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14 August 2009"What is the future of regional Australia?" and "What is the role of the creative arts in regional development?" This website and project explores the convergence of these questions in Australia today.

CAMRA (Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia) is a major Australian Research Council and industry funded project which aims to provide planners, policy-makers and local communities with the information they need to plan for a future in regional Australia that integrates the effective development of the arts and cultural industries.

The project runs for five years from 2008 to 2013 and is a partnership between seventeen organisations, including four universities.

CAMRA aims to provide planners, policy-makers and communities with the knowledge they need to make better-informed planning decisions for more effective development of their local arts and cultural industries.

It will do this through:

1. developing sustainable models of data collection and documentation that map local cultural industries using a range of methodologies specifically appropriate to regional, rural and remote settings in Australia;
2. building a GIS and relational database to store this information and allow it to be interrogated, analysed and used at local, regional and peak levels by a variety of users;
3. enabling systemised interactions between national and international experts in cultural development through this culturemap.org.au online (and offline) community as a key site for knowledge exchange and storage.

Concentrating on a carefully selected set of communities that cover many different types of regions - so the information can be usefully transposed to a national scale - CAMRA will provide an understanding of how a region's capacity for creativity and innovation can ensure its quality of life and its economic viability. Moreover, it will show researchers and policy-makers how to recognise and valorise regional specificities and local knowledge when piecing together an integrated approach to development.