Salford's Culture and Place Strategy: People at the Centre and Creative Ecology, Schemes and Mind Maps of Innovation

Download Salford's Culture and Place Strategy: People at the Centre and Creative Ecology and more Schemes and Mind Maps Innovation in PDF only on Docsity!

The Strategy for Culture, Creativity and Place in Salford

The launch of Salford’s

Culture and Place Partnership

Thursday 12 March 2020

Sponsored by

Salus populi suprema lex

‘the welfare of the people

is the highest law’.

Creativity and innovation are at Salford’s heart: it was formed in the crucible of the industrial revolution, founded on making things. Creativity is manifest today in the city’s rich cultural offer from The Lowry’s world- class arts programme to the vibrant creative community at Islington Mill, from the START in Salford’s early innovation in arts-on-prescription to the dynamic cluster of media companies at Salford Quays. Salford holds its

own as ‘the creative fringe to Manchester’s economic powerhouse’, but we want to grow this role into something deeper, something better for our city and our regional neighbours. We have a growing understanding of the roles culture and creativity can play, from our health and well-being to the ways that Salford’s identity is understood and communicated. Salford’s city motto is:

INTRODUCTION

As we build our strategy for culture, creativity and place, Salford’s motto gives us an opportunity. While many strategies and policies advocate positive outcomes for people, so often these come second after economic outcomes. In other words, money takes priority over people. Proclaiming ‘the welfare of the people is our highest law’ sounds fantastic: it is a laudable sentiment. Turning that sentiment into the common ground for a shared, city-wide strategy is another matter. There is risk in this – in positioning this statement at the heart of our culture, creativity and place, we must activate ‘people’ as the central driver for everything we do strategically. It should be our first, middle and last thought in any project we dream up or take on. We will need to hold ourselves to account and allow others to do so.

This is the moment – and the place - to take that risk.

The vision and ambition outlined in the Suprema Lex strategy outstrips our present knowledge and resources. It is marked as Salford’s 10-year vision and, as we graft to bring it into tangible realities, it will demand from us real shifts in thinking, working and collaboration. But we also see the prize – what this strategy could co-create with the people of Salford – and it is worth the risk and the work to come. We want culture, creativity and place to be part of what makes Salford a place to live in, work in, believe in, and be part of. We want to find better ways to work on stubborn problems in the most deprived areas of the city. They aren’t just darkened blotches on the city map; they are people’s neighbourhoods and people’s lives. We want connect our cultural and creative districts and their surrounding neighbourhoods. We do not want Salfordians to be only visible in L.S. Lowry’s paintings; we want them to feel like – believe that - all the cultural riches of the cities are theirs.

In striving for this, we will also cultivate collaborative practices worthy of regional, national, and international practice at a time where social inequality, political division, place-based and environmental threats to life and livelihood are growing.

We see the risk, we see the prize and we are ready to take it on: Suprema Lex.

By 2030, Salford will have earned its global

reputation as an open city where creativity

and social innovation thrive and feed one

another, a city that shares its cultural riches

with the world.

ION^ ONON

The Suprema Lex strategy focuses on five areas, with ‘People’ as the central pillar that unites the strategy as whole. These areas include:

Salford: the city of makers and making – a place where creatives from all walks of life can live, work and make their work

Place-making – creating tools and processes that make Salford’s centres and neighbourhoods feel distinctive and open with a sense of clear identity

Animating the City – connecting the ways that we plan, communicate and create access to Salford’s distinct and varied cultural and creative events

Destination Salford - Salford knows exactly who it is and what makes us distinctive. This strand of Suprema Lex is about how we communicate to those outside the city, the stories we want to tell, and the dialogues we want to start.

People at the Centre of Everything – As we activate parts of the strategy, the people of Salford must be a consciously present priority. However, we also want to focus on the cultural, creative and place-based opportunities for people in four additional areas:

Cultivating Sector Leadership IN Salford – cultivating new leaders in the city, connecting proactive people to co-imagine better ways of doing things, and taking them into action

Social Prescribing – maturing the city’s offer in which creative and nature-based activity can support individuals’ health and well-being

Children and Young People – understanding the diverse cultural and creative offer for our youngest Salfordians and improving the access, quality of opportunity and impact on their lives and futures

Neighbourhood-based Delivery – work to transform Salford’s astounding cultural and creative offer to be accessed across all areas of the city.

STRATEGY

PRIORITIES

AND

OBJECTIVES

In February 2017 a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Salford City Council, the University of Salford and Arts Council England, with deep facilitation by The Lowry as the city’s flagship centre for culture. This captured the ambition and recognition that Salford reached a stage in its growth and economic development where the city’s leaders faced pivotal decisions to secure a balanced, socially inclusive and economically resilient future. The MoU also recognised that the role of culture and the arts in the lives of people, the well-being and the identity of communities, and in heritage and place-making needed anchor institutions to work together collaboratively. Over the following 18 months, the lead organisations evolved to form Salford’s Culture and Place Partnership.

The group brought other key cultural organisations, creative businesses, developers and stakeholders into the partnership. In creating a new strategy, the partnership sought ‘a new and radical approach to culture, the arts, heritage and place- making’ across the city. Suprema Lex is the response to this call.

SALFORD’S CU

PLACE PARTN

Salford is a city of complexity and variety. From the outside, it can be hard to understand either on its own or in clear relationship to its neighbours. From inside Salford, the themes are clear. Salford has a both a cockiness and a dogged independence that permeates the city. It is a ‘city of firsts’, but not as some privileged place of encultured enlightment. Salford has never waited for conditions to be perfect to try something new; indeed, it is often in direct reaction to the lack of perfect conditions that it has imagined new possibilities and made them happen.

There is a defiant pride in who and what Salford is, as much of the city is home to working-class communities with the city’s industrial heritage ever-present in the eye and mind. At times, it creates an inner tussle when imagining of who and what Salford wants to be in the future. There is little sense of entitlement in the city and a shared suspicion of big promises by big people with big dreams. The iterative experience of regeneration has something that has been done ‘to’ Salfordians and not ‘with’ them; a fair word of warning to those preparing consultation workshops in sharp suits with pop-up banners. The people of Salford will see you coming a mile away, with the taste of broken promises still fresh on their tongues. No one is going to do it for us, so we do it ourselves. Brilliantly. Defiantly. Raucously. It might just about break us, but we will make this city better for ourselves. And we will be stronger for it on the other side.

CONTEXT

LTURE AND

ERSHIP

In shaping this strategy, Salford’s Culture and Place Partnership does not look at culture in a box. It interrogate intersections with other industries and strategies, needs and aspirations across the city. In taking a wider view of culture and its potential, the conversation changes. Economic resilience and technological advancement are essential for the future of the city. At the same time, we need to continue to make space to explore what makes us truly human: culture, art, community and creativity. Where ‘models of good practice’ to address Salford’s needs and aspirations are not fit for purpose, we must work across the partnership and the wider city to create and test new models. As a city of firsts, Salford is ready to take on this challenge.

At the time of writing, Salford’s Culture and Place Partnership includes:

Arts Council England (anchor partner) Salford City Council (anchor partner) The Lowry (anchor partner) The University of Salford (anchor partner)

BBC Islington Mill Peel Media RHS Bridgewater Salford Community Leisure Walk the Plank

As we move from vision into action, the partnership will grow and change as we build plans for collaborative delivery from 2020 onwards. The Suprema Lex strategy heralds a vision for the future, a brave statement of intent. Delivery plans will follow the coming months, articulating the tools, actions and measures as we drive the Suprema Lex strategy into a shared reality.

In amongst both ‘creative clusters’ and ‘cultural districts,’ heritage is a golden thread woven in and across our diverse city. This includes and extends beyond the city’s diverse collection of heritage buildings and monuments to include Salford’s green and blue spaces. The National Lottery Heritage Fund has funded transformative change in our natural heritage. In 2014, the Bridgewater Canal was granted £5.5 million to revitalise its towpaths, parks, and natural environment, allowing Worsley Delph and the Barton towpath to reopen and has supported a wide range of creative and community events across the city. This project had a catalytic effect in securing RHS Bridgwater, the RHS’s fifth garden, in Salford. Built alongside the Bridgewater Canal in Worsley on the lost historic grounds at Worsley New Hall, RHS Bridgewater is the largest gardening project in Europe and this 154- acre site will open to the public in July 2020. Heritage, in both Salford’s built and natural environments, plays a vital role in the city’s cultural development, activating the intersections between Salford’s people and place and its past, present and future.

Heritage also creates new opportunities in developing cultural clusters and districts that respond the city’s natural topography when planning both development and regeneration. Salford’s MediaCityUK is part of both

THE CULTURAL

AND CREATIVE

INDUSTRIES

ECOSYSTEM

The sum is greater than the parts and each part makes a contribution to the whole.

Figure 1: Warwick Commission Report: the Cultural and Creative Industries Ecosystem

By thinking about creatives as ‘talent’, it starts to reveal that insider’s perspective. Vocalists might both gig professionally and teach singing lessons. Illustrators might both create artwork, work as commercial designers and collaborate on published books. Creatives can support function and fun, profit and protest, education and e-commerce. And some policymakers are starting to see the value in supporting the ‘ecosystem’ for better creative ambition, productivity and social impact.

a response to the city’s heritage and focus towards the future. Built on Salford Quays on the derelict Manchester Docks, MediaCityUK reimagines the role of a port in its digital, 21st century context: a place where ideas and content are imported and exported internationally. It took risk, ambition and partnership working between Salford City Council, Salford Urban Regeneration Company, Peel and the BBC as its anchor institution to co-create the concept of MediaCityUK. At the time of writing, it is now home to 8000 people working at 250 creative businesses: a creative and digital cluster key to Greater Manchester’s growth and prosperity.

In recent years, there has been a shift away from thinking about culture, creative and digital industries separately. The Warwick Commission was tasked to craft a blueprint for greater cultural and creative success in the UK, working towards a national plan for how culture and creativity can further enrich Britain. It looked at culture and creativity in a ‘distinct ecosystem’, one that feeds and depends on one another. It highlights that insufficient attention has been paid to the connectivity of talent, ideas and investment between the cultural and creative sectors and stated that this “flow needs to now be better identified and encouraged.”

Some of the areas of Salford are changing at a blistering pace, while others are on track for development and investment in the next five-to-ten years. It is easy to focus on the cranes, the shiny new buildings and focus on the city’s prosperity and promise. Both the promise and the prosperity are real.

But it is not enjoyed by Salford as a whole.

The 2019 Indices of Deprivation for England (IoD) revealed that the overall picture in Salford is persistently challenging. Salford is ranked as the 18th most deprived area in England, despite having made steady improvement over the previous fifteen years. These statistics take in a huge range of factors such as income, access to employment, health deprivation and disability, education and skills training, crime, barriers to housing and services. It is a broad snapshot and, while there are some areas of improvement, we have to accept some hard truths: some areas of the city will not receive any major investment for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, they are not benefiting from the investment into the city. The IoD map reveals in stark colour: some of the most challenged areas of the city, deepest blue on the map, sit adjacent to the city’s creative and cultural quarters. While our city’s creative clusters and cultural quarters are boosting growth in Salford, it is not inclusive.

Salford does not experience this dichotomy in a bubble. Manchester is ranked as the 5th most deprived area, with Rochdale (15th) and Oldham (19th) close to Salford’s position respectively. While the direct relationships between culture and deprivation are not always clear, there is are clear barriers in terms of access. The Greater Manchester cultural strategy takes this on with laudable honesty: “Whilst we are known around the world for our contribution to culture, we know that not all our residents have the opportunity to contribute to, participate in or access our rich culture and heritage offer.” Arts Council England’s 10-year strategy Let’s Create builds on similar hard truths, recognising the challenges of the “inequality of wealth and of opportunity, social isolation and mental health and, above all of these, the accelerating climate emergency”. They pledge that “understanding the role of culture in building and sustaining communities… will sit at the heart of our work over the decade to come”. As an anchor partner of Salford’s Culture and Place Partnership, we share Arts Council England’s vision and commitments.

The promise and prosperity in Salford is real, but so is the city’s widespread and stubborn unmet needs. If this strategy is to be a catalyst of change, it must embrace both aspects of the city’s future equally and unflinchingly.

ADDRESSING

UNMET NEEDS IN

SALFORD

Meta-themes

While sitting untidily outside the central pillars of the Suprema Lex strategy, there are themes that run through the city like currents in deep waters. These are big ideas that would inform all elements in the strategy as they move from strategy into action. We aim to make the city a ‘living lab’ to test big ideas, inform our thinking and sharpen our practices across culture, creativity and place. Starting ideas include:

PORTRAIT SNAPSHOTS:

THROUGHOUT THE STRATEGY, WE WANT TO TIP

YOU INTO THE EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE OF THIS

CITY, INDIVIDUALS WHO TOOK A BRAVE MOVE IN

THEIR LIVES AND SALFORD MET THEM HALFWAY,

RESULTING A MARKED CHANGE IN THEIR LIFE.

This is the beating heart of the Suprema Lex strategy: the central ethos and driver. In embracing ‘the welfare of the people is the highest law’ as our shared mantra in developing our culture, creativity, and place, we need clear work to embed this from day one. The strategy will dig into four more areas but action is needed to instigate this and do this well. We need to recognise and shout out for the great people-focused work in the city. We also need to listen more, strive for better and take ownership of the vision we are creating together. No one else will do it for us.

We are not starting from scratch. Social value and social impact hold close focus for Salford’s political leaders, creative institutions, social enterprises, strategies, and partnerships. The Salford Social Value Alliance brings together 69 public, private and third sector bodies around a mission to embed social, environmental and economic value into all aspects of business, service

delivery, commissioning, procurement and collaboration to obtain the greatest benefit for local citizens. The Lowry is developing innovative approaches to capturing, measuring and improving its social impact across its extensive offer of arts programming, events and outreach. Walk the Plank is celebrated as “a trailblazer for Outdoor Arts in the UK; combining a constantly inventive artistic vision with socially grounded practice” Both Salford City Council and the University of Salford have placed social value at the heart of their corporate strategies are co-embedding a social value strategy into the Salford Crescent development. Working with their shared private sector partner, which is considered essential for the successful delivery of the project. The Crescent is the largest development site in Greater Manchester and its social value strategy seeks to achieve outstanding social value outcomes during the development lifecycle of the Project, creating improved models and practices to share across and beyond the city.

The following Delivery Plan will look at the higher- level activity that would support Suprema Lex and its specific projects and work streams. They seek both connectivity across sectors in the city to strengthen our ‘people-at-the-centre’ approach, as well as looking at the cornerstones needed to build more specific work outlined in this strategy.

PEOPLE

AT