During September’s City of Fredericton public consultations for its new Creative City Strategy (CCS), CreativeSpaces-Fredericton (CSF) provided the lead planner, Patricia Huntsman of Patricia Huntsman Culture + Communication and the city’s cultural staff a visual submission which included our survey findings and seven different ways the city could foster providing Fredericton’s artists with dedicated and affordable studio space. Among the options were:
entering into public/private partnerships with the city’s property managers to provide residential and commercial spaces for individual and collaborative studio use in new and existing neighbourhood developments;
placing rentable mobile studios in several of the city’s parks; and,
seeing an artist/artisan village created similar in scope to the current Quidi Vidi Village Artisan Studios in St. John’s Newfoundland or the former Opus Craft Village that existed in Mactaquac in the mid 1970s.
This submission followed CSF’s spring and summer meetings with new city Mayor Steve Hicks and the city’s cultural leads to discuss the city’s interest in supporting a feasibility study exploring one downtown private property that CSF considers suitable to be an arts hub, should the City of Fredericton be willing to lease it. While interested, Mayor Hicks indicated the city needed to await the adoption of its new cultural strategy before considering this property.