Creative Metropoles

The DogA Sessions: Vol. 1

March 22nd, 2009  |  by Jon Hickman
Published in Creative Metropoles, Podcast

During a recent trip to Oslo I spent some time chatting to Paal Shervan, formerly of Norway’s By:Larm Festival and now working on the Schous Cultural Brewery project. Recorded in the quietest corner we could find at the DogA during a conference (so apologies in advance for some of the background noise), I had an in depth chat with Paal. In chapter 1 of this episode we discuss the Cultural Brewery concept and popular music heritage. Chapter 2 features a discussion on how you get the “suits” in a city to buy into popular music heritage projects. In next week’s episode we talk about managing archives online and in the real world.

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Custard Factories & Cultural Breweries

March 17th, 2009  |  by Jon Hickman
Published in Creative Metropoles, General

Live at DogA Oslo - forthcoming podcast

During my recent trip to Oslo I kept bumping into Paal Shervan, formerly of Norway’s By:Larm Festival and now working on the Schous Cultural Brewery project. A Cultural Brewery sounds slightly odd, but really it’s no stranger than our creative industries living in a Custard Factory. The Cultural Brewery is a redevelopment project that is turning a disused brewery into a world class centre for popular music education and culture. I was quite taken with this parallel between our two cities, but I had something much more important to talk to Paal about: that was our mutual interest in developing popular music archives.

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Surprise Surprise! It’s the Custard Factory!

March 6th, 2009  |  by Jon Hickman
Published in Creative & Cultural Industries, Creative Metropoles, General

Digbeth sign posting
Image CC Jon Hickman

One of yesterday’s speakers at the kick off event for Creative Metropoles was the Chief Town Planner for Oslo, Ellen S. de Vibe. In her presentation she had a lot to say about how town planning can create an environment to encourage creative industries, and help the city to learn value its creative industries. I was fortunate enough to be sat next to her at the dinner in the evening, and she explained a little more to me about here idea that cities needs to surprise their citizens and visitors, to ecnourage exploration of the space.

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What are the Creative & Cultural Industries Anyway?

March 5th, 2009  |  by Jon Hickman
Published in Creative & Cultural Industries, Creative Metropoles

This week I am in Oslo at the kick off meeting of Creative Metropoles, and I will also be attending Kreative Oslo. I’m working on the Creative Metropoles project as a local researcher, tasked with identifying and writing up case studies of best practice in policy and funding for creative industries. Yesterday I spent an afternoon with reserachers from 12 countries, where we quickly realised that across Europe nobody knows what creative and cultural industries actually are.

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