If place influences writing, can writing influence place?

My name’s Sarah Butler, and I’ll be guest blogging for the next couple of weeks. I’m a writer – novels and short stories mainly, but starting to do more residencies and public art projects (see www.sarahbutler.org.uk). I also run a consultancy called UrbanWords (www.urbanwords.org.uk), which I set up about 3 years ago now with the support of Arts Council England funding, to look at the field of writing and regeneration.

I’ve been on quite a journey since setting up UrbanWords, navigating this fascinating, frustrating, rich and complex field we sweepingly call ‘regeneration’. The more I read and think about how our towns and cities are regenerated, who makes decisions and why, the more politicised and often angry I feel about it all!
My interest is in how writers and writing might be able to work within this context of regeneration, to positively affect how places are changed. I’m interested in how writers can use their skills of empathy, investigation, and articulation to unpick people’s emotional relationship with place and express it in a useful and meaningful way. In a world chock full of jargon, that’s a skill indeed!
I could write for ever about this (!) but I am a fan of short blog posts and am keen that this is the beginning of a conversation, rather than a monologue. If you want to read more about my ideas, visit www.urbanwords.org.uk/aplaceforwords. This is a site I launched 2 years ago, which outlines some critical thinking, gives some case studies and offers practical advice. There are also a series of downloadable articles I’ve written on the subject. I’d be very interested in any thoughts, feedback, agreements, objections to any of the ideas there!
I am fascinated in how place can inspire new writing. I am also interested in how writing can inspire/influence/change place. So my question to the My Place or Yours writers is: Has your residency had an impact on the place you’ve been working in? If it has, what has that been? If it hasn’t, does that matter, and/or how might it have if you’d done things differently? I find myself constantly negotiating a balance between projects that enable writers to work in a participatory/community development capacity and (at the same time?) find ways to push and develop their own creative practice. So my question doesn’t come with a judgement attached (that writing residencies have to ‘earn their keep’ by ‘benefiting’ the ‘community’), but it does come from a genuine interest in how writers and their writing might act upon the places that inspire them.