Creative Improvement Districts review

Culture Commons was commissioned by the University of Manchester to explore a new place-based policy mechanism that could play an important role in supporting culture-led regeneration in a major UK city region.

Creative Improvement Districts seek to encourage the agglomeration of creative businesses, cultural organisations and their associated workforce in a defined geographical location to support the creative and culture sectors to thrive and revitalise struggling urban areas in towns and cities.

In our policy paper we:

• Explore the rise of cultural regeneration as a favoured mechanism for growth by the UK Government and local decision makers

• Revisit Greater Manchester Combined Authority's original CID plans of 2019

• Gather learnings from other recent regeneration schemes and programmes that have successfully incorporated the creative and cultural sectors

• Propose several ways that CIDs might go beyond economic growth paradigms to address local policy priorities and unlock community benefits for local people

• Draw all these strands together to introduce a series of light touch recommendations to inform the roll-out of existing and future CID programmes across the UK

This paper has already been shared with key decision makers within the Greater Manchester, the UK Government, devolved administrations, and other local and combined authorities and national sector bodies. We are pleased that Culture Commons’ thinking on CIDs was spotlighted by the Local Government Association in their recent 'Cornerstones of Culture' report on the relationship between local authorities and the cultural sectors.

This consultancy research was undertaken by Culture Commons as part of the ‘Cultural recovery, place and the pandemic – policy models for new localism and the new normal’ research project led Dr Abigail Gilmore at the University of Manchester.

Download the paper here.