Volume 8 (2015): Issue 1 (January 2015)

Community-led design is a practice whereby people take the opportunity to engage directly and creatively in the formulation of solutions for their own environment. In community-led design, professionals, stakeholders and communities come together to develop sustainable solutions to complex design and planning problems. Such projects can include the co-creation of public spaces, communal and public services, as well as processes and tools for citizen participation.

Web 2.0 technologies and social media offer new opportunities for community-led design, potentially transforming the ways in which people take part in these processes and their ability to make an impact. This paper reports insights from the use of different types of media in community-led design projects and reflects on their role and their value for those involved, as well as for their wider communities.

This paper examines the Shoot to Live community media initiative and data collected from this study will provide a discussion on whether or not this programme can be used as a development approach for at-risk youth. Discourses on community media, youth and development will be used as the theoretical framework for this study. Accordingly, theory and practice from these constructs can be used to develop ideas that emerge from the Shoot to Live programme. This paper initially assesses some of the various degrees of success of this community media initiative. Finally, the findings of this study will play a pertinent role in the creation, evaluation and transformation of future community media programmes and youth development approaches particularly in developing countries.

Environmental degradation is one of the main challenges facing the modern world. Transition to sustainable development is often cited as a strategy to contain the situation. Arguably, nation-states cannot manage this shift alone. Therefore, individuals are urged to participate in the process of transition to sustainable development by acting sustainably in their capacity as consumers and citizens. Sustainable consumption is an essential way for consumers to contribute to sustainable development. This article examines the roles that the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community on Facebook might play for consumers. The focus is placed on the two theoretical possibilities: manifestation of environmental citizenship and means of self-expression. Drawing on the ideas of individualisation of responsibility and political consumerism, the article explores the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community as a potentially political form of advocacy for sustainable consumption and development. The article concludes that the creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community might be viewed as an impact-oriented pro-environmental behaviour, whose role is a combination of manifestation of environmental citizenship and means of self-expression. As such, it fits better with the framework of depoliticised alternative hedonism than political consumerism.

This paper examines the democratic co-production between the artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, the Liverpool Biennial, local citizens and its local and global social network of members, as together they develop alternatives to cultural and economic regeneration. In a neighbourhood that has suffered from over a decade of stalled regeneration programmes, Homebaked is located on the high street just a few steps from the famous Liverpool Football Club. It was set up as the first UK urban Community Land Trust (CLT) to design customised housing, support social enterprises, enhance the wellbeing of the community and open a co-operative community-run bakery. Homebaked’s principle is one of creating value, both social and monetary, which stays within the neighbourhood and is invested back into its communities. With the economic support through its extensive social network implemented through its Kickstarter campaign, the local and worldwide members of Homebaked have learned how to take matters into their own hands. Drawing on over four years of embedded PhD research, 24 Notebooks and personal experience as a volunteer and CLT board member, this paper aims to make visible the continuous shifts between a tentative agonistic framework between art biennial, artist and creative citizens as cultural co-producers, as they challenge and influence local economic drivers. The paper questions if artists and biennial, with their local and international communities, are capable of creating an ‘agonistic public sphere’ (Mouffe, 2007), where they can address one another in the co-production of new cultural and economic infrastructures to create social change.

This paper raises the question of how a proposition such as ‘Creative Citizenship’ might fit into the UK policy landscape. It begins by describing the appeal of such a concept to politicians keen to latch on to an idea that positions the electorate as creative, engaged and technologically astute. However, Creative Citizenship runs the dangers of being yet another fashionable, wide-ranging concept that political leaders tend to be ‘mesmerised’ by as they write up their election manifestos. Initiatives based on such ideas rarely meet with success and therefore for Creative Citizenship not to meet with the same fate it must be more clearly defined. The paper outlines a manifesto for Creative Citizenship that would allow for a more targeted application on those areas of public policy where the features of Creative Citizenship might be seen to be making a positive difference.

The Creative Citizens project asks whether new media enhance new forms and scale of creative civic activities. If so, the project seeks to identify practices that will exploit this new individual and collective activity, presumably as a means of achieving authentic self-governance. This paper considers three potential obstacles to the realization of a creative citizenship: that the sort of political engagement it fosters may be too personal and episodic; that the commonsensical political knowledge typical of politics known at a distance as performance and simulation may impose further limits on effective understanding and engagement; and that the emerging new media environment may be different enough that today’s digital skills and relationships may be insufficient in the medium term. The paper looks at the same conditions that inspire the creative citizenship project and reaches reverse conclusions – but not on the grounds of nostalgia or pessimism.

This paper is a representation of a live, audio-visual keynote address given at the Creative Citizens Conference in London (September 2014), co-presented by Hargreaves (IH) and Hartley (JH). It seeks to combine (i) autobiographical narrative storytelling – two of them, in fact; with (ii) an attempt to build concepts, themes and strategies out of that narrative, and how the two stories did indeed arrive at ‘one destination’; and (iii) plentiful use of visual prompts, combined with part-scripted, part-improvised dialogic commentary. This approach was risky on the day; it is even harder to render into two dimensions, not least because a vital element, the audience, cannot be represented in that format. Nevertheless, we offer the ‘paper’ as a record of how two intersecting lives and careers were both drawn to the ‘Creative Citizens’ idea, not only as a research problem but also as a component of the speakers’ own practice – one as a high profile journalist turned academic; the other as an academic with interests in alternative models of journalism. We think that our bio-trajectories are relevant to the way that the research project led by Hargreaves has been tackled.