Co-creation and the state in a global context

This chapter draws on debates about the need for theory to ‘see from the South’ (Watson, 2009) to critically reflect on the increasingly global nature of co-creation both as a focus for research and for initiatives from governments around the world. It explores whether current understandings of co-creation narratives, which have tended to come from the Global North, can adequately characterise and understand the experience from the South, and the resulting need to decolonise knowledge and conduct research into the diverse ways in which co-creation can be constituted. It goes on to illustrate these debates by exploring the differing contexts for co-creation created by state-civil society relations in the project’s participating countries. These show that, while distinct contrasts emerge, it is important to move beyond dichotomies of north and south to explore the spaces of participation and resistance that are created within different contexts and how these are navigated by projects and communities engaged in co-creation. The chapter draws on material from interviews with local stakeholders and academics involved in the Co-Creation project and project conferences in Rio, Mexico City and Berlin.

When Co-Creation meets Art for Social Change: the Street Beats Band

This chapter explores the interface between the concept of Co-Creation and the ‘Art for Social Change’ movement, taking the case of the Street Beats Band, a community-based percussion band in Vancouver, Canada. Local community members in the band collaborated with professional musicians, to perform a commissioned work at an International Contemporary Music Festival, on ‘found object’ percussion instruments that had been curated by members of Vancouver’s ‘binner’ community. The chapter illustrates that a Co-Creative process such as the Street Beats Band can empower and build community, as well as confront conventional thinking and trouble received narratives and expectations. However, while the methodology of Co-Creation holds critical potential as a tool to challenge stereotypes and marginalisation, it nevertheless operates with the structural constraints of deeply embedded power hierarchies that dominate discourse around urban disadvantage. The chapter also highlights the potential tensions and dilemmas that are embedded within a Co-Creation process, due to different visions, interests and inevitable power hierarchies. These issues should be acknowledged, addressed and negotiated by those involved, for Co-Creation to achieve its potential.

Co-Creation and bridging theory-method divides

This chapter thinks through the possibilities and challenges posed by Co-Creation as a knowledge practice that is more than a ‘novel method’ for addressing urban inequality. We consider the onto-ethico-epistemological assumptions that underpin the ‘doing’ of co-creation as inventive practice. Drawing upon Barad (2007), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and post-qualitative scholars (St Pierre, 2011), we ask what claims are made about participatory approaches in voicing issues of marginalisation? How are human and non-human relations recognised in creative collaborations? What role does affect play in the micropolitics of working with different desires, bodies, and techniques to effect change? New materialism offers a useful orientation to thinking through Co-Creation as a material-discursive process that has a rhizomatic, rather than linear form. Moving beyond humanist assumptions about individual creativity and essentialised identity categories, Co-Creation can be understood as a research assemblage that brings into relation objects, desires, bodies and contexts to disrupt, queer, reimagine and contest the normative (e.g. stigmatising of groups and places, and the invisibility of privileged perspectives). Using examples from our own and others’ work we explore the complex processes of Co-Creation projects, as they bring together artists, academics and communities in the face of urban inequality and marginalisation.

Co-Creation and social transformation: a tough issue for research

This chapter looks at social transformation through the lens of ‘tough issues’. The perspective makes the vast challenges communities are faced with more practical, which in turns allows for progress in the right direction through small wins. Many citizen and community organisations with a background in environmental, peace and third world movements have roots in direct action. Over recent decades, they have been moving from opposing developments to proposing alternatives. We use the words of de Certeau (1984) to describe it as a shift from ‘résistance’ to ‘bricolage’. This shift has brought them closer to more institutionalised partners like government, business, civil society and research institutions. While this rapprochement has proven beneficial to each party involved – research methodologies such as Co-Creation prove that notions like horizontal decision-making, anti-authoritarianism and self-organisation are no longer the preoccupation of informal actors solely – the different stakeholders have not become interchangeable. The chapter argues for the role of a third actor in a social transformation process. This actor is not a stakeholder itself, but through a creative process (“prototyping” in the case of City Mine(d), arts creation in others) becomes tactically linked to the important stakeholders.

Can literary events use Co-Creation to challenge stigmatisation?

This chapter takes a comparative approach to two initiatives developed by artists and cultural promoters from the Global North and South, to challenge clichés attached to French banlieues and Brazilian favelas as places devoid of the production and consumption of literary texts. The ‘Dictée des Cités’, a spelling competition promoted since 2013 in French banlieues by writer Rachid Santaki, and the ‘Literary Festival of the Urban Periphery’ (FLUP) curated in Rio de Janeiro since 2012 by writers Julio Ludemir and Écio Salles, are analysed through the lens of Co-Creation as examples of artist-driven initiatives to encourage large local audiences’ engagement with literary texts, transform literary institutions and canons and challenge stereotypes associated with urban peripheries. While the chapter seeks to evaluate the potential of large-scale literary events to change the perception of disadvantaged urban areas, it also explores differences between the Global North and South. The chapter ends with the conclusion that socially engaged arts festivals and Co-Creation events may promote similar aims, they however differ in their scale, approaches to knowledge production as well as in their strategies promoting engagement with creative methods.

Does space matter? Built environments and Co-Creation in Mexico City

This chapter argues that urban built environments are essential elements for the success of collective projects associated with the concept of Co-Creation as a contribution to a sociological approach that favours other political, organizational or financial aspects. The research considers geographical analysis, fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with staff members of cultural venues in Mexico City, an iconic metropolis of the Global South with a long tradition of socially engaged art, and frequently associated with informal urbanisation processes which are the origin of more than 50 per cent of the city’s neighbourhoods. The chapter considers the built environment as a useful medium to achieve the social benefits that Co-Creation promoters look for, through diverse participatory methodologies. In this sense, the definition of Co-Creation in this chapter favours the process, more than the product, in which various agents participate to produce knowledge about their current urban situation and expectations. The chapter clarifies the relationships between the location and characteristics of official and independent art and cultural venues, the key social components for successful Co-Creative projects, and the agents involved in the process.

Co-Creation, social capital and advocacy: the Neighbourhood and Community Improvement Programme, Mexico City

The aim of this chapter is to explore co-creation, as a participatory process that includes different actors and actions to have an impact on social cohesion in marginalised communities. The chapter relies on the experience of the Neighbourhood and Community Improvement Programme in Mexico City as an example of advocacy. It argues that given the important community benefits generated by advocacy, such as the development of social capital in marginalised communities in close collaboration with the State, advocacy actions cannot be dismissed since they constitute a very important participatory aspect of co-creative processes, in particular in Latin America.

We Can Make: Co-Creating knowledge and products with local communities

Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) believes that all people, whatever their background, should be able to imagine, co-design and shape their future, for themselves and their community. KWMC uses an arts-led Co-Creation process that generates creative, engaging and relevant ways for people to get involved in activism, education, employment and local decision making, leading to and building networks, communities of interest, and strategic interventions that can contribute to wider system changes. The chapter outlines this approach, which builds on participatory research practices and the concept and practice of ‘common-ing’, and how this approach can be applied to diverse settings, issues, and engage diverse participants. It shares two case studies: The Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensing which develops an alternative people-first approach to Smart Cities, Big Data and new technology; and We Can Make, which takes an asset-based approach to citizen-led housing and enables housing to be developed at ‘point of need’ by unlocking micro-sites for development. Over twenty years KWMC’s approach has achieved significant impacts at the individual and collective level. However, there remains a challenge to secure fuller recognition and engagement from decision-makers and a commensurate shift in resources and power relations that would enable more people to work together effectively and non-hierarchically towards the change they want to bring about in their communities.

Fostering artistic citizenship: how Co-Creation can awaken civil imagination

This chapter adopts a theoretical approach in order to discuss how the collaborative artistic-creative projects that are essential to Co-Creation can help to make visible the conditions of marginalisation within and beyond the communities where they take place. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay’s concept of ‘civil imagination,’ the chapter argues that Co-Creation contributes to awakening the skill of civil imagination by building relations of solidarity and respect between participants. Such relationships serve to reflect critically upon the power relations that are the causes underpinning social disparities within our societies. Thus, civil imagination is necessarily linked with an exercise in ‘artistic citizenship’, which entails a commitment to engaging in collaborative art projects that stimulate positive interactions among participants, and hence the improvement of communal well-being. The chapter concludes that Co-Creation has the potential to promote among the participants the sense of a community in which their opinions are heard and counted.

A top-down experiment in Co-Creation in Greater Paris

This chapter explores how Plaine Commune, the local authority in charge of urban development in an area north of Paris, has implemented a ‘top-down’ art-based collaborative process, which may be regarded as Co-Creation. The chapter analyses whether and how a process initiated by a public authority can be understood as part of the Co-Creation method defined in this book. The chapter places the reflection in the frame of the Creative Cities debate (Florida, Landry) and looks at whether and how Co-Creation can be used as a tool for inclusive Creative Cities strategies. The case-study reveals that local authorities can innovate by calling in artists for their specific creative ability, involving them as mediators, to help develop new ways of making the city, together with urban planners and residents.