Students, staff and graduates of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) will soon benefit from nearly £900,000 of EU funding for three cultural regeneration projects.
UCA’s Research & Enterprise department has been awarded funds from the European Union’s Interreg IVA Channel Programme to actively participate in three schemes that aim to engage the creative and cultural industries in the UK and France.
UCA has been appointed lead partner of one of the contracts and will handle a budget of £3.6m to help boost cultural regeneration and civic engagement on both sides of the Channel.
Uwe Derksen, Assistant Director of Research & Enterprise at UCA, said: “We are delighted to confirm three new and exciting projects with the EU’s Interreg Programme.
“They will aid research at UCA, and in the UK, in a variety of ways but also create new partnership opportunities and access to new resources and expertise.
“I find it particularly satisfying that UCA has been made lead partner of one of the projects as it clearly shows the many benefits that a creative arts university can bring to a cultural regeneration scheme.”
UCA will lead the Inter-regional Culture-led Regeneration (ICR) project which aims to stimulate the growth of the creative and cultural industries in the south coast of England and Par-de-Calais, Normandy and Brittany in France.
The £3.6m scheme, in partnership with Kent County Council, Medway Council, Arts University Bournemouth and French counterparts, will employ innovative models of creative knowledge exchange, cultural interventions and audience engagement to reconcile and refresh cultural activity in urban centres.
UCA will work on two other projects: Recreate which aims to transform vacant town centre premises into vibrant creative enterprise hubs by establishing creative enterprise hubs for start-ups and micro, commercial enterprises from the creative industries.
ACT’s (A Common Territory) objective is to pool cultural, financial and human resources in order to set up cultural events on both sides of the Channel. UCA will play a key role with major input from BA (Hons) Creative Arts for Theatre and film, Graphic Design, Broadcast Media, and CG Arts & Animation.
Dr Simon Ofield-Kerr, Vice-Chancellor at UCA, said: “Each of these projects demonstrates UCA’s commitment to working in partnership within an international context and the importance of the creative arts for social, cultural and economic development.”
The three projects are due to last two-and-a-half years and will involve students, staff and graduates of UCA, from a wide-range of courses, at each stage.
UCA is currently working on several EU Interreg projects, including Transparent Boundaries, led by Prof Lesley Millar, and the Crysalis Cross-Border Professionals Programme, which recently hosted a seminar for Textiles experts at UCA Rochester which was attended by the ‘patron saint of print’ Mark Eley of Eley Kishimoto..
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