Research project STARTUP: Sustainable Transitions. Action Research and Training in Urban Perspective
STARTUP will engage in a double-sided process of taking action and doing research that promotes transformative change.
The project highlights the critical role of cultural heritage (CH) and the cultural creative industries (CCIs) in socio-economic, post-crisis recovery and their potential to drive the transition towards a beautiful, inclusive, sustainable environment.
These principles align with the New European Bauhaus’s (NEB) core values, which seek to engage citizens, institutions, and creative individuals as thinkers and change-makers in shaping a better future. The project adopts the placemaking paradigm, which promotes a bottom-up, small-scale and place-based approach. In eight small-scale trials, placemaking based on culture and creativity will be tested and refined. Cultural mapping and comparative case study research will further promote the knowledge-base for such interventions. The trials, mappings and case studies will form the empirical underpinnings of analyses of sustainable architectural design, multi-level policy and governance, and social, economic and environmental impacts (positive and negative) of culture-driven placemaking. These analyses, in turn, will form the evidence-base for STARTUP’s final results and main outcome: a “European Creative Placemaking Framework”, which is the policy-option STARTUP seeks to innovate. The approach of the framework builds upon local actors in culture and creativity, and aims at strengthening these actors as well as local authorities, in building their future on the tangible and intangible cultural resources represented in the place. The framework, which aims to be a management tool, hereby supports local economic development, sustainability, social cohesion and identity across Europe, but based on local cultural and creative professionals engaged in their art.
Project description
The New European Bauhaus (NEB) represents a path of social and environmental transition in which cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are strategic assets to promote concrete responses to the European Green Deal and other urgent challenges. The overall aim of the NEB is to foster a ‘new wave’ of systemic change where the three core values of aesthetics, sustainability and inclusion are guiding principles (Hill, 2021). These goals and values are likewise at the centre of the STARTUP project in our aim to innovate a “European creative placemaking framework” that promotes change at the local level based on the development capacities of cultural and creative professionals. The project develops upon the placemaking paradigm, which fosters a bottom-up, place-based, and human-centred approach to imagining and realizing tomorrow’s cities that are in line with EU Cohesion policies as well as place-based policies to promote available local and regional resources (Barca, 2009; EC, 2019; EU Cohesion Policy 2021-2027). Placemaking refers to a process of citizens’ involvement that introduces a wider set of social elements and collaboration in urban design and planning. In creative placemaking (Markusen and Gadwa 2010), the research and practice on which we proceed, cultural and creative professionals have a role based on their art and artistic practice.
Following EU Communication on the New European Bauhaus, we thus recognize “that artists and cultural and creative professionals are essential actors when it comes to reflecting and conveying values, to transmitting new and symbolic meanings, and to ensuring sustainability and enabling societal transformation”. The notion of creative placemaking corresponds well to these tasks.
The focus of STARTUP is on the role of the often neglected but important “local cultural praesidia”, meaning small cultural institutions, local organizations, cultural initiatives or creative spaces representing the finest grained contact points between cultural and creative professionals, and local communities. The term praesidium (plural praesidia), in the original Latin meaning refers to a place to safeguard, protection and a place of pertinence, and we will use it to cover for a fairly wide phenomenon that to date have not been properly conceptualized in the research literature, but is discussed under various terms like creative space, small institution, free actor or the like. Praesidia’s type of cultural activity could differ (craft, music, theatre, art, film, dance, design, etc.) and in their venues, they often have a set of parallel of activities (e.g. a bar, café, activities for children and parents, or even study places for young people). The venues are often re-used buildings or parts of buildings that with fairly limited means have been adapted, reconstructed and re-programmed to their new functions. Importantly, these buildings often also represent a local cultural heritage that gain new meaning while being preserved for the future. In Europe, although there are a number of case studies of individual local cultural praesidia (e.g. Bain & Landau, 2019, 2022; Borén & Young, 2017; Warren & Jones, 2015; Sachs Olsen, 2019, 2022), the STARTUP approach to systematically and comparatively on a broad scale investigate this part of the CCIs and their role for local cultural heritage, sustainability and local development is novel and innovative.
The organizational forms of praesidia could differ, e.g. public or nonprofit organization/entity or foundation, private “cultrepreneur”, or independent self-organized groups of creatives. In common among praesidia is that they engage in cultural, social, environmental, and artistic enrichment at the local level often seeking the transformation and integration of a neighbourhood (Alteri, 2021), a social group or a community using culture for social innovation (André et al., 2008), for collective knowledge (Cacciolatti & Lee, 2022) and for the support and dissemination of particular values. In praesidia, creative and cultural professionals play a crucial role for dialogue with local communities, as well as in programming, cultural content, and not the least, they are often – alone or in
collectives – the initiator of the praesidia. To understand the role of these actors is a crucial task for any creative placemaking project.
The praesidia also represent a field within cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries that need more policy attention. Culture is a national competence among the EU member states leading to a very scattered picture of cultural and local development policies across the continent (Borén and Power 2021). Nevertheless, local cultural praesidia are often involved in both strategic and spontaneous local development practices when re-using and re-generating buildings and spaces, as well as heavily invested in local value development, the work of which is important to attentitively care for – and understand – in both research and policy.
Project members
Members
Thomas Borén
Professor
Dominic Power
Professor
Peter Schmitt
Professor
