Universities and the Creative City
An inclusive design strategy to reimagine the creative city policy in Detroit | S. Renoir
In Detroit (Michigan, United States), after a decade of fast urban regeneration causing economic and cultural gentrification, displacement and exclusion, a new strategy has emerged in 2018. Led by Design Core Detroit (DCD), a business accelerator and advocacy organisation formed through a partnership between the College for Creative Studies (CCS) and an influential local business roundtable, the long-term goal of the strategy is to drive inclusive growth through the practice of inclusive design. Previously known as the Detroit Creative Corridor Center (DC3), DCD’s past strategy has consisted in rebranding Detroit as a “Creative City”, with a peculiar emphasis on design: for instance, the city joined the Unesco “City of Design” network in December 2015. It has been partly responsible for the negative effects of the urban renewal. This communication intends to evaluate the capacity of the new inclusive design strategy to resist the major trend and reimagine a local creative city policy. Based on an analysis of the DCD’s Action Plan, observations of the Detroit Design Festival between 2015 and 2017 and interviews with local stakeholders, it will address the following questions: may the new inclusive design strategy change the direction of urban renewal in Detroit and to which conditions? What sort of relationships and partnerships with the universities and with grassroots organisations can help achieve its inclusive growth goal? From a communication sciences perspective, the paper will first analyse DCD/DC3’s past and present activity and discourse to show the ambivalence of the new strategy, in fact oriented both towards short-term economic benefits and long-term inclusive growth. We will then discuss the notion of inclusive design and the set of practices associated with it in DCD’s plan, including creating an Inclusive Design Certification and incentives to achieve a more diverse composition of designers graduating from local universities.
Re-thinking the Creative City through Participatory Action Research | M. Nunes
In the last few years Universities are increasingly being called to contribute proactively in developing sustainable and inclusive urban regeneration strategies, in collaboration with a wide range of non-academic actors such as municipalities, NGOs and local communities. National and transnational programmes promoting multi-sector partnerships for action-research are an important funding-source of scientific research today. However, while these initiatives may open up new opportunities for producing socially relevant and impactful research, they can also lead researchers to submerge in their specific structures, visions and practices and only superficially engage with local challenges and sources of knowledge. Based on my PhD research within the Horizon 2020 EU funded project ROCK – Regeneration and Optimisation of Cultural heritage in creative and Knowledge cities – I wish to explore the opportunities and challenges of Participatory Action Research (PAR) for fostering more democratic approaches to the idea of a Creative City. Namely, what is needed for PAR to be effectively developed in order to address complex urban challenges and to give voice to different local actors; how can research produced through PAR bring clear and relevant outcomes for places and communities; and ultimately, what does this entails in terms of critical challenges and changes in academic activity. Discursive dominance over the creative city imaginary is requiring us to engage in wider and more participated discussions that allow us to reimagine what a creative city means and to create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs and models. The current appeal for PAR could be a step forward in that direction.
Beyond the ‘Creative City’: Reimagining the university’s creative business incubator through social design | M. O’Dair
The arts and cultural sector in the UK is not representative of the population as a whole. Social and spatial inequalities in cultural labour markets are reproduced in London (Oakley et al 2017) as elsewhere – as even as vocal a champion of the ‘creative city’ as Richard Florida (2017) now concedes. What does this mean for the modern university – and the specialist arts university in particular? What are our responsibilities to students, to graduates, and to society? On the one hand, for a university to land like a spaceship in a given geographic location is rightly seen as a dereliction of duty. Higher education institutions are increasingly expected to engage in placemaking and to drive economic growth, for instance through ‘creative clusters’. On the other hand, for a university to launch an incubator is to become implicated in concerns around labour precarity, economic exclusion and gentrification – and an incubator that specifically focuses on the creative and cultural industries could simply perpetuate the injustices and inequalities already endemic within those industries. This paper adopts a case study approach to university incubators across the world (Remenyi and Grant 2018), especially those with a focus on creative and cultural industries. Should we simply resist such incubators as examples of the intrusion of neoliberal values into higher education? Or should we, more pragmatically, reimagine the university incubator, so that it focuses on ‘social start-ups’ (Janus 2018) with a ‘triple bottom line’: economic prosperity, environmental quality and social justice (Elkington 1997)? And should the specialist arts university focus only on the creative and cultural industries? Or, instead, through the broader application of our methods and approaches – for instance, those of social design (Kimbell and Julier 2012, Manzini et al 2015, Sachs 2018) – do we have the opportunity to contribute to a future that is more sustainable, resilient and just?