Sustainable Co-Creative Practices in Arts/Culture-led Placemaking Initiatives

The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities

A practice-led project which will focus on developing an effective sustainability framework for large-scale partnership projects that engage in participatory culture-led regeneration of places.

This practice-as-research or practice-based project will focus on developing an effective sustainability framework for large-scale partnership projects that engage in participatory culture-led regeneration of places.

This is a practice-based PhD, being embedded in a partnership involved in large-scale cultural delivery with art-led regeneration as its aim. Thus, this PhD will complement the work, as well as be independent of it: it will focus particularly on the sustainability aspects of strategic culture-led and participatory initiatives. Sustainability here is understood as having three dimensions (environmental, economic, and social), all three of which will be considered in the context of arts-led approaches to place shaping and place-making.

The PhD is designed to develop both new knowledge and a framework that supports future creative stakeholders to attend to sustainability aspects of their strategic cultural initiatives by specifically focusing on questions of:

• The role of cultural and creative co-creation in relation to understanding medium to long-term sustainability (environmental, social, economic)
• What new tools or processes would help increase sustainability for creative/cultural programming, education, cultural enterprise and outreach?
• The identification of underpinning infrastructures needed to sustain participatory place-shaping processes.
• The processes and systemic prerequisites for continued innovation in developing social capital through arts and cultural initiatives.

Considering the interrelationship to creative leadership, community development (instead of community engagement), community resilience, motivational factors, drive, incentivisation, etc.