I had a conversation with fellow artist Martin Daws back in 2016. He had a great idea. imagine if artists were employed, full-time to work in communities? We worked on it. Martin then wrote a guest blog here in 2017.

This article sets out how we could easily and relatively cheaply employ artists in everyday community and how such a simple, yet radical system would create just the sort of transformative cultural change that is at the heart of Arts Council England’s new 10-year strategy, Let’s Create.

This is the conclusion to the first chapter of my as yet unpublished book. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this chapter.

See previous posts for earlier sections...

This is the fifth section of the first chapter of my as yet unpublished book. The conclusion to this sample chapter will be published later today.

See previous posts for earlier sections...

This is the forth section of the first chapter of my as yet unpublished book. See previous posts for earlier sections...

This is the third section of the first chapter of my as yet unpublished book. See previous posts for earlier sections...

This is the second section of the first chapter of my as yet unpublished book.

I am publishing the first chapter from my unpublished book New Bohemias: Artists, Hipsters and Gentrification in six parts - one a day from today onwards. I published the book introduction earlier today. A longer section of this chapter "Old Bohemias" will be published tomorrow...

I began writing a book about artists and hipsters and gentrification. It's a follow on from my article in the Guardian titled Hipsters and artists are the gentrifying foot soldiers of capitalism. The book remains unwritten although this is the introduction to the book proposal.

I will publish the first chapter, "Changing places – from Old Bohemias to New Bohemias", in 6 instalments beginning with the chapter introduction this afternoon then the following subsections one a day from tomorrow onwards: "Old Bohemias"; "Hipsters - Gentrification's Leeches and Parasites"; "New Bohemias"; "Gentrification"; and, finally, "Revenge of the Middle-Classes".

This is a video recording of my lecture entitled Rethinking the role of artists in regeneration contexts. It was recorded at Northumbria University on 24th November 2017. Includes a short Q&A at the end.

This is a guest blog by Martin Daws.  Martin is a Spoken Word Poet and Community Artist.  Full-time freelance since 1999.  Young People's Laureate for Wales 2013-2016.  Check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

Martin came up with the idea of paying artists to work with communities instead of "investing" millions of pounds in "capital projects" such as arts centres.  We chatted about it back in 2016 a bit and he came up with some figures back then.  My take is similar but different to Martin's.  I favour a simple system based upon replacing infrastructure projects with 10 year funding for community artists based on a scaled system proportionate to the size of each city, town or village.  I recently tweeted this question: "Instead of a £50m art venue, a city could pay 200 artists £25k a year for 10 years to work with communities; do what they want.  What do you think?"  That's sort of my starting point.  Martin has kindly agreed to lay out his first draft in a guest blog to hopefully stimulate more discussion and debate about this brilliantly simple, yet potentially life changing shift in how we think about arts funding and how it is distributed more equitably.  I will respond in a blog post soon...