Creative City Network Canada
Podcast Mini-Series 2021
Interview with Nancy Duxbury
Welcome to the Creative City Network of Canada podcast mini-series, where we explore the topics and conversations that connect and support cultural leadership, celebrate cultural excellence, and nurture cultural development in local communities throughout Canada. I’m your host Annetta Latham. Today we welcome Nancy Duxbury, Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Cities, Cultures and Architecture Research Group at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, in Portugal.
Nancy was a Co-founder and Director of Research for the Creative City Network of Canada in its earlier years, and is an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University, Thompson Rivers University, and her research has examined cultural mapping, culture in local sustainable development, culture-based development models in smaller communities, and she has published books on cultural development, cultural policy, and cultural tourism.
Welcome, Nancy.
Nancy Duxbury: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Annetta: It's wonderful, wonderful to have you here. Now, even though you're based in Portugal, you are originally from Canada. Now tell us about your scholarly career path and how it's influenced where you've got today.
Nancy: The path has actually not been a straightforward thing, but a path, a winding path. So I'm actually from Halifax originally and I have a Bachelor of Commerce in Management from St. Mary's University, from Halifax. And then I moved to Vancouver, where I took on a Masters of Publishing degree and then a PhD in Communications, worked at the City of Vancouver, which then launched the Creative City Network of Canada, and eventually found myself in Portugal working at the Centre for Social Studies.
So it's definitely been jumping. It's really helped me understand and be more aware of the different locations and situations in which we work and the systems that surround what we can do. And to have a greater awareness of, and I think the importance of practice and research links, which are often not there, but hopefully growing; and also just a very multidisciplinary, there is no throughline in there, really undisciplined. So you really do gain in the process a much higher appreciation for different perspectives on similar issues and this importance of bridging.
Annetta: So in relation to that, in the different perspective stuff, you know, you're a Canadian who's now living and working in Portugal. What would you say are some similarities and differences between the arts and cultural ecologies between those two countries.
Nancy: I think I've become much more aware of how much geography and history influence what we do culturally and why we do it and how, particularly cultural policy is set up and things like that. And there's so many differences between the countries, I think, in Portugal there is the dominant, I guess, a continuing influence of connections with the Portuguese-speaking world. And so there's very much a greater tie than I had originally realized. And on the other hand, I think I've come to really appreciate the specificities of Canada in its geographical proximity to the United States and indigenous peoples in Canada, where there isn't really an equivalent in Portugal, as well as emergent perspectives and how much that is seen as also flavouring what is Canada.
The other thing that stands out for me as a cultural policy researcher is Portugal being part of the EU has a huge influence on where funding comes from, where programs come from, and how you are supposed to be connected to this larger, very complex whole, which is a whole other layer that you don't have in Canada.
Within Portugal, I see there seems to be more of a dominance of two large cities. And so they are really quite present within a small country, whereas in Canada being so spread out, you have many other major centers you can have. But increasingly, I think the smaller mid-sized cities are becoming much more vibrant. Coimbra, for instance, is becoming known for its visual arts vibrancy, connected to the university.
Annetta: Your answer is fascinating, because I think one of the things that we often forget when we live in places like Canada or, you know, everybody can hear that I'm obviously not Canadian, or New Zealand or in Australia, that governance structure that is the EU, which is incredibly interesting. And not many of us engage with that, or have that as an extra layer of impact and, but also an extra layer of funding, which is really, really interesting.
Nancy, one of the things that you are well known for is cultural mapping and your interest in cultural mapping, and I understand that you did a Ph.D. in communications. How did you kind of get to land on cultural mapping?
Nancy: I think the first experience with cultural mapping was actually the development of the cultural mapping toolkit by the Creative City Network in Canada, which we produced in 2007 and seeing that have an influence, an international influence, after it was published online - and it really taking on a life of its own - which is what you wish for when you develop projects. And I guess it stayed more in my mind as an area of interest or curiosity rather than an area of research that I could do at the time. But then I had an opportunity in 2011 to develop a conference in Coimbra and we added cultural mapping as one of the threads which turned out to be quite interesting. And you realized there was, anyway, in short order, I developed a full conference on cultural mapping in 2014, with quite a surprising take up for a topic that we thought would be quite specific and small, and a very high international interest from all different perspectives. And so that also fueled the development of the book in 2015 and different special issues of journals. I think it got back to my interest in bridging and the different perspectives and the fact that this was something that clearly was taking off, but rooted both in practice and in research - and in artistic practice. And people didn't have much opportunity to actually talk to each other except at these venues like this conference. And so it became an interest. So it continues to be so.
Annetta: So we've talked a little bit about cultural mapping. And just for the listeners, I had the incredible privilege of doing a summer school with Nancy in Portugal, which was fantastic. And we did a lot of work around cultural mapping and things like that. And it was absolutely wonderful. But for our listeners, Nancy, how would you describe cultural mapping?
Nancy: It was lovely to have you at the summer school, first of all. I think it's really a multifaceted, I guess, emerging field. And on one side, it's a knowledge gathering or research tactic, or exercise, methodology. On the other hand, it's also a platform for engagement. And it's something that bridge, as I mentioned, research and practice. Traditionally cultural mapping, really focused on identifying and documenting and articulating cultural assets, whether tangible or intangible. But what I find is increasingly interesting is that it's expanding, for various reasons so that it's taking up more broader approaches. It's been termed “cultural DNA mapping” to explore and characterize community connections between cultures, territory, and the people who live there. Their knowledge, experiences, memory is what makes a place special. And whether this is coming out of the fact that the physical things were already mapped - and then what? - but there seems to be a growing interest in how places are distinctive in today's world and how to keep that. And so cultural mapping seems to play, can play, an important role in that.
Annetta: So picking up on that, Nancy, one of the things that you really have mentioned is what you are mapping and I think that was really interesting, you mentioned that just a moment ago, like, what it is you're mapping. And so I guess my question around that is, in relation to cultural mapping, how does a municipality think about what they're mapping and then what is that culture in relation to tangibles and intangible assets? You know, I mean, we could spend a long, long, long time talking about what the definition of culture is, but we're not going to do that. But in relation to tangibles and intangibles of cultural assets and how municipalities think about that in relation to their planning, what are your thoughts around that moving forward?
Nancy: I think there's been a lot of effort about identifying tangible assets and perhaps the intangibles throw people off because “mapping intangibles” seems like an odd thing. But I can see that the researchers and the artists are increasingly interested in the intangibles. And how can you articulate that? How can you document that? And I think relating to that, there is a growing realization that tangible and intangible are related. So it's not either or, but it's together. And it's oftentimes underscored by, I think of the term “to visibilize.” Whether it's tangible or intangible, it's bringing things together in a way that you see things as a whole, or you see the overlaps, or you see how things might work together.
I'm involved in a project called URBiNAT, and as part of it, we're designing and installing green corridors within a few cities. And we're trying to innovate cultural mapping as one of the local diagnostic tools that needs to be done, and we're looking at the type of material, the information that's coming forward from community interaction. And we've divided into three categories rather than the two: Mappable - the mappable things that can be connected to a particular place; the Countable things which might not be so specific, but could be the level of activity of organizations and, then, the Intangible or the subjective.
It's an exercise to see how this information can provide a new level of understanding about the neighborhood and that new development, which it will be a new development, a new installation, is sited in a way that's sensitive to the community. It also can open up information about what's important to the residents, what do they want, what do they want to mark?
Annetta: What would be an example of an intangible for you, in relation to what you're currently doing?
Nancy: I think the intangible so far are stories and narratives and histories, particularly long-term residents’ - I'm thinking specifically of this neighborhood in Porto that we're working with - remembering what was there previously and how it is an area that's on the edge of the city that's changed a lot. And seeing if there is - and it's also multicultural, so to also see if there are cultural dimensions to the neighborhood that are not always recognized - that the motifs or there's something that could be built into something permanent so that residents see themselves in their environment. The way that the cultural mapping will inform what's done is still a process, so we're not completely certain, but we're hoping it will affect where things are placed, what is created, the design of things that are created, and also perhaps inspire social enterprises - that there's new ideas will come through and culture-based activities and things like this.
Annetta: So in relation to cultural mapping as a methodology, how do you feel it relates to existing power relationships or, you know, systematic oppression that's out there? You know, are there concerns around cultural mapping as a methodology, that it reinforces that or it helps to break that down. What are your thoughts on that?
Nancy: Thank you for this question, it opens up a very long answer, which I won’t give you in a minute. But I think there is a tradition that's influencing cultural mapping, which is from the counter mapping perspective, which is about using this as a platform to visibilize people's real experiences, or knowledges, or things related items that are not known by either the authorities or the general public or something, and to bring a platform for discussion forward, which I think is very powerful. And that's why mapping is also often taken up by civil society organizations and things like this. And relating to that, I think anything that's working with community, or pretending to develop an authoritative piece of knowledge of any sort, it's the question of who is involved, and and how they're involved, and how the pluralistic views and perspectives of the people involved get maintained through the process without compacting them.
And there is actually current research happening in British Columbia now, at Thompson Rivers University, looking at that specific issue, which is nice to see. I think one of the questions that's rarely asked, or should be asked more, I guess, is about not only who is involved, but why would they want to be involved. Oftentimes, there's the sense that people will, of course, want to be involved in a process.
And I think one of, one of the large areas of, I guess, concern or issues that I've written about, think about, is about the use or the take up of the knowledge and of what mapped and, again, a lot of the focus so far on, in the cultural mapping toolkits, for instance, has been on the process of mapping, not what happens afterward. And I think that's the part that I'm hoping to develop an edited book in the next year or two, looking at exactly, looking at the question of how do you analyze the data you get? How do you put it together to be meaningful and what do you do with it? And how does it make an impact in the larger, larger world and if there's good practices out there for this to bring it forward.
I think the use and the takeup is particularly - with hopefully a city audience listening to this eventually - important. It's related to the changing nature of what is being collected. It's one thing to ask people to identify where is the theatre, where is the gallery. But it's another thing to ask them for their personal history or their attachments, or their favorite places. And with that personal involvement and engagement, their interest in knowing what's going to happen next is also heightened. If you build up these expectations, they may and it's squished and disappears, they may never participate in a civil sort of public engagement again. That's the part that I think cities have to really come to grips with and kind of think through, and some of the information that is created is not necessarily an easy thing to put through planning systems. But there are some municipalities out there trying to innovate internationally. And so that's where I'm hoping to look at.
Annetta: And it's I think one I think you've hit on something when you talk about engaging people, because, you know, certainly from my own experience, I know the minute you start engaging people, there's a hint of promise and hope that there will be an outcome and a difference and something almost something tangible that people will see out of being involved in a process. And, not to preempt your book, and I'm very excited that it's going to come, but, you know, what would your hope be in your perfect world? What would you love when a municipality goes through this process and it's usually the cultural department that does these things, the arts and culture department, what would your hope be that they actually do with the data that they've got and moving forward for themselves?
Nancy: Two things spring to mind. One is that the results are actually publicized quite widely and celebrated, and whether that's in some format like a book or a public venue, something that brings all that back out to the public and allows people to learn from each other. And in some form - I think in the ideal world, and this is the hoped for part - is that it becomes part of a regular system of cultural planning and policy-making. Oftentimes cultural mapping is seen as a preparatory step before cultural planning process is actually taken. So it's something you develop lots of information that you leave it behind and you continue on. And if culture is a dynamic, living, changing entity, and particularly if it's more than just where are the theatres, but how is your community living in the places living and what is important to them? And what are the histories and the stories that haven't yet been told? That should be changing dynamically over time.
And so there should be a need to have to, if not have a continuous process of mapping or something, at least a check-in every few years to identify something that's, I don't know, a different angle or something, so that it becomes something that there doesn't have to be a fight to do it, once, and that it becomes something that's accepted in the way that a lot of other things in city governments are monitored. It would be nice if, not for control, but it would be nice if there was a realization that this type of information is also important.
Annetta: So how do you think that information then that you gather around culture and cultural assets can be used for local sustainability development?
Nancy: Oh, that's a tough ask and, as you know, I'm a huge believer that cultural vitality and sustainability is an important dimension of local sustainable development and that anything that can help put culture into the picture as these sustainable development processes and plannings and policies and other initiatives take place, is a good thing, however you want to define culture. I think that the data collected from the cultural mapping depends on what you collect. I think from a planning perspective, it can identify gaps in infrastructure. And there's some techniques that are starting up as tests in some communities in Europe where they're connecting the mapping of cultural creative organizations with other data and a futuristic profiling into the future is really a showing where the future hotspots may be.
When you get into things like stories and narratives and all those other intangible or subjective, it's more difficult, particularly, for standard funding systems to take that on. But I think with change happening in communities, increasingly, there seems to be a desire to know what's important to the community that's living there before the population grows, so that they don't accidentally kill them. And to understand more about what the community wants and what it's doing. And I think the identification of significant places, significant history, that’s always invaluable.
And I should say, at the same time, that I'm always thinking about how this information might be useful. But I've also read critiques about how it doesn't have to be useful and that sometimes, oftentimes, the process itself, the knowledge that is shared that is articulated and shared and documented, it really is an important aspect as well. And the connections that happen within these processes can inform new initiatives, knowledges and things that people didn't know before that the connections can spark new initiatives, create sparks.
Annetta: I really like that thought about, especially for the people who are gathering the data, for them, it's new knowledge and it's for some of them it may be knowledge in a community that they've worked in for a while and giving them some level of information that they didn't have before because they've connected with their community in a different manner. And, you know, that ability to inform forward-focussed decisions just by the sheer gathering of the information, I think it's really critical in some ways to sustaining local development, because then the decision-makers are making informed decisions on behalf of the community rather than assumed decisions, which is the model that we could all talk about for hours and hours which we’ve seen at multiple levels around the world. In relation to, to take that a step further, a number of our listeners are going to be people who work in very small communities. And it's sometimes those communities can feel quite isolated and, or feel like the poor cousin to the big city that gets a lot of the money and all of those kind of things. So I want to talk about culture-based development models and for small communities and what you think would be a great model and cultural development model for the smaller communities that are out there.
Nancy: I think this is an active question and actually there isn't a model, it's more about strategies, but if they all work well, then they can be models in time. But I think my own definition, without looking at literature or anything, that I think the culture-based development strategy is, that really includes two aspects. One is that culture is explicitly recognized and taken up as an asset of the local locale, and that there's a care to culture, that there's a care given about the cultural vibrancy and sustainability of that community (so it's more than just recognizing), but there's something more actively caring or for that continuance. I've actually conducted some literature reviews recently looking at cultural and creative industries development in rural and remote areas, because I think, for me, it's an interesting area.
First of all, there's three major themes I've seen that, conceptually, have been developed. The first was about cultural vitality and really using culture for community development, good quality of life, that sort of thing. A second theme that emerged that wouldn't be a surprise, around two thousand and five, is really about the rural creative class. Who are the people that you can collect, can attract from outside the urban area and bring to your rural community? What are they attracted by? ... that kind of thing. It took a number of years after that before there was actually attention to the rural cultural or creative businesses, or the cultural economy, or the idea that there are actually entrepreneurs that have, are trying to survive in these areas. Now there seems to be a growing international discussion about smaller places and cultural and creative development. And these three themes are converging, gradually. But, and related to that, I know of some researchers in Canada who are actively investigating what it means, how can you develop a rurally grounded development approach that's not just trying to adapt the creative city model, which won't work in your community. And so some of that is still going on. So hopefully there will be a few more answers in the next few years.
It's been interesting looking at how the types of questions that have been asked, and how much they're influenced by each other over time. And it also reflects to me - I guess one of my pet peeves recently - is that in research, practice-based activities and innovations do not appear unless they're documented. So you're not “real,” until you suddenly show up as a case study within an article or a book or something like that, which is really sad. And I think it really shows that there really has to be more of a connection between research and practice and planning and really understanding that this shouldn't be a one time thing when someone's writing an article and they need some examples, but something that feeds one another over time so that there might be some wonderful examples of approaches that are being innovated that we just don't know about, because there's and hopefully they're being shared within the Creative City Network and that sort of thing. But I think it's really important to make those bridges so that these practices don't remain invisible as such, but actually can influence others and inspire others.
Annetta: And I like your idea about sharing them within the network. I think that’s a great platform to invite the network to start doing of sharing ideas and not having those ideas, just as you say, written in research or documented very heavily somewhere, but actually sharing that spark of an idea that somebody is doing somewhere. And I liked what you were saying about the creative city model doesn't necessarily translate into a smaller community. And to be focused on what's actually important for the community itself, I think is important, rather than always looking over your shoulder, what kind of Big Brother is doing and trying to almost in some ways, mirror image that. And it just you're right, it doesn't work, it doesn't sit alongside what your community wants.
I'm going to, one of your other passions that I'm very aware of is cultural tourism. And you and your team have just won some amazing awards for some films that you created around cultural tourism. And congratulations on those, they were wonderful, wonderful videos. And then I have had the privilege of meeting some of your team, and they're an amazing group of people. But can you explain to our listeners, what is cultural tourism?
Nancy: Creative tourism, creative tourism.
Annetta: So that's really interesting, though, what's the difference between cultural tourism and creative tourism.
Nancy: There are some writers who talk about creative tourism as a type of cultural tourism or as a response to the massification of cultural tourism, and we kind of take both. But creative tourism, I guess, at its core, is enabling travelers to develop their creative potential and developing opportunities for them to do that. There are many definitions (it appears that everyone that writes anything wants to create their own definition) and over time, its changed, it evolves. So within the CREATOUR project, which you mentioned, which is the project we've been working on in Portugal, which is a research-and-application project to catalyze a network of creative tourism offers through four regions of the country. We looked at a lot of definitions of creative tourism and we came up with four reoccurring dimensions. And so we picked those to sort of create a framework for the development of new initiatives.
So they were active participation - so the traveler doesn’t watch you do something or buy your product at the end (they may do that anyway) but they actually are creating something. They're learning something. So they're learning skills. They may be learning about the local culture and a lot of other items on the way. This should be an opportunity for creative self-expression - so it's not only a fill-in-the-blanks kind of approach to everyone's going to come out with the same product at the end. But you should have the opportunity to do something that somehow adapted for, something that's meaningful to you. And the fourth is or the fourth dimension that we identified was immersion into community. So this might be specific to our project, in that it wasn’t part of previous definitions, but a lot of the work that's been done on creative tourism has been focused on big cities. So you can have a professional artist in the studio teaching you something, and that's fine. Our projects were, our focus was on smaller communities in rural areas. And so that immersion into the community was, to us, very important - to link tourism and travel to the place and the people where you're visiting. And so what we came to realize as well, is that place, the specificities of the place in which something is created, underlined everything. It really enabled a, for instance, a watercolor course or a class to be completely different if it's held in a castle and you're doing the motifs of something built inside the castle versus on the side of a hill within nature, that sort of thing. And so, that's our definition.
Annetta: I think it's really exciting, I really like the four principles that you developed, because I think they are exciting ones, and almost create a really nice little checkpoint if someone's trying to think about how to develop this in their own municipality, to go, does this have active participation? Are the people who are engaging, learning something, do they get to do a self-expression, or is it paint by numbers? And, you know, are they getting immersed in the community and what's going on? And I think they are great kind of guiders in what you're doing. And for people to be able to apply those in their thinking if they want to develop some sort of creative tourism. In the work that you did, in the work that your team did, why did you think it was important to develop creative tourism and the idea and kind of bring it to the fore and talk about creative tourism?
Nancy: The original impetus behind the project was to find a bridge between culture and tourism. And that was what our funding framework was within. And I had known about creative tourism, and for a while and thought about that and continued to think about it, but hadn't been able to act on it. And when this opportunity came up, I thought, well, that's the perfect connection between the cultural/creative sector and tourism. And at the time and until right now, within Portugal - it’s also a Portugal-specific project - Lisbon and Porto have lots of tourists (maybe not right at the moment), but it really was overburdened. And so there is no use in putting on a project that focused on attracting yet more tourists to those two areas. So from the beginning, the focus was really on small places outside the majorly visited areas throughout the country and using creative tourism to develop activities that could attract people off the beaten path. But it's the activity themselves that could attract people to an area and that they would stay there for the duration of the project. So places that you might drift through in an hour or two, you might stay for three days to do a special workshop. And that this could be quite transformative in its ability to spin off both economically, for people staying three days, etc., but also as a seed of larger and wider development projects.
Annetta: So where do you see this research going in relation to Canada, like how can communities in Canada apply the kind of creative tourism work that you've been doing?
Nancy: On one hand, there is actually a project that started, but it's still to be activated, out of British Columbia, actually from Vancouver Island University, which is looking at a community in the north of B.C. and, I believe, Whitehorse in the Yukon, to develop localized networks of among artists and creators and others to develop pods of places where you could go. But I know that there are creative people and organizations and specificities of place that would be very attractive across the country, and so actually I was hoping that our experiment continues on - it is starting. It's at least an informal network. But also we've heard from numerous people that we've inspired their projects, whether in Canada or Brazil or others, which is always nice to hear. I think we learned a lot about what we took off, what we took on, with our project. We had five research centers, 30 researchers and 40 different pilot organizations. I wouldn't do that again - I would say fewer places and more networks within each place.
And so that would be the way I could see Canada. But we're very interested in also helping inspire others to develop this area because we're realizing that the connections between people who are doing creative tourism don't seem to be very great. It is. And so we've actually created an offshoot of CREATOUR to be a CREATOUR International network, which should have its website up shortly. But it's really, it's not funded, so it's something that we're looking for collaborators, but we really think that there's a missing piece about allowing people to learn from each other - people have heard of creative tourism, but they don't know what to do and they don't know how to make it sustainable, which is also an issue. And they need to be more connected, in the same way that the Creative City Network actually began, where it was strictly individuals out there finding one another. I can see something similar here and also the proponents may be from the tourism side, or they might be from the cultural side or, in our case, we have a number of municipalities, as well as regional development agencies, as our pilot organizations. And they can play a really important role in developing the infrastructure for a network that can enable lots of individual entrepreneurs to connect together without having to recreate all of the administration and marketing at the middle. So we are really hopeful that that will start and that we can inspire.
Of course, I have an ongoing interest in the possibility of a CREATOUR Canada starting up. But because I actually think it would be, it's very it's very, it enables entrepreneurial ideas, small-scale tourism experiences, and takes it beyond experiences to really showcase arts, culture, creativity, creative participation within travelers and for the communities as well. It seems to be aligning within an array of different types of alternate tourisms that seem to be emerging that really privilege the distinctiveness of a place, travellers not wanting to be part of a mass anything. And because it's small-scale in nature, it can really be placed anywhere if the formulas themselves are sustainable, so that's what we're researching as to how to help others develop formulas that can work.
Annetta: Well, I'm sure that many people listening will be very excited to have the magic formula. We're obviously in an interesting phase in the world. How do you feel creative tourism might play a role in assisting communities moving forward, as we're working hopefully out and through, the Covid pandemic?
Nancy: Yeah, it's a difficult timeframe and it's been difficult to think forward as to what it's, we've convinced ourselves because, of course, no one knows what's going to happen, that creative tourism can be part of the solution going forward to restart things. And we think that creative tourism is, its workshops and things like that, particularly for smaller communities, that usually is the format that is taken on, or small scale experience. And so it's small-scale intentionally by nature, which seems to fit quite well with the social bubbles and the family outings and things like this. And also, at least in Portugal, we're hearing more about people wanting to stay in one place for a longer time, rather than flit around from place to place. So if you're going to be stationary for a period of time, you're going to need things to do - in my brain, that’s how it works. So we think that creative tourism would be a lovely addition or part of that mix of activities that would be there and assets for visitors. And also domestically, there's more and more talk about domestic tourism because people can't go elsewhere. And I think creative tourism offers a wonderful platform for cross-cultural learning.
And even if you are perhaps a skilled potter, a pottery tradition from a different culture will expand your horizons and you'll learn more. And if you can't travel somewhere else, you can still explore your own interests and curiosities and things you've never gotten around to yet and go and take a class of some sort somewhere. And I think from the community perspective, all the communities want to get things moving again at some scale and creative tourism can be a piece of that puzzle.
And I think from a socio-cultural sort of perspective of the community, we found that for the people who were part of our pilots, are part of our pilot organizations, the process of going through the development of creative tourism possibilities was really inspiring for them - in rethinking ways that you can portray your, and present your community, to visitors and to yourselves and what things are really important to your place and what are specifics, what's meaningful to you. And as people, we build connections to their place just as residents and looking at how do you want to evolve from this point? I think that reconnection is really important.
Annetta: I think the dialog of that attracting the domestic creative tourist is a really, in some ways from my perspective, a very exciting one, because it makes us, as you say, relook at things through a little bit of a different lens and put opportunity where we may not have seen it before. And so, you know, but it is going to be a challenge for all of us moving forward. We've talked about some amazing things and we could talk forever. For you personally, what's in store for you for the next five years?
Nancy: I have actually been just asked to take on a new role at my research institution. They're reorganizing and they're creating new multidisciplinary thematic lines across the whole research center, that goes across research groups. And so I've been asked to coordinate, or be the lead coordinator for one called Urban Culture, Sociabilities and Participation, which is all about culture and cities of all sizes as platforms for social change and connecting research with citizens, and with policy, and with internationalization. So obviously, it's huge. And it's a new idea - so we're still not sure what that will mean in practice. But to me, it's very exciting because it enables me to delve more deeply into this connection between research and society. How do you do it well? How do you set up citizen involved labs and things like this in a way that then makes changes in the community, in the policy?
And also part of the portfolio is to look at research-action initiatives, so that I've become quite a fan of the idea for a future-forming research, the idea that you aren't just observing change, but you're actually consciously putting your sums up to make change. And in defining this field, such as my institute has, put within this category of research-action creative tourism because of the way that we did it (in that we have catalyzed a field that didn't really exist and an international network), and as well as art interventions in society and projects and things like this and other sorts of ways of connecting culture, broadly defined, and citizens and policy. So I'm quite excited about that.
And of course, we want to activate CREATOUR International. We're planning now on how we can involve the followers of CREATOUR, but also open up the doors so that the members define what they'd like to do. We have, again, no funding, but we know that collectively people want to connect and the technologies exist now that we can connect internationally and find people that want, that have often similar issues in completely different circumstances that might be able to learn from each other. That’s part of me, too, there's still, I would love to have enough time to write a book of my own that enables me to connect cultural mapping and culture, cultural development in smaller places, and culture and local development - all of those sort of things that are somewhat separate in my brain most of the time. But I don't know if that's going to happen in the next year. I'm hoping I will. I will try. But yeah, it should be an interesting year and I'm hoping it's not a pre-retirement phase of wanting to consolidate things in my brain. But I do hope that I can start to draw threads together between the different areas I've been working on and as others are able to see and I can't, oftentimes. So that's part of the goal.
Annetta: It's an incredibly exciting few years coming up for you. And it's a little bit, we might have to revisit you in a year’s time. Look, thank you for your time. I really, really appreciate it. Is there anything else that you'd like to add to our conversation before we finish off?
Nancy: I'm trying not to just repeat myself. I think just to remind people, I guess, to always think of bridging and exchange and to think about how the barriers between research and practice and planning and policy can somehow be broken and be bridged in an ongoing way of some sort.
I think, also, it's increasingly important to ensure that culture is part of the broader city planning in all sizes of community, in a way that integrates it, but does not invisibilize it, so that it's recognized.
And I guess to thank you for the opportunity. This is fantastic. Thank you very much. And to all of the members of the Creative City Network from whom I've learned so much over the years, and to let you know that I'm open for collaboration, if anyone wishes to do an international something, or other explore any of the topics that I've mentioned. I may be based over here, but I'm located not too far away on the electronics. I think there's a lot of good examples and also challenges that everyone's dealing with. And the more communication the better.
Annetta: Wonderful. Nancy, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. There's been so much here for all of us to think about and relisten over and over again. It's exciting to hear what your team is doing, of the number of things that we've talked about. For those listeners who want to know where they are, the Creative Cities Network, Canada, we will put them on the website so you'll be able to see them there. And we look forward to what you have for us in the future. Thank you.
Nancy: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Outro: Today's episode of the Creative City Canada podcast has been made possible through a partnership between Creative City Network of Canada and MacEwan University, and with the support of the many members of the CCNC.
Thank you Nancy for sharing your thoughts and your time with us today, and thanks to all of you out there, who took the time to listen.
Continue the conversation online, and see more resources and links from today’s guest on the CCNC Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
Join us on the Creative City Canada podcasts for other interviews with Ken Lum from Monument Lab and Mr Ernesto Ottone the UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture. If you’ve found this useful and interesting, please comment, share and subscribe. Until then, continue being creative.
Latham, A (Executive Producer and Host). (2020). Creative City Network Canada Podcast Mini Series [Episode 1]. Nancy Duxbury. Podcast retrieved from:https://www.artfulconversations.com/ccnc-miniseries-1/2021/2/6/episode-1-nancy-duxbury