Places Change: Tactics for Cultural-led Place-making

Abstract

Since 2003, In Certain Places – based at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston – has encouraged new approaches to art, culture and urban development by offering new contexts through which artists can contribute to the form and functions of a place.

Our goal is to empower artists to explore situations in an organic manner, and through the lens of their choosing. For almost fifteen years, we have engaged artists and architects to develop temporary place interventions, fostering connections between individuals, organisations, businesses and institutions as part of the process of the creation of locally rooted work.

This roundtable event, ‘Places Change’, will look at a current example of the work of In Certain Places, and reveal the methods and strategies we use to try and develop new ways of seeing and thinking about particular places. Our focus in this session is West Cumbria, located on the coastal fringe of the far north west of England. Our work here is concerned to engage with the distinctive qualities and features of a particular place – its tangible and intangible cultural heritage, its unique history and topography, its location – that has become marginal in much more than the geographic sense. Its future, to some extent, depends on finding a unique sense of itself as a place with its own history and cultural distinctiveness that can stand against the imaginative power and draw of the Lake District, which probably supplies the image of Cumbria that most people of us hold in our minds.