Croydon Creative Campus

Duration: 2019Client: Croydon CouncilLocation: London, UK
Services: Cultural Placemaking StrategyTypologies: Cultural & Educational, Districts, Downtown & NeighbourhoodsTags: Strategy
Futurecity was commissioned to create the narrative and vision for Croydon Creative Campus. The vision sets out Croydon as the place that combines all of its fantastic people and place assets together for everyone in the borough to create an exciting new opportunity to live, work, play and learn together like never before. Croydon Creative Campus embraces the new distributed and networked learning economy that combines digitalisation and globalisation with authentic creative placemaking at a local level for all residents and visitors.
“Cities, their economy and personality, are changing fast. Work and life is being transformed by the digital economy, globalisation and automation. Croydon has all of the places, people, creativity and innovation of this new world.”
Mark Davy, Founder of Futurecity.

Futurecity worked with Croydon to excavate and collate all of its fantastic people and place assets that have been part of its cultural,  social and physical regeneration over recent years. These include:

o  Croydon: a place that for generations has been the centre of workplace innovation
o  Croydon: one of the greatest concentrations of high-achieving young people in the UK and a huge, highly diverse population
o  Croydon: proximity to Gatwick Airport and Central London render us supremely ‘connected’
o  Croydon: second to none creative culture – especially urban music culture
o  Croydon: cultural and development investment coming in is phenomenal, with exceptional innovation in its wake
These were combined with research into the future of learning and the future of work to create a story of how Croydon as a borough could develop and work as a campus for learning for all its residents and visitors. For example:
– Technology is transforming the nature of work, creating demand for data scientists not data entry clerks
– 65% of UK Primary Students will work in future jobs that don’t currently exist

 

Croydon Creative Campus is about buildings, spaces, places, and outstanding contemporary environments that’ll excite learners from across the world, as well as Thornton Heath, Westminster and swathes of Southern England.

But Croydon Creative Campus is also about networks, touchpoints, sensors and bots – a place in which content is drawn from elsewhere, some spaces are treated as programmable places full of options, almost widgets, and there is a whole layer to Croydon, akin to the ambient beat running through its Music City veins, that is mobile, interactive and devoted in an open, available, democratic way to developing and delivering new generations of lifelong learners.

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