A sustainable community is a place where people want to live and work, now and in the future. MLA South East believes that museums, libraries and archives play a vital part within South East communities in creating social capital – the glue that binds communities together and contributes to creating high quality environments where people want to live and work, to building and maintaining a sense of community and promoting community cohesion, to empowering people through supporting learning and providing access to information and local services.
MLA South East is involved in a number of initiatives and developments to support this aim:
- Funding cultural and community infrastructure, to accompany the rapid growth proposed in the South East region, has become a major issue. One way of funding library, museum and archive facilities is through developer contributions, sought under section 106 of the 1990 Planning Act, and MLA South East has researched and published a number of resources relating to growth and the use of developer contributions for the sector, including a South East Library Tariff and an Archive Tariff
- The South East Plan and Implementation Plan is a vision for the future of the South East region to 2026, outlining how the region needs to respond to challenges facing the region such as housing, the economy, transport and protecting the environment. MLA South East is concerned to ensure that culture features strongly in the South East Plan
- MLA South East promotes the sector in areas of housing growth through the regional Living Places Group, through the Thames Gateway/North Kent Cultural Partnership and the Quality Places Theme Group of the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire (PUSH)
- MLA South East has contributed to the Invest to Save initiative which will result in the creation and pilot of an innovative cultural and spatial planning toolkit, demonstrating how to build culture into plans for regeneration and the creation of new communities
Follow the links in the lefthand menu to find out more about our work in these areas.
