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No sooner have Beatriz Garcia’s feet touched the (Liverpool) ground again, but she’s off again to another presentation, this time in Italy. The Impacts 08 Director has been invited to take part in the Ravello Lab 09 culture and development forum, contributing in particular to a session titled ‘The European Capitals of Culture: cities like cultural industries?’ Next week things calm down a little, thankfully.
Now that we have a French speaker in the Impacts 08 office, I can finally get to the bottom of what ‘grand rapporteur’ Bernard Foccroulle was talking about at the end of the European Culture Forum in Brussels recently. Beatriz Garcia had told me that M Foccroulle had name-checked her presentation about Impacts 08, but though I found the French version of his closing remarks, I haven’t been able to get a translation. Into the breach stepped our multi-lingual new staff member Matti, on whose good authority we have it that M Foccroulle said:
‘Beatriz Garcia from Liverpool observed that ever since the European Capitals of Culture, those cultural operators who have the strongest medium and long-term impacts are those which are operating on a small scale. On the scale of cultural policy and enterprise policy, is this not a possible orientation: counting on a large number of small projects with a strong and innovative value and not merely spectacular projects?’
Well that’s a relief. Impacts 08 is an exemplar of developing a strong evidence base, and it’s not always the big cultural show-stoppers that make the most difference. Now I can sleep at night.
Impacts 08 Director Beatriz García is making a keynote presentation at Revitalising Built Environments: Requalifying Old Places for New Uses, an event taking place in Istanbul from 12th-16th October. She’ll be discussing the long-term legacy of hosting the European City of Culture title in Glasgow 1990 and comparing the experience with that of Liverpool, European Capital of Culture in 2008. The presentation will examine the progression in culture-led regeneration narratives and strategies over three decades of UK-based cultural policy.
This year’s Cultural Trends one day conference is themed around: ‘Centre/Periphery: Devolution/Federalism – New Trends in Cultural Policy’, and takes place at City University in London on Friday 16th October. Impacts 08 friends Steven Miles and David O’Brien will be presenting on ‘Cultural policy as rhetoric and reality: a comparative analysis of policy-making in the peripheral north’. If you’re interested in attending (it’s free!), there are further details here, and you can contact shelley.allen@tandf.co.uk. Availability is on a first come, first served basis.
We’re holding a research seminar – Rhetoric and reality: The role of cultural policy in place and space – on 16th September to discuss findings emerging from our AHRC / ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and Regeneration. Attendance is very limited and therefore by invitation only.
The main objective of the Fellowship has been to advance the case for the development of a more ‘culturally sensitive’ cultural policy that can be informed by appropriate impact research methodologies. The ambition of this seminar is to begin a process in which academics, policymakers and stakeholders can develop a dialogue around notions of ‘cultural value’ founded in place. We’re aiming to highlight the contrast between rhetorical and actual notions of culture-led regeneration, using emerging data as a means of beginning to chart a way forward for a more reflexive cultural policy.
For further information check out our main site. We’ll also be adding updates here as we get closer.
Our Measuring Cultural Engagement workshop, the last in a series of impact workshops funded by the AHRC and Arts Council England, took place on Monday and was a great success. Over forty arts practitioners, academics, researchers and policymakers attended the event at Liverpool’s Foresight Centre, the highlight of which was some pretty intense discussion during the afternoon. Delegates broke into three groups and discussed issues around measuring audiences, measuring the cultural experience itself, and the thorny old problem of ‘excellence’. You can check out the programme, see who was there, and have a look at the presentations made on the day over on our workshops website, and there’s also a space to keep the conversation going. We’ll be adding feedback from delegates, and a report on the event as a whole, over the coming days…
