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Prepared For:Nicola Thomas Recording Details:GEO3131_Week-10-podcast Date of Transcription:21 November 2020 Transcriber:N. Brown Recording Length: 20mWelcome to the Week 10 podcast of the Geographies and Creativity module. This week we have got this theme of creative value and this might be a short podcast but I want to just give us this time to think through what value means, in terms of the ideas of creativity which we’ve been engaging with. Throughout Ollie Mould’s book, I guess value came up a lot. We had him rejecting the type of economic growth agenda which is so associated with creativity, we had him rejecting the way in which capitalism with its focus on economic growth gives a certain value or encourages us to see value in a very certain way. But it means that we don’t look necessarily for value in other places. If we think about the way in which the radical creativity agenda which Mould suggests in relation to value, what we see perhaps are very different types of values coming through. The value of social connection, the value of being kind to one another, helping each other through these creative acts which enable us to shape the world. The value of activism which challenges authority, which tries to do something, which brings about, I don't know, environmental change which encourages us to think about our responsibility to future generations. The way in which we might bring people who have perhaps been marginalised, to enable them to fully be in the world so that they can also encourage all of us to appreciate a broader understanding of our own lives, the environments around us and our human connections with people who perhaps were outside of our remit.All of these things are more intangible. They don’t necessarily have a relationship to pounds, shillings and pence as the pre-decimal generation would say. But these values, these values are still hugely important in a civil society or in our communities or indeed, just our own individual identities. But how does capitalism and government decisions, which are often driven by how much money is in the coffers to be spent, how does capitalist and capitalist societies work out how to measure different types of value which don’t come down to the economy? This often emerges in relationship to activities which require some form of public investment. We all pay taxes in one shape or form, this may become something which you particularly have to do in the future but we pay taxes and we, in a democracy, have the opportunity to choose a government who we put in charge of spending those taxes on our behalf. Those taxes pay for our Health Service, they pay for our education, they pay for military, the things you're very familiar with.But they also pay for libraries, for theatres, for various parts of the economy which perhaps are not seen to be economic agents necessarily but are there for the public good, that they have some form of intrinsic value which is seen by society to be useful and worthy of public funding. Now those decisions about what is funded through public money is a very political one, the Arts Council is one of the agencies which receives taxpayers money and it invests in very specific ways, to support the whole society’s ability to engage with arts and culture. This means that we all actually often can access free cultural products, free performances, free music festivals, free art museums, free museums in general, through the investment of public money which often times comes through the Arts Council. We also might have access to culture or cultural activities which are heavily subsidised, which perhaps wouldn’t be economically viable without some form of public investment. So there’s a decision making going on here about what is valued, that some things are hugely valuable to society and therefore they should receive public investment, irrespective of the economic advantage that comes from or the economic growth that comes from them. So value is a kind of hot topic because different political perspectives have very different views on how beneficial certain types of creativity is and how much money should be spent on those types of creativity by the public purse. The thing I want us today is to really think about if we’re going to be creating these interventions in Exeter and we’re going to be working out how to pay for them and we’re going to be working out why they’re important, we are all going to need to be thinking about value, about public benefit, about why people are interested in doing our projects, how much someone might pay for it or if there isn’t a model whereby someone might pay for it, how is it going to be funded? So if you're thinking about your project and how you're going to bring value into this equation, you're going to be needing to think really about where your project fits in terms of is it designed to be an economic type of project which aims to bring greater wealth and energy to the economy? Or actually is it designed to be maybe more of a community programme which supports some issues like health and wellbeing? Is it designed to be an intervention which enables people to think, think perhaps about their responsibility to each other, their responsibility to the climate, their responsibility perhaps to people far away, is it a project which is linked to an idea of civic duty or perhaps citizenship? Because the way in which you frame your project will have some link to a different way of thinking about value. The reading I’ve asked you to do this week really digs into the concept of cultural value. This is helpful for us because it’s perhaps more easy to see economic value but actually how we think through cultural value is much more complicated. Back in 1997, when Tony Blair came to government as part of New Labour, part of that government’s strategy was to look at the UK economy, to see the big changes that had taken place since Margaret Thatcher’s work in the 1980s which coincided with a time when the manufacturing base in Britain shifted to the Far East, when the knowledge economy based around finance and skills started to really rise up the agenda and then through the 80s into the 90s, this kind of shift whereby creativity and knowledge became a real focus for how the future of the UK economy might start to expand. In 1997, Tony Blair comes in with his Cool Britannia approach to creativity and created a taskforce to look at the way in which creativity might be enrolled as a new economic sector. This creativity taskforce undertook a mapping document, they published it in 1998 and the geographer, Andy Pratt, suggested that four policymakers, it was as if a successful new industry had arrived from nowhere, previously overlooked elements of the economy were identified as being creative and they were clustered together, to show that collectively, across fashion, across architecture, across marketing, across the games industry, across technology, across these sectors which incorporate the music and arts and culture and heritage, all of these sectors came together and they became an economic engine as a new creative industries. So New Labour used an idea of value to create this industry, it looked, it saw this possible economic value really being energised. And then in response to the economic crisis in 2008, again this economic industry was given a real focus as being this engine of growth. So we’ve got this idea of the creative economy being completely bound up with an economic version of value but how does this capitalist approach, when it’s so focused on monetising everything, how does it cope with intrinsic value? The value that comes from feeling relaxed as a result of having played your musical instrument. The feeling of connection that you might have to another person, having shared a book group experience. The importance of engaging in debate and having your mind expanded through an interesting dialogue which you’ve experienced in a museum, which helps you connect to someone who is far from your own group that you would usually interact with. There’s all sorts of different cultural values at work here that the creative economy, with its obsession with mapping and finding economic value, finds it really difficult to quantify. So many people who are trying to work within the grain of capitalism, have worked on different ways in which you can identify the economic value of intrinsic activity. This often comes because people are trying to justify the funding which is given to them through the public purse. If you’ve got to justify your funding based on economic value because that is the primary way in which a government understands value, then you're going to have to work creatively to think about the ways in which you can make your case for further funding. This is seen really clearly in the arts for health sector because it’s very clear from the qualitative studies, that people gain huge benefit from perhaps having creativity on prescription rather than antidepressants on prescription, for example. It’s seen qualitatively, that people who come together regularly and take part in a choir or perhaps acquire a skill of print making or of some form of artistic engagement, really benefit from the social interaction that they have with others, that they gain from the new skills that they learn through the activity and they also gain from that sense of increased motivation that we have when we achieve something. There’s lots of other ways in which people benefit but that’s just a short example.People’s health might benefit longer term because they’re not having to receive perhaps so much care in a clinical sense because they’re gaining this sense of community which is holding them, and actually longer term, looking at a social prescribing model, the art, the community walks, the gardening, the social prescribing model can save an enormous amount of money for the Health Service. So there is a way of quantifying it in the future but there’s also just this qualitative improvement on someone’s quality of life which isn’t so straightforward to quantify. Policymakers often really like quantitative data, especially when it’s easily translated into that monetary value. So for organisations which often have an arts and culture perspective, finding ways to demonstrate within a capitalistic model, how their offer can be valued, is really critical to ensure that they continue to be funded using the public purse, by the public purse, I mean our tax. Because this is a kind of a challenging thing, a few years ago, the Arts & Humanities Research Council funded a project called The Cultural Value project, whereby they looked at or a research team looked at a variety of ways in which cultural value could be seen in society, through various different projects from arts for health projects as I’ve just explained, into museums, into just the value which comes in terms of our individual experience. This cultural values project tried to find ways of thinking about the contribution of this cultural value to our society more broadly, in ways which perhaps still sat outside an economic model but which could be shown in more evidence based ways to contribute to society more broadly. It was an attempt, I guess, to make the case for arts and culture as a core benefit to society that although it might be complicated to demonstrate the value, that the evidence presented in the report made it absolutely clear that it was worthwhile investing in this type of activity. The reason I like us to think about value this week is because when we’re all thinking about the activities we do, whether they are radical anti-capitalist activities or activities which perhaps work with the grain of capitalism, we do need to think about why we’re doing this intervention, who it’s for, how they’ll benefit and what we hope it will achieve and why that matters and thinking about value, whatever type of value is present in your projects, gives us a really powerful way to justify what we’re doing and to make the case that our intervention is a really fantastic idea worthy of further consideration.This week, I’m going to ask you to do one piece of reading which is to think through this concept of value, reading the elements of the report, the Cultural Value Report undertaken and published by the AHRC and then to choose elements of that report that speak to the intervention that you're interested in making, and using the arguments in that report to help you identify the values within the intervention that you're proposing for Exeter. ................
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