Madison Cultural Plan 2011 - City of Madison, Wisconsin

II.G. Thinking Regionally
Madison recognizes that its creative context is regional, rather than municipal.
Madison Cultural Plan 2011, commissioned by the Madison Arts Commission, is of
necessity focused on the city itself.
However, as Madison’s cultural planning process has moved forward, other
interested citizens working under the name Imagine and hosted by Edenfred,
convened a series of discussions around the question of imagining the cultural
ecology of the capital region. Their conversations and public meetings reached
from Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point to Lake Mills with stops in Madison, Spring
Green, Prairie du Sac, Portage, Shullsburg, Stoughton, and Janesville.
The aspirations gathered in these meetings often parallel those discovered in
Madison’s cultural planning process. They seek to “organize, collect, act,” to inventory
creative assets and link them to one another and to a broader group of resources
and opportunities, to provide voice for creative issues, to fold all residents into a
continuous creative conversation, and to create “a slow moving train that allows new
people to jump on board.” Their ideas bind together the region’s food production
and its creative pleasures, its schools and learning centers, and its environmental and
arts programs, also giving importance to diversity and inclusiveness.
They echo Madison’s needs for affordable spaces for creative work to be done, for
common gathering spots where creative people can come together for
collegiality, for programs that reach out to under-served areas, and for closer ties
between the arts and commerce.
In addition, there has been some early exploration of the need for cultural planning
at the county level, perhaps via expansion of the Dane County Comprehensive
Plan, to include creative sector issues.
Therefore, Madison’s cultural plan must shape a starting point that positions the
community to take its place in a larger, regional creative commons to come.
Madison Cultural Plan Introduction and Overview
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