GCDN Annual Convening – Los Angeles 2025

This is a tough chapter for cultural leaders. Daily geopolitical realignments, technological advances, and societal and environmental upheaval – ‘wicked’ problems – have upended assumptions about our roles and responsibilities, where they start and where they end. Choices – often with personal and ethical dimensions as well as practical ones – confront us with monotonous frequency.

Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change. In our period of continuous and, indeed, accelerating change, what calculus should we apply to our professional decision-making? What values should we protect, and what accommodations must we live with?

Successful placemaking involves many factors – community involvement, access, design and safety, to name just a few – but perhaps the most critical element lies in the stories we tell about places, their authenticity, their appeal, and their congruence with physical reality. Humans search for meaning, and we experience cities through the lens of the narratives attached to them.

Nowhere is this more evident – or more complex – than in Los Angeles. LA exists in the interstices of overlapping and competing narratives. The city of noir and Hollywood mythmaking, of extremes in wealth and poverty, multiple cultures and diasporas, perpetual motion and reinvention… it resists easy definition. For many – whether American or from overseas – it remains the most elusive U.S. city to understand. Unlike the structured grids of New York and Chicago, or the civic core of San Francisco, Los Angeles is a place of dispersion, layering, and constant reimagination.

What, then, is ‘place’ in LA, let alone placemaking? What role do cultural anchors like The Music Center play in grounding this city’s identity? How can the arts help define and strengthen cohesion in a city that is, by its very nature, decentered? And, in this era of polarization, how does cultural policy reflect this? This session explores placemaking in a city that defies the concept – and in a moment when the very idea of shared narratives is unraveling.

Cultural institutions are increasingly being asked to demonstrate not just artistic excellence, but public value. As audiences shift, diversify, or disappear altogether, the question of relevance is no longer rhetorical—it is existential.

This closing session returns to some of the questions raised at the start of the convening—about leadership, values, and responsibility—but asks them with a longer view. How do we define relevance in a moment where institutional trust is faltering, cultural debates are increasingly politicized, and traditional metrics of success no longer hold? And how can leaders respond—not just to the pressures of the present, but with a sense of care and commitment toward those who will come next?

Drawing on insights from across the programme, this conversation explores what it takes to build institutions that are not only relevant today, but capable of evolving tomorrow. What does it mean to lead with relevance as a civic practice, not just a strategic imperative? And how do we cultivate the courage, imagination, and humility to make space for new voices—ensuring that relevance is not something we defend, but something we continually co-create?