Last May we were at the GCDN, the Global Cultural District Networkan annual international event dedicated to cultural districts, and more generally to the understanding of public space as a vector for social ties and collective cultural experimentation.
As its Chairman is keen to point out in his welcoming remarks, the GCDN is first and foremost a community, a place for exchanging ideas, sharing experiences and networking. The event has no commercial vocation, and participants are invited to express themselves as freely as they wish. Chatham House ruleThe Chatham House rule states that anyone attending a meeting is free to use information from the discussion, but not to reveal what anyone else has said.
The GCDN team works closely with those of AEA Consulting, a leading agency specializing in strategic planning for the creative and cultural industries sector (1,200 assignments carried out in 42 countries since 1991), which was behind the creation of the association that promotes “the improvement of the quality of urban life through the contribution of the arts, culture and creative industries”.
Co-organized by its host, the Cultural Center of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in Athens, this tenth edition wisely chose the Agora as its theme. The Agora was the focal point of the Greek population in the second century BC. The seat of the people’s assembly, but also a public square and the administrative, religious and commercial center of the city, the Agora perfectly illustrates the intention that seems to have become widespread in the approach of both private and public operators: to create accessible, open spaces for social interaction and inclusion – in a word, squares and cultural districts designed (and above all perceived by users) as modern Agoras.
A wide variety of cultural neighborhoods, and an emerging trend: taking care of your audience.
This trend is all the more interesting given that the GCDN brings together initiatives of extremely varied scale and location (from Expo 2020 Dubai – 438ha, 24M visitors – to a citizens’ initiative in the heart of Copenhagen, via Little Caribbean in Brooklyn), from so-called top-down initiatives – i.e. cultural districts developed as part of ambitious master plans within international metropolises – to bottom-up projects, which develop organically from local and citizens’ initiatives.
A sign of shared concerns, approaches and experiments centered on user involvement, interaction, alternative practices, the quest for inclusion and sometimes the affirmation of cultural identity have been progressing in protean fashion for several years in many countries. The covid experience has contributed considerably to accelerating and spreading this trend.
Placing the individual and his or her place within a meaningful social body at the heart of the program, and possibly providing levers for emancipation through artistic practice, for example, now appear to be a shared response to the crises and aggressions that have weakened the social bond, first and foremost the covid pandemic, the stigma of which is still present in our relationship with the public. But also the climate and environmental crises, geopolitical tensions and the return of wars to the West – which generate anxiety and withdrawal movements – the growing polarization within societies, the need for affirmation and recognition of marginalized or invisibilized communities, and the need for clarification of history and truth.
The positive effects of the arts, culture and artistic practices on health are now recognized and documented: “the results of more than 3,000 studies have highlighted the major role of the arts in the prevention of health problems, the promotion of health and the management and treatment of illness throughout life” [source:WHO website – Health Evidence Network synthesis report 67]. This theme was explored at the GCDN 2023.
We can’t help but notice how these concerns resonate with 3 contemporary currents of thought, in France at least. Firstly, the notion of “care”, as developed by psychoanalyst and philosopher Cynthia Fleury, which she posits as “(…) an attempt to heal the world’s neglect, to place at the heart of care, health, and more generally, in our relations with others, the requirement to make vulnerability capable and to carry everyone’s existence as its own stake (emphasis added), in all of life’s circumstances.”[Care is a Humanism – 2019]. The idea of care thus seems to be freeing itself from its health context to extend to relationships with others, to interrelationships, and by extension to relationships with the public.
The second is the notion of “habitability”, a term that can be defined as “all the conditions for inhabiting a place (accessibility, conviviality, citizenship, proxemics), both material and ideal. The term refers to an idea of inhabitation that is broader than the fact of residing. The habitability of a place is linked to the existence of sufficient possibilities for creation and adaptation, enabling individuals to make it their own. Habitability approaches study the way in which the social is constructed in a living territory.” [source: Géoconfluences website]
Sociologist, co-founder of the Eranos company and teacher Michaël Dandrieux considers the question of the world’s habitability to be inescapable today, and dedicates his seminars at Sciences Po Paris (School of Management and Innovation) to it.
It’s hardly surprising that Cynthia Fleury and Michaël Dandrieux were invited to take part in a corporate seminar on “How can design re-enchant the making of the city?”, during which they proposed the idea of an “architecture of care”.
Finally, the prospect of a systemic vision of the living world, in which it becomes fundamental to take care of the environment in order to ensure the habitability of our planet “by us and by the millions of living forms on which we depend” (M. Dandrieux), seems to be gaining ground in public, private and citizen initiative projects alike.
We find these concerns, in one form or another, in almost all the GCDN 2024 roundtables, like a common thread. For example, cultural districts are presented as dynamic centers that develop a sense of community, promote culture, creativity and innovation, and inspire the making of the city. They are based on sharing and interconnections, diversity and education, thus developing social ties, individual empowerment and a sense of community, and mirroring the vitality of territories.
And the question is: “How do we go about it?” in a constantly changing world, where the acceleration of techniques, uses and crises seems unstoppable. This is the purpose of GCDN 2024: to debate, draw inspiration from innovative projects and share experiences through case studies.
The example of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens: priority to the local population.
The event’s host site, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC), is a case in point.
Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the site includes the Greek National Opera, the National Library of Greece, the Cultural Center and the 21-hectare Stavros Niarchos Park, one of the city’s largest green spaces and the largest Mediterranean park in the world. The guiding principle of the project is to create a truly open public space, where everyone can participate freely in a multitude of cultural, educational, sporting, environmental and recreational activities and events.
The SNFCC was entirely financed by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which handed it over to the Greek state in 2017 once the work had been completed. A non-profit organization declared to be of public utility, SNFCC S.A. is responsible for operating, maintaining and managing the Foundation’s Cultural Center and the Stavros Niarchos Park, while developing and organizing its own activities. It is supervised by the Greek Ministry of Finance. The governance of the SNFCC is based on a particularly dynamic collaboration between the public and private sectors, designed to meet the expectations of the investors and organizations involved. It is a model that can be replicated, and will inspire new organizations.
In terms of its urban insertion, the project’s primary aim was to restore the natural and conceptual link between land and sea (cut off by major traffic routes). Renzo Piano summed up the approach in a topographical concept: “lift” a piece of land to design a sloping park, at the top of which the building stands, thus restoring the lost view of the sea and the Acropolis. This reconnection was also materialized by the installation of a footbridge dedicated to soft mobility and completed by the creation of a 400-metre-long by 30-metre-wide canal, to integrate the physical presence of water into the site.
In terms of environmental sustainability, the project is exemplary in every respect. It is the first cultural site of its scale to obtain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification in Europe, a guarantee of excellence in 6 key areas concerning building design and construction, energy and water management, air and materials quality, sustainable resource use and landscaping.
From a societal point of view, the 2004 Athens Olympic Games marked a real turning point, transforming Greek society and revealing a glaring lack of public squares where community life could be organized. These squares became a social issue, a common aspiration, and still are today, given the densification of the population and the scarcity of available physical space. This is why projects to create public squares are often the occasion for collaboration between the state, districts, local authorities and citizens, the latter generally being invited upstream to participate in the programmatic definition of the spaces.
In the case of the SNFCC, workshops were organized in advance to gather the expectations of the various audiences. Among the requests expressed, the need for safety – or rather a feeling of safety – came to the fore, alongside the notions of welcoming and respecting the public, as well as those of accessibility and inclusion of remote audiences.
The subsidies received by the Center enable it to offer a wide variety of cultural, artistic, educational and sporting activities for all publics, the majority of which are open to the public. One of the key elements of its approach has been to involve local talent in the design and production of the events on offer.
In a context where Greece’s strategy is to work on and question the interconnections between culture and tourism, the SNFCC has chosen to focus on the local population in all its diversity, in order to encourage creativity for all. The cursor is clearly positioned on a search for social impact to the detriment of purely economic impact. Offering a platform for social and cultural experimentation, rather than seeking to attract tourists. As the social return on investment is at the heart of the project, the measurement of the environmental, programmatic and social impact on the local population on the one hand, and in terms of the country’s image on the other, has been the subject of work to define indicators, the data collected from which form the basis of an impact study currently in progress.
Chicago’s Navy Pier: creation as a lever for emancipation.
Many sites are also undergoing a similar transformation. For example, Chicago’s Navy Pier, a site dedicated to commercial and tourist activity, is undergoing a gradual and profound transformation in the nature of the activities offered there. For the municipality, the challenge is to build a strong socio-cultural offer for the local population, not just for tourists. Local artists have been called upon to help build a range of proposals in the fields of performing arts, music, cinema and more. Creative workshops for all publics have gradually replaced entertainment activities, in a spirit of equal opportunity and emancipation, particularly for specific audiences.
And the Navy Pier experience shows that a new kind of tourism is emerging around these participatory activities, attracted by the authenticity of the artistic proposals presented there.
In different parts of the world, the notion of tourist fatigue has taken root, the limits of tourism have been tested, and cultural districts are working to renew approaches to understanding and involving populations and audiences, in search of levers for emancipation, building social identity, or quite simply well-being.
One of the highlights of the GCDN 2024 was the closing round table discussion on the positioning of major institutions in the face of the many – often divisive – debates currently shaking our societies. What does the neutrality of an institution mean, and how is it expressed? Does it mean proposing a clear, long-term position that provides a solid framework for debate, acting as a guarantor without taking part, or playing an influential role and attempting to influence the course of events by taking sides? And in whose name?
A debate conducted with a great deal of verve and quality argumentation, which did not fail to provoke reactions from the audience and the expression of divergent points of view. The notion of the Agora was relevant right to the end.
