Creative Futures in Regeneration
Creative Futures in regeneration asks whether the cultural communities that shaped Digbeth can stay, be heard and influence its future as more than £11 billion of investment reshapes the area.
Everything is at stake: years of community-building now sit alongside significant precarity.
This project convened a partnership of organisations that rarely share a room: Grand Union, St Basil’s, the BBC, Birmingham City Council, the West Midlands Combined Authority and Homes England. Through interviews, walking conversations, workshops and ecosystem mapping, the research showed what regeneration metrics tend to miss.
Affordable space, informal networks, social infrastructure and belonging hold Digbeth together. Policy recognises these assets. It does not yet protect them. The case study sets out how careful convening created space to test competing interests before positions hardened, and what this means for place-based practice in a devolved setting.
Independent convening gave “a more equal weight to the voices that are in the room."
Meet the Author
Dr Sara Hassan
Dr Sara Hassan is a Research Fellow II at City-REDI, the University of Birmingham’s City Region Economic Development Institute, and an AHRC Community Innovation Practitioner. Her research asks how cities can grow without losing the people and places that give them character, with a particular interest in planning, governance and the social value of cultural investment.