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?

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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