CCI4Change: Updates from Malmö 2024 onsite days
On October 24-25th, the CCI4Change project reached a new milestone!
The project partners gathered in Malmö, Sweden, for an intense 2-days working and planning session to further the project’s mission of reducing energy consumption through innovative collaborations between public authorities and the culture and creative industry (CCI). The meeting, hosted by Swedish partners Region Skåne and STPLN at the historic Kommendanthuset, served as a platform for project partners from Latvia, Finland, and Sweden to work further and co-create around the project toolkit and learn about its ongoing case studies.
About CCI4CHANGE
The CCI4Change project, titled “Facilitation of Citizens’ Energy Consumption Behavioural Change in BS Cities and Municipalities,” is a cross-border initiative funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme with a budget of €470,000 (80% funding from EU, 20% from project partners). Led by the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture (NDPC), the project brings together regions, cities and municipalities, universities, and development agencies and cultural intermediaries to inspire citizen engagement for behavioral shifts towards sustainable energy use, leveraging the influence of the arts and culture.
What happened in Malmö?
On the first day, sessions included a toolkit development workshop led by partner South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences Ltd (Xamk). The CCI4Change toolkit is intended to share the learnings of the project and further support local authorities and creative professionals structure partnerships that foster citizen engagement and co-creation in energy reduction and efforts around sustainability.
The session was followed by a presentation by Duncan Geere’s ongoing case-study in Malmö, providing one concrete example of how the arts can make complex societal issues like energy reduction relatable. Duncan Geere is a creative entrepreneur, a sonification artist and generative musician who plans to create a musical composition derived from data collected from different communities about the overnight energy consumption of various objects in their homes. You can learn more about his work “On Standby” within the CCI4Change project here.
Credits: STPLN & NDPC
Day two saw the participants visiting IFÖ Art Center in the small municipality of Bromölla to observe another project case study. Teresa Holmberg (head of IFÖ Art Center) introduced the most impressive outdoor gallery and old ceramics factory taken over for art.
Located in a closed ceramic factory property, the cultural center covers 43,000 m² and is being repurposed as a site for artist residencies, workspaces, galleries, and more. Being one of the case studies of CCI4Change, the organization has ambitious sustainability goals: to transform the property into a so-called ‘zero-sum’ building and initiate an energy cooperative with the building as its hub, among others. In preparation for this, the pilot project investigates how to proceed and explores the property’s potential, such as housing battery packs to stabilize the grid, installing solar panels to produce energy, and more.
Learn more about Ifö Center and other CCI4Change case studies here.
Murals and artworks at the Ifö Center. Photo credits: NDPC.
These case studies, five in total, will capture key insights from the project and serve as practical examples in the replicable model for other municipalities aiming to achieve energy-saving goals through creative collaboration and citizen engagement. The meeting closed with plans for a final event to be held in Jurmala, Latvia, and online on the 8th of May 2025, where partners will present the project’s outcomes and launch the toolkit of the CCI4Change collaboration model.
