There is an urgent need to engage with deep leverage points in sustainability transformations—fundamental myths, paradigms, and systems of meaning making—to open new collective horizons for action. Art and creative practice are uniquely suited to help facilitate change in these deeper transformational leverage points. However, understandings of how creative practices contribute to sustainability transformations are lacking in practice and fragmented across theory and research. This lack of understanding shapes how creative practices are evaluated and therefore funded and supported, limiting their potential for transformative impact. This paper presents the 9 Dimensions tool, created to support reflective and evaluative dialogues about links between creative practice and sustainability transformations. It was developed in a transdisciplinary process between the potential users of this tool: researchers, creative practitioners, policy makers, and funders. It also brings disciplinary perspectives on societal change from evaluation theory, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and more in connection with each other and with sustainability transformations, opening new possibilities for research. The framework consists of three categories of change, and nine dimensions: changing meanings (embodying, learning, and imagining); changing connections (caring, organizing, and inspiring); and changing power (co-creating, empowering, and subverting). We describe how the 9 Dimensions tool was developed, and describe each dimension and the structure of the tool. We report on an application of the 9 Dimensions tool to 20 creative practice projects across the European project Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures). We discuss user reflections on the potential and challenges of the tool, and discuss insights gained from the analysis of the 20 projects. Finally, we discuss how the 9 Dimensions can effectively act as a transdisciplinary research agenda bringing creative practice further in contact with transformation research.
This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.
