The Place Bureau 101: Creative Engagement
INSIGHT: Transforming Participation Through Imagination and Interaction
At The Place Bureau, creative engagement is about more than consultation. We aren’t the people standing on a street corner with a clipboard, canvassing for yes and no opinions. That kind of engagement is rigid and soul-less. We want to create experiences that invite people to imagine, express, and contribute in ways that are inspiring and provocative.
By blending interaction with imagination, we uncover the unspoken ideas, untapped knowledge, and unexpected insights that standard methods tend to miss.
So, WHAT does Creative Engagement look like with The Place Bureau?
We see the engagement process as an opportunity to innovate. Essentially, we’re just there to get people talking, but we’re always asking how we can draw out some more unusual insights, get people to think deeper about their answers, and create a bit of constructive debate.
A two-pronged approach is often the most successful. We might pursue one method of engagement to go ‘deep’ with a small cohort of people, and really dig into their thoughts and needs, and back this up with a ‘wider’ method to try and canvas some opinions from a wider population. When budgets are constrained, this gives us a good balance of detail and scope.
In terms of ‘deeper’ approaches to engagement, we might set up an advisory group, such as the Western Harbour advisory group in Bristol, with each member representing a cultural group. We may also commission artists, filmmakers or photographers to head out into a place and begin to capture stories from people on the ground, such as our ‘creative ambassadors’ did in Western Harbour, Bristol. Or perhaps we’ll work with local creative organisations, such as the theatre group 20 Stories High in Liverpool, to develop a mini festival that allows the community to test out ideas for the future of Canning Dock.
Why do artists make great Placemakers?
At the Place Bureau, we often work with artists, photographers, writers and poets to help us to understand place identity. They have the ability to scratch beneath the surface, overturning the stones that are often overlooked by urban planners and developers. When tasked with speaking to the community on the ground, they’ll ask the questions others might not think to ask, and they’ll point their cameras at the vistas most people might not deem valuable.
At its core — artists help us to shed a unique view on place. Their work helps to shape places that do things differently, and challenge the status quo.
How does Creative Engagement help to include diverse voices?
Activities like visual mapping, collaborative art projects, or participatory theater can draw out contributions from individuals who might feel intimidated or excluded by conventional approaches. These methods are particularly effective in amplifying voices often marginalised in traditional decision-making processes, such as youth, elders, or non-native speakers.
Beyond that however, we often see the same kinds of people turning up to engagement events - typically the wealthy, well-educated, and older demographic who have time to spare. By working in partnership with cultural organisations, it helps us tap into other demographics who may be less motivated to participate in traditional engagement activities - it makes the process enjoyable, and leaves people feeling like they’ve got something out of it themselves.
WHY is this kind of approach essential?
Creative engagement prioritises connection and imagination, turning passive participation into meaningful collaboration. People feel an enormous sense of ownership over places where they have had genuine input into, so creative engagement aims to create places that are successful, not just on day 1, but years down the line - due to the communities who care for it.
Surveys and public meetings often struggle to capture diverse voices. You end up with the loudest voices skewing the dialogue, and not everyone has the means or resources to attend public consultations. This approach invites people to actively contribute in ways that are accessible and meaningful, fostering deeper connections to the process.
We also believe that artists and creatives are able to shed light on the soul of places in unexpected ways, which result in unexpected insights, which shape unexpected places. We’re all about avoiding the ‘could-be-anywhere’ development that leaves our cities cold.
Good engagement can also be a way to build capacity among a community. We might work with young people and build skills in design or image making, or we might work with locals and leave them with the framework to establish and run their own advisory group to oversee what happens in their place. People are more likely to take these projects forward if they’re as valuable to them and their opinions are to the client.
Here’s HOW we do creative engagement at The Place Bureau
Bristol Western Harbour
Bristol’s Western Harbour lies at the heart of this major city. Set around working heritage docklands, with spaces people have made their own — including saxophonists and street artists who animate spaces under the flyover. In a city that punches above its weight creatively, Bristol City Council wanted to develop new creative methods of involving the community in shaping the vision for the future of a prominent area.
Harbour Hopes was a creative engagement programme that started a fresh conversation about the future of Bristol’s Western Harbour. We commissioned a cohort of Creative Ambassadors including the City Poet, Portrait and Documentary photographers, a Filmmaker and Illustrator. Each brought a skillset that contributed to the final vision: from poetry to articulate use of language and tone, through to portrait photography to reveal who makes Bristol’s Western Harbour today. This was backed with an online platform and social media campaign that gathered over 15,000 visits over 3 months, gathering thousands of comments and ideas.
Our approach in Western Harbour has been recognised by the Quality of Life Foundation as a best practice case study of Good Engagement.
“The Place Bureau listened and worked closely with the council’s culture team and regeneration colleagues to devise a fresh, creative approach to engagement and story-gathering that was deliverable on the ground and citywide, as required for a project of this significance. They created a strongly engaged and visual vision by including artists in the process.”
Jo Plimmer, Senior Arts Development Officer, Bristol City Council
Liverpool Canning Dock
The Canning Dock project is part of National Museums Liverpool‘s 10-year plan to transform the city’s waterfront. It intends to revitalise the complex site, which was used in the 18th century to serve and repair ships including those used in the transatlantic slave trade.
The Place Bureau were commissioned to unpack narrative and develop co-production strategies for Canning Dock, an opportunity to pull together the threads that make up the history of the transatlantic slave trade – from Africa, across the Atlantic to the US and back to Liverpool — while recognising that to live on, we need to create a place that the public can explore, enliven and firmly face towards the future. We worked with local cultural organisations; 20 Stories High, Writing on the Wall and Squash, to collectively understand what this site means to the people of Liverpool. The project culminated in a Sunrise to Sunset festival - a chance to prototype ideas and tell stories at the site.
“Our collaboration with The Place Bureau team was a dynamic and inspiring experience with community stakeholders, particularly in how we worked together with community partners. The workshops we conducted truly informed and enabled those involved, allowing both the museum team and participants to explore and rethink the project in exciting ways. It was a privilege to be part of a process that was as creative as it was collaborative.”
Paul Reid, Former Director of the International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool
Have you seen an unusual or unexpected method for engaging communities? How do you think it changed the outcome of community engagement?