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As a packaging device for policies and initiatives seeking to reduce inequalities of wealth and cultural access in inner cities, how valuable a concept are cultural quarters? Cany Ash examines the concept with reference to a current project to create artist studios in a redundant bus garage in Leicester.

We are currently building the core of a creative industries quarter in Leicester city centre. Its purpose is to provide interesting and affordable working space for creative businesses and thereby a critical mass of activity which will kick-start the cultural quarter of St George?s. It?s an old area which boomed with the textile industry when for a brief period around the turn of the last century Leicester was the richest city in the empire. Now many of its buildings are redundant and empty, awaiting new uses.

We found the notion of inventing a cultural industries quarter from scratch fairly strange. In other places these things have grown like mushrooms off old wood in organic and mysterious ways. We thought of stagnated Berlin where space was almost free, Temple Bar in Dublin coming through after being blighted by the threat of a mega bus station, Bennie Gray?s Custard Factory miracle in Birmingham, the Buddhist alternative lifestyles in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, even back to the vibrant, diverse Covent Garden of the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the vegetable market.

Our clients at Leicester City Council want to harness the forces of regeneration to raise the intensity of cultural activity in the city. The approach is to attack the problem energetically and simultaneously on a local and international level. While an internationally known architect Will Allsop is doing the master planning for the city and Rafael Viñoly, based in New York, was chosen to design the performing arts complex, a great deal of local thinking has gone into the cultural quarter project and the brief for our project, called CHIC, short for Cultural Heartlands Incubator Centre.

Cultural access in inner cities

Cultural quarters are a fairly recent concept. The Council of Europe between 1993 and 1996 ran a Europe-wide research project called ?Culture and Districts? asking 11 cities ? Athens, Bilbao, Budapest, Copenhagen, Liverpool, Marseilles, Munich, Prague, Sofia, Turin and Vienna ? to look at two different types of run-down area where cultural activity could be intensified: one in the city centre and one set on the urban fringes. This sampling, through its breadth and serious collection of qualitative as well as quantitative data, was to be very influential, and formed a much needed bridge between local planning authorities and local arts bodies of all sizes. The emphasis was laid on the particularity and diversity of these city quarters in the case studies and it meant that local authorities could import good ideas without the sense that they were indulging in a copycat fad.

Originally promulgated or verbally coined at least by American urban theorist Michael Porter in the 1980s, this idea that government could intervene creatively in the very complex and volatile business of micro-regeneration was very attractive to cities buffeted by the closure of traditional industries and left with the chore of bolstering up increasingly dingy and inactive neighbourhoods. The conventional commercial developers? model for regeneration offered these cities little: frequently involving the destruction of large chunks of urban fabric which were the natural habitats of shaky, start-up businesses. Alternative models were in the 1980s seen as babyish or were tokenistically given decorative functions in retained buildings to add character to the streetscape.

The pavement café culture ideal of the 1980s was a powerful urban concept in the UK, however strangely thin that thinking looks now. It was only gradually that the vital importance of a living and working community and not just a transient consuming population was realised. Various experiments in promoting a richer urban life like pedestrianising streets were not working, often killing them off entirely in the process. For councils the activity that made them most popular was the remodelling of housing estates by shutting down some of the more permeable grey areas in the public realm, and so reinforcing the lines of poverty and post-war zoning.

Lifestyle and culture

Before the advent of ?cultural quarters? and ?cultural industry quarters? (the terms are often used interchangeably), it was not the business of planners and policy-makers to know very much about the particularity of what went on behind the façades. Zoning was too clunky a tool for promoting particular types of activity. This has all changed now because cities are fiercely competitive. They want to both attract and keep the creative, self-motivated people whose output may be small in raw economic terms, but whose aspirations and lifestyles contribute to the image of the city.

In the documents on ?Culture and Districts? there is a constant refrain suggesting that the word culture is always to be understood in its widest possible context: to extend beyond the traditional fields of literature, visual arts and performance to include ?activities of the amateur type related to the craft industry, design, fashion and new media and music?. These activities are still seen by many as impure forms of culture: but there is now an attempt to be inclusive, often motivated (if this is not too cynical) by the desire to share in the growing powerbase and economic success of so-called popular culture.

Architectural issues

Graduates need to be persuaded to stay in Leicester because it is a lively expanding centre for creative entrepreneurs. At the same time a diverse range of artists and organisations working across the city also need a reason to invest energy and time creating a new quarter. So they need good space at the right price. But this in itself is not enough. Over and above this, two specifically architectural issues were crucially important to the CHIC project:
? We have designed CHIC to offer shortcuts through the city. A natural extension to the public realm of the street with walk-through café and courtyard for events night and day.
? We have created a strong architectural frame which people can customise and brand according to their own needs. The architecture will support their creative input to their environment.

By early 2004 sixty or so small businesses and individuals will be busy in an exciting new space right in the middle of town. Their energy and enthusiasm and creativity will play a key part in revitalising the whole St George?s quarter of Leicester.

Cany Ash is a partner at Ash Sakula Architects. t: 020 7837 9735; e: cany@ashak.com