June 2023

This residency concerns the reconceptualization of cultural management from a place-based perspective through the lens of interdisciplinarity. Residents are drawn from different disciplinary bases with a common interest in cultural policy studies, arts management, creative industries research and practice. Residents have been invited for their expertise and interest and are drawn from an emerging network of academics and practitioners whose work informs new place-based research agendas, from cultural policy, political science, economic and human geography, sociology, community development, and urban planning, including early career and senior researchers.

We will be asking what happens ‘beyond the creative city’ in endemic and post-Covid urban spaces including rural areas, small cities, satellite towns, peri-urban settlements, peripheral suburbs, and diffuse networks brought together through digital technologies. In policy and practice, creative placemaking often assumes wholly positive relationships between creative economies and local development. This follows the highly influential paradigm of the ‘Creative City’ as a strategic factor in urban planning, reproduced and transferred world-wide, but criticised for lack of place-sensitivity and for masking (and sometimes exacerbating) inequalities. The Covid-19 pandemic has generated further challenges to the Creative City model, by disrupting business models of CCIs and creating new creative geographies, hollowing out city centres, and increasing precarity, inequity, hybrid-working and a return to the hyper-local. The residency invites interdisciplinary researchers to establish new paradigms through research and knowledge exchange, agenda-setting, policy engagement, digital and peer-reviewed outputs.

activities-7-8-june-beyond-the-creative-city-managing-local-arts-culture-and-place.pdf