What is Birmingham’s Creative Direction?

Another in my series about Birmingham’s Big City Plan.

Photo by Pete Ashton

I’ve been working as a designer for a fair few years now and along the way I’ve learnt a few things about the things that make projects successful and, on the flipside, the things that can kill a perfectly good idea. You could break any project down (from a creative point of view) to four things that are important:

A strong idea.

At the start of a project you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Having a clear, solid understanding of what ‘the big idea’ is absolutely fundamental to the success of the project. The simpler the better.

A person to ‘own’ the idea.

Once you have the idea, you need to have someone who can say that they have ownership over it – to protect it from modification and unhelpful changes, avoid ‘design by committee’ and to maintain a clear vision.

A plan to make the idea a reality.

An idea is redundant without a way of making that idea happen. So a realistic plan on getting the idea into the world is a good place to start. This should usually be put together by someone who is good at planning and organising, not necessarily the person who ‘owns the idea’. And that takes me neatly onto the fourth thing.

A good team to make the plan happen.

‘Always hire people who are better than you’ is a good rule to follow. If you can find a fantastic team of people to work with on implementing the plan then the project will run itself. Hire people who don’t have the right skills and the project will be hit by micro-management issues and it won’t scale properly.

Applying those four things to the Big City Plan

So it occurred to me that on a project as big as answering the question ‘What will Birmingham be like in 20 years time?’ that it would be an interesting exercise to apply those four things to it as a ‘project’, and very quickly a few things jumped out at me.

A strong idea

The project isn’t short of ideas – in fact there are so many competing ideas about the future of the city that to just pull one out is virtually impossible. How is it possible to have a single vision for the city anyway?

So, let’s reduce that down and pick one idea from the pack.

In his ‘Visioning Study’ for the city, Michael Parkinson pulled out a long list of things that needed to be done in the city centre around culture and creativity. Why is the signage so poor? Why are there so few hang-out spaces? Why isn’t there an equivalent of the ICA in Birmingham? Why does the street furniture look tired in many areas? Where is the music? Where are the events happening every Saturday? Why are Birmingham’s expressions of distinctive cultural identity almost invisible in the city centre? Why does it feel like a ‘clone town’? And so on.

So, to simplify, I think we should be looking at a very simple idea:

“How about we put Birmingham’s culture and creativity at the centre of our plans and make the city centre one of the most exciting and interesting places to visit in the World?”

I think that covers it from a creative and cultural point of view.

A person to own the idea

I guess this is where it gets political. The city isn’t short of people who on paper are employed to achieve some if not all of that idea.

But are they all working along similar lines? Do decisions about the branding of the city get discussed in the same meeting as decisions about putting on a year-round events programme? Do the people who own vacant properties in Digbeth talk to the people who put on music events or gallery shows? I think they do at some level, but to something ambitious you need someone who can take ownership over an idea.

Who is that person?

On every project I’ve worked on that job description comes up all the time.

The Creative Director.

A person, whose job it is to take the reins, point out the obvious, make changes across the board, sorting out the branding issues we have, influencing the visual appearance of the city, helping put together a series of events, brokering a major festival and so on.

Who employs that person? Who is that person? Are the first couple of questions that come from it and I don’t have that answer. Probably the council, possibly not, probably someone with years of experience working in the creative and cultural field at an international level, then again, possibly not. I’m sure that many would have suggestions here though!

A plan to make the idea a reality.

Next, you need to know how you’re going to achieve something as ambitious as that. Bilbao did it with architecture, Milan did it with fashion – what’s Birmingham’s offer? Some are saying we need to build Birmingham into a Digital city – a place where digital media, technology, learning and creativity meet. A kind of twenty first century powerhouse for digital content and services. Could that be our plan? Maybe.

Either way, to put the city on the map, to up its game, pull out culture from under that bushel and put it centre stage is a tough ask.

It needs a plan.

The problem is, I keep coming up against meetings where I am still having to ”make the case” for the value of creativity and culture to a city’s reinvention and growth.

I say, we have to end the argument – we’re all tired of having to make the case over and over again. Creativity and culture are important. They are the things that make a city a home, they are the things that build reputations, attract young talent, make a city ‘alive’, attract tourists, build a city’s ‘brand’ and have big impact on a city’s competitiveness.

Just looking at ‘creative industries’ (I’ve never felt comfortable with that term), we contribute £1BN to Birmingham’s economy.

That’s more than Financial Services, that’s more than the universities put together. Pretty interesting then that these people have a structure in place to lobby, influence and make arguments about what needs to happen to support them whereas we as the cultural/creative people don’t. This is where Creative Republic comes in – and there’s more coming on that in a separate post.

The trouble is – you can’t just measure creativity and culture using economic data. When it comes to any decision making, at some point someone is going to say ‘how much is this going to cost’. Accountants and artistic decision tend not to mix well.

That is, unless you take a different tack.

I’d like to see Birmingham taking a ‘triple bottom line’ approach to any plan for the city’s future. That means as well as getting an accountant to run figures on how much x and y cost in terms of pounds, you also have to look at cultural and social currency as well. There are models for this, and other cities have seen huge success by implementing this.

A Creative and Cultural Charter.

To solve the argument once and for all I would like anyone who has a say in the cultural and creative future of Birmingham to sign up to a set of principles that mean that all decisions which have a potential impact on Birmingham as a city of creativity and culture are vetted against those principles.

Effectively, “We the undersigned agree to put creativity and culture at the heart of our efforts for the next twenty years.” with a number of distinct points that we can all sign up to.

So then, whenever we get situations like ‘Curzon Street is closing’ or ‘Birmingham Artists are getting kicked out’, and on the positive side ‘new plans for Digbeth announced’, ‘New Street Station to be revamped’ we all know that the potential impact of these things on Birmingham from a cultural point of view have been taken into account, or if not it’s a simple matter of pulling out the Charter and pointing to the line that says ‘at the heart of…’

It’s a set of working principles to pull the city together and make it a more interesting and exciting place.

So, we have our idea, our creative director, our plan, next is…
A team to make it happen

The great thing about this team is that there is no team.

It’s the city – the people who are already making things happen. It’s just a matter of changing some priorities, pulling people together and making things work across the board to a common goal.

This isn’t from ‘the top down’ – this is scalable, positive and brings together lots of activity that is already happening under a single concerted effort. The ‘team’ is just ‘us’.

We need to take control of our own destiny: do we want Birmingham to be a World leader in the creative and cultural stakes?

If the answer is ‘no’ then at least I and many others have our answer, and Birmingham will suffer the loss of some exciting, energetic voices when they go to a city that can support them more effectively in the work that they do.

But if the answer is ‘yes’, and I hope that it is, then we need to make it happen.