Capitalising on cultural capital investment in Dundee
Dundee faces an unprecedented opportunity to announce its identity on the national and global stage
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In late 2014, Dundee was successful in applying to UNESCO for ‘City of Design’ status — the first such designation in the UK and the smallest city included within the global network. The acknowledgement of the strength of design industries and design culture in the city, alongside the creation of the new V&A Museum of Design Dundee: “allows Dundee to communicate that it is a city making a new contribution to the UK”, according to V&A Dundee Director Philip Long. Having a major new cultural venue for the waterfront — part of the national cultural infrastructure — “helps Dundee build upon this position”. Addressing how Dundonians’ lives can benefit from design is an important question for V&A Dundee.
The strategic opportunity for Dundee is to connect efforts to remember and conserve its past with the efforts of civic leaders to shape its future around the theme of design. If successful, this will enable citizens with personal histories stretching back generations in Dundee to identify with the design theme and the associated investments, validating the authenticity of the city’s brand association with design.
Design is a boundless theme — which reflects an immense opportunity for people to interpret what it means to them. In parallel, there is a risk that the public are disillusioned with the scale of ambition.
As part of a global UNESCO network of 22 Creative Cities of Design, the strategy to capitalise on membership of this club involves learning from design practice globally, supporting design talent and the creative and commercial success of local designers, growing the economy through design-led business innovation, and championing high quality design.
The timing of the status, achieved during the construction phase of the city’s most prominent new piece of infrastructure lends credibility and momentum, but for many Dundonians the ability of design approaches to deliver a social and economic transformation may be unhelpfully conflated with the ability of the V&A to deliver this transformation.
With the building well under construction, V&A Dundee already has a vibrant programme of engagement promoting the understanding of design, inspiring creativity and developing skills for future innovation. This includes the photo-sharing project Living Room for the City, a national touring exhibition, Design in Motion, and the Schools Design Challenge pilot which encourages 11–12-year-olds at all local authority secondary schools in Dundee and Angus to use design to change their everyday environment.
As Tara Wainwright, Marketing & Audiences Manager at V&A Dundee told our Heritage Question Time audience: “Our tone of communication is important, it’s a conversation not a broadcast. It’s essential we go out to our audiences — we’re not expecting everyone to come to us.”
As one research participant put it, the key to engagement is “finding the special in the ordinary”. This echoes one of Dundee’s MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament), who remarked that Dundee culture reflected stories and struggles of tough experiences in industry — “the art of making the everyday beautiful.” Beyond the new museum, many groups in Dundee have for several years built approaches which connect Dundonians to the history of their city in powerful ways.
City of Design status raises the expectation for the cultural and creative sector — within which most people classify heritage as a component part. Its role will be seen not only to conserve the memory, and critique the processes, of social and economic change, but to lead a new and positive transformation. Dundee’s City of Design initiative articulates an aspiration to “promote social justice and inclusion”, “raise aspirations and create opportunities across all of our communities”, and “involve our communities in collaboratively designing services and solutions” thereby “using design to solve the social challenges faced by Dundee”. Setting the bar this high inevitably draws both scepticism and applause.
The heritage sector in Dundee will need to think laterally. A familiar dynamic will play out in other parts of the UK. Instead of lobbying for social innovation to direct energy to addressing traditional heritage concerns (like repurposing historic buildings), heritage organisations and active citizens will generate richer collaborations by demonstrating what heritage assets and heritage activities can offer to the social innovation at a city-wide scale. In Dundee, this means thinking not “what can City of Design do to benefit me” but “what can I do to benefit Dundee as a City of Design”.
