Developing a Sense of Place: The Role of the Arts in Regenerating Communities

Cultural planners, artists, and policy makers must work through the arts to create communities—and a place within them. Developing a Sense of Place brings together a series of case studies and success stories drawn from a different geographical or sociocultural contexts. Selected for their lasting effect in their local community, the case studies explore new models for opening up the relationship between universities and their surrounding regions, explicitly connecting creative, critical, and theoretical approaches to civic development. The studies cover various regions in the UK, and also areas in Brazil, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.   Developing a Sense of Place offers a range of viewpoints, including those of the arts strategist, the academic, the practice-researcher, and the artist. Through its innovative models, from performing arts to architectural design, the book serves diverse interests, such as the arts and cultural policy managers, master planners, and arts workers, as well as students of human geography, cultural planning, business and the creative industries, and arts administration, at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.  

Table of Contents:
"List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors Foreword by Hedley Roberts Acknowledgements Introduction: Sensing place, a moment to reflect Tamara Ashley and Alexis Weedon Section 1: Case studies of place-making 1. Eastern Angles: A sense of place on stage Ivan Cutting 2. Lesson drawing and community engagement: The experience of Take A Part in Plymouth Kim Wide and Rory Shand 3. Raising the Barr Sanna Wicks 4. Interview with E17 Art Trail directors Laura Kerry and Morag McGuire Alexis Weedon Section 2: Models and methods for developing place-making through the arts 5. A model for university–town partnership in the arts: TestBeds Emma-Rose Payne and Alexis Weedon 6. The Beam archive, Wakefield Kerry Harker 7. This Is Not My House: Notes on film-making, photography and my father David Jackson 8. Notions of place in relation to freelance arts careers: A study into the work of independent dancers Rachel Farrer and Imogen Aujla Section 3: Multidisciplinary approaches to place and contested identities 9. Performing places: Carnival, culture and the performance of contested national identities Jonathan Croose 10. A sense of place: From experience to language, from the Polish traveller through a Spanish saint to an adaptation of a Zimbabwean play Agnieszka Piotrowska 11. The EU migrant: Britain’s sense of place in English newspaper journalism Paul Rowinski 12. Rethinking the photographic studio as a politicised space Caroline Molloy 13. Creative routine and dichotomies of space Philip Mile 14. Doing things differently: Contested identity across Manchester’s arts culture quarters Peter Atkinson 15. First, second and third: Exploring Soja’s Thirdspace theory in relation to everyday arts and culture for young people Steph Meskell-Brocken 16. A sense of play: (Re)animating place through recreational distance running Kieran Holland 17. Shiftless Shuffle from Luton: An interview with Perry Louis Jane Carr Afterword by Tamara Ashley and Alexis Weedon Index "

About the Author :
Dr Tamara Ashley leads the MA Dance Performance and Choreography programme at the University of Bedfordshire. She has published Mapping Lineage Artist Book (2018), lineage maps of practice by dance improvisation artists, ‘Scores for Eco-Sensitive Dancing’ in The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2017) and edited a special issue of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices on Interactivity and Embodiment, 8(1) 2016. Alexis Weedon is UNESCO Chair and Professor of Publishing at the University of Bedfordshire. Her publications include Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market (2008); with V.L. Barnett, Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman (2014) and History of the Book in the West (2010).

Review :
'The reader can leisurely dip into a number of case studies. A wide range of invested experts, artists and local people ... makes this both insightful and engaging.' Journal of Urban Design