REFLECTIONS

Active listener reflections from the 10th Annual Convening of the Global Cultural Districts Network (GCDN) in Athens, May 2024. By Charles Landry , Co-founder, Creative Bureaucracy Festival

Listening can be a deep experience; it triggers a 360-degree perspective with at times unexpected results. You are there alone with your mind, yet it is not still, thoughts seep in, but most importantly there are the sounds of other people talking. I, quiet to the outside world, but inside there was a scramble of scattered thoughts attempting to cohere.

But then irony of ironies — just as the collective message from our convening was emerging: Listen to the unheard voices: really hear and viscerally feel that unheard person when you are listening — I, the old European guy actively listening, lost my voice. Was this an emblematic message from the spirits? Yes, say I, it is now time for others to be heard, because everything has a meaning.

The listening we are talking about is not of the trivial kind. It includes the dead, who are now only soil. At times simply scattered carelessly, or at other times in sacred places in Asia, to Africa to the Americas – slaughtered, enslaved and forgotten. Once you know their stories, tears can well, the memories hurt and for those closely connected, it can feel like a stab in the heart. Yet, those telling us these horrific stories of their ancestors at our convening were gentle, spoke poetically and were generous of spirit.

Such big issues gave another layer of significance to our convening and what a cultural district is and can be. You can think of the districts as typologies or as settings and gathering places for intent, purpose, activity and conversation. Whatever the origin of the district – just being there because of history, or developed by adaptive reuse, being a cluster of existing cultural institutions or helicoptered in from the sky – it is the philosophy that is key.

Here we see how much the GCDN convenings over the last decade have become richer, more engaged, more concerned to do the right thing and to address the questions that really matter, such as: Where is my voice and where are the diversities? Where do I belong in a nomadic world? Am I a shaper and co-creator of my evolving environment? Can we create a just society? Am I a friend to nature?

Perhaps the strongest encapsulating theme was to foster the dialogue of difference and where better to hold that conversation than in Athens where the GCDN theme was centred around the agora.

Agora – the gathering place – and in the room convening together there was an equivalent of 2,500 years of experience in thinking about the big questions and especially about what makes a space a place. And what is the difference? A space becomes a place when it is imbued with significance and meaning. That happens when the varied activities and discussions have these qualities – coincidentally ones that reflect the aims of cultural policy at its best. They all start with the letter E. They encourage and emphasise in essence, helping us to become enlightened, enabling expression, providing experience, but also entertainment as well as fostering employability and giving employment opportunities – and thus generating extensive effects.

Those places then are places of anchorage and distinctiveness, communication and conversation, ambition and opportunity, nurturing and nourishment, aspiration and inspiration. Easy to say, difficult to create.

In this way a 2,500-year idea – the agora – can come to life in contemporary times. In a time of endless forgetting, this old idea is fresh so it can work its magic. It is relevant, indeed urgent, through the ages as well as cross culturally whatever name you give it across the globe.

Today the agora is tangible and intangible. The physical probably has more impact, but that agora exists too in virtual space as part of the public sphere of discussion including the various media. And here to be a good agora we need rules of engagement, such as having respect from which trust can grow. Then the agora truly becomes a place to gather, to converse, to explore, to trade ideas, to see through the eyes of the other and to have this dialogue of difference.

The difference between conviviality and convivencia is key. The former is the quality of being gathered together and being friendly, whereas the latter – the Portuguese version – denotes more co-existence like in a family where you need to get along but don’t need to like or love each other. And this is what cities are like. It reflects good urbanity: the art of living together in our differences. Here the physical is the canvas onto which the familiar and unfamiliar coalesce and where in the endless small encounters that make up community and the occasional chance encounter can occur.

As isolated islands, cultural districts prefigure what great city-making can be. They are a model at their best and so they present a message to the future. And districts driven by heritage are equally important as the past and the future are great partners.

But there is so much to do in responding to the great yearning felt in this convening to connect and to explore more of what we share than what divides us, so as to address those intractable problems we face, but crucially to implement solutions.

So where next?

Step one: The great unlearning – once we have understood that a business-as-usual approach will not get us to where we need to ‘unlearn and reimagine’.

Step two: Assess what blocks change, such as challenging vested and entrenched interests, bad ideas (such as “the market is always right”), lack of trust or systemic rigidity. What triggers change? A crisis handled well as well as an ethos, a set of principles, a mission plus personal qualities like courage or tenacity. Yet, most importantly it is the real, implemented and lived project that embeds good principles that makes a difference and creates learning and the confidence to repeat and scale up. Orchestration is the key that draws together all the catalytic levers, otherwise the prescription is just a list.

Step three: Generate new levels of imagination, such as rethinking innovative finance mechanisms that foster the common good such as addressing housing affordability or more inclusive procurement schemes that bring in a wider range of players to deliver services.

Finally, the message from the convening was: Stay human, be open and go for it.

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