Civic Imaginary Partnerships: Cultures of participation and local decision making

In the context of widening inequality and declining trust in democracy, a renewed political attention to place has revealed the need for new methods to understand community aspirations and ideas. Place-based policy often claims to build community capacity, enhance social capital and strengthen neighbourhood bonds, outcomes which are difficult to evidence by traditional approaches and metrics, and need critical investigation. Policymakers need new ways to understand the lived impacts of place and the relational, felt experiences of policy interventions. This fellowship will foster new Civic Imaginary Partnerships, collaborative, interdisciplinary hubs that blend policy-facing research with grassroots creative practice. Civic imaginaries are the ways that people think, feel and dream about the futures of their places. Researching civic imaginaries creates a vocabulary and a geographically specific process to 'work out' and make tangible these relational and felt forces of place.

The fellowship will combine theory, practice and policy through the multi-site investigations of four civic challenges: i) Understanding and improving voter engagement; ii) Understanding and improving engagement with local services and public spaces; iii) Understanding and improving public-private place-making; iv) Understanding the lived experience of "successful" community action, including community-led climate initiatives. Phase 1 will map and review the paradigms, goals and methods of place-based interventions since 2016, through desk research, documentary analysis and interviewing of key informants. It will survey current academic approaches to understanding civic culture in the UK and map contemporary community-led development and international civic networks. Phase 2 employs long-term ethnographic fieldwork as its main methodological approach, with participant observation in four case neighbourhoods. This will involve living alongside participants to understand the civic challenges and cultures of participation from their point of view. We will co-create activities with partners and stakeholders, developing a model for civic imaginary partnerships that can encompass a range of civic challenges and place typologies. In Phase 3 we will test and refine the model with policy partners and collaborators to produce a new model for policymakers, and a scalable, transferable framework to support future place-based policy.

The fellowship draws on a unique combination of nationwide partners, including a government department, four local authorities and four community-based social enterprises. It will synthesise learning from national and international models to develop an innovative, multi-disciplinary approach that advances understanding about participation and local decision making. It will produce a combination of traditional academic outputs, policy resources and innovative artistic interventions. Drawing on the fellow's experience as a creative director-turned academic, the fellowship will experiment with different artistic forms to co-produce four large-scale works in response to the research findings. We will also co-produce a high-quality film that explores the value of imaginative practice in addressing civic challenges. These will enable us to enrich audiences' understandings of the civic imagination's multiple affects, resonances and contradictions and evidence place-based policy impacts directly to policymakers. We will also produce an informational project website and a national symposium. Academic outputs will advance new theories of the civic imaginary for a UK context, new understandings of the lived experience of place-based policy interventions, and new ways to lead place-based research. The Fellowship will enable the PI to grow as leader in the experimentation of new cross-disciplinary methods and place-based policy research.