Introduction

This chapter explores how Plaine Commune, the local authority in charge of urban development in an area north of Paris, has implemented a ‘top-down’ arts-based collaborative process, which may be regarded as Co-Creation. The local authority commissioned artists to coordinate a citizen consultation process, via a series of arts-based activities, about a major urban development project. This chapter will analyse whether and how a process initiated by a public authority can be understood as part of the Co-Creation method defined in this book.

This reflection will be anchored within the debates on Creative Cities (Florida, 2002; Landry, 2003), investigating under what conditions Co-Creation could be used as a tool for building (more) just ‘Creative Cities‘(see the first section for a more detailed explanation). The chapter will look at how the project ‘The Football Pitch, the Player and the Consultant’, an experiment set within the frame of Plaine Commune's strategy of becoming a ‘territory of culture and creation’, fits with the ten principles this book suggests for Co-Creation.

The project ‘The Football Pitch …’ was a two-year arts-based project, led by the artists’ collective GONGLE (2017) and the cultural operator CUESTA in the Pleyel neighbourhood in Saint-Denis, France. The neighbourhood is facing major redevelopment, driven by the construction of a large train hub of metropolitan scale and of the Olympic Village and swimming pool for the 2024 Olympic Games. After the two first stages of the project had been implemented, the author's active involvement took place in its last stage: a participative evaluation process. This analysis is based on qualitative interviews and informal conversations with the artists and curators, civil servants working for the local authority and other researchers, as well as on a review of extensive artistic documentation and local authority policy documents.

The chapter will argue that, beyond its impact on the local community and on the urban development project itself, the Co-Creation experience can be a methodology that local authorities could use within Creative City strategies, as a first step towards innovation and changes in urban development processes.