Including Culture In Development

A step-by-step guide

Urban Land Institute .

• Publisher: Urban Land Institute
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780874204407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This how-to guide will help you improve the creation and integration of quality public art and cultural infrastructure within urban development. The publication outlines six steps that can be taken to achieve high quality results and includes real-life examples and interviews.

Part I

Six Steps to Success

Ten Top Tips

Six Steps to Success

These six steps set out a shared and achievable route to finding the right cultural match for a development.

Getting Step 1 right – identifying and agreeing the vision – is key to what follows. It is where mistakes most often happen, so this step is explained in more detail to help get it right.

Major developments will often have a requirement for a cultural element as part of their planning permission – and several of the case studies, including RELAY in King’s Cross, and the North West Cambridge Residency Programme, refer to these 106 agreements, as well as to a desire to go beyond the usual developer approach. The key is for all stakeholders to trust that this does not have to be a competitive negotiation. Following the six steps outlined here will result in finding commonalities – where shared objectives overlap – so the cultural opportunity will emerge without anyone compromising their objectives.

Step 1

Agree a vision of success

Step 2

Establish benchmarks and measurements

Step 3

Select the cultural engagement

Step 4

Build an inventory of resources

Step 5

Create the strategic opportunity and engage a cultural professional

Step 6

Agree the cultural brief

Step 1 – Agree a vision of success

Objective:

Identifying everyone’s priorities for the impacts and characteristics of the development will help create a clear vision of success.

Question:

What do you want to achieve?

Key actions:

1. Form a working group. The people who will be delivering the project should start thinking and working as a partnership as soon as possible. This group is likely to include different people at different times throughout the development timeline.

2. Map priorities. Explore and capture in bullet point form the outcomes all stakeholders need the development to achieve. This should include the relevant planning and policy context for the site in local plans and cultural strategies. Is the site in a Creative Enterprise Zone, for example? This may require existing cultural infrastructure to be retained or new cultural infrastructure to be included in the development. Be as transparent and open to each other’s ideas as possible.

3. Identify the types of impacts and characteristics. An open, objective conversation can start to find natural intersections of priorities. Should the development’s impacts be economic, social or environmental, including natural or man-made? Are there particular requirements around quality, identity, health and wellbeing or community building? (There are some ways to help think about this on the following pages.)

4. Explore how culture can help achieve the priorities. This will help ensure culture is not seen as ‘additional’ later on. Aim to explain the type and role of cultural content or activity in the development as expressively as possible. More complex districts will require a wider cultural placemaking strategy and delivery plan.

5. Capture these goals and priorities in a loose, descriptive vision (see an example on the following pages). As this is for internal consumption only at this stage, there is no need to be too restrictive. However, make it clearly specific to this site, and not too generic. Consider using a facilitator to help explore and capture priorities.

6. Record all of the suggested ambitions and outcomes identified. Even if some of these are not included in the final vision, they will add detail to the eventual artist or cultural brief and help cultural collaborators trust you share similar values in what you both hope to achieve.

7. Keep options open as far as possible and continue to refine in the following steps. There is no need to make it a tightly drawn narrative just yet: the ‘cultural opportunity’ may well be an action, or programme, or artwork that links the disparate elements together.

Finding shared priorities

At first, stakeholders’ priorities for the impact of the development might seem too disparate. To help identify common objectives, try overlaying three broad headings of social, economic and environmental goals into the discussion to find where priorities overlap:

Social goals can include bringing a new identity to an existing area, building a sense of place in a new or abandoned area, uniting different communities or introducing new or different activity in the area.

Economic goals can include bringing economic benefits to the development, the local or wider area, and the existing or new community.

Environmental goals can include setting out environmental and sustainability targets that the development must achieve, developing a brownfield site or creating new, natural public realm.

Examples of a vision: ‘The development will create an appealing shared landscape (environment) that encourages more cross-community activity (social)’, or ‘the development needs to raise economic value in the area through challenging negative perceptions of provision (economic).’

Types of impact

As well as broad objectives, consider the impact for the success of the development, for example in terms of:

Quality	Targeted Occupiers
Some developments will need to ensure the scheme is associated with high quality in terms of materials, design, etc., and this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Team
• Biographies
• Further Resources
• References