Creativity, culture and city change from the bottom up

Creative Producers International was designed to illuminate the work of, and respond to the needs of, a newly emergent category of creative practitioners called Creative Producers. We define their role as:

“A creative professional who acts as a broker forging collaborations and relationships, connects parts of [a] network together, puts people in touch with resources, identifies advantageous development routes for creative people, and frequently translates between different parts of the ecosystem where professional languages and approaches to work often differ.”
– (Network for Creative Enterprise, Final Report 2019 p.18)

We see these skills applied across a number of sectors, drawing together creative practice and cultural organisations, to realise projects in cities and communities, with artists, businesses, policymakers and more.

Fundamental to Creative Producers International was an exploration of how Creative Producers, as a distinctive kind of cultural professional, can effect city change. The programme drew on over ten years of work by Watershed and its partners into understanding and illuminating the impacts that Creative Producers make to the world. We have had a strong sense of the importance of Creative Producing for a long time but wanted to learn more about how the idea was understood internationally and aimed to do so through international exchanges with cultural organisations from a number of cities across the world – notably Lagos, Nigeria; Recife, Brazil and Tokyo, Japan.

Our intention was for Creative Producers International to consolidate existing international relationships, and build new ones, in order to explore how Creative Producers generate grassroots city change in a global context. Our conviction that cities across the world need Creative Producers to instigate change emerged from within a very specific UK cultural policy context, so we aimed to design a flexible and responsive programme to create a shared space for organisations and individuals to learn from one another, collectively stretch our practice, and explore how creative producing was already unfolding in various international contexts.

A collective and collaborative approach to cultural practice feels ever more important as the question of how our cities grow, adapt and thrive continues to become more pressing. Problems like climate change, searing global inequality, social division, displacement and militarisation are among the many seemingly insoluble challenges of the twenty-first century. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has further demonstrated the fragility of economic ecosystems. The rate of social, economic, political, technological, and environmental change in the twenty-first century is often overwhelming. Cities all over the world are booming in both planned and unplanned ways and, while emergent digital technologies have been argued to offer solutions of all kinds, these are often talked about in terms of ‘big data’ processing, such as systems to monitor or ease traffic, provide surveillance, or otherwise create ‘frictionless’ cities. This means that the conversation around the future city is more focused on policy and ‘smart’ technology than people, culture and creativity.

The challenge is further compounded by the way that creativity has often been mobilised by urban development imperatives in western countries as a means to promote economic growth, rather than address deeply entrenched social divides. This is because creativity is assumed to have an impact on how neighbourhoods regenerate, how markets expand, and how health and wellbeing, tourism, education, social innovation and sustainability can be improved through its market function. Yet, more often than not, these top-down strategies for creative regeneration lead to gentrification and high levels of inequality. Creative work is increasingly precarious, and many cities are often compelled to market themselves as destination cities where a creative lifestyle can be purchased rather than created.

We don’t believe that this is the only blueprint for the future. While we know these problems have no single solution, we believe messy, cooperative interventions produce the best possible responses. We believe mobilising and connecting people through the lens of creativity and culture provides a real opportunity to open up more democratic, grassroots responses to contemporary challenges. We are exploring an approach that harnesses creativity, technology, culture and city infrastructures, mobilising direct dialogue and collaboration with the grassroots, to grow messy solutions to intractable problems.

We therefore believe that artists and cultural organisations have a unique opportunity to help re-imagine the cities of the future, ensuring citizens are engaged, public spaces are open and infrastructure solutions are people-centred, appropriate and textured. Creative work can change the conditions of what is possible by offering encounters with other ways of thinking, being and living through new imaginative visions. Creativity can give voice to people in ways that changes their experience of themselves in the world, and in so doing they can see and be seen by others differently. Playful approaches to creative work encourage participation and reduce barriers to entry which can in turn empower a wider range of people to act creatively in tackling the big challenges we face.

The path to a better future is not straightforward, but through collaboration, co-creation and participation, we feel there are opportunities to meet the challenges that face us. This programme has been based around the belief that to make socially impactful, creative work many different kinds of networks must be mobilised. These might be governmental, third sector, education, technological or cultural or beyond, but what is needed are the right kinds of creative talent to connect, amplify, and move forward creative and inclusive responses to our messy world. This is where we think Creative Producers are already playing a role.