Within the UK, the ‘Liverpool model’ is being celebrated as the new template
for Capital of Culture festivals, and culture led urban regeneration in general.
This paper will question this celebration and argue that there are, in fact, two
‘Liverpool models’: the first, outlined in its bid and developed within its initial
planning strategy, represented the apogee of a New Labour informed ‘cultural
planning’ framework for urban development; the second, developed post-2008
within the impact analysis Impacts08, is a more sober and realistic reflection of
the role of culture in urban regeneration. This paper will demonstrate how this
first model, while politically expedient and rhetorically seductive, was both theoretically
unstable and practically unrealizable. Its subsequent abandonment represents
an indictment of cultural planning as a nostrum for the complex
structural, social and economic problems of the post-industrial city.
Keywords: cultural planning; Capital of Culture; Liverpool08; social instrumentalism;
economic instrumentalism; New Labour cultural polic
