Research project on the future of the Olympic Park

Andy Pratt is part of a team that has received research funding from AHRC to study the ‘Impact And Legacies Of Creative Clustering: The New Culture And Education District, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park’. The project is being led by Dr Beatriz Garcia, Institute of Cultural Capital, Liverpool University.

The development of a new Culture and Education District (CED) within Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEO Park) offers a unique opportunity to fully capture and understand the value and legacies of a major culture-led regeneration initiative, as they unfold. The study has four priority lines of enquiry that will bring together existing knowledge and data in order to set the foundations towards a larger scale research programme. This study will make recommendations and propose lines of enquiry that should form part of a longitudinal study (ideally, five to ten years on) into the medium to long term impact of creative clustering. The project pioneers ‘the long view’ of evaluation. The ‘successes’ we now associate with these cities could not have been appropriately captured via short term ‘one year-on’ evaluation exercises. Further, the reasons for these ‘successes’ and their sustainability have never been fully explained. This is largely due to the fact that we lack information about each of these cities’ points of departure. This is study is the first of its kind to document the impact and legacies of creative clustering from the outset, thus bringing a unique opportunity to capture impacts ‘in the making’.

Andy Pratt is leading one of the studies. The aim of this strand is to provide an audit of the creative landscape in the CED. It represents a unique opportunity to monitor a de-novo start-up cluster, as well as an existing organic one (Hackney Wick), and to examine the changing relationships between them. The project offers insight into knowledge exchange, and innovative/creative practices that operate in hubs and clusters.

The project grant is £70,000 for a 3 months initial study; the project will finance a part-time post doc (Dr Tarek Virani) to work on the project with Andy. The other three projects will be carried out by colleagues from LSE, Loughborough, and Liverpool Universities.