Workshop: Rethinking the Creative City: Sites, Measures, Methods
Researchers and policymakers often map, measure, and evaluate ‘creative cities’ using cluster-based theories, which privilege particular types of participants, industry activities and instrumental economic outcomes.
Alternatively, an ecological approach highlights the broad range of participants in urban creative activity – individuals, organisations, and institutions; their spaces of activity – from the everyday to formalised interactions; and their full range of impacts. Eco-system thinking also points to how these relationships develop through a desire to collaborate and make social change, where values such as play, generosity and care are cultivated and exchanged (Shorthose and Maycroft 2017). In other words, cultural ecologies often perform diverse economies (Gibson-Graham 2008), challenging more neoliberal and instrumentalised versions of the ‘creative economy’.
Eco-system thinking raises important questions regarding the role of research practice, knowledge production, and its impact on the creative sector and urban communities. As HEIs and researchers are increasingly embedded within cultural ecologies and subsequently implicated in policy decisions and other impacts, researchers, cultural and community-based organisations are increasingly interested in co-productive methodologies to ensure research is not extractive, but rather mutually beneficial.
Drawing on the South West Creative Technology Network, a university-creative sector partnership, this workshop will explore how eco-system thinking informs the project’s design and methods. Working in groups, participants will then apply these concepts to design ‘utopian’ research projects and by mapping their own eco-systems – partners, places, resources and practices.
Participants are invited to return to the afternoon workshop to identify potential barriers in actualising these ‘utopian’ projects, and collectively explore tactics to overcome those challenges.
Workshop limited to 20 people. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/workshop-rethinking-the-creative-city-sites-measures-methods-tickets-72057531015