creative city brand
We want to create vibrant neighborhoods with bold artistic statements! We want our communities and cities to have a reputation for being places where you meet creative experiences on every street corner.
urban art
as a transformation tool
Designing urban spaces worth experiencing
Public spaces and cities should be an experience for all the senses. Urban art can transform a space to be more humanizing and invigorating. This makes it not only inviting but alive and buzzing - an emotional experience. As the number of options and alternatives on how to spend your time increases, vibrant and creative places become very appealing. Street art, murals and graffiti have an important role in this buzz.
Pulling local and international headlines
Moving towards creative cities and spaces, art has the power to draw attention adding character and life to dull spaces that require a little bit of “oomph”. Urban art encourages social media engagement, word of mouth marketing and draws foot traffic. New incentives to visit these places emerge for locals and tourists alike.
Highlighting Geographic, Economic and Symbolic value
Urban art is an integrated and natural phenomenon in the "creative city". It builds value by connecting a complex range of city stakeholders as well as the different social, economic and political arenas. It evokes social dialogue and linkages, but also leads to economic development for the business and tourism industry.
Fostering Local Pride
The creative city brand challenges entrenched negative narratives of a place. Artistic initiatives introduce new neighborhood perceptions and attracts a more diverse social mix, often including the so-called creative class. A huge mural, for example, creates an emotional experience and adds to the spirit of the local area. Family and friends, as well as visiting tourists drawn to that area, will enjoy the artwork. As they make new memories, they will also be investing their time and money in the community.
Our research finds that through creative placemaking, arts and culture make substantial contributions to local economic development, livability, and cultural industry competitiveness. These contributions have not been given their due in public policy. Many city and small-town leaders are beginning to understand these connections.
— Markusen & Gadwa, Creative Placemaking white paper 2010
OUR SERVICES
attract - impress - grow - buzz
The story about a city can be told in many ways. Different types of stakeholders are looking to draw attention to their specific agendas. A Creative City Brand can attract attention, impress your audience and make the kind of buzz every city wants. Street art helps build local uniqueness and can be used to create strong themes and atmospheres.
Groups within various fields like the following will find street art a powerful tool in achieving their goals:
Commerce & business
Tourism
Property development
Municipalities & public services
Art milieus
Architecture & construction
Advertisement & marketing
In the pursuit of your desired outcomes, we will guide you on how best to develop projects or programs that include urban creativity. With our help you can build strong creative city brands, and leave the curating and facilitating to our team of cross-disciplinary specialists.
It is important for us to note that we emphasize the importance of respecting the local environment and culture in these creative city branding projects. These values are at the core of any project or program we engage in.
OUR CREATIVE CITY BRAND SERVICES INCLUDE:
CREATIVE CITY STRATEGIZING
Developing creative city brand strategies with various stakeholder perspectives, targeting objectives such as cultural life, buzz, tourism revenues or population growth
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Concept development and design processes relating to neighborhood identity
COLLABORATIVE PROJECT FUNDRAISING
Fundraising partnerships, adding innovative project elements, partnerships, network and expertise to your grant applications
FACILITATING AND CURATING CREATIVE ELEMENTS
Talent and high profile recruitment of muralists, development of art spaces, street art tours, trails, urban art festivals in all formats and sizes, facilitation of artist calls and creative programs
CATALYST FOR PROMOTING YOUR CREATIVE NEIGHBORHOODS AND INITIATIVES
Creative city campaigning, communication and event consultation, dialogue, panel participation and presentation of cases from other successful and less successful creative city brand programs
Below are 3 case examples, where you can see the potential projects to use urban arts and a creative city program to strengthen your city's brand.
1 | Urban art jury and speakers on creative city brands
Street Studies is often invited as an international urban arts representative to help qualify processes, including managing and evaluating artist proposals, bringing fresh ideas, solid knowhow, and guidance on how to approach a project.
CONSULTing - CURATing - FACILITATing
Our specialists can act as an external curator/facilitator or consult cities' own curators. If looking for some of the harder-to-get profiles, we can draw on our goodwill to recruit trending names and top profiles. We offer to sit in as you qualify project briefs and consult on how to best structure proposals and selection processes.
BUILDING LONG-TERM COMMUNITY SUPPORT
We can assist in adding democratic decision layers and community sourcing to the process. This creates deeper understanding from locals, better tools for them to evaluate future projects and a broader support base. This can help justify multi-faceted decisions and minimize project risk, while it helps argue the project's soundness if challenged.
With us, you can make processes more nuanced, adding expertise knowledge and international organizing experience. As your ambassador, we help you connect your creative city program with other international networks, opening up opportunities for collaborative efforts.
Case Example: Helsingborg City
2 | Curated Street Art Corridors
Want to attract visitors looking for extraordinary experiences? Let us help you turn your tunnels, passages and corridors into artistic spaces worth experiencing. Locals will tell friends and family about the impressive artworks. Visitors will travel to see the area, drink coffee and do a bit of shopping and maybe eat dinner before going home. If they are already in town, they will linger in the city, benefiting the same cafés, restaurants and retailers.
URBAN ARTS POWER HOUSE
These artistic spaces worth experiencing don't happen without a thorough plan for branding the neighborhood as being creative and buzzing. We will assist you in making the plans, developing concepts and bringing it to life. We will build a program of changing street art galleries or specifically curated artworks, from international and national artists. Our exceptional portfolio of street artists are among the biggest in the world, including top trending profiles and new portfolios every year. With our selection of styles and nationalities we will be able to provide you with a diverse artistic profile specifically catered to your wants and the area.
BIG NEWS AND CULTURAL ENRICHMENT
While working on a new piece of art, why not tell the world about it? It can be big news, telling the stories of visiting street art international superstars. This is definitely something worth communicating. Not only does it bring new buzz to the city, but the artists themselves also bring about cultural richness to the local environment. People will want to meet the artist, hear her or his international perspectives and know more about the artistic commentary it opens up. Let your corridors be unique places to tell stories about! We can help you on your own artistic journey towards a more creative neighborhood rich in experiences.
Using artistic elements in your passages can also have a stronger focus on social and crime prevention aspects. Read about how we work to make safe and inspiring urban spaces in our urban safety section.
Case example: Ringsted Municipality
3 | Documenting how neighborhood conceptions change
We always encourage decision makers to prioritize giving us time to work thoroughly both with the initial gathering of information, as well as documenting the process.
Our specialists help you with the documentation process:
Our urban planners and urban sociologists observe flows and uses of the neighborhood, including the voice of locals and minimizing risks for local decision makers.
The media team snaps the right photos and video of the process, giving you amazing content to tell meaningful stories about your city.
The international research team sums up relevant learnings from it, providing important insights for future projects and attention from key researchers in the related fields.
These materials will help neighborhoods with a negative reputation tell more colorful stories – in order to challenge stigmatizing narratives. In more well-balanced neighborhoods, authentic stories about colorful artworks can help build a specific brand catered to that area. This will provide better promotional opportunities, attract more visitors and generally provide a good case for other cities to learn from.
Case example: Greve Safer Tunnels 2018, Greve Municipality
Transforming public spaces and tunnels is our specialty.
If you have a project in mind, don't hesitate to contact us!
our services are 100% based on NON-PROFIT PRINCIPLES
Meaning we:
work actively and passionately with UN’s SDGs
reinvest our net income from new projects within our mission statement
consume according to a strict spending-policy
engage in research to increase our overall understanding of and benefit to society and public spaces
And much more.
