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…