Why Abundance needs Culture.
Abundance isn’t just about having more—it’s about having better. Better futures, better systems, better ways to live together. It offers an opportunity to score higher on the Cultural Wellbeing Index. To get there, however, we need more than economic growth or technological innovation. Culture is the operating system for abundance.
Culture helps us to define and redefine better. Abundance gets us airborne, culture flies the plane.
Abundance without culture risks becoming another system of privilege. Culture ensures abundance is generative, not extractive — shared, not hoarded. It creates a world in which the future is not just something that happens to us, but something we shape together.
By engaging our hearts, bodies, dreams and feelings, Culture has the potential to challenge tyrannies of NIMBYism and no-sayers—those who block bold futures in favour of clinging to broken ones. But Culture can't do this in a context of scarcity. Culture needs abundance. It's parabolic - you can’t have culture without abundance, you can’t have abundance without culture. The ball needs to keep rolling back and forth between the two. Stopping means starving..
Culture must create the space for “it-could-be-better” a space for design. Culture must invite speed, must welcome change, and embrace decisions and stop fetishizing process over outcomes. Culture reminds us that the past must be our teacher, not our destination.
Right now, our systems are still operating in scarcity mode. Scarcity is redistributing limited funding to increase equity. Abundance is inventing new funding and production models that grow capacity and multiply outcomes. Scarcity seeks more dollars for the same institutions. Abundance redesigns those institutions entirely. Scarcity clings to process. Abundance fixates on outcomes. Scarcity uses policy to manage disruption. Abundance responds to disruption with creativity.
Artists, storytellers, and creatives give form to futures before they’re feasible. They make abundance imaginable—and therefore possible. Culture is how we practice futures in public.
Too often, cultural policy gets stuck in deconstruction. We must stop mistaking critique for vision. Abundance needs direction. We must name what we want and start building it.
