Impact And Legacies Of Creative Clustering: The New Culture And Education District, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

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The development of a new Culture and Education District (CED) within Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEO Park) offers a unique opportunity to fully capture and understand the value and legacies of a major culture-led regeneration initiative, as they unfold. Building on the learning accumulated over the last four decades in cities around the world, and counting on a wealth of relevant UK-based case studies to benchmark against, we have the ideal conditions to set up an unprecedented study into the multiple effects of a large-scale urban intervention. This paper proposes four priority lines of enquiry (see Fig.1) as part of a scoping study that will bring together existing knowledge and data in order to set the foundations towards a larger scale research programme. This scoping study will make recommendations and propose lines of enquiry that should form part of a longitudinal study (ideally, five to ten years on) into the medium to long term impact of creative clustering. As argued extensively by Garcia (2004, 2010, 2016) understanding the multiple impacts of regeneration requires a long term view: cities like Glasgow post 1990, Barcelona post 1992 or Liverpool post 2008 offer clear examples of how some of the most remarkable (and sustainable) benefits of culture-led regeneration occur five to ten years on and come in a diversity of forms. The 'successes' we now associate with these cities could not have been appropriately captured via short term 'one year-on' evaluation exercises. Further, the reasons for these 'successes' and their sustainability have never been fully explained. This is largely due to the fact that we lack information about each of these cities' points of departure. This is study is the first of its kind to document the impact and legacies of creative clustering from the outset, thus bringing a unique opportunity to capture impacts 'in the making'. This proposal assumes CED stakeholders are proceeding with a baseline study to document their activities and populate key benchmark indicators. The value of the study is to provide additional lines of enquiry to capture the more complex dimensions of impact and document the development of medium to long term legacies as they happen. It is timely for the AHRC to lead the way funding such work, given the growing acceptance that the arts and humanities provide much needed complementary tools to capture - and explain - the full range of benefits and challenges surrounding accelerated urban change. As such, this proposal combines established social science methodologies with an arts and humanities methodological lens. Following on the model developed by Dr Beatriz Garcia within Impacts 08 (European Capital of Culture Research Programme, 2010) and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad evaluation (2013), the four proposed areas of enquiry and associated methodologies do interrelate. The chosen research leads will thus coordinate methodologies, data gathering and analysis of findings to ensure a holistic approach to final reporting. The final report will draw together all findings, identify synergies and produce a set of joint recommendations to inform AHRC as well as, potentially, other funders' priorities.