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Creatives and Cuts – the Big Leeds Debate

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Yorkshire has experienced the fastest growth in employment than any other region, however …

With all these cuts and changes what next?

  • Arts Council – 29.6% cuts over three years
  • Design Council – made a charity
  • Film Council – scrapped
  • NESTA – made a charity
  • Higher Education – 40% cuts over four years
  • Yorkshire Forward – scrapped
  • Local Councils – 28% cuts over three years
  • Business Link – scrapped
  • Almost 200 quangos – scrapped

What does all this mean for the future of the Creative, Cultural and Digital industries of Yorkshire?

‘Creative Networks’ has pulled together a senior-level panel to discuss exactly that.

Confirmed speakers include:

Sally Joynson – Chief Executive of Screen Yorkshire

Cluny Macpherson – Regional Director of Arts Council

Cllr. Adam Ogilvie – Chair of Leeds Cultural Partnership

Katie Stewart – Leeds City Region (Local Enterprise Partnership)

This event will be of vital interest to anyone working within or across the creative and cultural sectors in Yorkshire today. Short presentations followed by an open Q&A session

**Thursday, 25th November 2010**

6pm – Registration & Hot Food

7pm – News & Pitches

7.15pm – The Big Debate

8.30 til late – Networking in the Café Bar

Leeds College of Art, Blenheim Walk, LS2 9AQ

This event is free to creative, digital and cultural industry professionals.

If you would like to join us, please contact Creative Networks on 01422 399444

or email Bridget at bridgetm@leeds-art.ac.uk

Buy, Buy Everything…

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From 1985, when Birmingham’s Bull Ring was innovative:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X5zdWK6zc]

And this about Leeds Grand Daddy of Shopping Centres:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c85U4ITGv48]

Of Sheds and Shedmen…

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My pal Iain Scott has just written a swingeing piece on the problems of the ‘inward investment, picking winners and cosying up to large companies’ approach that has underwritten governmental approaches to economic development not just here in the UK, but across most of the west, at national, regional and local levels.  An approach that he characterises as being about ‘sheds and shedmen’.
So how have the ‘sheds and shedmen’ got such a tight grip on our economic policy and associated investments?
  1. Large well organised bodies of professionals make a lot of money from it – architects, planners, developers – they spend fortunes on organised lobbying – just look at the sponsorship of most of the big regeneration conferences – nearly all ‘sheds and shedmen’.  Look at MIPIM.  They will not easily give up their market share.
  2. Politicians like ‘sheds and shedmen’ because they give them something to open and point at.  ‘Look at the lovely building we have delivered, see how it shines, my lovely….’
  3. Politicians also like ‘sheds and shedmen’ because they provide interventions that can fit within an electoral cycle…when you elected me this was  a wasteland…now it has a ‘shed’.  More person centred approaches to tackling often generational problems in the local economy are likely to take longer and may not provide the short term ‘electoral’ benefits that our democratic leaders require
  4. Much of the electorate fall for the seductive line of ‘attracting employers who will bring us jobs and a bright and shiny future’. We have failed to provide them with a different, more compelling and honest narrative.  We have also failed to expose the nature of the ‘deals’ that are often required to attract such investment.
I am sure there are other reasons, but these strike me as the big ones!
So I propose a mission: to influence investment away from steel, concrete & glass and into people, their aspirations and progress.

Who is up for that?
Get in touch and we will organise….

Problems and Aspirations in South Yorkshire and Beyond

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I picked up this tweet from the inimitable and award winning Tom Bloxham MBE, Uber Prize Winning Guru of UK regeneration

Urban Splash’s refurb is turning one of the republic of Sth Yorkshire’s biggest problems into an aspirational address

Now ain’t that regeneration as it plays out here in the UK?

  1. Find a ‘problem community’ in an area with easy access to the city centre
  2. Refurb it to take it from a place where only the poor would live to an ‘aspirational address’.
  3. Replace a problem community with one that already has ‘aspirations’ .

The same recipe plays out all over the place.

Drive the poor people out, tart the place up.  Increase the property values and encourage the creative classes to move in.  Secure an immediate GVA increase, eliminate a whole bunch of costs, attract a community of shiny happy people and another award wining development is completed.

Everyone is a winner.  Developers, politicians, treasury.

Everyone except the displaced, who can no longer afford to live close to the city that is their home.  Who are driven out.  Who are economically excluded from the city.  Whose communities are broken up.

Regeneration is not economic cleansing.  It should be a process of inclusive community building.

Surely its time we awarded prizes for some other kind of ‘development’?

Dumb Strategy and State Funding

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I am hearing a lot at the moment from people and organisations that face a scary future because at some point in the past they chose (consciously or not) to develop a business model dependent to a very great extent, in some cases entirely, on public funding.

And right now that looks like a dumb strategy, because the development of mission, the pursuit of purpose, is regulated by a bureaucracy that makes political decisions about what to fund and when.  It decides how success will be measured.  In essence they are in control.

They hold the strategic reigns.