13 March 2025
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Much attention about the present and future of cities focusses on the hardware of highways and infrastructure, airports and flood defenses: what is missing are conversations about the software which is culture. We need to reframe how we talk about culture in cities – from a standalone ‘nice to have’ tool into an essential element – to build affinity, buy-in, and momentum, thereby encouraging behaviour change around urban planning, policy, and placemaking. Jason Schupbach and Rana Amirtahmasebi, authors of recently published ‘The Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning‘, discussed the what, how, and why of cultural planning. They put forward the common rules on how practitioners accomplish preserving and attracting new art and culture to a city, using case studies from as far afield as Africa to Australasia.
About our speakers
Rana Amirtahmasebi is an economic development and cultural planning strategist and researcher. She has worked in different regions of the world, has published widely and has led and facilitated technical meetings and workshops to formulate urban policy and cultural plans. Rana is experienced in policy analysis and program design and implementation in projects focused on urban planning, culturally focused economic development and community resilience and cohesion. She holds Master’s degrees in both City Planning and Urbanism Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a Master’s degree in Architectural Engineering from Azad University in Tehran, Iran. She is the founder of Eparque Urban Strategies.
Jason Schupbach is the Dean of the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University. He is a nationally recognised expert in the role that arts and design play in improving communities and was the federal liaison to the design community in his role as director of Design and Creative Placemaking Programs for the National Endowment for the
Arts. He has held multiple other academic, government and foundation positions.
