Eleven - A capacious approach to creative citizenship:implications for policy

Summary

In the first ten chapters of this book, we have explained how the concept of the creative citizen emerged within our research project and how it was subsequently explored, in conceptual and empirical fashion, through co-creative case studies. The concept, we believe, has shed timely light upon the important relationship between co-created civic activities of many kinds and a phalanx of digital communications technologies now in widespread use, but still rapidly evolving. Our central research question asked: how does creative citizenship generate value for communities within a changing media landscape and how can this pursuit of value be intensified, propagated and sustained? The question invites, among other things, some reflection on policy approaches relevant to creative citizenship open to governments and other bodies. This is the focus of what now follows.

One set of policy-relevant answers to the research question has already been captured in chapters one to ten, so first we summarise this chapter-by-chapter narrative, before moving on to more overarching points. Here we encounter the challenge that creative citizenship is such a wide-ranging concept that there is scarcely an area of mainstream political debate to which it is not relevant. We test the interface between our own work and mainstream political thinking by entering into conversation with four leading UK political think tanks; this discussion highlights commonalities and differences between our perspectives (academics and communities) and theirs (policy thinkers). We then provide some closing thoughts on some of the policy concerns, which have been prominent in the Creative Citizen project, namely economic wellbeing, education, city planning/urban development and journalism.

Summary

(Chapter 1) Politically, the idea of creative citizenship emerges through mainstream European and American ‘communitarian thinking’ in centre-left and centre-right politics around the turn of the millennium. It acquires urgency in the political circumstances that followed the 2008 banking crisis, which aggravated a much-diagnosed crisis of confidence in mainstream political participation and within other important civic and commercial institutions. We consider creative citizenship's many intersections with global digital media and other affordances of an increasingly mobile-accessed and globally accessible internet. We explain the title of this book with reference to the imaginative, poetic and politically charged epic work of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Prometheus Unbound.