Intermediaries, policy and place linked in new United Nations Creative Economy Report

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communities, conference, Policy, Well-being

This week has seen the launch of a ‘Special Edition’ United Nations Creative Economy Report 2013, co-published by UNESCO and the United Nations Development Programme.

Principal investigator, writer and editor of the report, Yudhishthir Raj Isar was speaking on Wednesday 22nd January at the AHRC Community Filmmaking and Cultural Diversity conference at the BFI Southbank (more on the whole conference on this blog soon!). The report has chapter-long contributions from respected academics David Throsby and Andy Pratt and this special edition was produced with the UN Office for South South Co-operation and focuses on creative economy at the local level in developing countries in the global South.

It can be downloaded from here.

He told us that at its launch the previous evening, the response to the report from those who were there was that it was also relevant to developed countries. In a presentation that linked academic research with the policy world, he said the same issues affect the growing subsector of the economy labelled as ‘cultural’ as affect all cultural practitioners: intermediaries, policy and place. He added “It suits us to be included in the cultural economy because it is a sector that is moving ahead” but this is a tendency in economic development that continues to ignore the deep-seated and persistent inequalities between North and South.

However he went on to urge for caution in wrapping creative industries policy up in economic growth terminology, describing it as counter-productive. Success is contingent on many conditions, including geographical, structural and cultural, and any development must pay attention to local strengths. Outside influences may contribute to the generation of highly original hybrids (as is frequently seen happening in music), but they must not impose a model or an agenda for development. Raj mentioned Justin O’Connor’s response to the report on this blog in which he supports it for building on a 2005 UNESCO convention that supported a “diversity of cultural expressions” over what Raj referred to as ‘the reigning paradigm of the creative economy’ that reduces cultural value to the bottom line.

Commercialisation of cultural forms also loses sight of cultural forms that are a communities’ rights to communicate and pays no attention to disonnant voices, leading to disenfranchisement and decreased social capital of local communities. To quote Justin’s article again “purely market-oriented development erodes local cultures and undermines the ability of individuals and communities to access material forms of cultural expression”. Alternative futures for cultural economy development need to be imagined. Funding is one element to be considered in these, but others include ethical decision-making, trans-national connections, access to markets, leadership and education; intermediaries may emerge from many backgrounds. “It is an argument that suggests a new approach to cultural economy would not just ask what kind of culture we want to produce – but what kind of economy we want to help us do this.”

This also begs the question – what kinds of intermediaries are capable of providing meaningful support to the development of cultural economy sectors?

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Reflections on the ECE 6th Conference, University of Toronto, and Artscapes, University of Kent

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, conference, connected, Creative economies, geography, Intermediation, Policy, Richard Florida, Toronto

At the end of summer term the academic calendar segues into conference season. First was the ECE 6^th Conference at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), University of Toronto from 18-21^st June. A highly stimulating yet exhausting programme ran from 8.30am till we had finished up to 7 courses of our dinners (around 9.30pm, depending on stamina). The conference was designed as a way to bring early career academics together from around the world in a process of field-rebuilding on the creative economy.  Generosity of funding by MPI enabled early career academics with limited or non-existent research budgets to attend – although Canadian immigration prevented two of the speakers joining us in person (Ammar Palik, Pakistan, and Andrés Goméz-Liévano, Colombia).

Richard Florida gave his time to meet one-on-one with each of the participants as part of a game in academic speed-dating. He also led a discussion on revisiting the creative class where he rightfully noted that 100s of trillions is invested in urban spending and urban practice therefore focus needs to be concentrated on how spending is translated into pragmatic strategy. Casinos, stadiums and bike lanes are not, of course, the simple solution. Issues of inequality and disadvantaged communities in urban space were discussed in the session and throughout the conference, with common agreement that the pay and conditions for the service sector were unacceptable. A set of fascinating papers ensued. In particular I was impressed by the potential of Dr Xingiian Liu’s data visualisations which showed how creative cities are networked in terms of level of workers and interdependence.

The next week it was onto a very different but interesting conference Artscapes: Urban Art and the Public at the University of Kent, 27-28th June. As an example of where site-specificity falls down, Dr Rob Knifton discussed David Mach’s Polaris (1983) which was set on fire by a protester on Southbank who suffered fatal burns. The paper recalled the type of intense public participation, and ‘radical decommissioning’, that artist Simon Pope articulates in the burning of Raymond Mason’s Forward in Birmingham City Centre in 2003 (see my artist talk with Simon here). Of particular note was an excellent keynote talk by Dr Jonathan Vickery which read Jochen Gerz’s 2-3 Strassen in relation to creative cities literature.  Vickery’s consideration of how culture in public space has to map itself onto broad objectives of governance and government usefully brought together the strands of thinking from both conferences which feed into our governance work. Exploring culture as a function of policy is one of our lines of thinking, and, taking a multi-level approach, in the next academic year we will be working with communities to learn more about how they connect into cultural and creative practice. More on this soon.

Imagining Possibilities Conference

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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.