Title

Please provide a name for your action learning plan.

Exploring creative placemaking as an innovative approach to local development

Challenge statement

Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)

The challenge is that conventional approaches toward local development in Kyrgyzstan are mostly based on the top-bottom approach lacking the power of co-design, co-creation and joint implementation of development plans. Therefore, local communities cannot fully leverage their creativity, culture and innovative thinking to shape physical and social character of a place in order to spur economic development, promote enduring social change and improve physical environment. 

Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?

Location-specific approaches, notably tourism promotion, generate positive externalities for local creative and cultural workers. It attracts international tourists and consumers, increases aggregate demands for local cultural products and services, enhances knowledge exchanges, and stimulates innovation. Products linked to particular places become more competitive and distinctive because local traditions and culture cannot be reproduced, and the place brand guarantees its authenticity and unique identity. This link between places and culture would in turn revive places, sustain intangible culture, and allow local tourism to thrive. Clusters are geographic concentrations of interconnected enterprises, service providers, and companies which engage in similar activity and cooperate together in certain domains. Clusters are broader than industries capturing linkages, complementarities, skills, marketing, and customer needs that cut across firms and industries. This attribute of cutting across, and linking the fortunes of, firms and industries enhances the global competitiveness of firms within the cluster. Such cluster development incorporating competition between like firms facilitates increased productivity, increases the capacity for innovation and productivity growth, and stimulates new business formation that supports innovation. Cluster theory features the importance of location, partnerships between organizations, the importance of cluster intersections and the synergies achieved through competition alongside cooperation between differentiated firms. Considering Kyrgyz cultural heritage including unique handicraft techniques and arts, nomad identity and history of places or communities usually reflected in the local creative works and pieces of art, opportunities for contemporary interpretation of traditional art forms, techniques, and motifs, blended with modern aesthetics, the local development paradigm based on the community-based creative clusters can generate additional tourist flows and income opportunities for local communities. In addition, it will provide substantial entrepreneurial opportunities for women, as there is a huge number of them already working in tourism including those in informal sector.

Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.

Creative Economy, Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration (miro.com)  public - creative economy, Visual Workspace for Innovation (miro.com) Situation analysis on creative economy https://docs.google.com/document/d/12_H7qK69qCF7sQTph15A7rBlKuWUVc4r/edit Academic articles:  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uVqpr4rk-5s0y4ijfRA5C3epkkX__7JC?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x4JnlDX0cNjDZfJPOUKvTC_0odmtcd63?usp=drive_link 

Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?

1.    Creative placemaking concept as an innovative human-centric approach toward local development  leveraging the power of human capital, creativity and arts which has not been tested by UNDP yet. 2.    Creative placemaking has diverse methodology toward development such as "eventful places" which can be customized, tested and applied to local context.  3.  Territory-based creative cluster is a new target group for UNDP work with.  4.  Creative placemaking allows to test advance technologies such as AR and NFT for further integration into activities. 5.  Experimenting with diverse methods and approaches of creative placemaking allows UNDP to test innovative ideas, identify gaps and opportunities and recommend them to scale within existing  and future UNDP programming

Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?

Accelerator Lab is designing and testing innovative approaches to local development based on the creative placemaking concept to harness the potential of grassroots innovators and creative clusters. 

Challenge classification

Partners

Learning questions

Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?

How can creative economy and/or creative economy's means stimulate local development? Can a creative cluster be a driving force for local and urban development? Is if worth for UNDP to apply destination-based approach toward tourism development?

Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?

1. Co-creation and Design Thinking - using these two approaches ensuring engagement and participation of diverse stakeholders we successfully conceptualized the Innovation Challenged "Open Osh" - innovative digital city platform which will leverage the power of arts, culture and creativity to serve a community’s interest while driving a broader agenda for change, growth and transformation in a way that also builds character and quality of place.  2. Sense-making being conducted through the collaborative platforms are ensuring alignment among the needs of the local communities, local governments and other stakeholders.  3. Pilots - pilot locations and territories were selected to test innovative approaches 4. Data ethnography helped to better align propose activities with the grassroots needs and explored capacity of the local communities. 

Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?

The gaps relate to the understanding of the situation with grassroots creative clusters and willingness of the local population and local self-governments to unite for the purpose of local development.  Lack of data on customization of the creative economy's means to stimulate participatory-based local development.

Closing

Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?

Association of Creative Industries, local tourism destinations nationwide, tourism associations, grassroot communities, Department of Tourism, Local governments and city administrations. 

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