Parades, Making and Wellbeing

Last Sunday 2 June saw the fourth Manchester Day Parade animate Manchester City Centre with a striking procession of people and artworks created by community groups, artists and volunteers. Hundreds of groups featured in the parade including Z-arts; The Real Harpurhey; Taylor Made Community Fitness; Women’s institutes of Manchester;  Jazzie J Street Dance; FCAM (Federation of Chinese Association Manchester); Batala Lancaster Samba; Greater Manchester Police and Band.  The list of participants is a very long one and would run to pages if I detailed them here. There are great videos showing the making and makers here: Workshop Videos

Commissioned by Manchester City Council, produced by Walk the Plank and created by Manchester People, the theme this year was ‘Wish you were here’.  Liz Pugh of Walk the Plank and co-producer of the parade with Billie Klinger and Candida Boyes said:  ‘What you see on the street is the tip of the iceberg…Culture has immense economic value – a £4 return for every £1 invested; cultural businesses contribute £28m to the economy annually and the arts are responsible for around 1 million jobs…Manchester’s great because people from the community groups and the many volunteers involved in the parade love their city.  And that’s the legacy of an event like the Parade – it’s the glue on your fingers; the renewed sense of community and the paint splashes on your clothes. As Orwell said, “nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less”’. Strong words in challenging times. Even more reason to keep on celebrating culture.

The Day Parade was sponsored again for the fourth time by engineering and construction company  Laing O’Rourke  who are currently working on the transformation of Manchester’s Central Library Building and Town Hall Extension in addition to the Metrolink extension and Beswick regeneration project. The company also deliver talent programmes and career development and are based regionally in Hulme.  Many other organisations sponsored or supported the Day Parade. Being immersed in crowds, creativity and colour as well as having lovely sunshine for the parade did much to lift my spirits.

Not content with being extremely busy in Manchester, last week Walk the Plank were in Derry for the creation of their biggest ever outdoor event as part of City of Culture 2013

In other news, I’ve been continuing conversations with individuals and organisations who are part of either the ‘big story’ case studies or governance case studies for the first year of this project. Interviews included those with Simon Ruding Director of TiPP (a practice-based organisation housed at the University of Manchester), and Cilla Baynes (MBE) Creative Director and founding member of Community Arts North West CAN. Cilla and Simon were as inspiring as ever on their respective organisations. Both represent long-standing and intensely crafted and connected work with many different people addressing a plethora of concerns, celebrations and challenges.  Their working practices have inspired and developed new projects and they continue to passionately support caring, meaningful and considered arts practices with people. Here’s a link to Simon presenting TiPP’s work which formed part of the Curious Minds, Bridge Development Group seminar based on the theme of Engagement and explains how Tipp began and their connections with various communities and also questions what we are talking about when we talk about ‘engagement’.  

Both Cilla and Simon are members of C-Pal (Consortium for Participatory Arts Learning). Established in 2005, C-Pal is a learning network for participatory arts in the North West. The main remit is skills development for people who are currently working in or want to work in the participatory arts sector. It is also a network to share learning, unearth key issues and explore the development of the sector. Originally C-Pal was set up by Arts Council England, North West in response to the need for learning pathways and capacity building within the participatory arts sector as highlighted in the 2004 ACE, NW research report carried out by Karen Smith (yes that was me!). Sadly approximately a quarter of the founding participatory arts organisations in this network no longer exist or exist in a different context following funding cuts from Arts Council and Local Authorities.

On a wellbeing note, as reported by Arts Professional: After much lobbying by many groups to include cultural activity as a measure in the Measuring National Wellbeing Programme, The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) will take account of  people’s engagement in the arts as a contributing factor to wellbeing. A report reviewing the criteria used to measure wellbeing in the UK shows that questions on arts, culture and sports participation have been the most commonly requested additions to the survey. The programme will use figures taken from the DCMS Taking Part Survey, specifically the measurement of the percentage of people who have engaged with or participated in arts or cultural activity at least three times in the past year. The Programme originated in 2010 to complement the use of GDP to track the nation’s progress.

Manchester International Festival is also about to kick off. I have spent some of my earnings on tickets to Massive Attack vs Adam Curtis (I lived in Bristol for a while and Massive Attack are part of the soundtrack to that part of my life, and Adam Curtis is always worth spending time watching) and, as ever, there is a wealth of arts activity taking place across Manchester and ‘The North’!

A big thank you to Liz Pugh, Cilla Baynes, Simon Ruding, Karen Shannon (at Lets Go Global) and everyone else who continues to commit and give their time to talk to me about this project when they are not paid to do so. I’m going to finish with Walk the Plank’s statement:

Create it, memorably
Burn it, beautifully
Make it, imaginatively
Learn it, passionately

6th Annual Experience the Creative Economy Conference, University of Toronto

Tags

Birmingham, cities, Creative economies, Culture, Intermediation, Richard Florida, Toronto

18-21st June 2013

I received some good news recently. I’ve been selected to take part in a highly selective forum for early career scholars who are engaged in research related to the creative economy. The conference hosted by the Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto, brings together 25 individuals from around the world to share and discuss their research. During the four day programme we’ll be looking at opportunities to develop methods and collaborate, as well as exploring the creative scenes and neighbourhoods of Toronto.

For the conference I’ll be presenting a paper entitled:

Local governance, community commissioning and intermediation in the creative economy

Here is my abstract which provides some more detail on the topic:

“Birmingham is at cross-roads in its governance of the creative economy. The second largest city in the UK, Birmingham has high levels of unemployment and inequality, the youngest population in Europe and its ethnic profile is projected to be majority minority by 2020. Contradictions in its cultural policy strategy include ambitions to develop a global city for culture and creativity, with simultaneous cuts in investment from local government and regional arts bodies resulting in a downward trend of arts provision in educational and community spaces.

Tracing processes of cultural intermediation (Bourdieu 1979; Woo 2012), this paper investigates the methods of connecting communities in the creative economy through self-organizing neighborhood arts groups. Balsall Heath, one of Birmingham City Council’s Priority Neighborhoods with multiple social deprivations, is a testing ground for new community-led budgeting and community culture commissioning pilots. Emerging arts infrastructure include Ort, a commercially run café, music and arts space with an ethos of community engagement, and Balsall Heath Biennale, a local partnership, who investigate what the role of artists can be in the 21st century through neighborhood practice.

Policy associated with the ‘Big Society’ (Cameron 2010), with emphasis on localized and distributed forms of governance alongside reductions on public spending, is transforming the role of the state and cultural organizations. Using the case studies of Ort and Balsall Heath Biennale, this paper investigates the increased expectation placed on community-driven initiatives and a climate of major cuts to public services to conceptualize the future of intermediation in the creative economy.”

Once the programme is finalised by Dr Melanie Fasche of University of Toronto I’ll post it here to give further information on discussants et al.

Laura’s travel diary

Tags

Birmingham, cities, connected, Creative economies, Festivals, Manchester, Salford

The last few weeks have been an exciting, stimulating and educational time for me as I have embarked on the early stages of my PhD journey, quite literally!

The first adventure was at the FutureEverything Summit in Manchester. Over two days of presentations in the rather impersonal Piccadilly 4 building, followed by an illuminated mass choreography down at Salford Quays, I experienced at close hand some pioneering work in the complementary fields of digital art, urbanism and technology. I even got to stand for several minutes in the dark inside the University of Salford’s own sound-proofed anechoic chamber in the Newton building, close to the SURF centre, listening to a processed audio installation, all part of the annual FutureEverything festival experience.

A theme running through many of the conference presentations was that of people re-appropriating frameworks and processes in order to ‘hack’ existing systems of urban living and develop smart and sustainable solutions to some of the problems created by cities. These interventions start with individuals using a combination of social media and public spaces to connect active citizens into responsive communities, where innovative and co-created practices can generate action. “In terms of organising and deciding” said Dan Hill in his keynote speech “the government now has competition”. Stirring stuff indeed.

The next day it was onwards to Birmingham, in search of more ideas and evidence to help inform the shape of my thesis, which currently looks at the role of universities as intermediaries in the festival economy. With visits to Bristol, Brighton and Bradford planned too, I was excited about having the opportunity to visit these great British cities and explore their civic architecture.

Last week in Brighton at the Beyond the Campus 2nd Workshop, Dr Paul Benneworth said “as social and spatial forms, buildings reflect their use”. He was talking specifically here about universities (with reference to Liverpool Hope University’s Cornerstone creative campus located in Everton) but it brought to my mind the words of walking urban historian Ben Waddington, who had revealed the psycho-geography of hidden architecture in Birmingham on his Invisible Architecture tour at the start of Flatpack film festival 3 weeks earlier.

Flatpack is an ambitious new festival in Birmingham that this year spanned 11 days in March. I went for the first weekend, my first event being the city walk. It was snowing heavily and freezing cold, but a crowd of 20 or so gathered at the Film Bug Hub, a vacant shop taken over by the festival team to house logistics in the Colmore Business District (one of the festival partners) to set out on the 90 minute tour.

Other partner venues I visited included Birmingham cathedral, in which I saw a screening of the silent Dreyer classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with piano score, a local café screening free short films in its basement and the recently restored Electric cinema by the station.

On Sunday I caught a bus over to the University of Birmingham’s Bramall Music Building to see the oldest surviving animated feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) with live percussive accompaniment. This last event was a collaboration with the university’s new Arts and Science Festival, a public programme of exhibitions, talks, performances, workshops and screenings organised by the Cultural Engagement team which, in the words of Ian Grosvenor, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Cultural Engagement “celebrates the University’s identity and makes available the first class research generated by one of the UKs leading higher education institutions”.

Back to Leeds to catch up on some sleep, but literally the next day I was off again, to Paintworks in Bristol this time, to hear brief updates from the latest developments coming out of the major AHRC community based research projects across the country, including news from the four AHRC research hubs, one of which is ‘home’ to the FutureEverything festival director Drew Hemment. Literally hundreds of organisations are currently enrolled in AHRC-backed research projects, in areas ranging from heritage archives to niche food producers, fashion SMEs to animation film makers. I can send more information about individual projects to anyone who wants to know more, but what is really good is that there are some recurring themes and individuals in these early stages of evidence-gathering that will help as I establish my research questions for the next phase.

I’ll need a few days at home to really think about what these are going to be, but with the Bradford Film Festival underway this week, that’s not quite happened yet!

From Cape Town to London via Leeds and Birmingham

Tags

climate, environment, formal governance, international poverty

So much for sustainability, I seem to have spent a lot of time recently in transit, one way or another.

In March I was fortunate enough to travel to Cape Town with one of SURF’s other streams of work – the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform for Sustainability. Organised by the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, the meeting brought together partners in Sweden, Kenya, UK and South Africa who are all working towards greater collaboration for sustainable cities as part of the Mistra Urban Futures centre. Unlike the usual conference, where you are locked in airless rooms for days on end, our hosts had thought to locate the meetings in different places around the Cape – including the spectacular Kirstenbosch Gardens and a visit to Phillipi, one of the largest townships in Cape Town.

Phillipi was a sobering place – a township of up to 500,000 people, many living in poverty, in cramped and crowded conditions, where deaths from unstable electricity supplies and summer fires rampaging through the densely packed dwellings are unimaginably high. A far cry from the kinds of poverty that we see in the U.K. Nonetheless – as became apparent during the panel debate I participated in “Fair Cities for International Poverty Reduction” – the generic issue of who holds the ‘right to the city’ cuts across both very different contexts. During my talk, I was able to draw on our Greater Manchester work. I highlighted how little deprived communities are engaged with formal governance structures and how poverty is only selectively prioritised within different policy frameworks. The failure of service-sector led economic growth in the 1990s and the parallel creative boom in addressing these issues is a key starting point for our project.

Fresh from Cape Town and the scorching heat (experienced only fleetingly in-between some serious work), a few days later I forced my way across the Pennines in the snow to Leeds. There, I attended a seminar held by the Sustainable Practices Research Group on the Uses and Abuses of Community for Sustainable Development. Not directly about the creative urban economy. Nor specifically about cities. But what was interesting was how the common issues surrounding the lack of connectivity – between formal and informal governing and how communities are conceptualised as targets rather than participants in policy formulation and implementation – cut across policy areas.

Onwards then the next week to Birmingham for the Project Continuity Day. Phil has already blogged about the day as a whole and what’s going on in the different workpackages. We did have a particularly fruitful discussion about different governance questions with a few themes reoccurring:
• The relative importance and value of formal structures and policy frameworks and informal or ‘organic’ forms of organisation
• The extent to which creative industries/culture are given priority in the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), the relative power of the LEPs and the impact of the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies
• The confidence of the two cities in articulating their distinctiveness – and the impact that rhetoric has on practice and vice versa
• The different ways in which the city-regional agenda are impacting on questions of territoriality – and questions of political stability
• The role of infrastructure and ‘nodes’ for creative industries to come together to collaborate or otherwise share ideas and how non-formal and non-traditional spaces may provide alternatives
• The extent to which creative urban policies and regeneration policies are merged and blurred – and whether and how this is problematic, for whom?
• The differences in the stories we tell about the development of the creative urban economy in each city – and whose interests those stories serve?

A very brief overview of a short, but packed set of discussions which we will take back into our respective cities to continue to inform the research.

And so to London to meet with Yvette Vaughan-Jones, Visiting Arts, one of our main partners on the project. Yvette has been with the team since the start – attending the sandpit back in December 2011 and we were delighted to have her batting on our side in the highly competitive process that followed. As one of the co-commissions in workpackage 5, Visiting Arts will be developing a project, drawing on their tried and tested Square Mile framework. 1mile² has inspired communities to explore the cultural and ecological diversity of their neighbourhoods through artistic engagement. Artists and ecologists collaborate and lead activity that enables vital dialogue and knowledge sharing within and between cultural and geographic communities. Launched in 2009, the programme has so far involved 42 artists, 18 ecologists, 14 creative organizations and reached over 13 500 people in 10 countries.

To take this forward into the Cultural Intermediation project we have decided to work with Visiting Arts on a pre-commissioning study to look at best practice for artist residencies and socially engaged artistic practice. Combined with a proposed seminar in the CIRCUS and some preliminary work in Greater Manchester, the partnership promises an exciting test-bed to cut across the work packages on governance, community, evaluation and co-commissioning. More information to follow…

The Big Tent Activate Summit, Delhi, India

Tags

Art, cities, communities, Creative economies, Delhi, digital, google, guardian, India, Intermediation, internet

Organised by Google, The Guardian and MediaGuru. 21 March 2013.

In March 2013, I was invited by United Kingdom Trade & Investment to attend a summit on the future of digital and media in India as an expert on the creative economy. The Big Tent Activate Summit, held at the Taj Palace Hotel, Delhi, was financially underwritten by Google along with The Guardian and MediaGuru, an Indian media services company. A short statement from the organisers explained the agenda was to “discuss and debate the impact of the Internet on the Indian economy, politics, media and culture.” Marking the first Summit to be held in India, Eric Schimdt (CEO of Google) and Alan Rusbridger (Editor of The Guardian) talked alongside politicians, media specialists, economists, academics, digital entrepreneurs and, to a lesser extent, marginalised groups and individuals. Weaving a somewhat problematic path through commercial gains to be made by big business and digital as a force for challenging inequalities in India, the summit nevertheless raised some interesting issues.

There are 150 million internet users in India. However, despite appearing huge in comparison to UK metrics, this figure only represents 12% of the Indian population. Of this 12%, the majority are on narrowband with just 1% estimated to have broadband. By point of comparison, the US has 80% penetration and UK 73% penetration (in market-speak). The internet effects how we work, govern, bank, learn and entertain. Furthermore, it has the capabilities to transform how we communicate with each other. As Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communication and Information Technology, told delegates the internet ‘allows communities to talk to each other’. Yet Section 66 was widely discussed by panellists as a curtailment of the democratic freedom of expression with divergent opinions on whether this was justified to prevent violent protests and killings in the most extreme of cases. Despite low usage, Ministers Omar Abdullah and Shashi Tharoor did agree that social media, and Twitter especially, was increasingly taken seriously in politics due to their power to influence as well as amplify volatile subjects.

In regards to equality, Sibal and Schimdt urged the Indian state to ensure wireless networks and fibre optics were installed so that everyday people can reach information. Further, devices must also be affordable, in particular smart mobile phones. Interestingly, 3/4^th of the growth in internet usage has been through mobile and tablet therefore web publishers targeting Indian markets need to consider small screen experience with low text, in contrast to the big screen computer experience we were first introduced to in the UK.

Innovative battery-operated education labs used in rural villages were showcased, which took ZAYA, a mobile and digital learning experience, to areas that lack text books and sometimes electricity. A breakout session at lunch by Radar also showed how technology could support marginalised groups through the usage of simple text messaging as a means of citizen reporting in politically, socially and geographically isolated areas. Dalat women were amongst those who shared their stories with Rusbridger, eventually getting past hotel security only with help from the organisers, demonstrating the caste system still shapes everyday experiences in India.

During my 5 day visit I also had the chance to pay a visit to Sarai which is part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies located in north Delhi. Sarai in an interdisciplinary research centre which runs the Media City Research project and Cybermoholla. These are digital labs located in neighbourhoods in Delhi aimed at connecting with diverse socio-economic groups and young people; echoing some of our community engagement priorities in Birmingham and Manchester on the Cultural Intermediation project. Also Sarai’s environment is itself a case study of a cultural intermediary, connecting creative practice, theory and political action from its position within a megacity in the global south. I was very impressed by my brief visit to Sarai and hope to start a conversation with the academics and practitioners based there on our shared interests going forward…

Project Continuity Day and other meetings

A busy week of workshops in the run up to the Easter break.  On Monday myself, Saskia and Kerry were invited to a workshop run by Catherine Durose of INLOGOV here at the University of Birmingham.  The theme was ‘How can research help policy?’ and was an opportunity to hear more about the Connected Communities Policy Reviews which Catherine among others have been undertaking.  Sue Hanshaw, the ARHC’s lead for Connected Communities tackled the central theme – just how can arts and humanities research help policymakers.  This kicked off a really interesting day of reflection and discussion about the nature of Arts & Humanities research, both methodologically and epistemologically.  The theme of co-production was prominent as were issues of scale – if, for example, making pots can do a great deal for wellbeing, is it the haptic knowledge of actually working with clay that the policy maker needs, or something more abstracted from embodied practice?  Fascinating stuff and great to meet Dave Prytherch to discuss these issues.  We also learned about ‘slide packs’ which have apparently become the prefered mode of communication between civil servants.  Digesting all your findings down to a handful of tightly packed PowerPoint slides is a skill in itself for academics more used to the more leisurely spaces of a written report.  And a touch intimidating too.

On Tuesday myself, Antonia and Richard were at a workshop kicking off the University of Birmingham’s new major theme for its Institute of Advanced Studies – regeneration economies.  Antonia and Richard gave highly engaging talks as part of a session thinking about joining up social science, arts, legal and engineering approaches to build knowledge and skills for the future of regional economic growth.  The regeneration economies theme will be the basis for a whole series of workshops run over the next 18 months by my colleagues Lauren Andres (Geography) and John Bryson (Business School) and it was really great to see postgrads and masters students involved in this right from the beginning.

The main event of the week (naturally!) was our Project Continuity Day.  These six monthly meetings are always a great way to catch up with what everyone is doing and start to see the connections between the different work packages that we’re working on.  What was particularly exciting was to see how Ian and Natasha’s work on the historical evolution of intermediation was playing against the work that Beth, Karen and Saskia have been doing on contemporary governance – not least with the ‘Big Story’ interviews that Natasha and Saskia have been undertaking with people who have a long perspective on culture within Birmingham and Manchester.  Similarly Dave presented about the possibility of using participatory evaluation on the intervention work package.  This approach, which gets participants to design and implement their own evaluation of the project they’re involved in has a lot of resonances with the co-construction and co-commissioning of the interventions that we’re planning.  Indeed, Paul’s discussion of how the ‘Communities’ workpackage will operate has made it clear that we need to start thinking about the interventions (particularly training of community participants) at a very early stage.  Myself, Dave and Paul have resolved to meet after Easter to start a conversation about this.

We had a really productive set of small group discussions about the findings from the Governance workpackage thus far.  In my group we were thinking about the different attitudes between the two case study cities – Chris Jam and Jo Johnston noting the great confidence of Manchester about its cultural offer, which contrasts so strongly with attitudes in Birmingham.  It was also great to hear from Tim about his reflexive project – thinking  about how researchers actually function when undertaking projects and how these practices then shape the research itself.  This of course segues neatly into Laura’s PhD – Laura was presenting for the first time at Wednesday’s meeting and it was really interesting to hear about her background and what she’s been up to.  And we should also welcome Tania to the team, who’s going to be working with Antonia on a PhD about IP in the context of the creative economy (just as soon as we’ve finished sorting out the paperwork for getting her started!).  I had a really interesting chat with her over lunch about just how often IP is being raised in lots of Connected Communities meetings as being a critical issue to think through – her PhD has the potential to have a huge impact on debates within the Connected Communities group.

In the afternoon we had an opportunity to enter Richard’s lair/Batcave – do.collaboration.  This is a great resource at the university with a huge number of large touchtable interfaces to play with.  Richard, Russell and our graphic designer Brigitte were asking us to think through ways in which we can build tagging frameworks within the data (transcripts, films, audio, pictures) which can then be explored via a touchtable interface and, indeed, in a more detailed way on our website.  This is particularly exciting because our server was being installed on  Thursday so we’ll be up and running with building our project database by the end of the Easter break.  Ultimately for all the “boys toys” elements of this side of the project, the fundamental point is to give people access to our findings in ways that a normal/static website wouldn’t really do.  I’m particularly excited by the visual ways of drilling down into different data and identifying connections.  Once we have the server up and running, Russell and Brigitte are going to start building pilot versions of the interface – hopefully so we have something tangible to look at by the next project continuity day (date to be confirmed!).

Connected Communities Showcase

On Tuesday I was at the Connected Communities Showcase event down in London.  This was an opportunity for people involved in the exceedingly varied Connected Communities projects to talk to people about their work. The event was keynoted (if that is a word) by David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science, who said some generally enthusiastic things and then was whisked away leaving us mere mortals to it.

I spent a bit of time on a stand with one of my postgrads, Colin Lorne, talking to people about my MapLocal project.   Colin took a break from his PhD to be the research assistant on this project that we undertook with Chris Speed from Edinburgh and Cultural Intermediation’s own Antonia Layard.  MapLocal excited a fair bit of interest and gave me a chance to talk to a lot of people interested in mapping as a tool for representing/tapping into the creativity of communities.  This included some really exciting work by Peter Insole from Bristol City Council with the Know Your Place project

It was really intriguing day out and was also the launch platform for five major new AHRC/ESRC-funded Connected Communities projects:

• Dementia and Imagination: connecting communities and developing well-being through socially engaged visual arts practice, led by Dr Gillian Windle at Bangor University £1.2m.
• Representing Communities: developing the creative power of people to improve health and well-being, led by Professor Gareth Williams at Cardiff University, £1.2m.
• Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery: connecting communities for mental health and well-being led by Professor Paul Crawford at Nottingham University, £1.2m.
• The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: Imagining different communities and making them happen led by PI Professor Graham Crow at the University of Edinburgh, £1.9m.
• Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement led by Dr Morag McDermont, Bristol University, £1.9m.

(See the AHRC press release for more details)

Keri Facer and George McKay, the Connected Communities fellows organised a meeting between the Principal Investigators of these and the other large projects – including the creative economy call of which we are a part.  In what turned out to be a refreshingly honest meeting, we had a really good chat about the pressures and problems of managing very large projects and the potentials for collaboration between them.

One potential element for collaboration is the fact that we are planning on creating an interface that connects our project database (which we are creating in a piece of analysis software called NVivo) to our website (and touchtable).  This idea produced some excited interest among other PIs – all we have to do now is figure out a way to do it – over to Russel Beale on that one!  One of the most important recent events from that point of view is that, after many (many) delays, our project server has finally arrived.  I was expecting this would be a small black box that would sit in a cupboard somewhere but it turns out to be a huge tower taller than me (and I’m 6’4″!).  Apparently our University IT team needed spare rack capacity and so used our project as an excuse to buy a new rack cabinet.  I’m hoping that when plugged in it will have a large glowing red eye a la HAL.  Boys toys.

Big Story Interviews

Tags

Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, Creative economies, Culture, Engagement, Intermediation

One of the things I’ve been working on alongside Natasha are films of Big Story interviews with key ‘movers and shakers’ from Birmingham’s creative and cultural economy. The aim of the interviews has been to develop a common understanding of the site-specific and broader contextual stories around the development of the creative and cultural economy in each place. These narratives bridge the historical research by Ian and Natasha and governance research by Beth, Karen and I. Filming in Birmingham has already been done with: Roger Shannon, Film Producer; Derek Bishton, creator of photography magazine Ten.8; Anita Bhalla, Chair of Creative Cities Partnership and Head of Public Space Broadcasting, BBC; and Lara Ratnarajah, digital and business expert.  Overlapping with the Manchester work, Natasha and I also travelled down to London to interview Ben Kelly, the designer of The Hacienda nightclub. The rest of the Manchester Big Story interviews will be conducted by Natasha, Beth and Karen using walking techniques and photographs in an aural and visual mapping of the stories.  We’re hoping to facilitate focus groups in both Manchester and Birmingham at the end to share and refine the stories, building a picture of the distinctiveness of each place. Using the concept of ‘stories’, the Big Story methodology we’ve developed will develop urban narratives about change, transformation and the reconfiguration of places in dialogue with existing creative cities discourse.

 I’ve attached a short 6 minute clip of the first interview which features Roger Shannon, shot by film-makers Aman Alimshand and Karishma Popat from Birmingham City University. Enjoy!

Cultural Intermediation’s photostream

Cultural Intermediation’s photostream on Flickr.

Imagining Possibilities: group planning and key note speech

Imagining Possibilities Conference

Tags

Community, Creative, Participatory, Policy, Remaking, Society, Well-being

Creative Futures Institute, University of West Scotland, Paisley, 1 March 2013

I haven’t checked in for a while however the project has continued to move at a pace. On Friday I attended a conference exploring the findings of Remaking Society, an AHRC Connected Communities ‘Pilot Demonstrator’ project. Both inspirational and instructive by turns, through a series of presentations and workshops involving health policy makers, cultural programmers, artists and academics the day explored the connection between participation in cultural production, well-being and community-making. Taking the argument that community has been ‘demolished’ as a concept in part due to how it is mobilised to designate the insider/outside, Kerrie Schaefer, co-investigator of Remaking Society, instead considered community-in-flux, as dynamic and shifting, or being with others. Ethics in participatory practice were a key point of debate with the ever pertinent issue of power-relations between researcher/practitioner and participant communities. Here, the claims of participatory practice came under the critical lens: Are participants given real power? Or is the power illusory and fleeting? How can excellent quality work and participatory politics work together? Can product and process play an equal role? Above all, why do we expect certain communities to undergo a transformative process in their lives, yet our lives don’t need changing?

François Matarasso, in his key note speech, gave six best practice points which will inform our work going ahead:

1. The importance of stating clear aims and objectives between researcher and participants.

2. Must obtain consent from participants that their lives will be transformed.

3. Needs of communities are best identified by communities themselves.

4. In partnerships must share common goals (but not necessarily all goals).

5. Communities have to decide themselves if these common goals are met.

6. Art may not be the best way of reaching common goals.

In particular, exemplary work was shown by the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC), Belfast, on healing trauma through film. Their current landmark project is called Second Chance for Change: Including the Excluded which works with a group of Community and Forensic Mental Health (CFMH) service users at Holywell Hospital in Northern Ireland. Theatre Modo working in Fraserburgh, Odd Numbers project in Milton, North Glasgow, and Swingbridge Media, North Tyneside, were also highly impressive, deserving greater recognition and continued funding.