Welcome to La Goutte d’Or, a Parisian in the urban backstage neighbourhood behind the Gare du Nord whose name – meaning ‘the drop of gold’ – belies its scruffy appearance and less-than-glittering reputation.① My colleague and I are here to meet Fayaz, a tailor and dressmaker, in his atelier, which lies behind an unmarked entrance on a backstreet corner. He greets us from behind his sewing machine and stays there through- out our visit, never losing contact with the garment-in-progress beneath his hands. We perch on stools by frosted windows that block the view from the street. With orders for the fabrication of stage costumes, runway pieces and event finery, from opera houses to fashion houses and individuals, there are no tables free of fabric, threads or machinery in the compact space. This is the urban backstage, where work happens away from the public eye and where the messiness of production is valued above carefully staged display.

Before we have a chance to make our inquiries, Fayaz interrogates us: ‘I’d like to know what your objective is … to understand what constructive relationship I can have to this process?’ I tell him we are documenting the spaces where artists, artisans, musicians – cultural producers, in other terms – do their work. Our aim, I explain, is to offer architects, planners and organisations a deeper understanding of how and where culture is produced in cities. He listens and nods, rightly weighing up our intentions and whether he should help us. When I tell him we specifically want to protect the infrastructures that allow people to work independently and outside of corporate structures, his enthusiasm is evident. As he listens intently, I explain our understanding of cultural infrastructure as a set of conditions that allow individuals to define their own ways of working, with access to spaces, materials, support systems, funding and supply chains, whatever they need to imagine and produce cultural forms. His response takes me aback, and hits at the exact reason we started this study in the first place: the understanding that having access to the infrastructures for cultural production is not just about making a living, but about living well, with a sense of social or even spiritual value to one’s work.

As Fayaz explains:

You’ve seen today how the global economy is under monopoly, and it’s the big financiers who built themselves a network that shares most of the global profit. Pretty much everyone has to listen to them and to follow their model. That vision … screw it. It’s me that chooses my model. I stopped my studies, and I learned a craft.② For me, that meant finding my freedom, because I don’t have to look for someone to sell my knowledge to. I have a craft. I sell know-how.

So, what are infrastructures that enable cultural production worth to a city and its inhabitants? Clearly, their value goes beyond the simple fact of being able to earn a living, as Fayaz’s personal manifesto makes clear. In which case, what other kinds of value do they give rise to, and who benefits from it? These questions are at once crucial and difficult to answer in both London and Paris, the two neighbouring but divergent global cities of our study, where globalised, finance-led economies and real estate pressures mean affordable space for independent cultural producers like Fayaz is far from guaranteed. But despite the neoliberalising project of current president Emmanuel Macron, the value system shaping France’s cultural policy is different to that of the UK, and within it are developing approaches that are worth learning from. As we took our fieldwork from London to Paris, we observed investment in social infrastructures helping craftspeople like Fayaz to build their livelihoods through networks of collaboration, without the need for physical regeneration of their neighbourhood. Further afield, Marseille offers a counterpoint to both capital cities: an urban landscape where an abundance of space leads to a different set of value propositions. As the Greater London Authority (GLA) looks to develop tools for measuring social value and ‘good growth’ to guide its investment in cultural infrastructures, we will look here to projects in both Paris and Marseille that offer alternative definitions and mechanisms for the value of cultural infrastructure.