Culture at the Heart of City Centre Recovery
The City Centre Recovery Task Force (a collaboration of the Scottish Government and Scottish Cities Alliance) has published a report called At the Heart of Economic Transformation.
The report sets out the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on city centres and identifies priorities to support city centre recovery.
It includes recommendations to increase the cultural offer of city centres, and increase creative, entrepreneurial and start-up activity.
Public health measures during the pandemic reduced city centre footfall to historically low levels. This change raised questions about who city centres are for, and how to bring people back into them.
The report aims to identify priorities for city centre recovery that ‘empower our communities and places, and support inclusive and sustainable economic development.
Cultural Hubs
The culture sector and cultural hubs are identified as providing focal points for our experience of cities and all they have to offer. On Culture Hubs the report says;
“City centres also host a large share of Scotland’s cultural assets in the form of museums and galleries, theatres, and music venues. The seven local authorities that contain SCA cities offer over 60% of all employment in the creative, cultural and entertainment sectors in Scotland.
Cultural institutions, such as museums, also play a key role as anchor institutions in the communities where they are based The V&A Museum in Dundee, for example, has been designated Scotland’s Centre for Design as part of the waterfront city centre regeneration of the city.
While employment in the cultural sector can often be insecure, these institutions provide secure employment and crowd in economic activity by bringing customers to local cafes and restaurants, and so work in support of city centres’ role as consumption hubs. They often also offer a number of benefits for the local communities, like accessible and affordable leisure and meeting spaces, thus contributing to the quality of life in cities.”
Creative and Culture Recommendations
The Task Force agreed on priorities to take forward. Included in the report's five-year outcomes for city centre recovery are:
increase in city centre creative, entrepreneurial and startup activity
reduction in oversupply of retail, and increase in cultural offer
Increasing creative, entrepreneurial, and startup activity
The report says “we need our city centres to be creative, innovative, and thriving places, on a cultural and an entrepreneurial level. This will support the Scottish Government's National Strategy for Economic Transformation and includes ideas such as;
“Digital collateral. We could consider local authority investment in new digital collateral to support inward investment.”
“Creative hubs. We could investigate routes to encourage the development of “creative hubs” in city centres that connect creative practitioners, support cross-sector innovation, and foster the development of creative entrepreneurs and businesses.”
“Business Improvement Districts. We could encourage the development of city centre Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), and investigate the feasibility of offering higher levels of startup grants for new BIDs.”
Increase in the cultural offer and reduction in oversupply of retail
The report explains this priority is considering how to attract people back into city centres. “Thriving culture and creative sectors bring vibrancy and life to city centres, enriching the lives of residents and tourists alike.”
To do so it needs to address vacant high street units due to the closure of shops and other businesses.
Ideas include;
Maker-spaces. We could seek to incentivise the creation of “maker-spaces” in former retail units. These are collaborative work-spaces incorporating varying technologies, allowing people to make creative use of machinery too expensive or unwieldy for home use and creating shared exploratory space for people to collaborate on projects of their choosing.
Unused retail units. Even before the pandemic, our city centres were seeing retail unit vacancies which took considerable time to fill. We could look to develop a range of options to support the re-use of derelict retail units, targeting both short-term and long-term re-uses through investigating planning barriers and potential incentives.
Large vacant units. We can consider potential funding options for redesigning large empty retail units into smaller lettable units, which may allow for greater use of the space.
Further Reading
You can read the full report on the Scottish Government website - At the Heart of Economic Transformation: Report of the City Centre Recovery Task Force, 2021-22
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