Where Design Meets Community

I have a fairly international career background, having studied in the US and then worked in Hamburg, Berlin and London. These experiences allowed me to consider how certain issues around design, technology, and environmental and social sustainability can be addressed in various ways. Across these contexts, I spent a decade working as a project architect and urban designer on regeneration schemes. This allowed me to look at large-scale strategies, but mainly from a private sector perspective. The exception was on a project involving direct engagement with Swansea Council, working on an ambitious community-centred brief of setting up sustainable meanwhile spaces, allocating local jobs, using local materials and improving public transport. The opportunity to engage with projects like this was one of the main reasons why I sought a career change towards the public sector. 

My academic work has also accelerated my shift towards community-based projects through teaching at various universities for several years. My teaching has been two-fold: a Design & Build studio directly engaging a community in need and studios focusing on circular economy principles around locally sourced materials. These courses call for ways of integrating the needs of communities while putting sustainability in a wider system of economic, ecological and social flows. This kind of thinking is about creating resilient communities - and I had believed my research and knowledge of such place-based circular systems would be an asset to local authorities.

My first job with a local authority was with Durham County Council when my family and I had relocated to the North-East of England for personal reasons. I had various roles there, first looking at strategies around special education schools. Then, I managed a DEFRA-funded project (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) around innovative and community-led sustainable drainage, which was extremely interesting as it brought together the private and public sectors, the community and the council, universities and innovators. My last role there was programme managing the Bishop Auckland investment programme, a 20+ project programme ranging from highways to cultural regeneration.

Through the Public Practice Associate Programme, I started working as an Economic Development Officer at Newcastle City Council on Creative Central NCL, a place-based project investing in the development and sustainability of the cultural and creative sector. Creative Central NCL invests in various activities and interventions, including affordable workspaces for cultural and creative organisations, business skills development and support, professional development, and improving access to and engagement with the creative sector. Within the team, my role is to support the development and delivery of creative workspaces and our public realm projects, which focus on creative commissions.

My role involves working on incredibly fun projects where my design and creative skills can be used to imagine and create new opportunities while my strategic and delivery skills can push them along to make them happen.

Through the various projects, I get to engage with many parts of the Council and the private sector, taking the usual interdisciplinary approach beyond the ‘design team’ and the ‘client team’ and involving the ‘local team’, communities, council members, local artists, educators and children.

Our team is small but diverse. It comprises a team leader, project manager, admin support and input from Culture and Tourism colleagues who help connect the projects within Newcastle's broader cultural strategies.

We have various projects in the pipeline; some have already been delivered. They involve making creative workspaces, ranging from relatively small; supporting creative organisations with fit-out costs to create recording studios, artist studios, etc., medium size; such as a new community performance space and some larger, such as the creation of a creative hub, comprising of retail, exhibition and event space and artist studios.

These projects have the potential to shift the feel of the neighbourhoods we work in, strengthening existing creative venues and organisations while drawing new ones to our patch.

With our private sector ‘property champion’ partner, we are also looking at a neighbourhood-wide inward investment strategy to turn some of the empty heritage assets into bases for cultural use. 

We have delivered our first public realm improvement scheme, the Forth Lane Urban Gallery, in partnership with the local Business Improvement District Company, NE1, and the creative neighbours, Project North East and Newcastle Arts Centre, who provided the walls for the gallery. It has been a transformative project with visibly less antisocial behaviour in the historic alleyway of the gallery, receiving surprising respect for the artwork from casual graffiti taggers.

We are developing ideas for new public realm improvement schemes, starting with creative micro-commissions to help signage and wayfinding in the area, then moving on to other urban galleries with old and new partners. We are also creating some ‘visioning’ documents with private sector partners, such as the universities and local architects, artists and landscape architects, to highlight the potential and opportunities in our public spaces. 

Creative Central NCL will continue until at least 2027 and potentially beyond, so we hope to get more projects off the ground in that timescale. We are starting a new Business Engagement stream of the project and through that, we hope to create more opportunities for engagement and commissions within the creative sector. We are also working on bringing added value to existing and proposed significant capital schemes through creative angles, always looking out for the needs of the creative sector and our communities who would like to get access to the arts. 

The vision is to have a creative and cultural neighbourhood where creative individuals and organisations can thrive, grow and create, attracting enough inward investment to become resilient and self-sustaining.

• Image 1: Vikki Leaney
• Image 2: Anna Czigler
• Image 3: Mawson Kerr Architects
• Images 4 – 7: Anna Czigler