Five Ways to Grow the Arts and Culture in Surrey
An event recap and look forward at the new partnership between the City of Surrey and the Surrey Board of Trade
It’s often easy to forget that show business is just that: show business. For a real, vibrant arts and culture industry, economic sustainability — the ability to make art that generates enough revenue to make more art that generates more revenue, etc. — is key.
Surrey’s an interesting place. With just over 502,000 people and around 1000 more every month, our six city centres are expected to be home to 1 in 5 residents of Metro Vancouver by 2041. We have people, over 70,000 students in our public school system, two universities, a large number of new and established immigrants (with strong ties to globally expanding markets right accross the bigger pond), we have over 15,000 businesses, and we have a lot of talented artists and other creatives at all stages of their careers.
In short, we have a lot of potential.
The human resources and markets are largely present in the city, but a place that’s so spread out and generally suburban has a few issues when it comes to organic connections forming between artists, businesses, and the rest of the public. Thankfully, our incredibly proactive and progressive city council and board of trade, neither of whom has paid me to say things like that (yet)have partnered to run a series of events designed to support growth and innovation in Surrey’s Arts & Culture industry. This morning was the first. And it was great.
Facilitated by Surrey Councillor Judy Villeneuve, the panelists this morning all enthusiastically supported the idea of Surrey further establishing and growing its arts and culture industry in their own ways.
The panelists were:
- Dr. Alan Davies, President of Kwantlen Polytechnic University
- Howard Jang, Executive director of the Arts Club Theatre Company
- Jordan Strom, Surrey Art Gallery’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections
- Rowland Lorimer, Director of Publishing Programs, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at SFU
- Dr. Catherine Murray, Professor at SFU
You and I both wish I remembered to bring a pen and paper to note down some key quotes. I didn’t. That said, there were some key commonalities between what the panelists said in their 10 minute talks, as different as they all were as individuals. Here are some of those commonalities.
1. Creative industries can have a sizeable, tangible economic impact on communities and cities.
Not only did 83% of residents in the South Granville neighbourhood around Vancouver’s Stanley Theatre report that they are patrons of the theatre themselves, businesses around the theatre reported a 100%+ increase in sales in the first few years of the theatre’s re-opening in 1998.
86,000 British Columbians work full time in the narrowly-defined arts and culture industry. It’s 4% of our provincial GDP.
Arts grants are not really grants or donations, they are infrastructural investments in the present and future of a city.
2. People are leaving.
They’re leaving Surrey to go places where there are things to do in the evening, where arts are accessible, and where you don’t always have to take a car to get there. Though, as the Surrey Art Gallery’s Jordan Strom pointed out, LA has a fantastic arts community and terrible public transit. This isn’t an endorsement of car culture, but rather an encouraging reminder that we shouldn’t let the lack of an LRT down King George stop us from developing the arts. In fact, developing the arts may be a key factor in getting an LRT or future developments. For real though, side note: can we get that LRT? Streetcars are so cool. And electric. Electric!
Artists are also getting priced out of Vancouver and heading east to Toronto or south to the US. Why not Surrey? Rhetorical question, but you see what we’re getting at here. There are opportunities for attracting talent to the city.
Surrey’s a great city to grow up in, and a great city to raise kids in. But what about in between? There’s a dead space there where a ton of people pack up and leave. And once they’ve settled in another city, it’s hard to get people to move back home.
3. Arts and Culture are Growing
It’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, it’s hardly any doom and gloom at all: the arts and culture sector is growing big time in Surrey and even though we started late, our growth in the sector is outpacing the growth of a lot of places. Plus, the municipal government clearly cares. And we’ve got a great public school system complemented by two world class universities— Kwantlen in the most densely populated city centre, Newton, and SFU right in the new city centre.
4. More! I really didn’t have a pen. But you might have, what were some other things that were brought up?
Ok. Panel. Cool. Well done. Let’s all clap. Fun! Now what? Some ideas that people brought up, some takeaways, and some potential next steps:
- More events like this! The city and board of trade seem to be on the ball with this. Smaller, more specific industry and/or issue focused sessions would be great too, though I don’t expect the city and board of trade to be responsible for all that themselves. How could we do smaller versions of this on our own, as citizens, artists, and entrepreneurs? And are there ways the city/board of trade can help with resources (space, promotion, etc.) to make these things happen?
- A business incubator for creative companies. Digital media/physical art/whatever— it’s possible to make enough money to make these things sustainable, but it’s hard to get started. How can we have space — anything from some desks and wifi to a little funding — to get these things kickstarted and help us on our way to economic sustainability?
- Design Surrey.Trevor Boddy of TownShift is already working on this, including a book on 10 years of building Surrey. The man knows design, and can use all the support he can get in terms of building design awareness and capacity in a city that already has a world-class design university or two. This is a real project that’s really close and really possible. We can have some very cool, tangible progress by December.
- Direct connections between arts, culture, and businesses in Surrey. This event was good, there were businesses and artists, but there wasn’t a lot of connection. This is something I think we can and will do more work around in the months to come, but we need to be very intentional about it. There is a ton of sponsorship/product placement/cross-promotional tie-in potential, and with so many independent artists and independent businesses, the ingredients are here for industrial-strength bonds between arts and business. Let’s build on that.
- What do you think? There were a lot of ideas, and pen-less me couldn’t write any down. There’s good stuff I’m forgetting!
We’re still in the early stages here. Arts and Culture, if I understood Dr. Murray correctly, are around 0.25% of Surrey’s industry, financially speaking. But her ambition was inspiring, and it is totally possible to reach 5%. Or to at the very least strive for it.
At the moment, the city of Surrey is a lot of houses and a lot of businesses that build houses. But by forming stronger ties between those businesses, businesses in other industries, and artists that can bring meaning and reflection and a sense of identity and purpose to the daily goings-on that are going on every day here, we can, as a group, move to a place where we aren’t using money to create culture, we’re creating culture that generates money.
The more we develop that, the more people can be artists and entrepreneurs and still be able to afford to raise a family, the closer we come to being not just an urban hub south of the Fraser, but a shining example of a modern city for other urbanizing suburbs to follow.
kashif@dunya.ca
shyam@dunya.ca if you want to talk to Shyam! Which you should. He cool.
