Learning Lab: Art, Cultural Democracy and the City

Art, Cultural Democracy and the City is a conversation focusing on who and what makes a city, a partnership between Create, Counterpoints Arts and Crawford Art Gallery Cork, taking place with a group of invited participants, on September 27th 2019.

Cork city is facing a range of exciting, overlapping developments with nonetheless physical and infrastructural pressures. Whose interests and passions fuel and actually shape the current vision for the city? And how might we imagine – from the perspective of 2019 – Cork city in 2050?

This invitation-only Learning Lab will take the form of a ‘think and do’ session bringing civic actors, artists, residents, planners, small business people, activists and researchers to think and work together. Our aim is to collectively draft a creative ‘blueprint’ for the city, to be adapted and used as a stepping off point for further conversations. Questions guiding and framing this conversation include (among others):

• What are the current challenges facing the city and how might socially engaged art and culture be the catalyst for both immediate and slow change?

• How is Cork becoming a welcoming city responding to a growing, diverse demographic?

• How might we work together around a common purpose and vision for the city, even if personal and organizational needs appear to be differently aligned?

• What central role might young actors and new citizens play in the imagining and shaping of the city?

• How do we avoid a growing disconnect and lack of trust between citizens’ vision and official policy and how might city planners and elected representatives liaise and learn from grass-roots projects?

• Is it possible to identify a shared city narrative that citizens and dwellers can, in turn, make their own?

Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Lab believes that change comes about when learners from all walks of life make new meanings together. We are committed to creating experimental and participatory learning spaces in which knowledge and practical knowhow is collectively shared and co-produced. We believe in the power of ‘transformative learning’ where everyone brings equal knowledge, skills and knowhow to the table, where we learn from each other (horizontally) through collective thinking and doing.