Reflections from The Three Bells: S5#9
Title
Finding the will to reinvent downtown…
Contributor
Adrian Ellis
In this new episode of Reflections from The Three Bells, Adrian Ellis reflects on the slow unravelling of downtowns – and what it will take to reimagine them as civic, cultural, and residential spaces fit for the 21st century.
Date of Recording
25 August 2025
Date of Publication
11 September 2025
[00:00:00]
THEME MUSIC
[00:00:05]
Adrian Ellis: Hello, and welcome to The Three Bells. This podcast is part of the fifth season produced by AEA for the Global Cultural Districts Network. The focus is, as always, the relationship between cultural and urban life, and the ways in which cultural life contributes to urban vitality and vice versa. The series and supporting materials can be found at www.thethreebells.net. And if you like our content, please subscribe and give us a positive review on your favourite podcast listening platform.
I'm Adrian Ellis, the chair of GCDN and the director of AEA Consulting, and I'm happy to share some reflections from The Three Bells.
I've just spent a week in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota's Twin Cities. I was there with my daughter, a journalist from Los Angeles, visiting my son, who's a park ranger. Rebecca and I stayed at a bed and breakfast. We did some kayaking with Nathaniel. We visited the Walker Art Center and the – to my mind, glorious Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the new-ish Guthrie Theater. I also found some great second-hand record shops, and I managed, finally, to get my fingerprints taken for an FBI RAP sheet that I need for Italian citizenship. And I would like you, dear listeners, to know that it was clean. Anyway, that meant spending some time hanging around downtown with inky fingers.
That was quite lowering…
About our Contributor
Adrian Ellis is the founder of AEA Consulting (1990) and the Global Cultural Districts Network (2013). He has worked in senior management and as a board member in both museums and the performing arts and as a strategy consultant to leading clients in the cultural, public, and business sectors around the world. +
