On the 4th of October 2023, LaboFriche at La Friche, Marseille, hosted visitors from London for an evening symposium reflecting on parallel experiences of social value/power in the two cities. The event explored perspectives on social and cultural value specific to the contexts of La Friche, Marseille and Camden, London.
The first session was focused on Value, with:
_Eli Hatleskog – Research Fellow | University of the Arts London/T-Factor.
_ Mathilde Goûteux – PhD student employee | Friche la Belle de Mai, LEST-CNRS).
_ Carol Giordano – Digital and hybrid arts producer | Chroniques.
_ Malik Benghali – Expert in social utility project assessment.
_ Sven Muendner – Founding Director Beispiel | Studio Tutor MArch UAL.
Hello everyone hello uh welcome and uh thank you thank you very much to be here so there are a few people here in the room and a few also connected uh thank you very much for everyone for being here I mean in the yellow light yeah um so uh you are
Here for a session uh until 8:00 pm about social impact of cultural projects it’s an event which have been uh co-built and co-organized between uh U uh and uh laish in the these format of conferences uh named the labor the laboratory which have been launched a
Few session ago uh in laf and uh which is dedicated to explore uh problematics issues or preoccupation of the cultural sector with uh other Specialists researchers but also inhabitants uh writers practitioners of different sector uh so yeah thank you very much and uh I will pass the microphone to my
Colleague from London I’m Mick Finch I’m um also working with EV I just want to thank ever and the FR Le team uh just to say um that we’ve been working along with ay hatl who’s the one of the main drivers of uh this project uh but also we’ve
Been working in the context of a thing called tab one which is not going to mean anything to there’s no reason why it should uh which is um it’s looking into Arts the relationship of arts and culture to Meanwhile spaces uh and the has been a massive inspiration for that
And it’s it’s really been extraordinary to to work with that so it’s just to say uh thank you and I’m going to pass before I Pass thanks um really excited about this event it’s it’s idea for it develop through many conversations between yeah what we’ve been thinking about is the role of um arts and culture and temporary urbanism um and one of the contradictions in the UK at least is that when we do temporary art activities
In the city they can sometimes lead to unexpected consequences like gentrification and increases in urban precarity um so what we’re really interested in and learning a bit more about is um what are the long-term values that can be generated through Art and Design and practices and I guess one thing that’s
Really interesting with all of this is it’s it’s not new practitioners have been generating value social value and cultural value through their activities for many many years um but it’s often something that we we can’t manage to describe um particularly well so um today is going to be an
Attempt for us to um share our experiences of the actions that can generate social value in the built environment and hopefully um make some Reflections across the two contexts where there’s really rich territory to be explored um the session the event will be split into two sessions we’ve got a
Value session which is thinking about what what is value and we’ve got these speakers here we’re discussing things then and the second half of the event we’ll be looking at Power what can these values do do and then we have another set of speakers for that but first we’re
Very fortunate to um have Patricia kinska um who’s a expert from the University of Arts London in valuing culture in decision-making in the UK um and we’re very happy to have her here to to just share some of her thoughts and give us an overview um to the event today thank you very
Much everyone hopefully you can hear if we could my presentation on the screen that’ll be great brilliant I’m I’m I’m very happy to be joining you today even though um I’m joining uh remotely uh I’m looking forward to uh hearing what the um all the other contributors have to
Say my focus today as you can see is on the UK and US perspective on cultural value this is because uh this is what I know I would not presume uh to be able to uh um capture uh knowledgeably what’s happening in France and yet I am hoping
That uh what I will say will uh inform what’s happening across the channel other uh either through contrast or similarities so I I do hope that uh um what I have to convey today uh will resonate with you so yeah if we could move to the next slide
Please brilliant so okay so I want to provoke today and ask can there be too much social value in cultural value well the answer is that from the point of view of cultural policy this indeed can be the case uh this is because of how cultural value and social
Value are understood in policy terms uh policy uh understanding does not reflect and in fact distort what uh uh we mean by both social and cultural value so let me first explain what our key terms mean next slide please okay so what is social value social value represents the value
That people experience as a result of changes in their life I guess no no surprises here a different way to put it uh using the quality of life a foundation definition that Ellie kindly shared with me is that so social value is the level to which individuals may
Feel their lives to be in their lives to be happy active sociable interesting and meaningful now what is cultural value cultural value is non-monetary irreducibly collective and fundamental expression of the value of culture what do I mean by this here you might think of uh elements such as the aesthetic and spiritual
Dimensions of experiences that people have perhaps more importantly uh the symbolic Dimension the fact that art design and uh culture convey meaning that help us to make sense of other things this is uh collectively and holistically cultural value now the problem with policy translation is that that firstly rather than representing the
Subjective nature of social value that is that it’s in people’s experiences fundamentally policy makers insist on seeing social value in terms of objective outcomes and general indicators of social impact sure policy makers have their reasons and yet it’s important to stress that those registers distort what social value is and secondly for
Cultural value policy makers insists that cultural value uh can be expressed in monetary terms and crucially that cultural value is reducible to social value and this is where problems start this takes me to my next slide which is on measuring badly and what does not count could we have the next slide
Please right if you look at at the image uh on this slide it’s a photograph of a clay vas by a famous ceramicist uh uh in the UK Grayson Perry who used to be a um affiliated with our University but the title of the vas is this pot will reduce crime by
29% well will it it illust this this illustrates uh the issue that we have been having in the UK for the last uh 30 years for nearly 40 years so in the in a nutshell there was a shift in the 1980s from what can be called like a Victorian or kenian
Approach that uh where the state supported culture largely on an unquestioned assumption that it was a good thing uh the shift was to the new public management approach that was effectively an attempt to to modernize public sector using techniques from the private sector such as setting targets monitoring outputs and auditing
Performance with this cultural Services became yet another area of State provision and it meant that cultural sector had to demonstrate its impact uh to be uh accountable for cost benefit analysis this needs to demonstrate impact led to the cultural sectors of objectives being expressed in terms of other agendas basically governments required
Cult that cultural funding has to deliver and be able to demonstrate how it delivers on other policy objectives so uh cultural value became uh Associated if not assimilated to other specific economic as well as social outcomes so uh for instance tourism employment in due course we started to think about the
Cultural uh Industries and yes for instance social cohesion very very popular with new labor government this approach has been called Defensive instrumentalism basically resorting to instrumental arguments from elsewhere to defend the value of uh the arts and culture and with in in integration to other government agendas economics uh
Became the lingua Frank so what does it mean when people talk about uh economics in the in the context of cultural value and cultural policy they mean two things either they mean measuring uh economic impact so you can think like the uh Guggenheim bilb effect right uh all
Suddenly you build something uh cultural and you have increased footfall tourism uh local spending and so forth but also and that’s the second thing by introducing economic approaches you Mayan measuring the individual utility that is that people value cultural experiences like for instance people pay to go to theater right but also more
Interestingly people value things that they would never uh experience or use like for instance when the uh there was a fire in notredam all over the world uh people expressed that they you know thought that was an object of Highly uh highly valuable objects and were
Prepared uh to pay money to have it uh to have it restored and rescued even though a they have never been and B they have never intended to visit right something interesting is happening here so it’s cultural economists are weirdly interested more in measuring this uh non use non-market value whereas it’s the
Cultural sector people who are more interested in the former that is the measuring uh the economic impact like you know increased spending and footfall well here’s another provocation for you why why is that anyway both of these approaches have their problems next slide please I don’t want to go into much
Details regarding um the economic approaches but when it comes to the approach preferred by cultural economists uh how they measure non-market non use value it’s basically asking people how much they are prepared to pay or be compensated for for for some kind of a experience right and the
Problem is that people come up with crazy numbers I mean it kind of you know what would you say if I ask you like how much would you pay to prevent St Paul’s from being burnt down it’s not really obvious how to do that so uh in addition the uh these kind
Of contingent valuation approaches they are called have the problem of pretending that cultural value that is irreducibly collective can be disaggregated into individual utility and then add it up that’s also a that’s a huge like conceptual issue happy to go back to it in the question time the
Economic impact approaches are just like bad economics like very few people really uh believe the numbers sure they can be uh done better and less well still like they are pro they are problematic methodology but moving to the second Point there’s something more fundamental um that uh uh gets in the
Way of uh using this approach which is that when you focus on the economic aspects such as like you know Regional regeneration increased tourism and so so forth um you you suddenly find out that this is not what matters to people at all I mean this is like not
Why they want to have La frish in their neighborhood maybe partially yes but not solely there’s something missing in there right and also there’s a question whether uh if you if you look at the economic approaches do they really dictate how decision making is uh is is conducted right is this how policy
Makers uh arrive at uh at uh their uh funding uh decisions let’s say and um well here’s another provocation uh this um Robert peston uh uh who used to be a BBC economic editor kind of uh looking at this situation said if we could demonstrate conclusively that the
Economic impact of the Arts was zero would we stop children from learning to draw well no and uh if we could demonstrate that the economic impact of uh having um I don’t know aborigin uh art or opera house or you name it was Zero would we like insist on getting rid
Of those not quite right so uh what you see here is that decision making is not uh based on economic calculation and probably is not um always evidencebased either but uh that’s for later anyway let me give a very very quick example next slide please I know that my colleagues will be
Giving lots of uh very uh uh detailed and uh uh interesting examples so I just want very very uh um generally look at uh what has been called creative uh placemaking in the US um American Planning Association describes creative placemaking as a process where community members artists Arts and Cultural organizations
Community developers and other stakeholders use Arts and Cultural strategies to implement community-led change this approach aims to increase vibrancy improve economic conditions and build capacity among residents to take ownership of their communities it’s kind of univers I mean you kind of would think well their heart is in the right
Place right this is not a new approach as a way of kind of acting uh locally across different dimensions using the Arts uh uh those uh sort of Frameworks were already being introduced uh in San Francisco in the 1950s however creative placemaking as a as an attempt to ring fence a policy
Domain to talk about cultural value and social value value is quite a new thing in the US uh in it is around 2010 that uh the main Us funer in the Arts uh um National Endowment for the Arts invested started to invest uh over 40 million and uh art Place America uh a
Charity that works with different organizations put over 150 million uh towards creative plac making right so uh what we see is like a really economies of scale like a big accumulation and yet uh next slide please either because uh not despite but because of the scale of investment when
Uh a few years later people to start to ask so you know what happened through those uh many interventions in in our cities it turned out that uh there was a massive issue to demonstrate that the creative placemaking prog s uh have achieved their objectives or met their
Uh goals and um this despite that not so much programming but evaluation was highly subsidized there was a lot of money poured into uh validating indicators and developing those indicators so why this spark the debate so what happened and essentially three things happened uh the uh mistake was
Made uh in using policy registers wanting to demonstrate that creative uh um Place making make a difference in terms of what policy makers cared about rather than what actually changed through cultural engagement that’s taking us back to the defensive instrumentalism this problem then uh there was the issue of using one siiz
Fits all indicators and suggesting that everyone has to use the comprehensive list without being able to uh uh choose depending on uh uh region or local variation and then thirdly there was too much focusing on input output uh evaluation rather than understanding the systemic interaction within places they need to understand local
Ecologies was in fact the key learning point from that from that huge initiative but also what transpired is that surprise surprise plac making if it suggests that there are no places before they are made is not a good name so there has been a shift towards uh Place shaping as a
Result but this uh takes me to my last point to discuss the lessons that have been learned that I want to share with you today and uh leave you with how to do things better so uh last slide please right uh where measuring better and what matters well measuring uh less
Badly and paying attention to what matters um this I want to suggest um presupposes essentially three things once again learning from the mistakes in a creative Place making so regarding the first and uh the need for subjective validated uh registers uh and this going back to the definition of social value
That you were effective looking at how change is experienced by people you need to involve stakeholders and understand what matters to them and assess change in terms that are meaningful to them and yet in terms of validated indicators that is checking that uh the indicators mean uh what they purport to mean to
Everyone there’s a lot of confusion that people Express different things by you know big terms like livable and so forth secondly you need portfolio approaches so being sensitive to local variations and context people should be given choices of what the pro proverbial boxes they want to take basically not all of
The indicators have to be applied to all the places at all times different different places will have variations and most importantly systemic approaches what does systemic mean it means paying attention to relationship ships and how the units are related within the system and this can apply for places on
A smaller scale or it can in fact apply apply to like uh big units like National accounting let me very briefly explain how that works so in traditional approaches those that distort both cultural and social value we we are used to uh growing things in individual silos and growing
The pie like take take let’s let’s assume we have a pie so we want to grow the pie or even worse grow a cherry on top of the pie without paying attention to anything else and we now know that this is unsustainable why because we’re only paying attention to Growing
Individual units without uh tracking damage that might be caused elsewhere right instead we should be looking at how the slices of the cakes are cut up and indeed how they are configured uh within within within the larger uh prey lots of lots of metaphors here anyway in those more general terms uh
The sort of how the uh cake is uh made up approaches are now in fact being proposed uh in mostly coming from environmental economics uh and ecological economics and uh yeah I guess uh ecological Sciences more broadly but if you look at AO es such as inclusive uh or comprehensive wealth um these
Offer a way of rethinking uh what we are doing basically the basic idea is that systems can improve without growing that a society can increase its inclusive wealth and social well-being without growing the capital goods but simply but by making a better use of what we have by reconfiguring the relationships within
The system this I’m arguing applies both to place-based approaches but also to uh I guess national accounts and systems uh of this scale and to conclude this is where the intersection of cultural and social value should be understood cultural value helps us with reimagining how to reconfigure the system and provides the
Basis for coordinating our action this turn solidifies the basis for social well-being and the individual perceptions of social value and I will stop here to see if we have any time for questions hi do we have any questions from the crowd or do we not have time
We have any questions from the room to ask Patricia I’m I’m I’m very happy to to you know let you uh uh uh dwell on this and uh if there’s anything uh you have my email address in the presentation I’m H I’m very happy to be uh contacted that
Way okay well thank you very much Patricia I really um think that was a great start to the event this evening um now we’re going to move on to um the value session we have four speakers up here with me um they going to be three presentations um and it’s a mix of
Perspectives from um marsill and and London so first up we’re going to oh and one thing before we start is we’ve got some people who are joining us online if you have any questions that you want to ask the speakers you can pop them in the chat and they’ll get shouted out um
After the presentations um so at the table with us this evening we’ve got uh matild G uh Carol jordano um and matild is a PhD doing her um PhD candidate doing her research here at lefr and car is um a digital and hybrid Arts producer also based here at
FR is that correct yeah um and then following them we’ve got um Malik benali who’s an expert here in France in um social utility projects and then finally we’re going to be speaking with our Sven M Munda is going to be speaking to us um
From a S UK perspective so I’d like to pass the floor to Matilda Caro please hello everybody um so I’m actually a PhD student here at LEF fridge but I will be talking about an experience that I had before uh we’re with car jordo we’re going to give you a
Testimony about us study that we conducted in 2021 um for acnum which is the national network in France for ibrid and digital art actors um so the first thing uh uh to introduce the this presentation was to talk to you about uh our methodology to conduct this study and first the
Question we asked ourselves what what do we want to to grasp what the effects we want to grasp so um as Patricia already a little bit um introduced the effects of a project or an actor can be direct or indirect and Merchants or non- merchants and most of the time uh when
You um do a a value impact or social value or economical value on a territory um measurement measurement can be a problematic term but we’re not going to go inside those debates but we most of the time we measure more Merchant effects the direct ones for for instance
For a cultural event will be how many jobs you created how many tickets you sold those kind of stuff and the indirect ones could be yeah all the local spending in the hotels of restaurants nearby all those kind of things but what we wanted to observe were more what we call the externalities
Which is actually something that comes from economics which are the effects that are non Merchant and are indirect so they can be perceived as positive or negative on all the stakeholders that will be affected uh by your project and those are much more complicated to grasp so to grasp those externalities there’s
Um a urgent need for participative methodologies uh there are many reasons for this uh the first one actually uh P patrici said um we cannot have one siiz fit all indicators because all territories of their needs and so the idea is to for uh participative methodology is to ask the actors uh
What’s relevant for them and be uh so that’s um one of the more important things it gives you richer uh information uh for the local uh needs and local effects uh where the actors um actually uh develop their activities um uh there is also another uh interesting um uh dimension of um of
Developing participative metodology is it can empower the actors and give them uh tools to develop their projects and to defend them to funders and of course as a researcher there’s also the idea of promoting uh another way of producing knowledge uh which is the promoting experimental knowledge and not only the
Expert voice so that’s for the why and now I’m going to talk to you about the example of the research that uh I conducted with the researcher Rafael Besson um in 2021 for Akim the the network I told you about about for IBD and digital art
Actors uh and the idea was to actually um yeah grasp the externalities of those actors uh and and to help them because it’s kind of a marginal artart sector to help them understand their externalities and be able to defend them also for um uh cultural policies um so there were three steps in
The methodology we developed uh first um we made some workshops with the actors uh which are not only there were three fields in France of experiment with three located actors and we uh conducted the workshops with uh stakeholders um so uh with the funders the partners and um
And we wanted to go to the users too but they were not in the workshops uh and with the uh during the workshops we we try to understand what was the effect of those actors uh that could be positive or negative that was something that we were interested in to to understand too
Uh after all these workshops we created Auto evaluative questioners that were more widely uh to um all the St stakeholders of those different um uh ibrid and digital art projects so they could valuate um there were qualitative and quantitative questions and they would valuate the intensity of the
Effect that we had identified and justify them uh in a little text box and the third step that um we couldn’t really um develop properly because it was coid and everything thing was closed in France but was the users evaluation uh and this uh we were actually kind of
Sad because we wanted to experiment uh more experimental protocols with the the users um uh like um like drawings or photography or work clouds or just another way of making evaluation with the people that actually attend those cultural events so uh uh I don’t know if I’m late but real quick
Uh I’ll talk to you about what came out of this and what are uh some of the effects that we could identify and that we could kind of measure with the with the questionnaires uh that was the dynamization of cooperative and IND interdisciplinary processes uh which was
Um which is a a key um Topic in ibrid arts uh especially um uh we also could um understand better the practices transformation in the artistic sector that those actors uh can um can develop also the change in represent representational representations in the cultural field uh and uh and also the
Shape of public policy that this can involve of course there’s the topic of societal Transformations and for uh digital and ibrid arts they are um developing a critical approach to technology uh and uh to contribute to shaping Collective imaginaries and the last but not least uh we talked about the environmental
Impact which we couldn’t really go in depth because it’s a whole other kind of evaluation which needs to go way further than this but we want it to make it appear a little bit because it’s really important even more in the technological field so now I’ll give the floor to Carol
Um who will uh give you the actor uh point of view of being a uh um part of such a study thank you mati um so first of all I deeply apologize for my poor English I’ll try to do my my best um because after the level of MAA I’m not
So confident now and I hope my whole whole my colleague will help me after to be more confident at the end so yes I just want to put a feedback as an actor and a member of acnum so uh I try to not read so much
But of course I will need to read my note um and uh so firstly I’m Carano deputy director of chroni chroni is a member both of laish and member of akum network and we we follow the research with maild and and Rafael um we obviously share the concern
Of the the the CD in particular the need to make uh visible and tangible hold the kind of activities that escape all the econometric uh economic metrics from the network it was really the the start of of the the the survey and the the research uh but as a feedback
Unfortunately uh I can say as a conclusion that nothing really happened after concerning the actor so that’s an issue and I want to discuss a bit about that I think I have four reason for this um I don’t know if I yes uh for reason but basically one can
Maybe summarize the the things is that the difficulty for actors to work on non-economic metrics when you face uh or you need to find economic solution uh this is the shortterm midterm problematic between this kind of of research of course the result uh provide an interesting Insight uh into
What digital art producers generate as social impact or values um but the first things that we maybe do not um work on kind of implementation tool or protocol for the actor to take the survey and try to make things inside the local context and project and knowing that these
Actors have a big lack of time to conduct this kind of evaluation the tools uh that could be given after this kind of survey to the actor is really important the other way or other thing uh that uh also um Patricia mentioned during the the K note is that
Um what why we need this kind of survey it’s basically to convince or to have other metric to convince the policy makers or decision makers about funding and uh it’s really hard for actors to to take this kind of metrics and try to convince uh with the basic metrics we have economic impact
Tourism territorial marketing Etc so that was the first things that nothing happened after because it’s not a tool for short-term uh issues that face to the to the actors the other reason uh I see is that the self evaluation is really interesting uh in term of process for
The The Operators and the organization inside Akim um it’s a way to uh to recognize their value uh to take also ownership of of this kind of indicators or metrics to integrate them into a process for understanding their own action but uh firstly this require a a critical mass
Of um evaluation to see what is could be objective uh and uh and share with all the the network and what could be very useful in the discussion with the the policy makers so what it was the the second reason why he not working after the
Survey and this first two point lead us to the to the third is that in my opinion um I think this kind of survey and the whole uh the the work need uh after this kind of survey uh to uh have relation and to make advocacy
Uh on the basis of non-market effect to legitimize action of of these social or cultural actors must be achieved by inter intermediary organization uh it could be a structure representing the sector and I think acne annum U must take care of this kind of survey and go through this with for
Example the minister of culture in France Etc and not waiting for the actor to take the the the the methodology to to to change things and it could be also also um um provide by institutional structure maybe the minister itself it could be possible we see with the adem
For example ADM in France I don’t know exactly the the the name in English who who is working on these kind of metrics about ecologic or ecological Challenge and the final point if I can to add things about the survey and the discussion of to today
Um um yeah it’s an example that it’s written inside the survey itself uh it’s about to just explain what is a um externality positive externalities was take the example of the bee and its unique role in pollination and when we see how is is we take care of the it and
The policy makers take care of this challenge of ecological aspect Etc with this kind of metrics um it may be demonstrated that the moment we are living is not so crucial to convince but maybe also to find by this kind of uh research and Survey way to to uh um
Let’s say to find um references or standard shared standard to uh uh to alongside to the market cycle um to yes to to find a new new way to Share value between uh actors um non economic or non- monetary uh values and could be maybe give solution economic or the way to produce
Things for the actors uh on the basis of this kind of of results of the the research I mean uh the the self evaluation could be um help us to see what exactly we are uh in capacity to to uh to to produce as as a social and cultural values and maybe
What we can share inside acum itself uh like uh outside the market to find economic um sustainability and possibility to produce things we want to produce at the end so yes it was my four points to just uh um complete the presentation of ma and I thank you for you’re [Applause]
Listening that was great thank you so much and I really appreciate you speaking in English um and it’s a bit presumptuous of us to come over here and ask you to speak in English but we do really really appreciate it um yes Adam thank you thank you for your uh sharing
Your example I have a question just to clarify make sure I understand um around when you were talking about how to share value between actors as being one of the challenges that you feel would be useful to still address how do we share value between actors I do you mean how do we
Make how do we have a a way of talking talking about value that is comparable between actors or do you mean that we have a way of um accepting a collective attribution for Value so that it’s because you you have many actors making a contribution often a fund requires you to
Claim this contribution for your particular effort so my question is when you talk about how when you your your question about how to share value I think I agree with that that’s a real challenge but do you think it’s the challenge of sharing in terms of the how
We can be cross- comparable or sharing in terms of uh how we can have a collective attribution and I’m sorry if that’s that that’s not said in French maybe someone it’s okay it’s fine it’s a challenging question of course but I think I I will say both but as um short-term pre
Preoccupation for operators I think the first things to to share um uh reciprocity yes in the the contribution we can made maybe only inside the the network itself it could be interesting because we can share things about production about many things but we always have the first way to think
It’s about economy it’s about money it’s about how to exchange money about production maybe we can build kind of uh standard or um uh uh yes referen in French um to try try to uh share things without money exchange so it could be a first interesting step knowing that
Inside a network with operators that share many type of activities or value it could be not so complicated I think okay thank you right great um thank you very much again um and we’re now going to move on to our next speaker um Malik are you ready to take the floor hello everybody
So like my new friend Carol I will read my notes I apolog I AP I apologize sorry um um for 25 years I’ve been uh director of community centers in the suburb of Paris in Marill and in for little town near Marill um so I will start with a
Short speech um to introduce social uh communities and after I will introduce the method uh community centers appeared in France approximately at the same period as settlements in England the aim was to help the educ and educate Working Class People uh it is after the second world
War during the economic boom of the 50 60s and 70s and the develop of the the development of cities in France that community centers focused on the following missions taking care of children and young people on Wednesday and holidays to supervise them and also allow them to participate in different
Activities and apprenticeship workshops meetings with parents to talk about issues in their relationships with their children at school communication screen addiction French will for newly arrived people helping studies for children social integration action for jobless people parties and neighborhood meals uh they also develop various project local
TV and radios shared Garden young people communities trips holiday stays cultural and artistic projects uh there is a common approach as far as far the family is concerned but every structure is free to manage his project according to Opportunities uh the centers are managed by association elected every year by a
General assembly of residents they work with a team of salar employees specialized in leading team generally there is a director with a team uh and um and an administrative staff uh a team uh has about uh um seven salaried employees but some more important centers can can have up to 50
Permanent employees the average budget is about 7 700,000 EUR but can reach 4 million for the big ones the money comes from the French benefits office municipalities departments City policies foundations and finishing help from Members most of them are found in popular neighborhood where living condition are sometimes poor but also in
The middle class areas in Ral territory uh since 2017 I’ve been working on the concept of social utility and social impact and uh in 2021 I founding a training organization in order to develop assessment project of social Center here are the objectives uh to show precisely and Method method
Methodically the effect of social Center upon the members to underline the specific Futures and added values of social Center in the social educational field to show the ability of teams to carry out assessments to change the perception of social centers by institutions to get better recognition to influence the choice of social
Educational policies and to get new funds but before giving some example of this working method I would like to ponder over the notion of soci the Notions of social impact and sociality for the two terms are close but actually very different ideologically speaking social impact is not about is
Only about the effect produced it doesn’t deal with their origin the term social impact is linked to a performance approach or social caching is on this explains the common tendency to express the social value in Euros for example by explaining that if you g if you give one
Euro for a specific social policy you will get back to maybe 5 or you will save five EUR this Vision focused on performance stems for a capitalistic economy from competition and the result is that today or tomorrow Association nonprofit organization will become competitors in project and it is one the
Most most sociality lucrativity which will get the subsid uh what I mean is that to assess social value we choose a nonprofit approach more Global more aware of organization organizational practices and patterns that allow its achievement our Target is not performance but the quality of practices of work and
Processes which is the key to social value in a field of a mutual understanding our our objective is not to be competitors but sharers of good practices in the spirit of cooperation as apparently we are doing now um now I will introduce you the method we use to
Assess the social value of some project is a bottom up method which start from the user and what they say uh what say uh wow so um uh we start one day to determinate the to determin to determine the workshop leading teams they have one month to implement them the aim is to
Allow people to say what change the social Center has brought them on a daily basis and why it is important for each Workshop the team feel in agreed with the assessments of people two extra days of training are necessary to analyze the commments and DET take the following elements those is there are
Examples that what we are doing in the workshop with the users and um this is a uh first TD uh um okay um okay uh don’t this is a result of a study Carry Out Among retired people in Social Center the study encompass 11 social centers spread over the South
Region 40 workshops were set up involving 364 people with a total of 210 andent evaluation look I show you example before okay sorry sorry I read my note I I don’t look around um so this is the way we uh we work uh we analyze the testimonies and uh we built
Topics and after we look for the structure of social value and uh and this is in the shot the following chart the classification of the 220 uh evaluation involving not profit not profit stem okay yes it’s not so easy for me sorry um so for for us this is the first step
In the assessment project of social value the next step is to carry out questioner to quantify detected effect and give proportion because it is hard to know if it’s 10 20 30 or maybe 200 people who Express themselves uh in a workshop you have result from three
Groups dealing with the topic of social link this is another project a group of woman uh uh just uh a group of women taking part in adult activities a group of women just arrived in France taking part in French courses a group of children getting private lesson on Wednesday uh the main
Effects have been spotted during the first phase of the training new meetings new friends with people you can see again outside the center the social Center is the main place where my social life is organized in other words no Center no social life so results give proportion but but also
Element of understanding children with private L come from four different school for the area is very large some already know each other from the same school but they meet children from other schools however it is not easy for them to keep those links outside the center
Because it’s hard to travel in such a large area public transport are few and there is a a lot of violence because of drug trafficking and some parents are reluctant to let their children go out alone so the difference for the children it’s a it’s difficult for them to to see
Each other outside the social Center um part of the woman taking French courses are CDs are from the koros other come from Algeria Morocco or subaran Africa some already knew each other but all of them met new people and a lot of them become friends however only 27% of them regard the social
Center as their main place of activity of or social link for the Kurdish women all those from the Kos spend a large part of their lives in their communities yet 70% of the women uh with adult activity decare the social Center is their main place for activity and their
Main social link there are woman who have lived in France for a long time but because of circumstances arrived without knowing anybody and as they did not have a special place to meet other people remain isolated but thank to the creation of the social Center in
2017 they were able to set up a network of helpful people this is just an example of what we achieved and many other fields are explored such as apprentiship El family Harmony social and cultural opening today I just want to explain how we work to assess social value through conrete example thank
You that was really great thank you so much do we have any questions from the floor I’ll do it in English but then I can do it in French afterwards um just one thing is that in in English you say community center when in French we say social Center I really
Think we should think about this deeply and the other thing is did I understand right um You first spoke to people and get the testimonies and then you built a questionnaire to get quantities is that it yes okay because I think it’s interesting because most of the time we do the
Contrary we get quantities and then we get back to some people to get no for for us uh this is exploration uh Workshop uh it’s an exploration and because uh people say some things we build questionnaires this is the way we we take do we have any other
Questions well we’re going to do some questions at the end of the session anyway but first of all we’re going to travel to the UK um and pass the mic over to svan thank you um and thanks to the love FR team for inviting us it’s absolutely fantastic that such an inspiration the
Um the project and the UK and London can learn a lot from it just to stay there it was also great to hear uh my um the other speakers Patricia absolutely the economics as a lingua franer um sort of invading a particular space that previously hasn’t spoken that
Language is is an aspect I’m quite interested in but also mat you was speaking about um the experi experiential knowledge and how we can promote that I think these are aspects I wanted to touch on so if you can um go to the next slide um what I want to oh
There we go mer um so what I want to do is like give a practitioners um perspective a UK practitioner perspective to sort of um flush out a few experiences that we had with a particular discourse with a particular system that comes at us as practitioners I do engage
In the Frameworks I do engage in policy but I think the approach that what I wanted to contribute today was very much the practitioners perspective so what I do do is um my background is self-initiated Project projects I will show you one later which is essentially starting a project and actually carrying
It out I’m also a consultant for the built environment and my clients are local authorities um developers and funds and with a question how can we create a particular spatial situation I’m also teaching at Centrist Martins in the architecture department but my real focus is linguistics and culture history
That’s my background so when I look at the world and I look at that discourse that those are my goggles um what I’m not doing here is a particular academic um discussion or policy or Finance let we have to Eclipse that for a second because those are huge things now what
What is really interesting as practitioner what happened um and that’s my personal experience I think I share this with lots of people were two moments that happened in our professional life um one happened in 2013 and that was that the uh in the UK the UK Public Services social value Act was
Um published and came into effect in 2013 um that sort of slowly filtered through and what happened quite recently in the past 24 months let’s say that when you apply for a public project you often have to demonstrate the social value and that has changed how you apply
For projects that that has changed how we tender for projects there’s no judgment in whether it’s better or worse it’s just something that has changed as for a practitioner the second thing was that um it sort of rippled through the industry and that’s the finance industry
Is that the CEO of black rock made big announcement saying that all of the Black Rock Investments one of the biggest um investment funds will look at purpose ESG and other elements um to make decisions on investment whether you buy into that or not what has happened is rippled through
As a discourse for the industry and suddenly everybody talked about it and people do ask for that so what has happened in terms of tenders and briefs in the private sector you have to suddenly demonstrate that you generate social value you adhere to particular system of ESG and and that you monitored
So that has happened and rapidly is in the past two years so what has happened there was suddenly that it shaked things was shaking things up and when you look at it from a sort of linguistic perspective there was suddenly two different languages there was a whole um
New on site a I mean I’m going back to very old sort of linguistics model that’s about 100 years old but it’s really quite the simple way of looking at what kind of image you have and what you say and when you look at side a it
Was sort of that sort of near arrival of a language of social value is metrics that you can use as building blocks and they have an objective often Financial value and then there was sort of practitioners community that has been doing projects like laf and projects I’ve been doing and there was something
That was sort of professional experience mixed with knowledge of a place and other elements and that was sort of suddenly we didn’t quite understand each other and often was a misunderstanding when it cames to when it came to project planning and so forth so essentially what I saw was three different dilemas
It was like there was a practitioner and there sort of you know sort of a tradition of doing things the way you do it and was sort of inherent knowledge uh versus metrics and again there’s no there’s no judgment what’s ever I mean um there was
A lot of um sort of thinking about where’s that incidental project can we not just go to a place and do something out of the situation um versus something that is is driven by framework where you s think about what you want to achieve first and then you basically apply
Certain um metrics to then action a project and the last one is the situational versus sorry going ahead how do we go back the little one there you go that’s okay so essentially what I wanted to demonstrate here was you essentially had that sort of wi rectangular definition of value that
Often has equivalent in the industry of a financial value often that’s very clearly defined and then you have this bleed and and we currently really really really struggling to get a grip on what you see of this s of yellow and blue cloud and those words I put into this
Cloud is just just examples responding to biographies individual biographies as opposed to an age group grou um situational opportunities often they are not recognized in a in a sort of metric approach because it’s different to Brooklyn it’s different to marsill um it’s different to Berlin and then sort
Of unlocking Place specific potential I mean we all been there we’ve all seen it probably so so that’s sort of these these languages that are sort of clashing at the moment that’s how I see it um and what then happen is that lots of sort of conflicting languages were
Being presented so as lots of universes developing social value models lots of funds developing social value models and they’re not always matching they have lots of overlaps but we not arrived at a point where we all speaking the same language the what what I wanted to show
How this played out in practice in my personal from my personal experience with three examples um the first project self initiated was all Tendencies we started that in 2008 it’s probably not too far away from laf in the sense that it was an underused K Park in South London it was locked away
The top two floors and slowly through an art um cultural project an annual commissioning project for culture dance um and other art forms U we were given access to the space there was no funding attached to it it was literally just self administrated and then it slowly grew
Some things didn’t work out we had a lot of problems with Outreach you know we had we had audience sort of um sort of clusters and and effects that W um planned and then it sort of slowly grew and still working so it’s it’s still an annual project it’s still opening and
May still closing in September I’m not um running it any longer but what I was would be calling this a sort of structured navity nobody with a sort of structured plan would have started it and as you just want to create the activity and
Find a home for it so I think lots of parallels I mean I hope it’s correct with um the F in that sense that it started and then it sort of slowly figured itself out it slowly organized itself it’s slowly solidified and of became um social Val ultimately and then
What you can see here is sort of then filtered through the whole car park and then Studios um were added to that the um local Authority who owns the build then also engaged more thoroughly and there was um public funds were contributed and sort of that story really rippled through the building and
Now it’s sort of um has a longer lifespan is on a longer lease and has a similar effect to laf to its environment I hope the second project complete different recently happened Soho big American Investment fund um the brief was we want to have the best performing
ESG build building in all of London not not the only brief I’ve seen like that and we were given a particular social value system which is um ESG is environmental social and governmental um um metrics that you perform against and that can be evaluated often it’s also done monitored
Against financial performance so lots of investment funds have particular targets and then advertise that their fund has is performing particularly well so it could be with regards to carbon it could be with regards to social value and so forth so essentially we then had a whole
List this is a tiny s of list this is also general knowledge this in the public domain with particular elements um where we then had to create a ground floor experience according to the outputs and as you can see the the back column was a clear equivalent in pound
Sence we had already had an animation concept for the ground floor and then we had to completely change it um with which in the end we would have to see how it plays out in practice but essentially the the animation concept that we had in mind we wanted to work
With this of homeless charity next door was not possible because it did not score well enough when it came to the metrics again it this is not this is not to say this is a worst system but this is happening in practice at the moment if you go to next
Slide no I’m doing it still sorry so a different project where we’re sort of almost in response to it we’re trying a slightly different approach this is Shepherd’s Bush Market it’s in West London it’s an old 100y old Market which is along a train line where we
Were trying to do here was um a approach where we had a constant social value monitoring with a Baseline with this sort of quite place-based um activation approach where we did not or where we are not looking at the specific output for each individual activation like as sort of we had not Carnival
Intervention so we would do that activation and then evaluate afterwards and then it was sort of a a sort of a hybrid approach essentially so far that’s the best thing we can we came up with it’s not perfect but that’s basically where we arrived
At so then going back to a more sort of positive solution based approach if you have these three dilemmas as I see them practitioner versus metrics incidental versus framework and situation versus of a universal value how we count this or how we react to this three things with regards to
Those metrics we try to engage in Place analysis that gives something very close to metrics one of them is mapping because this geospatial um approach allows a very kind of metric approach and observing um the second one especially with regards to frame is is sort of
Engaging policy and the last one is to engage clients on site it sounds very simple but is actually um amazing effective from my experience so if you look at the first one it this we’re very very lucky in London that the GLA pushed for a um culture infrastructure um
Framework and is continually um measuring this and actually upgrading as we speak which is a baseline so culture infrastructure was defined and is um and mapped and it helps to create a sort of Fairly objective argument when it comes to developing specific sites because we’re speaking about the same values I
Mean this system is not perfect and we and we’re continuously upgrading it but when we look at a particular place as you can see in the green um the of green delineation we looked at a particular place we could identify a particular concentration of cultur infrastructure
And then react in response to it with a fairly objective metric response um but it didn’t preclude we didn’t wait it at that point and the waiting was done on a on within the framework of the culture infrastructure the second one was engaging policy so I suppose this is
What we’re doing today in actually engaging what that social value definition could be and comparing notes between also internationally so I think this is a really important thing we’re doing tonight and the last one was bringing clients on site now one of these things that work really well we
Brought UK clients to the city fer in in p and it was eye opening to see people a CEO of a big investment fund CEO of a development company go into a project and see we went to um the E and went to different other um organizations and it
Immediately sparked the next Monday we had emails in in the inbox where we where they asked how can we achieve this so those were just three quick insights into a PR ition perspective thank you very [Applause] much and I really enjoyed the maps especially um I love maps and do we have
Any questions from the floor I have a question are you happy to have me yes of course I didn’t realize who that was there for a second but yes Patricia it’s Patricia and yeah I’m here and like what I’m hearing is fascinating uh thanks so much to the other um presenters and yeah
I do in fact have a have a question for you because I think we all agree to an extent that uh what we uh value is inherently situational it’s uh context specific it’s to do with uh developing um networks of uh um actors that are kind of difficult to replicate so what
We value is effectively sticky right kind of difficult to extrapolate and put in a format that then uh can be uh compared benchmarks but the problem is that like policy makers think that this is kind of essential for them to be able to process information they need uh
Benchmarking and then they need to manipulate that information very quickly so like what do you do with all this uh uh specificity um as it happened this is like what we kind of value right so my question to you is uh there are three options for us either like we uh V the
Uh policymaking approaches and just insist that uh policy makers see that they in fact make subjective judgments premised on politics not based on evidence and we kind of just refuse to play the game so that’s option number one option number two we compromise and cave in and kind of think of uh
Indicators as the distorting but maybe necessary uh approximation of something or thirdly do you think that uh alternative approaches can be developed from within the sector meaning can we give policy makers what they insist they want which is their uh ability to compare across country context why staying true to ourselves sorry long
Question but I’m genuinely curious what you will say guys well it’s always difficult from my point of view it it’s somewhere between two and three um I think the danger with just coming up with our own system is that it may not get any traction because a there’s other systems that have
Already a lot of traction and and B it is you know like it’s it’s not actually the language that comes out of the sector so I think what how I would look at it is it’s it’s it’s basically it is an economic language it is a metric
Language that we have to learn how to speak without necessarily having to accept every single term not every single word and I think we can challenge Notions I think we can challenge the grammar but I think we should try to speak the same language I wanted to respond to um tr’s
Question by wondering whether there’s such a thing or could be such a thing as collective subjectivity so if we elect somebody through a democratic process to represent our interests um yes that individual may have a subjective position but do we have trust in that individual or in that party or in that
Collective that we’ve elected to represent us and if we do have trust then can we trust their subjectivity so yeah because otherwise you know who else then some other random person decides or how you know what we we have a democratic system that may or may not be working as well as it
Could but within that of course we’re all human beings including our policy makers and so that is it a sin to have subjectivity or can we work towards Collective subjectivity W you want to you want to answer not yeah please come I just have this little introduction I forgot to present her
Julia David who is uh writing here registering by graphic recording so that’s what you are seeing on the screen yeah thank you I was just thinking about sven’s maps that spatialize the gaps and what’s being measured in terms of value sometimes directly Financial exchange and I wondered to Adam’s question
Whether there might also be not just Collective subjectivity but collectively spatial subjectivity and more than one pair of eyes thinking about how this gets mapped it creates another data set it still creates a kind of value that would be crunched and delivered to policy makers in a particular way but it could
Be um could be quite an interesting one and not an uncomplicated one in terms of the histories of of mapping and measure as well I think you’ve all talked um either explicitly or implicitly about uh cultural value and social value social value seems to have the metric that’s
Active um and actually this what Patricia was referring to as well is is it is it something that’s feasible to not so much measure cult cultural value but measure the path from I suppose cultural production to social value or is that just absolutely
So slippery or is it is it is it is it is it possible is there is there a sort of sociocultural aspect which is joined up I guess is it I I suppose it’s the same I don’t know it for me personally it’s like it’s
Light a particle or wave it it is is both right and I think as a practitioners Community we got away with murder for a long time doing stuff and nobody held us a accountable for certain things so do we have to be self-critical and ask have we actually spent the money
That we’ve been given through grants and you know um contributions and so have we spent it in the right place have we been inclusive enough I don’t know you know I’ve I’ve done stuff and I wasn’t good enough personally so maybe metrics helped me to actually get on my toes and
You know stretch a bit further and get going but I also equally some I’m just if I see a tender and I need to explain the social value in pound coins I’m not going for the tender equally because I’m not I’m I’m not interested any practitioners again there’s no judgment
But it also deters action that could happen if we metri just going for the metric so I I think um it’s that hybrid thing right we are responsible but also we want to create um have that situational freedom and actually being able to unlock something out of the situation I
Think someone want to complete no yeah a last intervention maybe I don’t know okay in response to mix’s point and also clarify my understanding of what Patricia was saying um is it that culture is a collective action that delivers social impacts so are we actually trying to you
Know this idea of social impacts cultural impacts is culture an impact or is culture an action that delivers social impacts and for me listening to what’s being said and hearing what’s being said I felt like there was you know that’s it’s like a something not Computing why
Is it so difficult to get our heads around that given that all of these people are looking at it and if culture is collective and social is individual and Patricia notes that the sum of individual impact does not equal or does not recognize all of the value in the
Collective cultural impact then um yeah I wonder whether culture is an action rather than an impact very quickly respond to that may I just because I mean totally the issue is that like if you cannot map from Collective uh from cultural value to social value I’m just quitting I mean we
Have to be able to do that we have to be able to uh demonstrate but here’s the thing uh we don’t need to insist on measuring uh cultural value because indeed it is the irreducibly collective thing that configures other things that can be measured here I’m wondering and
I’m not an expert on social value over to you but maybe social value is the kind of thing that we can you know translate uh in terms of proxies well enough that it will make cultural value manifest so yeah I I I basically agree I think we need I’m sorry we’ll
Continue debate but I think we have to move for the second session Ellie you want to take the mic yeah I just want wanted to say thank you to all of our speakers that it was a very good session enjoyed it and now we’re be hopefully having some more
Questions and discussions at the end so now you can sit back and relax think a bit about power and then join the discussion [Applause] again