Where culture plays such a pivotal role in shaping place identity, fostering social cohesion, and improving well-being, why is measuring its impact and reflecting the breadth of cultural activity across communities challenging?

Working with The Audience Agency and supported by Research England, the Centre for Cultural Value has been leading a project to develop a Cultural Indicator Suite, a new framework that helps to communicate the holistic everyday cultural vitality of the places we live.

What do we mean by cultural vitality?

Cultural vitality is central to understanding the cultural and artistic health of the places we live. It involves understanding the dynamic interactions between cultural activities and opportunities, participation, diversity, access, and infrastructure, which collectively shape the identity and well-being of our communities.

Cultural vitality encompasses not only formal cultural institutions but also everyday, informal and grassroots expressions of culture. Policymakers, funders and practitioners need tools that capture this full range of activity to inform strategy, track progress and demonstrate value across sectors such as health, education, local development and environmental planning.

Sharing our findings

We have reviewed recent research and literature and interviewed representatives from Local Authorities across England, covering urban, rural, and coastal regions. Our interim report, lays out a practice-relevant vision for how the UK cultural sector can more effectively understand and support cultural vitality.

The report brings together key insights, including:

• Traditional indicators have overemphasised ‘high culture’ and formal participation, underrepresenting informal, local and community-driven cultural life.
• Culture should be approached ecologically – not siloed – capturing interactions between formal institutions, community spaces, policy contexts, infrastructure and everyday creativity.
• ‘Resilience’ is an outcome of culturally vital communities. As such the seven dimensions of cultural vitality presented in the interim report represent key thematic areas for exploring and measuring this.
• There’s an urgent need to develop rural cultural vitality measures, address diversity and access gaps and understand the cultural sector’s contributions beyond economic growth, including wellbeing and belonging.

Download the report

Watch a recording of the Launch event

Centre for Cultural Value director, Stephen Dobson, says:

“Cultural vitality captures something greater than just numbers or outputs. It reflects the depth, relevance and connectivity of cultural life in our communities.”

He adds:

“At the Centre for Cultural Value, we have seen a pressing need to provide a more nuanced, context-sensitive and practical framework that helps those shaping cultural policy to understand what cultural vitality looks like on the ground, what contributes to it, and how it connects to building resilient, inclusive and thriving communities.”

Watch this video from Policy Leeds, to learn more about the project findings to date:

Next steps

We want to take this project into its next phase with the support of a wider network. This emerging network will help us explore and support the many interconnected factors that shape culturally vibrant, socially cohesive places to live and work.

At the same time, we want to work towards refining the Cultural Indicator Suite framework, ensuring it’s a practical tool for local and regional decision-making, helping to balance priorities and ultimately benefit communities.

If you would like to be involved in the next stage of this project, or simply stay updated on the next steps, please sign up for our email newsletter. We’ll be sharing updates, opportunities, and developments very soon.

Should you require the interim report in an alternative format, please email us at ccv@leeds.ac.uk.

Image credit: Mafwa Theatre. Community Garden Event.