too?
- How do we ensure that we’re not further entrenching dominant culture at the expense of others’?
Belonging is the goal. There are people right now, in every city, who feel true belonging. It’s most common that they align with the dominant culture in their area. This culture is well-funded and well-established. I heard this anecdote at the conference: inclusion is being asked to dance at a party. Belonging means helping to create the playlist. You can’t trust me with the aux cord in most situations but it’s still a great metaphor. It’s not unnatural for people to say, “what you have, I want to share with you.” I want to feel like I belong in the cities where I live. I want everyone to share that feeling. And I don’t want anyone to have to assimilate to feel that.
- When was a time when you felt like you belonged in the place where you live?
- What makes people feel like there’s not enough to go around?
- How have people countered that sense of scarcity in other places?
the plan for global belonging
Changing culture is an interesting approach to making a city more fair. Oakland is a unique and quite lovely city! There’s nothing structural that is stopping other cities from following their lead. The only obstacle is ideological. Belonging means belonging for everyone. It will not do to create outgroups of the people who enjoy the full glow of the spotlight today.
To me, the root question is really this: where do we want to go as a society? It’s now more than six months into Israel’s war on Palestinians. Students at campuses across the country are protesting this clear example of genocide. The universities they attend profit from their investments in this war and others. Al Jazeera reports on one example. Columbia University’s investments include “BlackRock, the asset management giant; Airbnb, which has offered rentals in the occupied West Bank; Caterpillar, whose bulldozers Israel has used; and Google, which has faced protests from staffers over Project Nimbus, which provides artificial intelligence services to Israel.”
My own alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, sent in riot police to silence the peaceful protests. I’m proud of the students who have taken a stand against this genocide. We need to keep raising awareness about the injustices in all areas of the world.
The Cultural Development Plan is one approach to creating belonging in a city. Some people claim that oppressed people would do the same to their oppressors if they had the chance. That’s isn’t true. We can create a world where everyone feels like they belong in the place where they live. This kind of global change will start at the local level. I’m grateful to have spent time in a city that’s trying something new.
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josh
my name is josh martinez. i have always loved trying to understand systems, and the systems that built those systems. i spend a lot of time thinking about how to get there from here.
i'm the founder and principal consultant at Future Emergent.
say hello: josh[at]bethefuture.space
