Market Town Futures
Cultural Engine was funded through the Emerging Futures Fund to implement Free Market Radicals, a project which is exploring the ways in which the concept of the ‘market’ borrows from its original meaning - that is, a physical space of social and cultural exchange. How has the way we understand ‘the market’ today challenged and distorted much of what traditional market towns may once have offered in terms of craft and local distinctiveness in favour of corporate standardisation? Although drawing inspiration from the past, the project is forward-looking, with an emphasis on being free from constraints on the imagination, and radical enough to cultivate the new approaches needed to ensure town and village centres can be vibrant hearts of local creative economies once more.
Free Market Radicals is a project working with nine towns and villages in rural Essex to understand what the people who live there would like to see happen in their places post-Covid, and how they can lead these changes. In particular, the project has a focus on what can be done to bring new creativity and cultural vibrancy to the communities, identifying underused public spaces and thinking about heritage and what makes a place distinctive. In the current phase of the project, Cultural Engine are researching and understanding local opportunities through the use of an online survey and discussions with key stakeholders, focus groups and workshops to understand the passions of and pressures on the local community.
The project’s emphasis on the cultural, relational and other non-monetary aspects of the economy recognises that markets don’t exist as monolithic entities somehow outside the course of ordinary time and space. Instead, they are fundamentally the products of relationships - of culture, values, history, and politics - as well as relationships with the world around us - geography, climate, ‘resources’, and more. By recognising this entanglement of economies and markets with nearly every other aspect of human (and non-human life), Free Market Radicals is paving the way for an entirely new, emergent vision of the future of economic life and of what we mean by the market.
You can learn more about Free Market Radicals here and here, or head here to learn about the organisation behind the project, Cultural Engine.