Are you an artist, creative or organisation wanting to find out the latest in creative placemaking and wanting to put it into practice in Birmingham? Culture Central is working with Dr. Cara Courage, Birmingham City Council and key thinkers and ‘do-ers’ working in creative and cultural placemaking to deliver a day or practical information sharing and inspiration.
What you will get out of the day:
Understand what ‘placemaking’ means for artists, creatives and cultural organisations.
Learn how cultural organisations, artists and creatives are currently working in place
Unpack the frameworks and principles that guide the wider placemaking agenda
Explore what innovative work has shaped creative placemaking in in Birmingham
Participate in workshops showcasing how creative placemaking is happening in the city.
Fill the form below to register for the session.
What will the content be and who will be speaking?
Understanding Placemaking -This session explores what placemaking means, and which key ideas have shaped both the policy and practice of creative and cultural placemaking.
Speakers: Dr Cara Courage, Culture, Communities & Place Consultant & Anna Kime, Policy Officer, Centre for Cultural Value
How we work in place - This session will highlight examples of how other places in the UK have approached creative placemaking highlighting best practice and unpicking what works in a particular place.
Talks & Panel: Rachel Smith, Director, Make/Shift, Cara Pickering, Head of Creative Places, The Audience Agency
Frameworks for place – Here we’ll take a macro view on working with people and place in the UK – looking in detail at what frameworks, structures and plans shape placemaking activity.
Talks & Panel: Sarah Kennedy, Director, Birmingham, Arts Council England, Dr. Nicola Headlam, Lorraine Cox, Creative Estuary – and more to come!
The making of place - Spotlight on Birmingham will focus on the cultural placemaking pilots taking place in Birmingham at the moment.
Speakers: Keith Shayaam-Smith, CEO, Legacy Centre of Excellence, Grand Union & Eastside Projects, Cheryl Jones, Director, Grand Union & Gavin Wade, Artist / Curator, Eastside Projects. Jayne Murray, Director, Place Prospectors.
The creative of place – This active world café session will explore the creative placemaking practice of artists and organisations and allow people to learn from and develop their own approaches to creative placemaking.
World Café: Anna Francis, Co-Director, Portland Inn Project, Kim Wide MBE, Founder, CEO and Artistic Director Take A Part – and more to come!
Our principles for placemaking
Hear what Birmingham artists created as a set of Birmingham Placemaking Principles at the Developing Future City Plan Makers: Bootcamp. You can sign up to the waitlist for the bootcamp here.
Partners:
Dr Cara Courage
Dr Cara Courage, Culture, Communities & Place Consultant-Director, is a globally renowned placemaking, arts and heritage sector leader, named in the top 10 of place-thinkers worldwide and a ‘strategy angel’ for the culture sector.
Her passion for and dedication to people and place has led her to specialise in practices that are socially-engaged, community-led, and in embedded in place, whether that place be a team, a city park, a national museum or a rural town high street, doing this as a consultant, practitioner, researcher and writer. Cara works with local and national government, network organisations, universities, cultural institutions, artists and communities, and has worked on projects from Plymouth to Basildon, to Belfast to Derby, and across the USA and Europe. Much of Cara’s work is as a Critical Friend to organisations helping them think through what they do why, how and who with.
Birmingham City Council
Birmingham City Council (BCC) have been working in partnership with the Birmingham Cultural Compact to refresh the Cultural Strategy, and alongside this, the Art in the Public Realm Strategy and policy for the city. This work has been made possible thanks to investment from West Midlands Combined Authority’s dissemination ofCommonwealth Games Legacy Funding across the region. BCC Cultural Development Service have developed a Cultural Placemaking programme to undertake the following work areas by 31st December 2024:
Three Cultural Placemaking Strategy Pilots in Druids Heath (led by Place Prospectors CIC), Newtown (led by Legacy Centre for Excellence) and Digbeth (led by Grand Union and Eastside Projects)
Birmingham Cultural Strategy Refresh (led by Creative Concern)
Birmingham Art in the Public Realm Strategy Refresh and Policy Development (led by Dr Cara Courage and Hamdee Yusuf)
Developing Future City Plan Makers Bootcamp and Conference (led by Culture Central)
Alongside this work, some activity funding and CPD package was also available (scheme now closed for applications):
Get Creative Project Funding (grant funding to Stryx CIC, LouDeemy, Sudden Productions, Autin Dance and Theatre, Craftspace, West Midlands Circus Centre, Northfield Arts Forum, RAQS, GAP Arts
Get Creative Producer Programme (led by Culture Central)
BCC teams and a range of community and multi-disciplinary partners have worked together closely since the previous Cultural Strategy and Birmingham Public Art Strategy (2015) to review how arts and culture can play a more integral and better integrated role within developments across the city. Much work was undertaken to emphasise the importance of arts, culture and creativity within the ‘Our Future City: Central Birmingham Framework 2045’, leading to ambitions to further strengthen Cultural Policy within the Birmingham-wide Local Plan, masterplans and other key local authority documents in the future.
Commonwealth Games Legacy Enhancement Fund
The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and UK Government set up the Commonwealth Games Legacy Enhancement Fund to use the underspend from the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games to ensure its positive legacy is felt right across the region and for many years to come.
