The serious opportunity hiding in medium-sized cities
Why artists belong in economic development, not at the edge of civic life
Medium-sized towns and cities face a particular strategic challenge in terms of finding their identity, and their commercial appeal.
A small historic town may get by on charm, landscapes, intimacy or one very good, sometimes very old, story. A market square, a castle, a monastery, a lake, a handsome old hotel and a decent restaurant can do a surprising amount of economic work.
A large city has different advantages. Airports, universities, global companies and deep labour markets, cultural density, transport, noise, money, chaos, visibility. People forgive large cities many failures because scale keeps producing alternatives. One street disappoints, another street rewards you. One job ends, another will appear. One gallery closes, three more open. The machinery is large enough to keep turning.
The medium-sized city has to be more deliberate. A town of 80,000, 150,000 or 300,000 people has enough scale to matter, but not enough scale to coast. Its economic future is a web of physical infrastructure — streets, housing, workplaces, transport, schools, public spaces — combined with an emotional overlay of stories and expectations. People need to believe that the place is working, and that it is working towards something.
It has employers, schools, cultural institutions, sports clubs, festivals, cafés, municipal departments, business parks, housing estates, possibly a university, and probably several people who have been on every committee since 1997. It has the raw material of civic life. What it often lacks is the machinery of connection. That is where the opportunity lies.
A medium-sized city is still clearly legible. People can know each other. The mayor can know the main employers, the cultural director will know the schools, and a respected business leader can be a civic figure rather than a logo on the side of that new building south of the river. Here artists can know their audiences. A new studio cluster can be noticed. A residency inside a local company can become part of the town’s story. The question is whether the town is willing to work with that scale intelligently. This is the scale at which relationships can still be designed, and the question is whether anyone is designing them.
Attractiveness is built, not merely announced. Every municipality wants to be attractive. The word appears in strategies, investment brochures, tourism campaigns and mayoral speeches with such regularity that one begins to suspect it has joined “innovation” and “sustainability” in the great cupboard of words people reach for when they need to sound serious. Except attractiveness is not a slogan but an ecosystem.
Businesses need people. People need work. But people also need housing, schools, services, public space, culture, safety, leisure, decent coffee, somewhere to take visiting friends, somewhere for their children to discover that life contains more than exams and shopping malls. Employers need a labour pool. The labour pool needs reasons to stay. The town needs tax revenue. Tax revenue depends on residents and companies believing in the place enough to remain there, invest there, grow there and recommend it to others. And so, round and round it goes. A strong employer helps families stay. Families support schools, restaurants, sports clubs, shops and services. A lively cultural offer makes the town feel more generous. A town that feels more generous helps employers recruit. Employers that can recruit are more likely to expand. Expansion strengthens the tax base. A stronger tax base helps the town improve the conditions that made people stay in the first place. That is the real economy of a medium-sized city: confidence, repeated daily, and culture runs straight through it.
Culture gives people reasons to gather. It gives children and young people evidence that their town contains possibility. It gives older residents ways to stay involved. It gives visitors a reason to come for the day, then perhaps for the weekend, then perhaps again with friends. It gives employers a richer story when they are trying to persuade people to move. It gives the municipality something more substantial than “a great place to live, work and play,” which should now be retired with thanks for long service. A town becomes attractive because people experience it that way, not merely because it says so.
The arts are already in that economy of attraction, though there is still a habit of treating the arts as though they belong in the softer part of civic life. A nice to have kind of thing. Good for the children. Good for a ribbon-cutting and a photograph of a mayor looking interested and friendly beside a new sculpture in the municipal park. The numbers are less sentimental. The European Commission estimates that the cultural and creative industries ecosystem represents about 3.95% of EU value added, employs around 8 million people and includes around 1.2 million firms, almost all of them small and medium-sized enterprises.
The creative economy is not some alien species that needs to be introduced into local economic life under conditions of controlled engagement. It already resembles the economy of many medium-sized towns: small firms, freelancers, specialist knowledge, risk, relationships, improvisation, networks, trust, craft, and shifting reputations. Artists and creative workers create work, and attract visitors by virtue of that output. They make places recognisable, support hospitality, and animate empty spaces. They help people understand where they live through their work, and through teaching. They influence design, communication, identity and public life but their value often slips through standard economic measurement because the metrics are not tuned finely enough.
The ticket sale is counted, of course, but is the atmosphere? Grant spend is counted but the young person who decides that creative life is possible locally may never appear in the spreadsheet. The hotel booking is counted, but the reason the visitor came is probably reduced to “leisure”, or “business.” The studio rent is certainly counted, but the fact that the studio community helps a town feel alive is harder to price. May I posit that a municipality ignores these things at its cost?
Medium-sized cities may have an advantage, and they can be hard-nosed about it, if they choose. See, there is a comforting myth that culture belongs naturally to large cities. More people, more money, more institutions, more stages, more noise. More NOISE! When you look more closely, however, the conclusion is no longer so obvious.
European research has found that medium-sized cities often appear to have more cultural capital assets per inhabitant than larger cities. This should make every ambitious mid-sized municipality sit up, take notice, and start a deep audit of its cultural landscape.
A large regional capital may have more of everything, but a medium-sized city can have enough culture at a scale where people can actually feel it. The smart operators in that class have been positioning their cities in exactly that fashion for a long time. It would be great if more of them realised the opportunity exists.
A new studio space can be noticed by passers by. A residency in a local factory can become a editorial story with long shelf life. A festival can become part of civic identity rather than one listing among many other options. A theatre can work with schools, employers and visitors without needing six committees, three subcommittees and a ceremonial coffee and canapés with the assistant deputy associate director general of partnership alignment. Pardon the sarcasm...
This is the great advantage of proximity and Dundee’s (Scotland, 150,000 people) creative industries strategy captures it beautifully. Local creative people described the city as the “perfect size and location” for a creative business because one can walk across the centre and connect easily with others. That is not a small thing. That is infrastructure of another kind. Medium-sized cities are large enough to have substance and small enough to retain consequence. The trick is to use that scale on purpose, with the people who make that culture locally. Of course, there is a “but” here.
Artists need space before they can create culture, and there is no serious local culture without working artists. A town can import events, book touring productions and hire famous names to perform the same, certainly beautiful, material they have played everywhere. It can host a respectable festival and print a handsome programme. All of that is worthwhile, but the real cultural energy of a place comes from people who are making, testing, arguing, and rehearsing locally. Sanding stone, recording music, stretching canvasses, welding steel, editing, painting... All that creates a living cultural tissue of a town, as opposed to an attractive overcoat that looks great but is not “made here.”
Young and emerging artists, in particular, need encouragement, but encouragement without space is just polite applause from a safe distance. Artists need rooms, often large rooms, cheap enough to make a mess in. Rooms with bad carpets and beautiful light. Rooms where work can be left overnight, where sound can resound, where bodies can move and sweat, and where things can be built, broken, stored, fixed and discussed.
Large cities are increasingly bad at providing these rooms. Artists help make districts interesting, then the districts become expensive, then the artists are invited to continue to be interesting elsewhere, preferably at a greater distance and lower inconvenience to capital. Pretty much every large city you can think of is a tough environment for artists, no matter the opportunities and the energy. Even New York City is reporting a sharp drop off in the number of resident artists.
Medium-sized towns can offer something that large cities often cannot: affordable space, visibility, proximity to audiences and the chance to belong to a recognisable ecosystem, and this should be treated as an economic opportunity. Artist studios are not a decorative luxury. Rehearsal rooms are not an indulgence. Shared workshops, temporary project spaces and affordable production facilities are part of the machinery that produces civic life, and civic life is what makes places worth living in.
Many towns already have the raw material - empty shops, unused offices, former workshops waiting for redevelopment. Redundant municipal buildings and spare floors in commercial properties. Shopping centre units waiting for tenants and buildings in that administrative limbo known as “awaiting planning consent.” Across Europe, the practice of making such spaces available to artists is often called temporary use, meanwhile use or interim use. The idea is simple. A landlord, developer, company or public body has unused space and artists and creative organisations need space. All that’s needed for this to happen at scale is a trusted intermediary who makes the arrangement workable: agreements, insurance, utilities, safety, public benefit, sensible notice periods, and clear responsibilities all around.
Everyone gains. Artists get space and audiences, property owners reduce vacancy and dead frontage, developers make new districts feel alive before they are fully occupied. Companies can demonstrate civic commitment in a way that is more tangible than a logo on a banner and makes for far more interesting editorial column inches. The town gains cultural production from assets that would otherwise sit empty.
There is a warning here, because there is always a warning where culture meets property. Artists should not be used as temporary atmosphere machines for developments that later expel them. The best models create fair access, safe conditions, public value and, wherever possible, a route from short-term use to longer-term workspace. Temporary activation has value, and durable space has deeper value. A town that wants living culture needs both.
And visitors need reasons to visit. People in larger cities are always looking for somewhere to go. Not necessarily far, preferably not expensively – a day trip, a Saturday, maybe a weekend. Somewhere with a good exhibition or a concert, an open-studio weekend, an old street they have not walked before, lunch worth remembering, a small hotel, a market, a cool story. Draw a circle with “ninety minutes out of town” on it. If your municipality lies within this circle, so does opportunity.
The numbers are vast. In 2024, EU residents made 1.19 billion trips. The overwhelming majority were within Europe, and most were, actually, domestic. EU tourist accommodation recorded more than 3 billion nights in 2024, with domestic guests accounting for just over half. In Poland, residents made 52.8 million domestic tourist trips in 2024, with short trips accounting for 60% of the total. Leisure and holidays were the leading purpose of travel with cultural tourism counting for almost 40% - and cultural tourists spend more per day and stay longer than other tourists.
For a medium-sized town, this is not a call to chase after coaches with cut price lunches and fridge magnets. A far better prize to aim for is repeat regional visitation. Someone comes for an exhibition or a concert and learns that there is a tradition of open studios, where they can meet the people who put up that exhibition or played that gig. There are good restaurant by the square. The local arts centre has a newsletter, and there is always something interesting just around the corner, so it’s worth signing up. Before long, that visitor begins to think of the town as part of their own cultural map.
Living artistic ecology is built up in layers and is both more resilient, and more authentic than any cut and paste “culture strategy.” The combination of working artists, local companies making cool things, unusual spaces, food, heritage, public life and good production gives a town a visitor proposition that belongs to that place.
And business is already cultural, to a greater or lesser degree. Sure, it usually enters cultural conversations through the sponsorship door, but the relationship can be far deeper if the company sees itself not just a source of money but a member of the town’s culture tapestry, with its own cultural environment. A well-run company has rituals, language, habits, stories, jokes, and memory. It shapes how hundreds or thousands of people experience the town every day. In a medium-sized city, a good employer can influence civic morale as strongly as a theatre, school, sports club or annual festival.
Companies train people, support families, and create careers. They give young residents reasons to stay, and bring suppliers, visitors and investment into the area. They are part of the town’s identity whether anyone has written that into a strategy document or not.
So the relationship between culture and business should be more ambitious than sponsorship. A company trying to recruit talented people needs a town that helps make the case, and a municipality trying to retain residents needs employers that feel like civic partners. Artists can help open this relationship because they bring a third language into the room. They are neither city officials nor corporate managers, and notice things that insiders no longer see.
This is where Art. In a Place of Work. comes in. We place artists inside companies and build a wider process around the encounter: residencies, workshops, interviews, exhibitions, publications, open days, and public storytelling.
The company becomes a site of cultural exchange, employees become participants in the town’s cultural story, and the artist gains access to materials, people, processes and spaces rarely available in a studio. The municipality gains a visible bridge between business life, artistic life and civic identity.
In a town of 80,000, 150,000 or 300,000 people, this kind of project can be noticed. Its outputs can move through schools, families, business networks, cultural institutions and public events. Over time, each residency becomes one chapter in a larger story about the town’s people, imagination and future. The value is well beyond making business look creative for a week. It is in doing something real: bringing artists into the economic life of the town and allowing both sides to see differently.
All of this needs someone to hold the threads. In a large metropolis, culture, creative industries, tourism, business relations, innovation, education and international projects are spread across large departments and multiple agencies. In a medium-sized municipality, one person or small team with the right mandate can change the whole temperature of the place.
Lublin, a city of around 350,000 in eastern Poland has built a function inside its city administration that connects entrepreneurship, creative industries, business cooperation and international projects. Mannheim (a bit over 300,000, South of Cologne) has placed its Creative Economy cluster inside economic and structural development. Oulu (220,000, central Finland) supports creative industries through its business-development agency. Tartu (Estonia’s second-largest city, 100,000 inhabitants) has a city-founded creative industries centre and incubator. Slovakia’s Košice (225,000 close to the Hungarian border) has Creative Industry Košice, which grew out of its European Capital of Culture process and now works across culture, education, residencies, professionalisation and business cooperation.
Every ambitious medium-sized municipality needs a senior person, team or arms-length body responsible for connecting culture, creative industries, business, artist workspace, education, tourism, international projects and civic innovation - to the benefit of all those stakeholders.
This is not a job for a timid grant administrator with a drawer full of forms and a soul full of beige. It requires courage and taste in equal measures, a diplomatic ear, administrative intelligence, entrepreneurial fire in the belly, and the ability to sit between people who do not naturally understand one another.
Artists can be suspicious of city hall, business leaders can be suspicious of artists, and municipal departments can be suspicious of anything that crosses a departmental boundary and asks questions other than those that not been answered in the same way for a generation. Someone has to translate between these three camps, and has to broker trust. They need to know which empty building could become studios, which company might be ready for a residency, which school needs a project, which festival could carry the story, which EU programme might support it, and which mayoral promise can be turned into a working process. Such a bridge person is living infrastructure, and let us repeat - every medium-sized municipality needs to create such a position, fund it appropriately, and give the person time and support enough for their work to begin to bear fruit.
The opportunity is in the work, and the work is the opportunity. Medium-sized towns need to work at long-term attractiveness. They need to work at retaining people, work at supporting business, and work at culture, public space, visitor appeal, and identity. That can sound like a burden until you look at it through a prism of opportunity.
These towns still have the scale at which purposeful relationships can change the story - they are not so big as to begin to break up into large, discrete entities - major suburbs, neighbourhoods, self-governing districts. Medium-sized towns do not need to apologise for their scale because that very scale may be the source of their advantage - but only if they use it.
The towns that understand this will treat artists as partners in economic development - they will create space, they will build those bridges between art and commerce. They will invite companies in. They will give someone the job, and the authority, to connect culture, business and civic ambition into a coherent whole.
Art. In a Place of Work. offers one practical place to begin. It treats the workplace as part of the city and artists as key economic partners in a large circle of relationships. It treats employees as participants in civic culture. All of this gives a medium-sized town a way to turn proximity into value, and for many towns, that may be exactly the opportunity they have been looking for.