Start-Up Chile is a program of the Chilean Government to attract world-class early stage entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Chile.

Public interest: The Medular Pavilion at the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture 2009-10 was a public pavilion to read and network during the event. It also hosted screenings of short documentaries on Dutch design. The aim of the biennale was to mobilize public and professional interest in issues related to urban design and architecture.

There are a variety of workshops available in areas such as dance, fashion, filmmaking, music production and art. They provide a range of different activities and are suitable for community days, children’s parties, inter-generational projects, after-school workshops, and even young offenders institutions. Street Style Surgery workshops help young people and the socially disadvantaged express themselves, explore their creative independence and learn about basic business strategy. The marketable skills they learn, including creativity, innovation, individualism, pride, confidence and entrepreneurialism, can be applied to all aspects of their own life in the future.

Street Style Surgery

Indeed, Walker's book documents how cities such as San Francisco have simplified bus services travelling along major routes.

In Sydney, this would mean a limited number of extremely high frequency bus routes travelling along roads like Anzac Parade and Parramatta Road, fed by services from adjoining suburbs that do not make it all the way into the city.

To encourage this form of interchanging, governments would need to offer a ticketing system that did not make people pay extra for transferring. That proved beyond the capabilities of the former administration.

And governments would also need to be prepared to wear the political pain of changing long-standing routes.

Mobility has an innate potency, Kronenburg believes. Movable environments are more dynamic than static ones, so why should architecture be so static? The idea that perhaps all buildings shouldn’t aspire to permanence represents a huge shift for architecture. Without that burden, architects, designers, builders and developers can take advantage of and implement current technologies faster. Architecture could be reusable, recyclable and sustainable. Recast in this way, it could better solve seemingly unsolvable problems. And still succeed in creating a sense of place.

MyColumbus – This app from the city of Columbus allows users to submit 3-1-1 service requests about abandoned vehicles, loud animals, damaged fire hydrants and uncollected trash.

You The Man – New York City’s transportation department developed this one to curb drunk driving. The app includes a blood-alcohol calculator, games to help determine the designated driver, and a mapping tool to find the nearest public transit from the bar.

myDelaware – From the town of Delaware, Ohio, this app allows users to send a photo of a code violation directly to the city. The report is tagged to the location, and users can request to receive updates on progress with their complaints via text message.

Citizens Connect – The city of Boston created this one to encourage residents to be the "eyes and ears" of their neighborhoods by flagging potholes, graffiti and other nuisances.  

SitOrSquat – This app – sponsored, naturally, by the toilet paper producer Charmin – helps citizens in multiple cities locate and share information on nearby public restrooms. It also identifies changing tables and handicap accessibility.

n cities with populations of 250,000 or more, the city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii, took top-billing in the 2011 Digital Cities Survey. One of their most innovative projects that helped them capture first place is Kokua Wireless, a free island-wise municipal Wi-Fi Internet service installed without taxpayer money.

Gordon Bruce, director and CIO of the city and county of Honolulu, said he was “at a total loss for words,” when word came down that Honolulu had finished first in the survey. The Kokua Wireless system was at first, just a simple idea he and a colleague thought up over coffee: take a bunch of antennae and ask businesses to put them up in their buildings and share their Internet.

In exchange, the businesses receive free advertising over the system. Every 30 minutes the Internet connection is refreshed to prevent illegal downloading, and when it boots back up, and the user is reconnected, they are immediately routed to the website of one of the businesses who are housing the antennae.

“The first day we installed 15 antennae and only one store owner said no,” Bruce explained. “We announced it and word of mouth helped expand it.”

Bruce said the system is now up to almost 200 nodes and the loose grassroots group that put together the wireless network is looking to start an “Adopt Your Node” program. This way, groups of people can be responsible for individual antennae if they lose connectivity or issues arise.

In addition to Kokua Wireless, Honolulu has been busy on a number of other technological fronts. Bruce helped organize the CIO Council of Hawaii where CIOs from the public and private sector across the entire state get together to collaborate on issues such as disaster planning and preparedness and system implementations.

Honolulu has also implemented an ERP system that has replaced individual financial, human resources and payroll systems. By consolidating into one overall application, the city saved $12 million and reports that it will save an additional $18-35 million annually going forward.

On the far side of Beijing, the historic city of Langfang, whose population is near 800,000, has hired the architects of international firm HOK and San Francisco’s CW Group to retrofit it using a technique known as biomimicry. Langfang Eco-Smart City will mimic the forests that once stood on the spot using tree-lined walkways and “blueway” canals to circulate and conserve water as the tree roots and wetlands once did. A network of streetcars will connect to the city’s dominant feature: a station on the new Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line.

China’s biggest-ticket green city lies farther east, on the outskirts of Tianjin, Beijing’s gritty answer to Newark, N.J., or Long Beach, Calif. As its tongue-twisting name implies, Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City is a joint venture between two nations—an audacious effort to build the clean-tech industry’s Silicon Valley, once again using an entire city as a laboratory. Slated to be larger than New Orleans, Eco-City will replace a brackish wasteland with a “Lifescape” and “Urbanscape” of terraced hills and high-rises, all comprised of swooping arabesques.

The goal with both Eco-City and its nascent cousin, Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, the planned home of 500,000 due to open in southern China in 2014, is to write an instruction manual for green cities that any bureaucrat can follow. In Knowledge City’s case, this translates into an obsession with a city’s “software”—not the digital code humming beneath its screens, but the policies, practices, ways and means of building and managing one.

The most ambitious instant city of all remains Songdo. Originally commissioned by the Korean government to lure multinationals from Singapore and Hong Kong, Songdo is less a Korean city than a Western one floating just offshore from Seoul. Eschewing the sci-fi trappings of Tianjin or Mentougou, Songdo’s architects at the international firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates chose to use the signatures of beloved cities—Savannah’s gardens, Venice’s canals—as building blocks. (The golf course is courtesy of Jack Nicklaus.) This model has proved wildly popular with middle- and upper-middle-class Koreans, who bought the first 1,600 apartments in a weekend scramble in May 2005. More than half of Songdo’s 65,000 envisioned residents already live there; the rest are expected to move in by 2016.

Certainly, the overall average population density of the United States — about 100 persons per square mile — is roughly half that of Western European countries, but the comparison is misguided. The contiguous 48 states extend about 3,000 miles east-west and about 1,000 miles north-south, for about 3 million square miles total. If federally owned land is excluded, as well as the sparsely populated states of the northern plains, the population density would rival Western Europe’s. We need to target many long-range planning and public policy efforts to where people live, not where they don’t. As we show in our research, two-thirds of the U.S. population lives on less than 20 percent of the privately owned land. The United States is not so much a collection of 50 states, more than 3,000 counties, or more than 30,000 cities and places as it is a federation of 23 megapolitan areas composed of networks of multiple large metropolitan areas. This is America’s new economic geography.

In a space as large as France and the Low Countries, the Netherlands and Belgium — considered some of the world’s most densely settled regions — America’s “megapolitan” areas house more than 2.5 times as many people. In fact, although they occupy only 17 percent of the contiguous 48 states’ land base, America’s megapolitan areas are more densely settled than Europe as a whole. Or the United Kingdom. Or Japan. Or India. The table below lists the 10 megapolitan regions we define in our work, the principal cities in each, and comparably dense industrialized countries.

 The 10 megaregions we propose would, as a group, form the world’s third most populous country, behind China and India. The sooner the United States recognizes that it has evolved into a nation of 20-some very densely settled economic engines, the better able it will be to sustain long-term economic development to mid-century and beyond.

The population of ten American megaclusters in 2010 and 2040 (projected) is compared to the population of industrialized countries in Europe, held constant at 2010 levels. The signs < and > indicate that megapolitan area density is within 50-200 persons per square mile of the comparable country, while no sign indicates the density is within 50 persons per square mile. [Table by the authors]

Nair said some them were now household names, and included: the Gautrain rapid rail network; the Newtown housing and cultural precinct in the Johannesburg CBD; the iconic Nelson Mandela Bridge; Constitution Hill in Braamfontein; the Kliptown heritage area in Soweto; the Cradle of Humankind in neighbouring Mogale City; and the Dinokeng project in the eastern part of the province.

"The mandate of Blue IQ is to identify projects with economic growth potential, to develop the appropriate business models and to manage it until it has reached sufficient financial maturity. Once this has been achieved, the projects are handed over to the appropriate provincial department or local government for its future management."

GrowNYC is a hands-on non-profit which improves New York City’s quality of life through environmental programs that transform communities block by block and empower all New Yorkers to secure a clean and healthy environment for future generations.

GrowNYC was originally created in 1970 as the Council on the Environment of New York City. Born out of the spirit of the first Earth Day, the Council was initially a policy-based organization, writing comprehensive reports about quality of life issues like air quality, traffic, and noise.

Over the past 40 years we've worked to become more engaged with New York City and its citizens. Whether it's operating the world famous Union Square Greenmarket, building a new community garden, teaching young people about the environment, or improving recycling awareness, if you're a New Yorker, GrowNYC is working near you!

OUR PROGRAMS

Greenmarket
54 farmers markets providing New York City with healthy, fresh, and local food

Office of Recycling Outreach & Education
Helping all New Yorkers recycle more and waste less

New Farmer Development Project
Training the next generation of immigrant farmers

Youthmarket
12 urban farm stands run by local youth, selling Greenmarket produce

Wholesale Greenmarket
Providing the freshest and most local food to wholesale customers

Open Space Greening
Building and supporting more than 70 community gardens

Grow to Learn NYC
The Citywide School Gardens Initiative

Environmental Education
Teaching New York City students about conservation and environmental science

School Recycling Champions
Teaching students, teachers, and schools how to recycle better

Learn It, Grow It, Eat It
Teaching kids the hows and whys of eating healthy and growing food

Ithaca Hours is a local currency system that promotes local economic strength and community self-reliance in ways which will support economic and social justice, ecology, community participation and human aspirations in and around Ithaca, New York. Ithaca Hours help to keep money local, building the Ithaca economy. It also builds community pride and connections. Over 900 participants publicly accept Ithaca HOURS for goods and services. Additionally some local employers and employees have agreed to pay or receive partial wages in Ithaca Hours, further continuing our goal of keeping money local.

While no show about civic works could ignore cultural context, Living As Form succeeded in understanding its physical place. Not only was the layout of the space (designed by Common Room) highly approachable, constructed with cinder blocks, foam cubes and neon lights, but awareness of the neighborhood also played a central role. The exhibition hosted a series of walking tours that explored the streets of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, and guides (activists and artists alike) pointed out a building’s physical feature or a contested property and encouraged walkers to listen to the soundscape or understand the complexity of SPURA, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, large parking lots adjacent to the market that currently sit as the largest undeveloped tract of city-owned land south of 96th Street. SPURA, in fact, was a focal point of the exhibition, where commissioned artist Bik Van der Pol installed large text that read “As Above / So Below” to call attention to the stalemated evolution of the area.

The New York World, an online publication just launched by the Columbia School of Journalism, is partnering with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show to do a crowd-sourced map that will look into exactly those questions. Each of the city’s POPS is marked on the map and given a number; citizens are encouraged to visit the places and report back on what they see, noting also what time of day and day of the week they went.

To judge by some early reports, not all of these “public” places are quite as public as they are supposed to be.

The Burton Street Community, founded in 1912, was a thriving black community that gave rise to prominent leaders, a successful agricultural fair and a minor-league baseball team. In 1960, the neighborhood was bisected by the building of Interstate 240. Since then, it has dealt with abandonment, disinvestment, drugs and crime. Throughout these hardships, a strong and active community has persisted. In 2008, faced with the threat of losing 20 more homes as a result of the expansion of the same highway that decimated it half a century before, the neighborhood became proactive. Instead of letting outside forces dictate their future, they decided to define and create the community they wanted to live in — and make it happen on their terms.

Strategy

‘Tech City’ is nice shorthand for London’s rapidly-growing tech scene, especially its nexus around Old St. What can policymakers do to help it along, if anything?

Eric set out his four main tasks:

1 / Stop Government messing things up

2 / Help big firms to come

3 / Help small firms to grow, e.g. through access to finance

4 / Promote ‘talent’.

Still quite vague, but the focus on micropolicies is wise. International evidence gives no clear steer on what Government’s role, and standard cluster policies have a very patchy record.  Rather than just ‘building Silicon Valley in the UK’, strategy needs a distinctive London flavour.

24 August – 22 January 2012

Designers in Residence is the annual residency programme, run by the Design Museum, which celebrates new and emerging design talent. Now in its fourth year, the residency supports the selected designers at an early stage of their career, allowing them to build on their current design practice and develop new or existing work. The Designers in Residence have been given a bursary to support the development of their career and guidance in creating a new piece of work for the exhibition.

Selected through an open-call for applications, the finalists were asked to respond to a brief to consider the idea of imperfection either in an object, environment or experience. See their remarkable designs in the gallery.

Designers in Residence 2011:
Hye-Yeon Park
Jade Folawiyo
Simon Hasan
Will Shannon

Central St Martins Innovation, as it will be known, will be attached to the college's existing innovation facility, which houses 40 researchers, says Dani Salvadore, head of enterprise and innovation at the college. 'Innovation has become increasingly important and we are now starting to develop work on innovation in its own right. One project, funded by the London Development Agency, looks at how we as a college interact with businesses. Innovation is something that is taught in business schools but not in the creative sector, so we are also launching an MA in innovation management,' says Salvadore.

The centre will provide services aimed at supporting and nurturing young, creative start-ups, and provide training courses on innovation, creativity and business by tapping into the college's other skill sets. It will also aim to serve as an 'ideas laboratory' by undertaking 'cutting-edge research projects' that bring together specialists from different disciplines. External influences will also be galvanised via debates, discussions and events around innovation. Funding for the new centre has been raised in two phases, Salvadore explains.

The first phase was largely self-funded, while the second phase was funded by a £1.8bn grant from the LDA.

If the college's move to King's Cross goes ahead in 2010, the centre will move too, she adds.

Salvadore says that, with the new centre, CSMI will continue to apply its learning on innovation to the wider needs of business, Government, the charity sector and the design industry.

If you are a designer who is looking to transition from a hobby to a career, choosing the right design school may be an important decision. Today, we have gathered a list of some excellent design schools from around the world. Each school listed has some amazing programs in several design disciplines.

Innovation is a tough thing to measure. To compile this list, BusinessWeek turned to an international panel of 22 expert design and brand consultants and academics from both business and design schools. We also tapped six forward-thinking companies with expertise in design or innovation strategy. We asked all to recommend interdisciplinary design and business programs with curricula they respect and graduates they prefer to hire.

Then we conducted interviews with professors, students, and alumni from the recommended colleges, looking for design programs that incorporate business strategy—and business programs that teach design as a tool for strategic advantage. Here's a sortable list of the 60 schools that made the grade.

What changed in Minneapolis was that local bike riders patiently lobbied for better conditions, slowly winning over elected officials and city staff. Also, as the number of bike riders steadily rose, motorists became accustomed to sharing the streets with us.

Other factors that boosted Minneapolis as a bike town include:

• Minneapolis was originally laid out for streetcars — like most cities outside the Sun Belt — which is a scale that works very well for bike riders.
• The high number of recreational bike riders here eventually translates into bike commuters.
• As a Mid-American city far from the glamour capitals of the coasts, biking has become part of our positive self-image. Even people who haven’t rode a bike in years cheered when Minneapolis was named America’s #1 biking city.

Since the 1970s Dutch planners have separated bicyclists from motor vehicles on most arterial streets, with impressive results. Women now make up 55 percent of two-wheel traffic and citizens over 55 ride in numbers slightly higher than the national average.

The Dutch also found that as the number of riders rises, their safety increases. Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Public Works Department, notes the same phenomenon — your chances of being in a car/bike crash in the city are 75 percent less than in 1993.

Mayor Rybak stressed that in these lean economic times, cities across the country need to be creative about how they spend transportation dollars. Big-ticket road engineering projects to move ever more cars must give way to more efficient projects that move people by a variety of means—including foot, bike, transit. “We need to get more use from all the streets we already have,” Rybak said.

Bike projects in the Twin Cities are not limited to Minneapolis. St. Paul and many suburbs are also making it easier for people to travel on two wheels and two feet. Steve Elkins, Transportation Chair of the Metropolitan Council, a government body that guides development throughout the region, highlighted his efforts as city council member in suburban Bloomington (home of the Mall of America) to push the idea of Complete Streets — meaning that roadways should serve walkers and bikers as well as cars. (Editor’s note: There’s also a Complete Streets national network and advocacy organization.)

Minneapolis also launched the first large-scale bikesharing sytem in U.S. — called Nice Ride — and boasts arguably the nation’s finest network of off-street bicycle trails. It was chosen as one of four pilot projects for the federal Non-Motorized Transportation Program, which aims to shift a share of commuters out of cars and onto bikes or foot.

“Biking has become a huge part of what we are,” Mayor RT Rybak declared to a delegation of transportation leaders from Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, on a Minneapolis tour sponsored by the Bikes Belong Foundation. “It’s an economical way to get around town, and many times it’s the fastest. I frequently take a bike from city hall across downtown to meetings.”

This year the city is adding 57 new miles of bikeways to the 127 miles already built. An additional 183 miles are planned over the next twenty years.

It's true that we expect this kind of thing from wealthy Nordic countries, with their tiny populations and social democracies intact. But what about the UK, which is altogether bigger and messier? With our government currently casting around for ideas, it's no wonder that it looked at Sitra. In London last month – almost unnoticed in the bustle of the London design festival – Sitra launched a book entitled In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change. Afterwards, the authors paid a visit to the cabinet office, where they'd been invited to explain the ideas behind strategic design. After all, one of the biggest problems facing the UK government (indeed, any government) is the gap between policy and how it's realised. You can reform the health service all you like, but if a patient still has a seven-hour wait to be seen at the hospital, the system is failing.

Often, policies that look effective on paper have perverse outcomes. Putting a cap on fishing quotas has resulted in fishermen dumping tonnes of dead fish back into the water. And allowing universities to charge "up to" £9,000 in tuition fees has led to most of them charging full price, for fear of looking second-rate. These outcomes are failures of the policy implementation process. Much more successful examples would be London Underground's Oyster card system or the city's bike hire scheme – both, perhaps not coincidentally, systems where designers kept the user experience in mind all along.

One of the problems is that politicians deal in general principles and then ask bureaucrats to fill in the details. This is problematic when an issue spans multiple departments and funding structures, as environmental issues often do. Who is charged with seeing the process through from the initial idea to the final goal? This is something designers are practiced at. At the SDU, they describe this as a process of "stewardship". "Good designers and architects are very skilled at manoeuvring a team from a sketch to an outcome without losing sight of the vision along the way," says Dan Hill, who joined the SDU from the engineering and design consultancy Arup.

OPEN: New Affordable Spaces for Artists on Oxford Street

20 October 2011

The City of Sydney is calling artists, writers and other creative enterprises to set-up on Oxford Street, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore announced today.

 

Sixteen under-utilised spaces on Oxford St will be offered to creative enterprises at affordable rates and on short-term agreements, in a bid to provide more opportunities to our creative talent and make it a more interesting place to live, visit and shop.

 

Expressions of Interest (EOI) to occupy the vacant spaces, which range in size from 48sqm to 130sqm, will remain open until 9 November.

 

"Making these spaces available, at lower rents and specifically for artists and creative enterprises is about bringing a bohemian feel back to the strip," Ms Moore said.

 

"If you are a small, creative business, a start-up or an artist collective and could do with a new space, we want to hear from you.

 

"The best thing about this project is that instead of sitting vacant, these spaces will be put to good use by the creative sector, offering new, bespoke products and changing the mix on the strip."

 

Short-term leases of six months will be offered before Christmas, with opportunities to extend for a further six months while other long-term activation projects for the precinct are rolled out.

 

The City is also seeking an innovative pop-up café or retail concept to activate a vacant property and outdoor area in Oxford Square and the ground floor of 1A Burton Street, Darlinghurst.

 

Other work being done on the strip includes:

 

• Creating more attractive shopfronts on Council properties along Oxford and Foley Streets;
• Activating unusual vacant spaces such as blank walls, doorways and alcoves with public art and other creative projects;
• Reviewing cleansing and waste services to improve the appearance of footpaths and streets; and
• Undertaking feasibility studies into the conversion of three other vacant buildings.

The two former organisations Norwegian Association of Advertising Agencies and Creative Forum have merged their operations in order to strengthen the Norwegian agencies’ creative focus (January 2003).

The merged association has been named Association for Creative, Commercial Communication, in Norwegian: Kreativt Forum. The association’s vision is to create the world’s leading environment for creative, commercial communication. The Board consists of representatives from the leading Norwegian agencies.

Ethical Guidelines

Kreativt Forum has established ethical standards to which members adhere when designing advertisements. The Committee on Ethics in Kreativt Forum works to maintain high ethical standards within the trade through advisory statements to the forum’s board and membership. The Review Board in Kreativt Forum process cases of alleged violations of association rules.

Kreativt Forum’s skills training programme

In order to update and maintain a high level of professional competency, Kreativt Forum arrange training programmes in legal aspects for marketing, media counselling, brand management and project management. The association works to assimilate knowledge from other professional groups, to adopt new impulses and to provide alternative perspectives on interesting and current themes within the industry. Two fora for networking and skills training have been established: Account Planning group Norway and Account Directors group. For many years, Kreativt Forum has collaborated closely with the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH). In the spring of 2002, we also began a cooperative venture with the University of Oslo in order to develop a trade-related study programme within the humanities.

By playing the ‘connector’ role Watershed has developed to be a public facing cultural and creative economy hub for Bristol city region with strong networks amplified through the cultural programme. It is the open cultural approach combined with wide public engagement and a strong showcasing ethos which has enabled Watershed to leverage its arts profile to become a trusted connector for the Bristol city region.

“Watershed is a prime example of a highly connected, flexible, porous piece of cultural and creative infrastructure, of which there are too few examples. Watershed is more than just an arts cinema. It is at once a cultural centre, a business broker, a social networker, a research and innovation facility, a café/bar, and a cultural tourist attraction.”

UK Creative Economy Programme

Read more information on Watershedʼs role in the cultural and creative economy.

History

The story of Watershed is one of both idealism and pragmatism:

In the 1970s an Arts Centre built by enthusiasts in King Square Bristol became the first of the British Film Institute’s Regional Film Theatres. The founders ran the venue with dedication and passion, but the building was in a state of disrepair and due to a lack of funding its future was uncertain.

In the early 1980s, the City was looking to regenerate the derelict harbourside area. In partnership with the British Film Institute, JT Group, and Bristol City Council, funding was secured to expand and relocate the Arts Centre into Watershed’s current home with a new focus on media – particularly film and photography.

The old sheds circa 1980

Watershed opened its doors in 1982 and declared itself to be ‘Britain’s First Media Centre’ seeking to capture and contextualise the shift in media at the point when satellite TV and Channel 4 were starting up.

Key to our continued success was a £3.5 million Capital Development investment programme (funded through Arts Council Lottery) completed in 2005 which enabled us to meet the growing demands of our audiences and partners.  

While the cinemas bring world moving image culture to local audiences, our online platform dshed.net enables us to project local talent to the world, showcasing what happens in the building and in Bristol to a wider audience.

Since those early days in 1982 the organisation has changed and evolved but the original sense of being at the cutting edge has remained central to our DNA.

It’s not always been easy but the fact that we are still thriving owes much to our many supporters, the people who love what we do and have created the Watershed community.

Further reading

Steve Wright, Arts Editor of Venue Magazine, interviews Dick Penny, Managing Director, on Watershed’s digital development over the years.
http://dshed.net/articles/dshed-past-present-future

However, with the economic crisis, plus through more developed critical thinking, many are calling for a re-think on the role and value of the Creative Economy and for a refreshed approach to policy and strategy.

Therefore Enterprise Estonia together with Creative Estonia, Estonian Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications is organizing this major international conference which will call for a paradigm shift in the way the Creative Economy is understood and supported.

With a dynamic mix of speakers from all over the world, the conference will explore how to develop creative entrepreneurship to improve innovation and competitiveness. This will focus on entrepreneurship across the arts, in organisations and institutions, and across clusters and networks of creative businesses.

Conference program is produced and moderated by leading international creative economy expert, Tom Fleming.

The conference will have five main work streams:

• Creative Talent. This will focus on the role of the education sector in nurturing creative talent. The post crisis creative economy requires a mix of skills and competencies, both within and outside the Creative Economy. Here there is a need to reconceptualise what we mean by a ‘creative education’ and develop new progressive models to ensure creativity is a pervasive asset across society.
• The Creative Economy - Driving Innovation and competitiveness across the economy. This will explore the practical tools for maximising innovation in creative businesses and identify how to connect creative businesses to the wider innovation ecosystem. It will also explore the relationship between creative businesses and cultural tourism.
• Creative Infrastructure for a New Age. This will develop new thinking on the types of infrastructure required to deliver innovation and growth across the Creative Economy. New models for arts and cultural infrastructure, workspace, networks and a range of support services will be introduced and tested. The ongoing impact of digitisation will be featured.
• Creative Cities and Regions. This will reflect on how some cities and regions have successfully nurtured sustainable and resilient creative economies, while others have struggled. It will identify how creative entrepreneurs are operating to change cities and regions after the downturn. It will anticipate the role of the Creative Economy in new age of city-making and regional development.
• Creative Leadership. This will re-frame the policy approach to the Creative Economy. It will explore how best to connect agendas in arts, culture, economy, community and education so that holistic yet actionable Creative Economy policy can be established. This will culminate in a major outcome for the conference: the Tallinn Manifesto for the Creative Economy.

Dutch star-designer Marcel Wanders revamped this old school in the Jordaan into a cutting-edge eco-system for creatives and social entrepreneurs and named it the Westerhuis.

Inside is, among other things, The Hub, the Amsterdam home of the international network of co-working spaces. Offering flex-office services for independents and freelancers, The Hub, aside from providing Internet, office space and the cool address, perhaps most importantly puts people in touch with like-minded peers, fostering an international network for social and creative entrepreneurs.

The former school still boasts huge windows and the eco-conscious Hubbers have added sustainable furniture and a color-coded library. The time-based membership model means that rates start at a recession-friendly €20, so what are you waiting for, choose your desk and get to (net)work.

BUSINESS college is set to become the North-East’s first Studio School, offering work and life skills training to hundreds of teenagers.

The Durham Federation school has secured £650,000 in Government funding to transform unused buildings at its Durham Community Business College, in Ushaw Moor, near Durham, into one of only a handful of Studio Schools being piloted across the country.

The concept, pioneered by the Studio Schools Trust based on research from New York and Australia, involves creating small ‘schools within schools’, where up to 300 youngsters aged 14 to 19 get class- and work-based training to prepare them for employment.

Leaders hope DCBC’s Studio School will offer IT, business studies, construction and engineering and land-based courses to 300 extra teenagers by 2015, beginning with 30-40 in September.

Youngsters will still study the national curriculum but will do more work experience.

The Arts and Creative Economy (ACE) Team can advise you about almost anything to do with the arts and creativity. They can help you with your creative activities and businesses. Artistic skill and talent is at the heart of what they do - and if they cannot help you, they will direct you to someone who can.

Arts and creativity include designer fashion, film, video, music, dance, drama, creative writing, sculpture, painting, photography, graffiti art, computer animation and a whole lot more.

For example, if you want advice about how to plan an event or arts activity, where arts clubs are in your area, how to raise money to do an arts project or how to become a successful working artist or designer, the ACE Team will be able to help.

What the ACE Team does

• Provides information and advice.
• Helps groups and organisations to develop and manage arts projects.
• Manages training and skills opportunities for artists and anyone else who wants to be involved in the arts and creative economy.
• Co-ordinates networks which provide opportunities for creative practitioners and organisations to share knowledge and expertise.
• Administers grants - the Creative Partners Investment Programme, Arts in the Neighbourhood grants and Community Events. The team also co-ordinates the council's comments on all West Yorkshire Grants applications and applications from (or affecting) Kirklees which are made to Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts programme.
• Manages festivals and events such as Carnival, A World Together, Festival of Light, Concerts in the Park and Bump n' Bounce. Many of these are delivered in partnership with other council services or community organisations.
• Manages the orchestral, organ and lunchtime concerts at Huddersfield and Dewsbury Town Halls.
• Manages a programme of brass band concerts in parks and museums.
• Manages creative consultation projects.
• Develops advocacy and marketing initiatives to raise the profile of the arts and creative economy in Kirklees to potential investors and consumers regionally, nationally and internationally.
• Facilitates the production of relevant strategies.

The studio spaces of Bureau Broedplaatsen range from sheds and old school buildings, to spaces under bridges. Hangars and school buildings are perfect for painters and sculptors, who need light for their work. Darker spaces, like those under bridges, make great rehearsal rooms for musicians.

Because working space in the city is becoming increasingly scarce, while there are plenty of bridges offering much potential space beneath them, Bureau Broedplaatsen is researching to see whether it can profitably exploit such spaces. This seems to be the case, and Bureau Broedplaatsen is keen to lead the way. The office is also working with neighbouring municipalities in order to be able to continue to provide large working spaces, which are sometimes difficult to find in Amsterdam itself.

New York City is about to experience a new kind of democracy. Over the next several months, we will undertake an exciting initiative to put budgeting decisions directly in the hands of the people those decisions will impact most – the residents of our districts.

Participatory budgeting is grassroots democracy at its best. Residents of four diverse City Council districts from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, will come together to decide what to do with the districts' capital funding budget, the part of the budget that is used to repair streets, improve parks, buy school technology, or build bike lanes. Community members will exchange and debate ideas, work together to turn ideas into project proposals, and then decide what ideas get funded at the ballot box. The process will make budgeting more transparent and accessible. It will open up participation to people who have never been involved before. And it will make budgeting more effective, because who knows better what is needed in our communities than the people who live there?