Space for Young Creative Talent: Investing in the Future of Breda’s Appeal

This article was written for Uncover magazine – From Global to Ground (10th edition). You can read the full magazine here. 

Author: Peter van de Aalst is Manager of Business Relations and Internationalisation at the Academy for Leisure and Events. He is working on his Professional Doctorate project on the value of street culture for the development of cities.
 

Street culture and night-time culture: ingredients for a cool city 
On ‘the street’, knowledge that is not found in policy documents is built with a Do It Yourself (DIY) mentality. It is the knowledge of young creatives who build their scene because there is nothing, or very little. Street culture and night-time culture, closely connected to hip-hop and electronic music, are the result of this and are in fact several sides of the same coin. These bottom-up, originally metropolitan forms of culture attract young people who feel less connected to mainstream or regulated activities and who often feel less heard. They are looking for authenticity, freedom and a way to go against the current.

Florian Kock (2021) researched the factors that determine a city’s ‘coolness’ and identified four dimensions tourists use to decide whether a city is ‘cool’: authenticity (does the city feel real and genuine?), rebelliousness (is there a certain sense of going against the grain?), originality (is the city seen as unique and distinctive?) and liveliness (do people experience energy and dynamism in the city?). These are precisely the four dimensions that are also characteristic of street culture and night-time culture initiatives.

Broad prosperity and creative ecology as a lens for cities 
The fact that a city is seen as cool says something about its attractiveness to potential visitors and residents. But life in a city naturally means much more to its residents. Within that context, the concept of ‘broad prosperity’ is relevant. Broad prosperity is about much more than economic output; it is also measured by social cohesion, health, safety, equality of opportunity, and cultural vitality. It is a different view of development, one that puts people at the centre and takes account of its effects on future generations and on places elsewhere in the country and the world. PON and Telos has developed a model (Figure 1) showing that people’s quality of life is embedded in their social and physical living environment. It is therefore a promising framework for looking, from a broad perspective, at creating value for a city: a pleasant, inclusive, attractive and cool city.

Figure 1 

When looking specifically at the value the creative sector can produce for a city, this also fits exactly within that broader definition of prosperity. Alongside an attractive cultural offer, it is also about identity formation among young people, social connection across cultural boundaries, a sense of belonging, talent development outside the established educational pathways, and a living environment that ties people to a city. 

Greg Richards (2025) provides a useful analytical framework for this with the model of creative ecology (Figure 2). The creative city consists of three layers: the upperground of formal institutions (museums, venues, funders), the underground of informal bottom-up communities, and the middleground that connects the two through events and creative hubs and within which what Richards calls ‘switchers’ are active: people and places that understand underground culture, often come from it themselves, and translate it into broader markets and policy. 

Figure 2 

Bottom-up initiatives that emerge on the street in the underground form the city’s creative humus layer, the fertile ground from which innovation, identity and a lively living environment grow. In this context, factors such as affordable living and working space, gentrification, inequality of opportunity, the progression of talent and the often large gap between what happens in the city centre and in peripheral neighbourhoods are important considerations for making the most of the potential of cities’ bottom-up energy.

An example from Tilburg: the night as a living laboratory 
In Tilburg, pop venue 013 and youth organisation R-Newt are working together under the ‘De Nieuwe Nacht’ (The New Night) banner on that humus layer of the city’s creative ecology, because Tilburg has a gap precisely in this fertile ground that is important for the city. The core of this experiment is that young creatives from night-time culture, who would normally not quickly find themselves at the programming table of a major cultural institution, are given a say in the night-time programming of the small club to be created in the basement of V39, the building directly opposite 013 where R-Newt is based. Not only as a target group, but as creators who can experiment in this small-capacity venue and further develop their community. In that sense, this initiative fits seamlessly with the Tilburg platform ENNU, which amplifies the voice of Tilburg’s young people and gives existing movements and platforms a stage. 

What makes the ‘De Nieuwe Nacht’ experiment interesting is not only the content, but also the process. It began with co-creation sessions with the directors and staff of 013 and R-Newt. This experiment is being supervised as part of the professional doctorate project. A Theory of Change approach is being used: what change do we want to see, how do we measure it and how do we learn along the way? In this, 013 and R-Newt explicitly position themselves as learning organisations, willing to experiment and adjust on the basis of insights. In a next phase, sessions with young creatives will follow. A Theory of Change approach will also be used with them to discuss their dreams, ambitions and plans, and the translation of those into night-time programming will likewise be monitored with them and adjusted where necessary.

The themes at the heart of these co-creation sessions connect directly with the broader prosperity questions at play in the city: accessibility (who feels welcome?), inclusion (who are we not reaching and why not?), safety (social safety as a condition for self-expression) and the value of night-time culture as an informal but powerful learning environment for young talent.

Ultimately, this experiment can have a multitude of impacts: social value for the city, the development of new concepts for the night-time culture sector and new audiences for 013 and other cultural institutions. The indicators for measuring impact are not only visitor numbers or turnover, but also softer outcomes such as personal development, social connection and the progression of talent. Precisely those softer outcomes are difficult to measure, but they form the core of the value that can be created. One of the participants in the focus groups held in Breda and Tilburg stated: “Inspiration is not measurable.” This is true; it is difficult to measure, but that does not mean that it is not important.

The results of the research into night-time culture in Tilburg and other cities, also carried out as part of the professional doctorate, likewise underline the importance of small-scale, community-driven initiatives in which ownership lies with the makers and where they are supported without being taken over.

The potential and pain points in Breda 
Anyone who looks at Breda through the lenses of broad prosperity and creative ecology sees a city with qualities, but also vulnerabilities.

The DIY qualities are visible in a place such as Pier15 on Haveneiland (Harbour Island). TURF Event also has the explicit ambition to position night-time culture and young creatives more strongly in Breda. Focus groups at Pier15 and various interviews with other stakeholders in Breda reveal what this place means. Pier15 is more than a skate park: it is a breeding ground, a safe haven for identity formation and an informal learning environment. The pain points are also clear. Pier15 has been operating on short-term permits for twelve years, and the question is what exactly the place of this initiative will be in the development of the ‘t Zoet area. Affordable studio space is structurally scarce. Young makers leave for Rotterdam or Amsterdam because Breda does not facilitate them sufficiently.

The fragmentation of the ecosystem is also mentioned as a point of concern. It is observed that street culture in Breda is ‘hidden’: the communities exist, but are hardly visible to the outside world, to policy-makers and often to one another. A twelve-year-old child from a neighbourhood such as Hoge Vucht does not go to Pier15 because it is too far away, literally and figuratively. Yet in Hoge Vucht there are basketball players, dancers and skaters in the making who have talent and want to develop, who want to be given opportunities and who can make an important contribution to a culturally vital and inclusive Breda. They do not know the way to the existing infrastructure, and that infrastructure does not know the way to them. 

This is not a Breda-specific problem. It is the structural tension within every urban ecosystem: the places that bottom-up driven communities need are rarely in the neighbourhoods where those communities live. The centre absorbs the creative energy, and as soon as the land becomes valuable enough, the place is often displaced. That mechanism of gentrification is at work in many cities, from Berlin’s RAW area to Strijp-S in Eindhoven, and it can also been seen in Breda.

Lessons for Breda 
What can Breda learn from the research and from a city such as Tilburg?

The Nieuwe Nacht experiment in Tilburg shows that the potential does not lie in the formal established institutions or in the underground community separately, but in the connection between them. Breda needs people and places that can structurally fulfil that connecting role between underground and upperground: switchers who know underground talent and can connect it to the established cultural infrastructure. Breda already has a number of places, people and organisations that do this. If they are cherished and enabled to grow, the attractiveness of the city will grow with them.

Policy-makers ask for measurability. The challenge is to develop indicators that do justice to what street culture and night-time culture initiatives actually mean and add to the city. The broad prosperity concept also includes the indicators of social cohesion, health and subjective well-being and is a good starting point for developing indicators.

It is important that professional intermediaries are present in the neighbourhoods. They can create connections by ensuring that young people in Hoge Vucht and other neighbourhoods know that there is basketball, skateboarding and the possibility of developing programmes at Pier15, and that Pier15 knows there are talents in those neighbourhoods. That connecting space calls for people who consciously choose it and organisations that give them the room to do so. In that respect, the Park Haveneiland project that Pier15 is currently starting is promising. That project has the explicit aim of working on connections with target groups that Pier15 has not yet reached.

Initiatives such as Pier15, studios and affordable living and working space form the infrastructure of the underground. Many initiatives of this kind are under pressure in cities. Without physical space, there is no ecosystem. The question is not only whether the city wants to make room for this layer of the creative ecosystem, but whether the relevant municipal domains, alongside sport and culture also property, urban development and the economy, are being involved for that purpose.

One of the findings from the research is that good cultural initiatives often arise from scarcity and necessity. That is valuable, but it does not mean that the city should maintain that scarcity. It should provide infrastructure, but keep the distinct character intact.

In conclusion 
Ultimately, it is about the question of what you, as a city, want to be and for whom, now and in the future. That question touches on the core of the concept of broad prosperity. The research leads to the conclusion that a city that is built up to capacity, that sacrifices cultural space for residential tower blocks, that lets its underground communities disappear to cities with more space and less pressure to build, in fact becomes smaller. That city loses a specific power of innovation and emancipation, and potential substantive-artistic, social and commercial returns in the form of new products, services and programmes, new audiences and new networks, opportunities and careers.

‘Street knowledge’ is the knowledge of people who know how to make something out of nothing. That knowledge is precious. For Breda, the challenge is to see, value and facilitate it sufficiently.

Sources

• ENNU, https://ennutilburg.nl
• Het PON & Telos, https://hetpon-telos.nl/brede-welvaart
• Kock, F. (2021). "What makes a city cool? Understanding destination coolness and its implications for tourism." Tourism Management, Vol. 86, 104317.
• Richards, G. (2025). Journeys in the network society: spiders, ants and archipelagos. Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa em Turismo, São Paulo, 19, e-3213, 2025, https://doi.org/10.7784/rbtur.v19.3213.

Photography

Rechard Motieram, Rosa Meininger and Suzie Farcoin