Audience Development and Creative Place-making: towards common ground?

"How do you see the future of audience development?"

This question was asked to me in the sign-up form of a seminar for Finnish audience development professionals. Hesitantly I wrote: "audience development's common ground with place-making" and quickly hit Enter, before I would change my mind. No, that’s not really a proper sentence, just some words that came fumbling from the gut. Yet somehow, I felt it made sense. This post is an effort to dig a bit deeper and explore this gut feeling. 

Communities, not audiences

Arts organisations should move away from the focus on audience (yleisö in Finnish) and put the focus on community (yhteisö), claims author Doug Borwick, in his book Engage Now! A Guide to Making the Arts Indispensable. The future of the arts, he proclaimed in 2015, lies in building communities, not audiences. While Borwick's writings are rooted in the very different cultural setting of the USA, many of the same societal evolutions that he describes are also happening in Finland. And the change that he envisioned is also actually taking place, I believe.

Stating that the relevance and perceived value of art is decreasing in society (e.g. through ageing audiences), Borwick proposes a re-examination of arts organisations’ missions. Instead of outsourcing the connection to the outside world to separate outreach projects, the arts organisation's core and intention should shift dramatically from presenting the art itself to the arts’ interaction with people. “A particularly important element of arts missions for the twenty-first century is the degree of ‘local focus’ in artistic and other programmatic choices. (…) To connect with the community, an intent to be local must be incorporated in all planning.” Making the comparison with wine production, Borwick states that community engagement should “reflect the wisdom of the region”, noting that the degree to which an arts organisation reflects its environment can also be an element of artistic excellence. “What would a Minnesotan orchestra look like? (…) The answer is found in dialogue with the community.”

Long-term, not short-term

Having worked on a few audience development projects, what often bothers me in them is their short ‘project’ nature. Too often, projects often keep standing alone as an experiment without follow-up, without integration in a bigger picture. The long-term view is missing and the sustainability of what was achieved remains unknown. Even though I previously argued that audience development in Finland is maturing, I feel it's not a long-term project yet. At least not from the community's point of view.

What if an arts organisation truly engages itself to adopt a certain community’s goal of creating a better environment for them? To make the community's long-term goal part of the arts organisation's mission?

Towards creative place-making

I think in Finland, when we talk about community engagement, we are most often talking about engaging minority communities - foreigners, elderly, people with a handicap. Borwick on the other hand mostly talks about rooting in local communities. 

Much related to Borwick's plea to make the arts serve local communities, is the practice of creative place-making: the practice of planning, improving and taking care of public places in a bottom-up manner. This methodology is rooted in urban design and activism. Place-making brings a local community together to develop a public space into the nicest and most useful space possible for that particular community by experimenting. Stuff that top-down city planners wouldn't think of. During the process, the identity of that place and community crystallise and come closer together. The involvement of the local community also gives it a very sustainable ground: people will feel more ownership and take care of what they plan themselves, and in turn the community is strengthened as well. The arts can play a role in this process, and then it's referred to as 'creative' placemaking.

I feel like the field of audience development and the practice of placemaking have developed separately and in different circles, even though the latter one could enrich audience development in communities so much. In Finland the best-known place-making facilitator is Helsinki Urban Art.

The common interest of creative placemaking and outreach projects is a certain local community. The big difference between them is their end goal: the first one aims to create or improve a place for that community, the latter one aims to create an audience - it feels a bit like a hidden agenda somehow, and that's not a nice feeling. How about if we would adapt to the community’s need instead of the arts organisation’s need, like Borwick argues? 

The concept of cultural well-being (kulttuurihyvinvointi) is a kind of bridge between outreach and creative placemaking. Art can imagine, heal, bring people together, grow or deepen roots, show new perspectives, give new energy. Art can also improve people's physical environments. For example the Finnish innovation fund Sitra points out that part-taking in art activities can enrich an area's diversity, improve its comfort and safety. 

Let's connect the dots: this is in fact describing a widely developed practice in urban activist circles, called creative place-making. Outreach can learn from this practice. It's the same thing, just from another perspective.  

It implies that the work ahead for an arts organisation is a structured, long-term framework for a series of experiments and cultural actions, like place-making. A real strategic cooperation with different communities. 

So what would a musical in Pihlajamäki look like?

In the coming weeks I want to dedicate a few posts to discuss some outreach cases which happened in collaboration with Helsinki city, the so-called "Helsingin malli". Stay tuned.