Here’s an excerpt of the speech by Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts & Humanities Research Council, at the Parliamentary Dinner of the Key Cities Innovation Network. The dinner was hosted by the Key Cities APPG at the House of Commons on Tuesday, 6 May 2025. Prof. Smith was discussing the launch of ‘Culture, Place and Development’, KCIN’s annual compendium of peer-reviewed papers on place-based innovation projects, highlighting in particular “Leveraging emotional geographies of heritage to boost community empowerment”, the paper contributed by Dr Tony Sampson of the University of Essex and CERG.
“… In cities, we build the most innovative social infrastructures—but we learn how to spread them out, partly because of a sense of emotional geography, which is another part in this excellent report. The Greeks thought about emotion as something that’s done to you, you suffered emotion. The Latins, however, note that emotion is something that’s about movement. You move in emotion, and emotion therefore becomes a very personal issue constituted within society. Aquinas called emotion a movement of the soul. When we think about that, I think there’s a real opportunity for us to work out why it is that our emotions are not only things that we feel, but they’re also the way that we think, and we need to embrace that notion of thinking emotionally in a positive way, not as thinking irrationally. And the way we do that with rigour, is through participant-based research.
Pretty much everything that has happened in [the Key Cities] APPG looks at bringing people into community and into research. It looks at bringing people into the construction of a plan. Not leaving them outside, something that is done to them. That means we deal with the messy business of people’s emotions. We deal with their emotions when they find that those plans aren’t really speaking to them. We’ve all been in those meetings where we thought we were doing the right thing and we suddenly discover that we’ve actually hit it completely wrongly—although we’ve not explained why the things that we think we’re doing matter to them. So that emotional geography is incredibly important, and AHRC’s participant-based research—on health, for instance, on embodiment through dance and music, on law and social justice, on green transition, leads fundamentally to two key [concepts], for me, that you have within your thinking. One is consent, and the other is civic discourse.
I was reading Derek Jarman just recently, because the British Library has got a fantastic exhibition on gardens. One of the gardens that’s represented is Jarman’s garden in Dungeness in Jarman’s garden. Jarman wrote in Chroma – remember this is the 1990s, and most of us are old enough to remember what was happening to the gay community and queer community at that time through the AIDS epidemic – he said, I’m told I’m living on the fringes of society. But what if society is awry? In his angry moments, Jarman would talk about how unwilling he was to be part of a society was that was illiterate in human complexity.
I’ve thought about that a lot, because one of the things we do in AHRC is try to look at what is thought to be on the fringes of society, and we have tried to think how to learn our way to the literacy and human complexity that is necessary—and is represented brilliantly in this report.
Cities are incredibly good places for that, but they’re also quite bad places for that. Actually managing –through our faith groups, through our civic groups, through our universities, through our FE colleges, through all the structures we have – to learn our way to literacy and human complexity seems to me to be the critical thing that the APPG is championing, and what AHRC, I hope, will continue to represent.
There are references in the report to meanwhile spaces, to the mezzo level, to the minority—all seeming to be, as it were, on the outside of something big that’s happening somewhere else. But every one of us is in that space at some stage in our lives. The question is whether, in the middle of our lives, in the middle of our way, there’s someone there to help us through in a way that brings us closer to others—or there’s nobody there and that reinforces our antipathies. If we get this right, we’ll be in the first place. We’ll be taking everybody who’s in the middle of a way and maybe not finding many people around them, and bringing them back in society. And that can happen to everyone, which is why Jarman must be right to say that living on the fringes of society is probably the place you look to make sure that society really works.
I am so pleased that the APPG is doing this work. I’m delighted that we are able to participate in it.”