Participatory Culture and Cultural Democracy in Dudley
The culture of a society or community is its art, music, dance, skills, traditions, virtues, humour, conventions, celebrations and conversations. These give structure and shape to community — they are the foundational strands around which its texture is wound. Culture keeps social capital alive and holds it upright.
~ David Fleming (2016), Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy
This summer marks 10 years of experimentation, learning and design through this thing I called CoLab Dudley. As this this milestone has approached I’ve found myself increasingly reflecting with a long view. I’ve also found it illuminating to use work and thinking developed in the last few years (our own and that of people who inspire and challenge us) to see and make sense of CoLab Dudley’s journey from some perspectives and understandings that I didn’t have while in the middle of trying things out.
In this lab note I look back at CoLab Dudley work with a growing appreciation that through this work over 10+ years, we’ve supported hundreds of local people to design and co-produce experiments in cultural democracy in neighbourhoods and High Streets across the borough.
I begin by making visible some of the threads between work that inspired me 10 years ago and the intentions I generated in response to the context I found myself in. I follow a weave through our work, tracing activity through time to where we find the work now; being stewarded by a truly incredible network of creatives, doers and dreamers (in part due to CoLab Dudley as infrastructure for convening and collective learning).
Early influences: creative collaborative approaches at the community scale
I initiated CoLab Dudley in response to a desire “to share and collaborate among people who care and want to use their imagination and creativity to help organisations and communities adapt to new challenges.” (Introducing Dudley Borough CoLab: An idea in draft, for consideration, Lorna Prescott, February 2014).
(Note: at that time I lacked a critical analysis around colonisation, and I was ignorant of the white privilege cushioning me from the frustration that, for example, the founders of MAIA experienced; “that the people with the ideas, passion, commitment, love and ideas for their places are usually the ones most disconnected from resources to make change happen there”. )
Back in 2014 there were three significant influences on my thinking around what CoLab Dudley might be and do, all of which I became aware of thanks to awesome online network weaving and in person convening by a wide collective of wonderful and generous people.
Social Spaces experiments, thinking and storycatching
I was inspired by the work of Social Spaces, such as the Community Lover’s Guide, and collaboration with its founders, TessyBritton and Laura Billings, alongside residents of Dudley through Civic Systems Lab. This work was about nurturing participatory culture, which Tessy initially described as a creative collaborative participtory paradigm to distinguish it from other forms of participation in society which are more familiar to us.
Inspiration from and analysis of an emerging civic economy
Early CoLab Dudley thinking was also shaped by surfacing and analysis of emerging collaborative approaches and initiatives in the civic economy, outlined by Indy Johar, Joost Beunderman and colleagues at 00:/ in the Compendium for the Civic Economy.
Against the context of rapid economic, social and environmental change, a collective reflection is taking place on how to build more sustainable routes to shared prosperity. In the meantime, an increasing number and wide range of change-makers are already finding ways to imagine and grow a different economy in our cities, towns, neighbourhoods and villages. This book presents 25 case studies of this civic economy — rooted in age-old traditions of the associational economy but using new organising tactics, ways of connecting with people and approaches to collaborative investment.
The intersection of the above work by Social Spaces and 00:/ (initiated independently to each other) offered an abundance of hope and people to connect with and learn from in relation to additional, futures-focused ways of organising in our communities. A potential to create and move in new ways outside of state imposed agendas and programmes. The possibility of reimagining governance so that the passion, creativity and myriad of capabilities of local people wasn’t drained through demands that committees, constitutions and elections be required for any kind of everyday, communal neighbourly activity. An opportunity to put care for people, planet and a just economy, right in the heart of the design of activities.
Impact Hub Birmingham
CoLab Dudley’s development was also heavily influenced by my involvement in the Impact Hub Birmingham Maker Team in 2014 and the incredible community which grew from this between 2015 and 2019. I learned so much about convening, working with creatives, and having the courage to talk about really hard stuff, thanks to the patient and deeply caring souls that made open invitations to the most astonishing array of events, conversations, experiments and exhibitions.
Note: Civic Square has since emerged from Impact Hub Birmingham, and CoLab Dudley and Civic Square team and network members continue to exchange learning in a myriad of ways; informally, through networks we are all part of, and sometimes through intentionally structured learning exchanges.
A retrospective realisation that this work has always been about cultural democracy
CoLab Dudley’s work on Dudley High Street during 2017 and 2018 and preceding experimentation with residents of the Wrens Nest neighbourhood in Dudley (Open Hub Wrens Nest, 2013–2015) were partly driven by a question which Tessy asked back in 2012:
How can we build sufficient density of this type of participation to fight intolerance and oppression while boosting our social, economic and environmental resilience?
Having formed the first resourced CoLab Dudley team in late 2016, we focused our work at the scale of the High Street: a location determined through learning from earlier experimentation and challenges arising in attempts to locate the work in community centres. Over 6 months in 2017 we collected data on the involvement of 454 people in participatory culture projects that we co-designed with local people in spaces on Dudley High Street. We gathered insights through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, developmental evaluation sessions and reflections.
Through our open to all collective doing, making and sharing together we have also witnessed an aspiration for and emergence of an alternative spatial imaginary for the High Street.
There is a growing articulation to collectively redesign Dudley High Street. This future spatial imaginary is rooted in a desire for social justice, collective agency and a reanimated sense of place and belonging. It is underpinned by the everyday creative power and talents of local people. This reimagining is mindful of the town’s history, but also seeks to re-weave a more regenerative connection with nature into that story…
~ Jo Orchard-Webb, Re-imagining Dudley High Street, CoLab Dudley Lab Notes, July 2029
We used our learning, insights, stories, provocations and cultural portraits from a year of ethnographic research to underpin a proposal for Reaching Communities funding from the National Lottery Community Fund for further work on Emergent Cultures. Our proposal focused on nurturing a local culture of (creative collaborative) participation, a culture of learning, a culture of belonging and a culture of flourishing.
We also took care to highlight our relationships with Fellow Travellers, pioneers in emergent participatory cultures who we learn with and from. We have intertwined histories with some that CoLab Dudley team members have also been part of, including Impact Hub Birmingham (now Civic Square), Grapevine Coventry and Wolverhampton for Everyone. Being part of a wider ecosystem of practitioners in this and proximate fields is critical to our work and never taken for granted.
Through 2017 and 2018 we were primarily working alongside local people happy to describe themselves as doers or makers, and also as learners or detectorists (our word for curious people contributing to collective learning). Each of them was involved in one or more of the creative, collaborative projects that CoLab Dudley partners and team members supported in a range of ways as a participatory platform. Various CoLab Dudley team members played key connecting roles across the projects and network of doers. A team mapping activity at the end of 2018 revealed clearly the stage of network development we were at, as I outlined in this early Lab Note about Network Vital Signs:
We were keen to grow a network of catalysts beyond the CoLab Dudley team, ideally local people with a variety of skills and talents, and a shared passion for nurturing a participatory culture. We began hosting a series of informal dinners bringing together local doers and makers with people who identified as creatives and designers, as well as other collaborators; encouragers and supporters. The aim of the gatherings was to nurture relationships, elevate ideas and make practical plans to bring Dudley High Street alive with the creative capabilities of local people. In 2019 and into 2020 we framed this around a very open convening call to collaborate on actions to nurture a more creative, kinder and connected High Street.
In 2019, as we were developing relationships with creatives across Dudley Borough (thanks primarily to network weaving by Kerry O'Coy), Creative People and Places funding was awarded to Dudley by Arts Council England for the first time. This enabled members of the Creative Black Country team to come into closer relationship with our work and we soon began collaborating.
Some time around then, or perhaps a little later, as we initiated some conversations around cultural strategy, I started to hear the term cultural democracy popping up. I’ll be honest, for quite some time I struggled with what on earth it means, repeatedly looking up definitions of it because it didn’t really stick. I couldn’t connect the descriptions of it to anything that felt tangible to me. It felt like a concept that belonged to people from the world of arts and culture, not something from design or community work, which my work has grown through. However I’ve since come to understand that most of the work I’ve been doing in developing CoLab Dudley and creating participatory platforms has been about creating conditions for and supporting acts of cultural democracy. (One of the joys of being a team member in a social lab is learning new language and understandings from different fields of practice.)
In our work on Dudley Creates, we describe cultural democracy as being about everyone deciding what counts as culture, where it happens, who makes it, and who experiences it. We’ve borrowed this from 64 Million Artists. The table below shows shifts which arts and cultural organisations can make to work towards cultural democracy. This table is suprisingly similar in content to other tables I’ve come across detailing shifts from being a service to being a platform.
Cultural democracy x Time Rebels
By Autumn 2020, inspired by Civic Square’s Department of Dreams Re_ Festival, Moral Imaginations early work and Rob Hopkins’ From What Is to What If, our lab team began seeking collaborators to experiment for a year with ways to nurture imagination and long-term thinking among people in Dudley. We were keen to convene a collective of creatives who would do this with the mindset of time rebels; people dedicated to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking (Roman Krznaric).
Following this year long enquiry our collective learning was shared and highlights insights which emerged when efforts to nurture cultural democracy are combined with a focus on collective imagination and long-term thinking. For example:
- The whole Time Rebel experiment framing draws our attention to an intergenerational justice approach to our entanglement with the rest of our species (past, present, future) and the rest of the more-than-human world. In fact it was a striking observation that nearly every Time Rebel experiment created moments to discover or dream of more nature on Dudley High Street.
- In Do Fest 2019 a provocation emerged from the learning we labelled ‘beauty is a human right’. This was concerned with questions around ‘who’ has access to creative cultural production and consumption on this High Street with very few existing creative civic spaces or experiences. The creation of Dudley street art in 2019 — that continues to be cared for by local folk — shone a light on this critical social justice issue in our High Streets that informs feelings and perceptions of individual and collective worth and belonging. In 2021 that focus upon democratizing access to and production of culture has especially manifest in two Time Rebel experiments focusing upon community self archiving — Dudley People’s Archive and AfroHistories Dudley. Once again this is a manifestation of correcting the imbalance of access to and co-creation of cultural value as well as care for cultural knowledge and artifacts. This has ramifications for a community sense of belonging and being seen. Care for and creative interaction with these memories and traditions through oral histories, archiving, collage, creative tapestries and counter-mapping via Time Rebel experiments captures and cherishes forgotten or erased cultural heritage and makes them available for all. It provokes deeper conversations about space, identity and our elders. We know that our memories and the traditions that flow through them are critical to our capacity to imagine ourselves in alternative futures.
- In 2021 the Time Rebels took the out of place theme in a range of directions as the High street became an artists canvas, a place of enquiry, of story-telling, poetry writing, playing games and much more besides. As we noted in 2019, disrupting usual High Street norms creates breathing space for other perspectives and ideas about the High Street to seed. These experiments have used what Rob Shorter’s Imagination Sundial refers to as “practices that connect us and change our frame of possibility”. These practices create space for participants to explore deeper cultural notions of nature, self, and time.
The above are drawn from this lab note by Jo Orchard-Webb:
In Autumn 2021 we evolved this work through a second year long enquiry with a growing collective of Time Rebels, exploring culture. We shared an intent to create cultural ripples, waves and swells across Dudley borough, rooted in creativity, imagination and long-term thinking. This was intentionally intertwined with work we were embarking on with Creative Black Country around cultural strategy development and cultural programming, which has led to the crafting of Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action for Dudley borough. Cultural democracy emerged as a key thread in the strategy:
Through a four month process of desk research, mapping and engaged research with local creatives in 2021 we captured a portrait of cultural activity in Dudley. Our analysis of the local and macro cultural landscape told us a story about existing and potential cultural activity and cultural assets. It highlighted evidence of enablers and barriers to cultural democracy, and the need to nurture cultural capabilities across the borough. This is the soil from which Dudley Creates grows. A pre-existing cultural context which we understand, respect and are mindful about. It requires us to pay attention to the relationship between cultural democracy, cultural capabilities and cultural action for the co-created futures we seek.
The existing local picture is one of uneven access to a creative life and imagining in the borough. This results in a limitation upon the types of futures that can be imagined and then manifest here. There is also huge cultural potential if the cultural democracy deficit is reversed and regenerative cultures were nurtured instead. We start from an understanding of the ability of culture and the arts to make the impossible seem possible.
Our ongoing work with Dudley’s Time Rebels, now both guided by and informing the evolution of Dudley Creates, positions the cultivation of cultural democracy firmly in CoLab Dudley’s work. For us, it is intentionally entangled with accompanying intentions to take a network approach, nurture a local cultural ecosystem, and focus on collective imagination and long-term thinking. All of which we see as critical in the face of the crises we are in.
We start from an understanding of the ability of culture and the arts to make the impossible seem possible. This is central to our collective ability to dream and take action towards futures in which local people, places and cultures express their unique contributions to the health and vitality of our communities and the flourishing of all life, for all time…
Our cultures and the climate emergency are interdependent. This story is premised upon the understanding that cultures are not static, they can change rapidly, and they co-evolve. This evolution is of course largely determined by who has the substantive freedom to take part and shape local cultures and create cultural value. This freedom, also known as cultural capabilities, is in part a function of the extent of cultural democracy in a place.
~ words by Jo Orchard-Webb, shared in Making The Case: The evidence, key ideas and intentions stimulating Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action for Dudley Borough.
Importantly, this work in Dudley is now being led by a collective of local creatives and doers — as shared recently by Jo Orchard-Webb in this lab note about the third year of Time Rebel collaborations:
As we dig into cultural strategy in action, we are deeply grateful to be travelling in relationship with (and located only a few miles away from) the fiercely talented team and constellations of artists convened by MAIA. They are a brightly shining star which guides our thinking and offers courage to our approach to cultural strategy. I highly recommend ALL of their Medium posts, and here call attention to one on Culture as Strategy in Apocalyptic Times:
This all feels a pretty significant amount of learning and ground covered over 10 years of experimentation around participatory culture / cultural democracy in Dudley. I’d love to hear if any of it resonates for you, or if you have suggestions for what we should be looking towards for nourishment, encouragement or challenge.
If Cultural Democracy has an ideal, it is not some distant heaven towards which we are guided by a priesthood, but the quality of what we are doing, sharing, living now. It is about making sense of where we are, through creative and artistic interaction with others. It’s about working out for ourselves what we think is good and why, always remembering that others think differently for equally valid reasons.
~ Francois Matarasso, quoted in Cultural Democracy in Practice by 64 Million Artists with Arts Council England (Sept 2018).
