I have often resisted thinking of the Netherlands as a business. After all, a country cannot lay people off, or divest unprofitable sectors to make more profit. Anyone who thus speaks of the BV Netherlands didn't get it. There are no competitors you can fight out of the market while being entrepreneurial on the few square kilometres of polder land we all live on.
Having said that, you can plan like an entrepreneur. Everyone who works here knows that before you start anything, you have to make a business plan: how unique are you, how are you going to survive, how are you going to stay, how are you going to grow? Artists have to do the same, although there is often still a big gap between the requirements for a grant application and the standard business plan. As in a previous episode of this series already stated: with a business plan, you can also start talking about (permanent) investment, rather than subsidy.
Ten-year plan
Those who haven't quite got it either are local governments. The regional visions that Dutch urban regions had to produce last autumn may be bursting with ambition, but they are also full of platitudes, and the obligatory words that the ministry now likes to see used: inclusion, diversity, spread, reach. And because the subsidy system, meanwhile, has not really adapted to a regional focus, they remain dead letters. The cake is still shared bizarrely in the Netherlands: locally subsidised buildings accommodate mainly nationally selected offerings.
Manchester City Council, wholly Labour-owned since time immemorial, makes 10-year plans in addition to the usual college plans. For continuity beyond the delusion of the election. That is perhaps the luxury of the two-party system: there is little chance of a Conservative majority ever emerging in Manchester. Still, even in a country of loose coalitions like the Netherlands, a municipal council should be able to do something like this.
What does Manchester want?
They have a fairly simple list, understandable by anyone and manageable in any conversation:
- make sure the city is known for distinctive work that can only have originated here;
- Make it the most culturally democratic city in the country, reaching a much greater diversity of people across the city.
- Let Manchester be known as a city that values and nurtures creative talents, generating skills and expressions that are more inclusive and successful than anywhere else in the world.
Now you might say: any civil servant can think of that, but that's not how it works in Manchester. Every cultural institution we visited went out of their way to tell us how much effort they were putting into meeting the principles. Principles, which are therefore not for a few years, but for at least 10 years.
Austerity
Then again, the council is leading by example. During the crisis years, when the Tories nationwide declared the infamous 'austerity' (and blamed Europe for it, which in turn led to the Brexit), Manchester decided to do things differently. True to the vision outlined above, the city poured millions into cultural projects. Biggest project: the Manchester International Festival, which is held every two years. The requirements were simple: only world premieres of unique work, which can only be made in Manchester, and only world-class work. It worked, and still works. MIF is now in the premier league of top international art.
To establish the success more sustainably in the city, the city council then decided to give the festival a permanent building. A festival factory where both production and presentation can take place. Multifunctional and large enough to accommodate even the most megalomaniacal plans of the world's greatest artists.
Peppercorn
The building will be gigantic: think of the famous Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, but one size bigger, and more luxurious. The factory, named Factory after the famous club that once spawned the Manchester music scene a few blocks away, is designed by our own OMA (Rem Koolhaas) will cost a sloppy 180 million and is on schedule. And anyone who might think that, as in the Netherlands, this is a lucrative vestzak-broekzak construction, in which the municipality rents the building to the users, thus financing - via the subsidy from which the users pay the rent - its own real estate department, is wrong. This is the thrifty entrepreneurship that keeps the Netherlands so small these days.
Manchester leases the building to the festival, yes, but the rent is a so-called 'peppercorn': MIF pays £1 a year in rent. The council retains ownership and pays for maintenance.
Connection
Once again, you learn that we may be wrong to boast about the generous subsidies Dutch governments have left for the arts. About a third of that subsidy flows back to us in the form of rent and maintenance. What the UK hands out in peppercorns runs into hundreds of millions a year. The Netherlands cannot match that.
Whatever it causes: an intimate connection between local government and the arts sector. We in the Netherlands might find that too much of a good thing. There are drawbacks, of course. But the advantages outweigh that: nowhere else than here in Manchester have I seen so much pride in one's own city, among artists and administrators alike.
Or, as the Leader of the Greater Manchester Area Council pithily put it: 'We need engaged citizens to sustain our economy. Mensenn don't come here to ski. People need to want to live here. Who wants to live in a city without culture?'
Good to know
Hide the books, if you want people in the library. (Lessons from Manchester, episode 2)
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