Dundee should not assume that the building of the V&A Dundee means the city's economic future is "sorted", a key figure in the culture-based transformation of Gateshead has cautioned.
Claire Byers, a former head of external affairs for development agency One North East, was speaking after a presentation at the Dundee Economic Summit last week. She praised the vision of Dundee's planners, and the £1 billion waterfront regeneration scheme, which has the V&A Dundee design museum as its centrepiece. The V&A Dundee is due to open in 2015.
Byers, also a past-deputy director of the iconic Baltic centre, a £50 million converted flour mill on the Tyne which opened as a contemporary art centre in 2002, told the Sunday Herald: "The V&A can't do everything on its own. It is backed by people of vision, authority and audacity, but one thing it has to guard against is the assumption that its opening means that Dundee is sorted. It won't happen like that. A museum can only be a catalyst.
"The building is really important, as is the quality of the exhibitions, but it has to be about the people of Dundee and Angus, and the sense of place and pride that they get from the first design museum outside London."
Presenting data showing that Baltic and its companion £70m concert hall Sage Gateshead helped generate £77m for the northeast economy in 2011-12, Byers said: "Baltic was built in a very different time. Now the big lottery money isn't there [the V&A] has to resonate with the local people who need to have a lifelong relationship with this facility. People need to feel connected to V&A Dundee and I'm sure they will."
Her stressing of the importance of Dundee's "connectivity" with the rest of the UK – in transport links and in minimising the "conceptual gap", or sense of distance, in the minds of potential visitors – was echoed by Beatriz Plaza, professor of economics at the University of the Basque Country, who outlined the lessons of the transformation of the local economy by the 1997 Guggenheim Bilbao, which she described as "not an art gallery but a huge connectivity engine".
A city-wide "employers' pledge" to co-operatively maximise job prospects was also unveiled at the summit.
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