How does literary practice allow us to think about the ‘pride in place’ agenda?
What can poetry offer to policy makers?
Professor Nicky Marsh (University of Southampton)
The AHRC-funded Feeling Towns project, part of the Place Programme, explored the relationship between emotions, policy and creative practice. Increasing ‘Pride in Place’ has been a political ambition for some time: a core mission in Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up programme and a flagship investment for Keir Starmer, providing up to ‘£5 billion of long-term support to up to 250 of the most in-need communities’.
Yet how pride went from being one of the seven deadly sins to a preeminent political virtue is worth pausing upon. What pride means to communities – what causes it to expand or contract, how is it defined in relation to other emotions (such as shame, or envy), whether it is experienced as an individual or collective emotion – are questions raised and silenced by the contemporary political agenda.
But they are the questions that need to be considered if pride is going to be used as an effective lever for cultural change. They are also questions that suggest answers that can’t be easily measured or aggregated in the ways in which public investments demand. The result for the Conservative administration, as we have argued in our published work, was a set of proxy metrics that revealed much about the Government’s attitude to public and private spaces but little about pride as an emotion that can be repurposed for governance.
Our relationship to this agenda was complex: we wanted to offer a critique of its limitations whilst respecting that pride in place was important to local communities, not least because it was attached to significant funding. We worked with local authorities to develop strategies for understanding the nuanced, local and engaged implications of pride and with policy makers to understand these nuances. In both approaches our cross-disciplinary team: of cultural geographers, cultural critics and literary practitioners was vital.
Our work with communities drew on the skills of literary and cultural critics and practitioners –a honed attention to language, representation, ambiguity, incoherence, form, and cultural difference. We used poems, maps, photo elicitation to develop more complex models of pride in place. This work revealed that pride works at various interconnecting scales and temporalities. It suggested, for example, that national pride, civic pride, and local pride have quite different forms and pride is often rooted in the hyper-local of people’s everyday experience. It revealed that pride in place crosses individual and collective identities and has a fragile temporality, it can come and go quite quickly and lay dormant. Crucially, we learnt that pride has positive and negative connotations, often experienced relationally in ways that resemble competition rather than community cohesion.
This work, and the reports for specific communities that we produced, led us to co-design a Think Kit that used our creative methods to enable a recognition that every place has different stories, different histories, different sources of pride.
We wanted to share these creative findings with policy makers. Our policy brief, training for civil servants, and evidence for government reports were accompanied by a film. We gave the poet Ella Frears access to our research and commissioned her to write a poem that engaged with the critical and emotional registers it had revealed.
Ella worked in collaboration with the director Annlin Chao to visually reimagine the poem, ‘How Proud’, as animated film . For this project creative outputs were themselves the most important form of evidence.
