New Ground

Sensory Trust has been collaborating on a project led by the Eden Project to develop events and community narratives as a focus of change in peripheral regions such as Cornwall that have lost their defining industries. In a short space of time Cornwall has seen the collapse of all its major traditional industries, but the loss of mining is arguably the most profound. Outside of the fishing villages, mining has been seen as the activity and industry that defined the county for thousands of years.

The project partners believe that effective regeneration of areas that have seen the collapse of defining industries should be lead by a sophisticated understanding of community narratives rather than a focus on the built infrastructure and the attraction and retention of new businesses. Our past lives on in living communities, and in the absence of a vibrant contemporary purpose heritage takes on special importance. The most advanced thinking about the role of heritage in our lives suggests its value lies in its ability to inform and contextualise the present. By doing so it gives us the vision and the cohesion we need to face the future. In this sense heritage is seen as an “accessible narrative” open to and legible by all of the community (English Heritage, 2004, “People and Places – a response to Government and the Value of Culture”).

The reality on the ground falls far short of this vision. Our environments are rarely legible in this way; the reality of community engagement with them is often confused. Our environments may remind us of the past, but they are ineffective at setting a context for change. In Cornish mining towns such as Camborne and Redruth, there seems to be two main fates for the physical heritage: it is either swept away and replaced by uses with no link to memory or history, or converted into “heritage tourism sites”. There are many traps in this conversion, not least that it is usually done in ways that freeze the sites and divorce them from a continued narrative with the community. Neither approach honours and remembers the past in a way that provides a focus for moving forward, transformation and change.

New Ground explores the role of cultural events and community narratives as a focus of change in peripheral regions that have lost their defining industries. In this model '”culture lead regeneration” does not mean encouraging creative industries to flourish in an area, it refers to the use of cultural activities as a tool for making more explicit and supporting the shift in community narrative. There is increasing evidence that internal narrative plays a key role in our ability to recover from catastrophic events such as bereavement or traumatic illness. Processes such as Griefwork and exploratory work with narrative as a health care tool explicitly reflect this. In many ways this is true of communities as well as individuals. The internal narrative of a community is rarely captured or articulated, but cultural activities reflect and dialogue with this narrative. The project’s hypothesis is that cultural activities can also be the focus of a transformation of that narrative, embodying the equivalent of Griefwork at a community level.

Collaborators

The Eden Project's role as lead organisation is based on its identity as a regeneration site and its growing experience of how to use cultural activities and different methods of public engagement as a focus for exploring and transforming society's narratives. The project builds on and extends a number of existing alliances. Each organisation involved in New Ground has been independently developing a series of original events and activities around this theme -working also with local communities.

Along with Sensory Trust, the organisations are:

Wildworks

An internationally significant Cornish theatre company specialising in large-scale, landscape-based works that involve communities in both development and performance. The setting for the work is usually places that have great historical resonance for the communities, but are currently seen as without use. Projects explore the transformational power of theatre, addressing themes that are both epic and intimate, human stories that can touch audiences across barriers of language, age and nationality.

Post Mining Alliance

A team within Eden Project focused on developing and promoting original grass-root partnerships and projects that have addressed the “problem” of mining legacy by harnessing creativity and innovation.

Health Complexity Group

A multidisciplinary team based within Peninsula Medical School, whose theoretical interests focus on understanding processes of change in health and social care communities and in urban and social regeneration. Their work is informed by the principles of complexity theory, but they seek to test these principles on the basis of empirical findings.

Themes the project will explore

Experiencing chaos

Self-ordering can lead to new possibilities, but only after the dissolution of existing structures. The destructive side of chaos plays a key role in our lives. How do we develop the tools that allow us to survive the “bereavement” in ways that lead us towards transformation? Without effective bereavement, people can become trapped in dysfunctional relationships with the past. Griefwork is one of a number of approaches that make the process of loss, adjustment and moving forward more explicit. Applying this model to community transitions, what role can cultural activities play in stimulating an effective process leading to sustainable regeneration?

Community and place

The root meaning of community is “together in giving”. Contrary to popular perception, community is not defined by geography but by the process of mutual support. Historically, the land where we live was an intrinsic part of the community, recognised as the source of gifts and as in need of respectful care. Today, our needs are met by people we will never meet in landscapes we will never see. Our local roots and geography are still important to us, but without a grounding in active dependence, how do we make this connection purposeful, and avoid meaningless territorialism?

Incomplete narratives

One reason that physical heritage fails to deliver as a meaningful narrative is because it is actually fragmented and illegible. What role can cultural activities play in making the narrative more legible and complete, working in a context of the existing physical heritage but also fulfilling the need to inform the present and help us meet the future?

New ghosts

Our physical environments are heavily marked by the history of human activity. Our presence is written into the landscape in so many ways we scarcely notice - patterns of movement, place names, festivals and gathering points. The landscape has ghosts; it is in this way that it has narrative and it has meaning. When ex-industrial areas are physically transformed by “regeneration” processes these connections are often lost and the new environment, no matter how rich, has only fragments of a broken narrative. Can cultural activities lead a process of reconnection, making new memories, new histories, new ghosts?

Funded by the Carnegie UK Trust, the project is a three year programme of events and activities that engage the communities in the exploration of these four themes.

The key objective is to demonstrate the potential for culture-lead social regeneration through a programme that actively engages local communities in evaluated work, and that also triggers greater appreciation by Regional Development Agencies, the CPR Regeneration Company and DCMS sponsored bodies of the transformative power of community narrative.