TALE: Find 100 Cultural Themes for City Curation
… and Local Curators
TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. TALE was launched as a new knowledge center for the Thematic Engagement project.
Thematic Engagement refers to the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction.
As a knowledge center, TALE considers the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction as its primary object.
Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical concept called “cultural themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life themes”.
The Thematic Engagement Project uses the “Themes of Practice” approach and the “Project Engagement” approach to connect “Life Themes” and “Cultural Themes”.
We also set a simple typology of themes:
- Knowledge Themes
- Cultural Themes
There are various concrete activities and projects under the abstract notion of Thematic Engagement. We will introduce some examples one by one.
Today we will focus on City Curation Activity.
The above diagram shows a theme network for the City Curation project. What’s the relationship between City Curation and others?
- City as Developmental Platform (Infoniche) refers to my 2021 book Platform for Development and the Infoniche framework.
- Local Curators (Creative Life) refers to my 2022 book Creative Life Curation and its framework.
I will use these two books and related frameworks to support this project.
City as Developmental Platform
In 2021, I wrote a book (draft) titled Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century and introduced a term called Developmental Platform.
What does the term “Developmental Platform” mean?
The concept of Developmental Platform is defined as an intermediate concept for connecting theory and practice for interdisciplinary developmental study.
As an interdisciplinary concept, the term Developmental Platform refers to a social environment that could strongly support adult development in various ways. There are three keywords in this definition:
- social environment
- strongly support
- adult development
The term “social environment” is a rough term. It can refer to traditional social structures such as organization and community. I also consider digital platforms and other emergent social contexts as social environments.
The term “strongly support” divides social environments into two groups from the perspective of strongness. Any social environment could support people, however, there are only a few social environments that could strongly support people. Thus, we can consider some strong social environments as platforms.
The term “adult development” is a solid term in developmental science. According to Wikipedia, “Adult development encompasses the changes that occur in biological and psychological domains of human life from the end of adolescence until the end of one’s life. These changes may be gradual or rapid and can reflect positive, negative, or no change from previous levels of functioning.” Thus, the Developmental Platform highlights the perspective of developmental science.
I also used an ecological approach to develop the Platform-for-Development framework, especially the Infoniche model. See the diagram below.
City is a special type of Developmental Platform for knowledge workers and cultural innovators. It connects to other types of Developmental platforms too.
Now we can explore the “Person — City” relationship with the Platform-foe-Development framework. You can find more details in City as Developmental Platform.
The City Curation project will focus on the “Curator — Theme — City” relationship. We will collect stories of local curation around the world.
Creative Life of Local Curators
In 2022, I developed the Creative Life Curation framework and wrote a book (draft).
In fact, Creative Life Curation is part of the series of “Aspects of Creative Life”.
The Creative Life Curation framework adopts Curativity Theory to study Life Curation and developed the following five units of analysis:
- Creative Actions
- Creative Projects
- Creative Journey
- Creative Landscape
- Creative Lifescope
The framework also highlights the following three types of “Curativity”:
- Curativity 1: Turning pieces of Projects into a Journey as a meaningful whole
- Curativity 2: Turning pieces of Projects into a Landscape as a meaningful whole
- Curativity 3: Turning pieces of Actions and Projects into a Lifescope as a meaningful whole
The City Curation project will focus on Creative Life of Local Curators. We will start with creative projects and move to other units of analysis.
An Example of Cultural Themes: Tree Care
New York City’s Online Tree Map is a great example of City Curation. Launched in 2016, the Tree Map has been expanded to include 150,000 park trees and total of 865,026 individual trees.
This is a large City Curation project. In the 2016–2018 Park Tree Inventory, many teams of Parks staff and volunteers participated in the program and collect data about precise location, size, condition, and species of non-forest trees growing in NYC’s landscaped parks.
The website not only displays data about all the trees individually managed by NYC Parks in New York City in an interactive map, but also offers information about Tree Care Activities. The website hosts a list of Tree Gare Groups and their newest activities.
On the website, we can find a Tree Care Group called Red Hook Conservancy which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that services the residents of Red Hook, Brooklyn and neighboring communities, as well as the Red Hook Recreation Center.
The website shows each tree care group’ homepage on the web. By clicking the link, we can find Red Hook Conservancy’s online group on Facebook.
Then we can find a Local Curator from a post. According to Red Hook Conservancy, “A professional marketer and Team Leader with New York Cares, Dan manages our marketing and volunteer coordination.”
Dan Quitério has 15+ years of professional marketing experience, he manages marketing and communications efforts for Red Hook Conservancy. He also coordinates volunteers for Red Hook Conservancy’s various service projects.
This is an example of exploring the “Curator — Theme — City” relationship from a City Curation project.
- City Curation Project: New York City’s Online Tree Map
- City: New York City
- Theme: Tree Care
- Local Curator: Dan Quitério
Tree Care is a typical case of cultural themes. As an abstract thing of social life, cultural themes offer us a special perspective to see the connection between local and global, citizen and city, past and future, etc.
Help me find 100 Cultural Themes and City Curation Projects
TALE aims to build a list of 100 Cultural Themes about city innovation.
If you are working on some city curation projects, you are welcome to connect!
If you find interesting cultural themes and city curation projects, you can leave a comment or DM me on Linkedin.
Related Articles
- TALE: A New Knowledge Center
- The Thematic Engagement Toolkit (v1.0)
- Why did I coin the new term “Thematic Engagement”?
- TALE: Find 100 Thematic Curation Projects
- TALE: Find 100 People’s Life Stories and Creative Themes
- TALE: Find 100 Novel Themes and their Communities
- TALE: Start Your Journey of Knowledge Engagement with A Possible Theme
- TALE: How to Develop a Possible Knowledge Theme? A Simple Answer
- TALE: How to Set Annual Themes for 2023?
- TALE: Start A Thematic Conversation
- TALE: The Challenge of Thematic Conversation
- Themes of Practice (2019–2021)
- Discover Pairs of Opposite Themes of career experience and beyond
- The Career Theme Canvas
- Project Engagement (v2.1) as an Innovation Approach
- CALL: How to Grow A Knowledge Enterprise
- Platform Genidentity: The Movements of Unfolding Uniqueness
