CommuniCity Pilots: The Cultural Challenge

CommuniCity is a transformative citizen-centred initiative, funded by Horizon Europe, that aims to inspire tech-enabled solutions to digital, social & urban challenges. In 2024, Manchester become the only UK city outside of London to take part in CommuniCity’s third Open Call.

In this blog, the first in our three-part CommuniCity series, we share insights from the development of Roots and Routes, an AI driven website platform designed to break down barriers to culture for people in diverse communities.

Read Parts 2 and 3, or explore our Cultural Challenge below.

If you’re searching for things to do in Manchester City Centre, you’ll never be short of options!  
 
Our libraries, museums, theatres and music venues offer an ever-changing programme of activities, enriched by a dedicated network of community organisations creating and celebrating culture at grassroots level. 

Perhaps you’ve been awed by the gothic grandeur of John Rylands Library, sung along to a favourite song at the Co-Op Arena, or marvelled at the opulence of ancient mummies during Manchester Museum’s grand reopening? With over £23 million invested in arts and culture in 2024 – and a new Cultural Strategy - Manchester’s vibrant cultural landscape is an intrinsic part of life in the city, attracting visitors from all over the world.  

From the People’s History Museum to Etihad Stadium, Manchester has lots to see and do.

But not everyone in our city finds it easy to access cultural experiences. While Manchester has made significant strides in broadening access to culture, disparities in participation persist across class, ethnicity and region. Long-standing inequalities create barriers to access that make it harder for all of Manchester’s diverse communities to take part in the cultural life of the city.  
 
By joining Horizon Europe’s CommuniCity programme, we hoped to explore how technology could promote cultural democracy and help more people to take part in cultural experiences. 

Our first CommuniCity challenge, developed in collaboration with Manchester City Council’s Cultural Strategy team, invited tech companies and innovators to design practical solutions that improve how residents discover, access, and enjoy culture. 
 
Working in close collaboration with Sicilian social marketing company Markesing - our winning piloting team - we launched a six-month pilot to develop Roots and Routes, an AI web-driven platform designed to promote cultural activities among diverse communities.  

Roots and Routes’ front-end user interface.

To reflect the diversity of the city’s cultural offer, buy-in from organisations is vital - including those operating at grassroots and neighbourhood level.  To build a platform with the potential to mitigate key challenges around event promotion and access, we first needed to understand barriers facing the sector.

In March, we held an initial co-creation workshop at Longsight Library and Learning Centre, to gather perspectives from organisations across the cultural ecosystem.  
 
Bringing together well-established cultural institutions and smaller charities, the workshop highlighted several common barriers. While there have been considerable efforts to curate the city’s cultural offer, including Manchester City Council’s event discovery platform Loads to Do, the administrative burden on organisations can be overwhelming. Feedback from the workshop emphasised the pressures faced by grassroots organisations around capacity and resource, which can hinder consistent engagement with existing platforms. Organisations also expressed frustrations in protracted approval processes that lead to long delays between the submission and publication of events, reducing the usefulness of curation platforms as promotional tools.   
 
The simplified backend of Roots and Routes – which allows users to submit links to events published on other sites – was highlighted as an innovative solution for organisations struggling with capacity and resource. Features such as intuitive UI, one-click approval, and multi-lingual support were praised as key enablers of broader inclusion. Through removing the demand for organisations to complete lengthy and potentially complex forms and streamlining the upload and approval process, Markesing aimed to explore approaches to a centralised events platform that could improve accessibility for a wider range of cultural providers and inspire long-term engagement. 

Following the workshop, suggestions from attendees were integrated into the development of the platform, including the addition of a search tool and event highlights. By engaging cultural organisations at an early stage of the design process, the piloting team could move beyond validating existing concepts to meaningfully engage with the ideas and insights shared. 

The simplified back-end of Roots & Routes.

Manchester boasts an incredibly rich cultural offer. To develop a working model of the platform that could be tested by real users within the pilot timeframe, we chose to focus on a specific community in a clearly defined part of the city. By narrowing the scope of the pilot to focus on the Bangladeshi community in Longsight, we could test whether Roots and Routes could widen access to Manchester’s city-wide cultural offer in a neighbourhood that faces disproportionately high levels of deprivation.  
 
Nestled in the heart of Lonsight, Community Interest Company Better We aims to improve the quality of life for people in the local neighbourhood through social meetups. From coffee mornings and shared meals to sewing clubs, yoga lessons, and more - Better We offers an incredible programme of free activities that make a profound difference in the lives of people they support.  

To gather more meaningful feedback on the pilot, we reached out to Tahera Khanam, Director of Better We, who generously agreed to host a session where residents could test and share insights on the Roots and Routes site.
 
Creating a safe, friendly and trustworthy environment is vital for inviting transparent conversation and encouraging honest insights. Stepping through the doors of Better We, we couldn’t have asked for a better welcome. We were amazed to be greeted by an incredible mural, painted by members of Better We, showcasing the names and cultural backgrounds of all the residents participating in the pilot .

The incredible mural created by residents taking part in the Roots & Routes project.

The collaborative workshop, expertly facilitated by Alessandro Marchese, Director of Markesing, was equally hands-on!

Kicking off the session with a game of ‘Cultural Bingo’, residents were invited to reflect on the impact of culture on their lives and share their stories with others. We believe that sharing cultural experiences brings people together – so when attendees showcased a traditional dance, there was no way we could decline the invitation to follow along! 

Ice well and truly broken, Alessandro introduced residents to the Roots and Routes platform before opening the floor for questions, reflections and ideas. Reception to the platform was hugely positive, with residents praising the simplicity of the site’s concept, design and user interface.  

Attendees also shared personal reflections on their own experiences to culture. For non-native English speakers, unclear descriptions and complex language on events sites created key barriers to understanding, complicated registration processes, and lowered confidence in feeling welcomed at events. Residents also expressed a desire for events that explicitly promoted inclusivity, suggesting that descriptions of events could more clearly welcome broad and diverse audiences rather than targeting individual communities.  

Alessandro (centre) with Tahera (right, in blue) and residents who took part in the workshop.

Going forwards, learnings and best practice from the Roots and Routes pilot will be incorporated into the further development of Manchester City Council’s Loads to Do event site. By embedding well-received elements of Roots and Routes’ site design, alongside insights from residents and cultural organisations, we hope to improve the functionality of Loads to Do to empower more organisations to promote their events and support more people to access Manchester’s incredible cultural offer.  
 
Without culture, our city would be little more than bricks and mortar. Culture offers the connection of shared experience, shapes our identity, exposes us to new perspectives, and brings us happiness.  By working together and listening to the needs of communities, we believe in making sure that everybody in our city can equitably access cultural experiences.

Curiosity piqued? We sat down with Alessandro Marchese, Director of Markesing, to lift the lid on the values and ambitions underpinning the Roots and Routes pilot - and everything he’s learned so far!

Explore the full interview below.