Reconsidering the Cultural City

On Tuesday I made the journey up to a very sunny Liverpool to attend Kerry Wilson’s AHRC-funded workshop “It’s not the winning… Reconsidering the Cultural City”.  This was the wrap up event from a series of workshops she’s been running out of the Institute of Cultural Capital, looking at the ways in which bidding for the City of Culture Programme impacted on the places involved.

There was some really interesting material discussed, particularly for me the notion of how a ‘cultural’ title fitted with wider issues around placemaking and community buy-in.  The full report will shortly be available via the Cultural Cities Research Network site.

I also took the opportunity to visit the Rolf Harris retrospective in a packed Walker Art Gallery.  Cultural intermediation… can you see what it is yet?

Project launch meeting (part 2)

Just a note to say thanks to everyone who came along to the project launch day.  After the presentations we had a set of really productive discussions about the direction of the project as well as a tour around the Heritage and Cultural Learning Hub, which gave Richard Clay an opportunity to show us some of the technology and techniques he has on offer for use with the project.

I was in Chicago last week as part of the University of Birmingham’s Cultural Delegation and heard a great deal about that city’s new Cultural Plan, as well as some really fascinating intermediation iniatives, including the Washington Park Arts Incubator and the work of the Arts and Business Council of Chicago.  Next week I’m off to Liverpool for a workshop being run by Kerry Wilson ‘It’s not the winning: reconsidering the cultural city’ – if you’re interested in going, follow this link.

One last set of links, this time to the slideshare pages for the presentations from the launch meeting:

• Phil Jones: Overview of the project and timelines
• Ian Grosvenor & Natasha Macnab: The historic evolution of intermediation
• Beth Perry: The governance of cultural intermediation
• Paul Long: Communities, culture and creative economies
• Phil Jones & Yvette Vaughan Jones: The interventions

Project Launch Meeting

We’re just about to start the project and as such we’re running a launch event on Friday 27 April.  This is an opportunity to get everyone around the table and remind ourselves what the project is about and make sure we get off to a good start.  As well as the academic team and stakeholder partners, the meeting is open to all – just drop me an email (p.i.jones@bham.ac.uk) if you want to come along so I can make suitable arrangements for catering.

We’ll be having these kinds of open meetings every six months to ensure that the project is kept on track and to give everyone involved an opportunity to feedback on progress.  For the launch meeting, we’re going to talk through how the different elements of the project are intended to work and provide a chance to discuss the road we’re heading down.  We’ve also got an exciting opportunity to visit the University of Birmingham’s Heritage and Cultural Learning Hub, a multi million pound centre part-funded by the ERDF.  As part of our project we are working with the Hub to devise multimedia outputs that work across web, mobile and table-sized multitouch screens.  The visit to the Hub will give us all a chance to think about how we can maximise the opportunities for dissemination of research that this technology affords us.

The full schedule for the Project Launch Day can be downloaded here.

New Year, new project

We were delighted to hear at the end of 2011 that we’d received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to undertake a project looking at processes of cultural intermediation in the creative urban economy.  This work is being funded under the Connected Communities initiative and is a joint research project between the University of Birmingham, University of Salford, Birmingham City University, Liverpool John Moores University, City University and the University of Cardiff as well as Visiting Arts.

The project formally begins in April.  In the meantime we’ll be posting about getting the project up and running.