Closer yet More Distant

The study contributes to the research on cultural participation and its determinants. It departs from the main branch of studies on the topic, which investigates the effects of sociological factors, and approaches the issue by focusing on the role of infrastructural barriers in the individuals’ patterns of cultural consumption. More specifically, it studies whether and how the policy of clustering museums affects the residents’ attendance at the cluster’s museums. In this sense, the study frames the research problem by using Feder’s (2022) concept of access opportunity, considering audiences among the many forms of cultural participation, and adopting Rotterdam’s Museumpark as a case study. The study addresses the research problem by calculating accessibility indexes for the different districts of the city of Rotterdam and using them to develop regression and correlation models, which are performed on a dataset collected by the author via survey. The hypotheses tested are relative to the existence of the relationships between the goodness of access opportunity and, respectively, the likelihood to visit a museum at least once a year, frequency of the visits, and perceived interest toward the museums. By accepting all the hypotheses, the study argues that access opportunity does affect the residents’ attendance at the clusters’ museums. Moreover, as the direction of these relationships turns out positive in all cases, it claims that access opportunity is directly related to the residents’ attendance at said museums. In this sense, the research suggests that clustering museums might create unbalances among the residents in their participation in the city’s cultural life.