Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives (GeoJournal Library)

Creative Economies, Creative Cities

The GeoJournal Library Volume 98 Managing Editor:

Daniel Z. Sui, College Station, USA

Founding Series Editor:

Wolf Tietze, Helmstedt, Germany

Editorial Board: Paul Claval, France

Yehuda Gradus, Israel Sam Ock Park, South Korea Herman van der Wusten, The Netherlands

For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/6007

Lily Kong Editors

•

Justin O’Connor

Creative Economies, Creative Cities Asian-European Perspectives

Editors Lily Kong Department of Geography National University of Singapore Singapore

Justin O’Connor Queensland University of Technology Australia

ISSN 0924-5449 ISBN 978-1-4020-9948-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-9949-6 DOI: 10.1007/978–1–4020–9949–6 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927463 © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocop ying, microf ilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

Contents

1 Intr oduction ................................................................................................ Justin O’Connor and Lily Kong Part I

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Creative Economy Policies

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Policy Transfer and the Field of the Cultural and Creative Industries: What Can Be Learned from Europe? ........... Andy C. Pratt

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Creative Industries Across Cultural Borders: The Case of Video Games in Asia ............................................................. 25 Ted Tschang

Part II

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Creative Clusters

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Spaces of Culture and Economy: Mapping the Cultural-Creative Cluster Landscape ............................... 45 Hans Mommaas

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Beyond Networks and Relations: Towards Rethinking Creative Cluster Theory ........................................ 61 Lily Kong

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The Capital Complex: Beijing’s New Creative Clusters ........................ Michael Keane

Part III 7

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A Creative Class?

The European Creative Class and Regional Development: How Relevant Is Florida’s Theory for Europe? ...................................... 99 Høgni Kalsø Hansen, Bjørn Asheim, and Jan Vang

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Contents

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Getting Out of Place: The Mobile Creative Class Takes on the Local. A UK Perspective on the Creative Class ............. 121 Kate Oakley

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Asian Cities and Limits to Creative Capital Theory ........................... 135 Patrick Mok

Part IV

The Making of Creative Cities

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The Creative Industries, Governance and Economic Development: A UK Perspective .......................................... 153 Calvin Taylor

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Shanghai’s Emergence into the Global Creative Economy ................. 167 Li Wu Wei and Hua Jian

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Shanghai Moderne: Creative Economy in a Creative City? ............... 175 Justin O’Connor

Part V

The Politics of the Creative City

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Urbanity as a Political Project: Towards Post-national European Cities ................................................ 197 Eric Corijn

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Alternative Politics in Urban Innovation .............................................. 207 Panu Lehtovuori and Klaske Havik

Index ................................................................................................................. 229

About the Authors

Bjørn T. Asheim is chair of economic geography at the Department of Social and Economic Geography and Centre for Inno vation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE), Lund University, Sweden. His research interests are in the areas of economic and industrial geography as well as the geography of innovation. He has served as an international e xpert for OECD, UNCTAD and the EU, coordinated the EU project on “SME Polic y and the Re gional Dimension of Innovation” and is currently coordinating the European Science Foundation project “Constructing Regional Advantage”. Eric Corijn is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the Free Uni versity of Brussels. Director of the Centre for Urban Research at the Free Uni versity of Brussels: COSMOPOLIS, City , Culture & Society and coordinator of UABrusselsStadsplatform, a platform of Brussels urban studies. Co-director of POLIS, a joint masters de gree in European Urban Cultures of the uni versities of Brussels (VUB), T ilburg (UvT), Manchester (MMU) and Helsinkii (U ADH) and of “4Cities”, a UNICA-Euromaster in Urban Studies with the uni versities of Brussels, Vienna, Kopenhagen and Madrid. Høgni Kalsø Hansen is from the Department of Social and Economic Geography and Centre for Inno vation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE), Lund University. Klaske Havik is assistant professor at Delft Uni versity of Technology. She writes regularly for v arious magazines and is editor of architecture journal O ASE. Her architectural and written w ork combines a subjecti ve reading of the city with an academic and theoretical approach. Her current research aims at developing a literary approach to architecture and urban regeneration. In Delft, she teaches the master diploma studio Public Realm alongside courses in architectural theory and literature. As part of the Public Realm research group, she is preparing the anthology Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere, forthcoming early 2009 at SUN Publishers. Hua Jian is researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), and a decision-advisor and consultant e xpert for the Shanghai municipal go vernment. His research co vers many fields, for e xample, cultural industry , cultural de velopvii

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About the Authors

ment and cultural strate gy. He has participated in dozens of k ey research projects with a nationwide and pro vincial scope, and comparati ve research on cultural investment systems in the U.S., the European Union, Japan, K orea and China. Michael K eane is Associate Professor and Centre Fello w at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creati ve Industries and Inno vation (CCI) at Queensland Uni versity of T echnology, Brisbane. His research interests include inno vation polic y and creati ve clusters in China; audio-visual media in China, South Korea, and Taiwan; and television formats in Asia. Michael is author of Created in China: the Great Ne w Leap Forward (Routledge 2007) and co-editor with Ying Zhu and Ruo yun Bai of TV Drama in China: Unfolding Narrati ves of Tradition, Political Transformation and Cosmopolitan Identity (HKU Press 2008). Other books include Ne w Television, Globalization and the East Asian Cultural Imagination (with Anthony Fung and Albert Moran, HKU Press 2007), T elevision across Asia: T elevision Industries, Programme F ormats and Globalisation (eds. Moran and K eane, Routledge 2004), and Media in China: Consumption Content and Crisis (eds. Donald, Keane and Yin 2002). Lily Kong is a professor of Geography at the National University of Singapore. Her work in social and cultural geography spans a range of issues, from religion and identity constructions to cultural economy and cultural polic y. Her main e xpertise is on Singapore, b ut she is de veloping comparative research on Chinese cities in East Asia, particularly, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei. Jan Vang Lauridsen is from the Department of Production, Copenhagen Campus, Aalborg University, Denmark. Panu Lehtovuori is Acting Professor of Urban Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He is also teaching the module “Urban Interv entions” of the Polis programme, the European MA for Urban Cultures, and doing project research in the Centre for Urban and Re gional Studies in Helsinki Uni versity of T echnology. Lehtovuori’s doctoral dissertation, “Experience and Conflict” (2005), presents a new conceptualisation of public urban space, v alorises the changes of the use of urban space in Helsinki, and tests a ne w, e xperiential approach to planning and urban design. Lehto vuori is co-founder of Li vady Architects, a Helsinki-based practice. W ith his team, Lehto vuori has recei ved se veral prizes, purchases, and mentions in architectural and planning competitions. He is member of the editorial board of Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu (The Finnish Journal of Urban Studies) and also writes regularly on planning issues in the Finnish Architectural Re view. Patrick Mok is a consultant with the Cheung K ong Centre for Creative Industries, Beijing. He was the consultant for A Study on Creati vity Index published by Hong Kong’s Home Affairs Bureau in Nov 2005. He was also a speaker at the International Creative Industries Conference held in Beijing on 7–9 July 2005. Li Wu Wei is Professor at Donghua University, Director of the Institute of National Economy, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Director of the Shanghai Creative Industries Association and V ice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the

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Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress. His publications include his book Creative Industry: A Ne w Engine of Urban De velopment (2005); Creati ve Industry and Shanghai’s International Competitiveness, Journal of Social Sciences, (Shanghai), No. 1, 2005; and Problems and Perspecti ves: Development of Creative Industry in Shanghai, Journal of Shanghai Economy, Oct. 2005. Hans Mommaas (Tilburg University, Netherlands) is a professor in Leisure Studies at the Department of Socio-Cultural Sciences and Director of Telos, Brabant Centre for Sustainable Development. His general teaching and research interests concern issues of globalization, re gional development and the role of cultural production/ consumption. In recent times he has in particular published w ork on the leisure industries and the netw ork economy, on the dynamics of cultural clusters, and on the role of culture in spatial de velopment. Justin O’Connor (Queensland Uni versity of T echnology) has recently been appointed Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty. Before that he was Professor of Cultural Industries in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. His pre vious research as Director of the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture has spanned popular music, contemporary urban cultures, cultural industries and innovative clusters. In particular, he has worked on the historical, theoretical and polic y dimensions of the creati ve industries since 1989, conducting research and polic y development in Manchester, the UK, cities across the European Community, St. Petersburg and more recently, Shanghai. Kate Oakley is a writer and polic y analyst based in London, specialising in the knowledge economy, the creative industries and regional development. In addition to being a long time Associate of Demos, Kate is a Fello w of the Royal Society of Arts and an associate of Burns Owens Partnership (BOP) a leading consultancy on cultural and creative industries. She is a member of the Advisory Group for IPPR’s Intellectual Property and the Public Sphere Project and a member of FOCI (F orum on Creative Industries). She is on the editorial board of Games and Culture, a journal about interactive media, published by Sage. She is also Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, where she is involved in a v ariety of research projects, currently including a study of arts and education. She is also an international member of the Institute for Creati ve Industries and Innovation, (www.ici.qut.edu.au) at the same faculty. Andy Pratt (London School of Economics, UK) is a geographer who has written widely on creati ve industries, and particularly ne w media. His w ork on cultural industries production systems is well read and his frame works adopted for study elsewhere, for example, in Japan and Hong Kong. Calvin Taylor (University of Leeds, UK) specialises in the teaching and research of the ways by which culture and the creati ve industries contribute to regeneration in the local and re gional contexts. He is also a member of the F orum on Creati ve industries and a Board member of the Creati ve Industries De velopment Agenc y (CIDA).

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About the Authors

Ted Tschang has a Ph.D. from Carne gie Mellon, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics and Technology at the Singapore Management University. He has written about information technology industries and researched the video game industry. He has w orked at the Asian De velopment Bank Institute (T okyo), the United Nations Uni versity/Institute of Adv anced Studies in T okyo, and for the U.S. Government. At ADBI and UNU, he coordinated projects on the software industries in India and China, virtual uni versities, the digital economy , and knowledge management.

Chapter 1

Introduction Justin O’Connor and Lily Kong

The cultural and creati ve industries ha ve become increasingly prominent in man y policy agendas in recent years. Not only ha ve governments identified the growing consumer potential for cultural/creative industry products in the home market, they have also seen the creative industry agenda as central to the growth of external markets. This agenda stresses creativity, innovation, small business growth, and access to global markets – all central to a wider agenda of moving from cheap manufacture towards high value-added products and services. The increasing importance of cultural and creative industries in national and city policy agendas is evident in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Australia, and Ne w Zealand, and in more nascent w ays in cities such as Chongqing and W uhan. Much of the thinking in these cities/ countries has derived from the European and North American polic y landscape. Policy debate in Europe and North America has been marked by ambiguities and tensions around the connections between cultural and economic polic y which the creative industry agenda posits. These become more mark ed because the key drivers of the creati ve economy are the lar ger metropolitan areas, so that cultural and economic policy also then intersect with urban planning, polic y and go vernance. These intersections have given rise to the label ‘The creative city’ – an approach to policy and planning that recognises the urbanistic context and infrastructure within which creative industry inno vation and gro wth take place. If the internationalisation of creative industry policy discourse, particularly its ‘export’ to many parts of Australasia, has given rise to significant debates regarding the need for ‘imported’ policies to be sensiti ve to dif ferent national conte xts, then further localisation of creative industries within urban contexts only exacerbates these issues. In short, though the promise of the ‘creative industry, creative city’ agenda has very real appeal, its implementation in the distinct contexts outside of European and North American cities in general is fraught with ambiguities, tensions and ‘mistranslations’.

J. O’Connor () Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct Z1-515, Musk Avenue Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_1, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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An example of this last w ould be the application of Richard Florida’ s concept and methodology of ‘the creati ve class’ in the v ery different context of Chinese cities – which has been attempted with confusing results, to say the least. This collection draws together 13 substantive essays which focus on Asian and European experiences, in order that dif ferences between varied experiences might be foregrounded, and meaningful comparisons made. The contributions are divided into five sections, focusing on creative economy policies, creative clusters, creative class, the making of creative cities, and the politics of the creati ve city.

Creative Economy Policies In Part I, we explore the related issues of how very different policy contexts might be meaningfully compared, and some of the dif ficulties of policy transfer between different contexts. In Europe and East Asia, there ha ve been growing expectations placed on the cultural and creati ve industries (CCI) to deli ver ne w high skilled employment, stimulate a high-v alue service sector , pro vide ecologically sustainable gro wth, promote urban re generation, act as catalysts for inno vation, and so on. However, as Pratt (Chapter 2) argues strongly here, there is a lack of empirical evidence, confusion as to the potential role of the CCI, and a persistent imprecision as to ho w e xactly we should characterise them. In particular there is ambiguity about the position of CCI between the traditional cultural polic y object of subsidised public goods and the ‘free’ mark et. Given these confusions, Pratt argues that it is highly unfeasible to transfer CCI policies from one context to another. What is required is a closer analysis and understanding of the operation of the CCI and their relationship with the rest of the economy (and society). Tschang (Chapter 3) tak es on the related task of trying to plot dif ferences between dif ferent CCI conte xts, using the computer games and animation industries as a case. In trying to compare the different trajectories and performances of this sector across East Asia, he also runs up against the issues of commercial industry and local cultural conte xt. CCI products take time to emer ge from a culture – the y cannot simply be created by industrial policy – and they bear the mark of those specific cultures as they are most frequently created first for the domestic mark et. Tschang suggests that public policy has always been an enabler after the f act rather than an early stimulator; which might indicate that our usual sense of ‘industry’ polic y needs to be supplemented by a more clearly articulated notion of innovation policy. Such an innovation policy needs to bear in mind Pratt’ s point about the ambiguous location of CCI between market and public provision.

Creative Clusters These issues are tak en up in some detail in P art II where we look at creati ve clusters. Mommaas (Chapter 4) starts with a comprehensive overview of the conceptual and policy origins of the term. Located in a triangle of culture-economy-space, he

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argues that the notion of cultural or creati ve clusters has gi ven rise to an appealing policy agenda b ut at the same time hides ‘a confusing and tense comple xity’. He ar gues for a much clearer dif ferentiation of cluster types, with concomitant clarity about development agendas and criteria of success and failure. This detailed exploration of the concept and the unearthing of ambiguities and conflicts can also be seen in Kong’s chapter (Chapter 5), which looks at cultural clusters in Singapore. Different histories, dif ferent agencies and dif ferent objectives all mak e it dif ficult to lump all these initiati ves under one de velopmental rubric. A more nuanced approach is called for, one where the cultural dimension is to play a significant role alongside the ‘industrial’. Finally Michael K eane (Chapter 6) tak es up the cluster agenda in China. The PRC, after a late adoption of the concept, has for ged ahead and created scores of different cultural and creative clusters in the big cities across China. K eane sho ws the pro venance of the concept in the ‘top do wn’ model of China’s industrial and latterly , high-tech development policies, now being used to promote the creati ve industries. K eane shows how Beijing has used the notion of creative cluster as part of its modernisation polic y, driving through man y clusters whose size dwarfs such development in the West. Yet there is little understanding of the new challenges creative clusters present to policy and management, and some real problems with the wholesale imposition of a singular model on a diverse set of economic and cultural activities.

A Creative Class? Alongside ‘creative cluster’, the notion of a ‘creati ve class’ is one of the most significant forms of direct polic y transfer seen in the last fe w years. From its use by US academic Richard Florida as a form of statistical ci vic boosterism tacked onto some loose claims about the ending of industrial society , it has gone on to enthuse urban politicians and planners across the globe. In Part III, we look in detail at how this idea has been recei ved in the UK, Europe and East Asia, and the problematic nature of this easy polic y transfer . All three f ind the idea seriously w anting in conceptual clarity. Hansen, Asheim and Lauridsen (Chapter 7) test the applicabil ity of Florida’s thesis in the European conte xt by a close empirical in vestigation of the relationships between talent, technology and tolerance relationship across 445 European regions. They seriously question that any easy conclusions can be drawn from the application of such a (for some) politically attracti ve guiding ideal. It is these conceptual and public policy questions that occupy Oakley (Chapter 8). Using particularly the case of Britain, she questions the v ery notion of a ‘creati ve class’ as well as the assumptions that it hides within itself – in particular the notion of a mobile labour force always ready to relocate – and the implicit endorsement of the gentrification of urban centres and its social consequences. Mok (Chapter 9) tak es up some of these issues in his case study of Hong Kong and Macau, whose governments have become v ery much attracted to the notion of ‘creati ve class’ in recent years. However, Mok shows how economic development in these two cities has taken a very different development path than that assumed by the Florida thesis, and that

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the notion of ‘creati ve class’ plays v ery dif ferently in this conte xt. Ho wever, he ends by identifying some common policy outcomes of the adoption of creative class rhetoric, including the further socio-economic polarisation of the urban spaces of post-reform China.

The Making of Creative Cities In P arts IV and V , we widen the vie w from creati ve clusters and classes to the notion of the creative city as such. In P art IV, we look at the resources a vailable to particular localities for the mobilisation of the creati ve capacity of the city. Taylor (Chapter 10) notes the increasing popularity of the notion of creati ve industries as a ne w kind of local (city) economic de velopment strategy since the arri val of Britain’s Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) in 1998. Ho wever, he argues that this popularity might ha ve come at a price. Re viewing earlier policies around cultural industries and local economic de velopment, he ar gues that questions of go vernance in volved not just technical or industrial b ut wider political issues. As other authors in this collection have argued, to ignore the wider political and cultural polic y issues is to ignore the conte xtual reality within which notions of creati ve industries must tak e their place. While T aylor focuses v ery much on the North of England, in the following two chapters, we examine Shanghai. Li and Hua’s (Chapter 11) account of Shanghai’ s strategic vision shows how the creative industries have become central to its aspirations to become a leading global city . This pro vides the empirical conte xt for O’Connor’ s chapter (Chapter 12), which attempts to problematise the creative industries agenda as it is transferred from the West to Shanghai (Chapter 12). Through a critical engagement with Hutton’ s The Writing on the Wall, he attempts to place the creative industries agenda in China in the wider context of theories of development, modernisation, anti-imperialism and post-colonial thought.

The Politics of the Creative City O’Connor’s chapter leads us to the f inal section which interrogates contemporary notions of the city and urban spatiality . Corijn (Chapter 13) situates urban go vernance within a post-national political and cultural space. Urban g overnance, he argues, ‘cannot be legitimised in the same way as representation (representative democracy) within a national conte xt’. Culture, in the sense of the ‘imaginary constitution of society’ and the ongoing ‘production of social bonds and inter actions’, therefore becomes central to urban go vernance. Here we f ind some responses to the questions raised by Pratt, Taylor, and others in this volume, as to the wider questions of urban governance within which any creative industries policy needs to be understood. Finally, Lehtovouri and Havik (Chapter 14) take

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us down to the sub-urban le vel, to the interstices of urban inno vation. Using case studies in Helsinki and Amsterdam the authors sho w ho w ne w forms of spatial management are being used to promote creati ve spaces in European cities. These spaces are deeply embedded in the comple xity and di versity of urban actors and dynamics, folding in marginal and temporary uses alongside the more mainstream and economically powerful institutions. In this way, the final section begins to flesh out Pratt’s call in Chapter 2 for an empirically situated creati ve industries polic y which is aware of the wide range of factors and interests involved in the production of urban cultures.

Chapter 2

Policy Transfer and the Field of the Cultural and Creative Industries: What Can Be Learned from Europe?* Andy C. Pratt

Introduction There has been an increased interest by polic ymakers in the cultural and creati ve economy1 in recent years, in part due to the success of de veloping reliable empirical measures of acti vity, and in part due to the anticipated economic and social benef its that such growth might bring. These benefits are partially based upon empirical growth (KEA_European_Affairs 2006), and partially reinforced by information society theories that suggest the creati ve industries are the leading edge of the ne xt long-wave of economic development (Garnham 2005). De veloping nations have been quick to see both the possibilities of the creative industries, and the way that they might be used to ‘upgrade’ their position within international production chains (Pratt 2008a). However, such interest and expectation has been difficult to resolve with a range of policy tools, or without an in-depth understanding of the CCI.2 There is clear evidence of confusion as to the role and potential of the CCI, a problem that is further obscured by imprecision concerning the core concepts that underpin the CCI. At the same time, there is much ‘hope’ v alue in polic y making in this f ield, some of which is patently aspirational rather than practical. For some, the CCI represent the * An initial version of this chapter presented at ‘Creative Cities, Creative Economies Conference, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences’. October 16, 2006. Thanks to the participants for comments and discussion. 1 I will use the terminology Cultural and Creati ve Industries (CCI) in this chapter to refer to both the notion of Creati ve Industries and the Cultural Industries. As I ha ve noted elsewhere, the precise terminology has specif ic political connotations. CCI has been increasingly adopted as an ‘umbrella’ label to cover a range of debates (Pratt 2005). 2 This is further compounded by the tendenc y to see cultural and creati ve industries polic y as synonymous with cultural polic y. The argument here is that CCI policies ha ve more in common with industrial policies. However, as will be noted, we ar gue against the use of generic industrial policies for the CCI. A.C. Pratt ( ) Department of Geography and Environment / LSE Centre for Cities, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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leading edge of the information society and hence of fer a promise of de velopment associated with leading technologies. For others, engagement in cultural production offers a potential means to ascend the value chain. So in the field of CCI policy, the stakes are high, and the pressure to do what somebody else has already done or to mimic policies adopted in other sectors is attracti ve. However, this begs two questions: does generic policy work with respect to the CCI, and, can polic y be simply applied in different social and political conditions and ha ve the same outcome? There is much interest in CCI polic y and in the e vidence that might support it. Whilst there may not be an agreement on precise policies, there does seem at least to be consensus on information gathering, although seldom with shared or e ven wellarticulated conceptual and def initional frame works. The recent de velopment of a UNESCO cultural statistical framework, and UNCTAD’s recent work on the creative economy and de velopment, both of which share man y common concepts, perhaps bodes well for the field (Burns Owens Partnership et al. 2006; UNCTAD 2008). Policy mak ers have turned to what the y perceive as the ‘best practice’ (in terms of evaluation and conte xt) in the f ield, or at least more usually the f irst movers, and seek to emulate them. This is what Peck (2005) terms ‘f ast policy.’ In so doing, policy makers are presented with huge challenges on ho w to select ‘best practice’ and ho w to apply this to their particular national re gulatory, cultural production, cultural polic y and industrial en vironment. Consequently, the most common form of polic y making has been what I term ‘Xerox’ policy making, that is, direct replication, and it is this tendency that I want to challenge in this chapter. Following this, I will question the notion of a unitary European e xperience or indeed, to name the most popular ‘model’ – the UK, on whether there is a clear notion of what models are available to be considered for such a process. Given these two problems, I will question whether it is possible to learn from the European experience. Indeed, is the notion of an ‘EU experience’ sustainable? Accordingly, the chapter represents a cautious attempt to consider what (if an ything) can be learned from the experience of other countries in the f ield of CCI policy. The chapter will be gin with a discussion of the v ery notion of the CCI, follo wing which it will re view debates on how to analyse the CCI. This will be follo wed by an outline of some of the problems and challenges of the idea of policy transfer. Following that, I take up the case of the CCI in Europe by outlining the varied experiences of information gathering, conceptualising and polic y making for the CCI. I conclude by returning to my initial question on whether it is possible to ‘learn from Europe’ in relation to CCI polic y, and if so, what can be learned?

CCI and Policy Transfer The Cultural Industries: Concepts There is a commonly assumed coherence to the notion of the cultural industries or the creati ve industries. The follo wing section outlines the contested history of the terms and their linkage with theory and polic y. In the case of the cultural

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Policy Transfer and the Field of the Cultural and Creative Industries

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industries, there e xist three main lines of thought. The term Culture Industry was coined by German writers Adorno and Horkheimer (1977; original 1944). Associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory , these authors sought to react to a mass society where the y felt culture w as becoming banal. F or them, culture (and meaning) played an essential role in the enlightenment as an emancipating force. The culture industries, the y ar gued, remo ved this emancipating potential. They also reacted against the cultural industries’ practice of e xtending the capitalist realm into leisure time. In the 1980s, French writers, especially Miège (1987, 1989), be gan to discuss the cultural industries. The y pluralised the ideas as, contra Adorno and Horkheimer , the y sa w the Cultural industries as di verse and dif ferent from one another . Moreo ver, the y vie wed the cultural industries as contradictory but not all bad. In the late 1990s, there are tw o major inflections of the Miège line of thought. One prioritises the production of te xts, and how meaning is shaped by ownership and production (Hesmondhalgh 2002). The other views the cultural industries as industries and seek to e xplore the particularities of their organisation across production, distribution and consumption (Pratt 1997, 2004b). Policy debates about the cultural industries can be link ed to the w ork of UNESCO on communications inequalities. From this came an influential report by Girard (1982) that sought to create a frame work of measurement. This approach influenced both the Canadian and Australian go vernments to measure cultural industries. Borro wing from Miège’ s w ork, Garnham (1987, 2005) was influential in adapting notions of the cultural industries to industrial polic y making in London, a notion that w as also e xplored in other ‘Old Labour’ run metropolitan areas of the UK. Here the cultural industries were used in part as political mobilisation of the youth, and in part as contrib utions to job creation in the de-industrialised cities. With the election of a centrist ‘New Labour’ in 1997, the cultural industries were ele vated as a national polic y. However, due to their associations with ‘Old Labour’, the y were re-branded the ‘creati ve industries’ thereby linking them to the ‘kno wledge economy’ (Garnham 2005; Pratt 2005). The first UK ‘mapping’ document that sought to measure the economic role of the ‘creative industries’ had a huge impact spa wning a number of similar reports around the world (DCMS 1998). Despite the popularity of counting emplo yment and output, it is debatable whether a deep understanding of the creative/cultural industries has been achieved. There remain a number of problematic relationships that have not been fully understood, namely, public and pri vate, formal and informal, production and consumption, arts and cultural industries, as well as the dif ferences between the indi vidual industries. Nevertheless, the policy juggernaut carries on, the latest concern being with ‘cultural clusters’ (Mommaas 2004; Pratt 2004a). Often, as commentators have noted, these are sites of cultural consumption rather than production. Moreover, the objective of these and other cultural initiati ves are more often than not instrumental; they seek to achie ve social cohesion or urban re generation rather than cultural excellence.

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The Creative Turn Alongside this emer ging polic y concern lie a number of academic debates. The term ‘creati ve’, as an adjecti ve applied to processes, is relati vely ne w. It has certainly received tw o quite distinct boosts in the last decade. The f irst of these occurred in 1997 as the UK go vernment turned its focus on polic y making in relation to the cultural industries (Pratt 2005). F or a variety of reasons, the term ‘creative industries’ was used instead of cultural industries. However, the same elements of the economy (film, television, design, high fashion, publishing, architecture, the visual and performing arts, new media and computer games, and advertising) were indicated in practice. The publication of data on emplo yment and output surprised many by the scale of its general contrib ution to the economy . Searching for an explanation of the economic gro wth indicated by cultural mapping surv eys, many sought to conflate the creative economy with the information/knowledge economy (Garnham 2005). The latter notion draws upon the work of Bell (1973), in particular his work on ‘post-industrial society ,’ which others ha ve sought to restyle as ‘the knowledge economy.’ Details aside, this has positioned the creati ve economy as the cutting edge of post-industrial kno wledge economy. In other w ords, it was the ‘new thing.’ Bell ar gued that the de veloped nations were increasingly dominated by people involved in the manipulation of ideas rather than things. Moreo ver, he argued that scientists, and what others ha ve called the symbolic analysts (Reich 2000), would add value to products; in fact, they would be the key element in future production. F ollowing this line of ar gument, ‘creati vity’ is the source of competitive advantage in the post-industrial economy . Hence, it is understandable that policy makers should seize upon the ‘creati ve industries,’ both as a label and as a panacea. We can of course find creative activities outside the ‘creative economy’ (in the car industry, in administration, etc.). Clearly this mak es the concept unwieldy. At a government level, this has led to the exploration of the ways in which creativity can be promoted through polic y within the education system (NACCCE 1999). The notion quickly travelled across Europe and around the w orld as policy makers sought some of the ‘magic dust’ of creativity. It was an idea that made all the right connections. There is an iron y in the embrace by the global South and East of a global North and Western concept of culture by cities that were in other ways seeking to stake out their separateness and individuality. A second and signif icant rise in the popularity of creati vity can be noted in the use of creati vity as spectacle and entertainment or to put it simply , as a means of attracting visitors and customers to a place. The notion of creati vity as a selling point draws straight from business studies, namely that of the entertainment economy or experience economy, The classic example is the redevelopment of Baltimore harbour (Hannigan 1998; Pine II and Gilmore 1999). Retailers and city managers have caught on to the f act that a good e xperience helps to open people’ s wallets. In part, this is a response to the f act that shops and malls are increasingly similar . What differentiates them, as proposed here, is ‘the e xperience.’ Such a notion is very attractive as it ar guably requires no latent resources, and with in vestment in

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the right labour force and setting, it could succeed an ywhere. An early v ersion of this spectacle is embedded in the idea of urban tourism, where the unique assets of a city – its heritage – are the attraction, and hotel bed-nights and consumption are representative of the benef it gained. In recent years, attempts ha ve been made to attract the ‘cultural tourist’ to cities with the hope that the y will be well-off and well-behaved, in contrast to the archetypical ‘sun and sand’ tourism (for e xample, Barcelona in comparison to the Costa Bra va) (Pratt 2000). Both cultural tourism and the entertainment economy ha ve been used to justify investment in urban cultural infrastructure. This has extended to the creation of new architectural icons to attract visitors and in vestors (the classic example being Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim art gallery, Bilbao).3 The more controversial such schemes are, the more the y attract publicity . Cities ha ve long competed against one another for foreign direct in vestment; the nature of en vironment, or the cultural attracti veness, are heavily implicated in such promotion (Harvey 1989). Not surprisingly, a number of indicies have been developed that rank cities on liveability or even creativity. The latest and most e xplicit linking of these aims can be found in the w ork of Florida (2002). Richard Florida has ar gued that the three dri vers of the creati ve class are technology, talent and tolerance. That is, cities that score highly on these become magnets for high-tech investment and growth (based upon the notion that the hightech sector is the current touchstone of economic growth). Florida’s study of US cityregions offers the following top five: San Francisco, Austin, San Diego, Boston and Seattle. Florida’s point is that it is not creativity, but the presence of creative workers (the widely drawn notion of the ‘creative class’) that makes a successful city. These workers themselv es then become a magnet for high technology and high gro wth firms seeking to emplo y them (see also critiques of Florida’ s thesis by Peck 2005, and Pratt 2008b). From the vie wpoint of the ar gument developed in this chapter , a central point about all of these insights is that they are about consuming culture, and not about its production. As noted abo ve, the ne w mapping studies of the cultural sector have pointed out that it is a gro wth area in its o wn right, and are not simply entertainment ‘candy floss.’ Florida’s creative cities are not about inno vation (product or process) nor are the y about cultural production (or creativity). A trio of less publicised b ut nonetheless important perspecti ves on creati vity and the city have been discussed and deployed as the basis for policy making. The first of these concerns creati vity being used in a socially instrumental manner in cities. The argument is that the pursuit of creati ve activities can be distracting and engaging, as well as a means of b uilding understanding and mutual respect. There are many examples of socially inno vative projects that use creati vity to reinforce social cohesion (Bianchini and Santacatterina 1997). Those e valuations that ha ve taken place point to significant success (in terms of social cohesion) (DCMS 1999). Another related use of creati vity has been in social problem solving. The w ork of The success, or otherwise, of man y such urban cultural e xtravaganzas is not conclusi ve. In particular, Bilbao, as the iconic example of the ‘art gallery that regenerated a city’ is a much disputed case (Plaza 1999, 2000a, b, 2006).

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Charles Landry (2000) is a testament to the possibility of inno vative and socially embedded problem solving through the use of local social and cultural resources. Inter alia it achie ves social cohesion, and sometimes produces artful outcomes as well. A striking e xample of this is discussed in Landry’ s book, the Emscher P ark in Essen, German y. This is the case of a run-do wn coal mining re gion that w as developed into an eco-tourism area and design centre. It is a remarkable e xample of lateral thinking, social and economic re generation. Thus far, we have the dominant notion of creativity as a magic bullet that leads to competiti veness, follo wed by creati vity as a ‘hone y pot’ to boost consumption and attract investment, and creativity as a new cultural resource for problem solving. A f inal application dra ws upon a dif ferent conception of creati vity, one that concerns the creative industries themselves, that is, one concerned with cultural production. As noted above, the notion of the creati ve industries does itself cover a wide range of industries. Those that ha ve been commonly focused on as providing economic gro wth in themselv es, as well as pro viding important input for other areas of social and economic life are high f ashion, design, ne w media and advertising. These and other creati ve industries are une venly distributed in cities around the w orld. Considerable adv antages are conferred by their location although it is not clear precisely why the y are located where the y are (see for e xample, Scott’s 2005 w ork on the f ilm industry and its shifting locational dynamics). The work of Becker (1984) and Peterson (1976) challenges the individualist reading of creati vity as well as the dominant reading of consumption and culture (Pratt 2004a, b), and of fers an alternati ve in the identif ication of an institutional framework that stresses the interconnections and feedback between processes of production, referred to else where as the production system or chain (Pratt 1997).

The Problem of ‘Travelling Policy’ There is a substantial literature on polic y transfer. On the one hand, the literature presents the dif fusion model, whereby polic y be gins in one place and ‘trickles down’ to others. The implication is that there is a temporal lag or more seriously , a transformative or translation ef fect in the process. On the other hand, there is a more historically rooted literature that emphasises the political processes that lead to polic y transfer. There are a number of classic studies in urban polic y. In par ticular, they highlight as much forgetting as they do remembering or perhaps more precisely, they point to a degree of oversight as policies are copied and re-copied. In both strands of work, there is an assumption that there is a coherent policy that gets ‘lost in translation.’ I want to question this whole notion of a portmanteau polic y. In much of cultural polic y, normative notions of policy making and transfer are used. There is not space here to re view this normative policy literature and its critique in detail. However, this section highlights a number of signif icant challenges

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to the normative agenda emerging from the disciplinary fields of urban studies and political science (James and Lodge 2003; Stone 2004; W olman et al. 1994). This position is used as a foundation to re-construct an analytical framework for cultural policy. Normative debates about polic y are framed as lying between tw o poles, that of lesson drawing and policy transfer. The former is usually presented as one of a formal rational choice of k ey characteristics. The latter is commonly presented as one of implementation f ailure or time lag; the notion of dif fusion of polic y ideas is common. In the last decade or so, a body of research has e xamined alternative conceptualisation of the polic y process and its comparati ve dimensions (Ev ans 2004, 2006; Evans and Davies 1999). One dimension of this debate has dealt with the relationship between political po wer and polic y, for e xample in discussion of ‘regime theory.’ Another has e xamined the di versity of economic institutional settings for polic y processes (Hall 1993; Hall and T aylor 1996). This w ork takes us a way from the functional, rational and disembedded practices as represented by normative theory. In particular, writers ha ve sought to de velop the variation of state practices and forms, notable e xamples being the w ork of Esping-Andersen (1990) on the welf are state, Duncan and Goodwin on the local state (Duncan and Goodwin 1988) and Hall’ s economic or ganisational v arieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001). More generally, there has been an argument to shift away from formal and limited notions of Go vernment to wards broader ideas of go vernance (Jessop 1998). Returning to the f ield of cultural polic y, and cultural and creati ve industries policy, we can note that much of the recent concern of polic y-makers has been met by normati ve analyses of polic y resulting in ‘Xerox’ policies, that is, policies that are simply copied with little or no v ariation from one place to another with no acknowledgement of the different social and economic conte xts, and little attention to the polic y object. The former point is well illustrated by w ork on arts policy and in particular, arts funding. Schuster (1985), for instance, highlights that simply comparing arts expenditure does not tell us much about policy or its effects. The work of T oepler and Zimmer (2002) indicates an application of the w ork of Esping-Anderson to cultural policy making, a point that has been further developed by Pratt (2005). By contrast, the popularisation of the w ork of Florida (2002) can be seen as a case in point of ‘Xerox’ polic y making. The latter point – the def inition of the precise object(ive) of policy – turns on regardless of whether the cultural and creative industries, and hence cultural and creati ve industries polic y, can be rendered as generic policy (as for other sections of the economy or society) or whether there are significant differences that require specif ic policy responses and formulations. At least in Florida’s work this is salient as he argues that the creative class requires specific policies to attract and retain them. Thus, in order to open up discussion of policy for the creative and cultural industries, we need to be clear not only of what the ‘object’ of policy is (the cultural and creative industries) – and how unique they are – as well as the objecti ves, and the context of their operation.

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Review of European Experience Fragmented Practice The aim of this section is to offer an overview of the European experience with CCI policy. We begin by considering the collection of data, although it cannot be considered in isolation as it is closely related to polic y making and the institutions of policy making. The particular formation of these policies gives a specific character and impetus to cultural industry policy making. Significantly, cultural policy making comes from a public polic y, public funded, system that is based upon the traditional arts. Modern cultural industries and any commercial activities are commonly excluded. Thus, the institutional and the historical role of the state are signif icant shapers of cultural industries policies and creati ve city policies. The central problem is associated with def inition and conceptualisation of the cultural and creati ve industries. In man y places, the same terminology is used for quite different activities. There are tw o inter-linked problems. First, each country has a different census agency and uses slightly different classifications of all industries. Second, there is considerable v ariation in terms of def initions and concepts. The primary disagreement concerns the inclusion of commercial acti vities within the cultural sector or the measurement of the cultural industries at all. A secondary issue concerns the general inadequac y (and variation) of the industrial taxonomies used to collate the data. 4 An attempt has been made by Eurostat (2000) to at least reform industrial taxonomies; however, the changes proposed will take a long time to implement. In effect, this lack of progress has made a true comparati ve analysis of the CCI in Europe impossible. Nevertheless, a number of indicati ve studies have been carried out. Perhaps the most comprehensi ve co verage comes from Northern Europe, the Scandina vian states. However, notable studies have also been carried out in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, France (Ile de France), German y (Nord Rheine Westfalia), Belgium, Iceland and Spain (Basque and Catalun ya) o ver time. The UK’s pragmatic and superf icial initial step of def ining the 13 creati ve industries represents a simpler solution and as such, has become influential; ho wever, it has been criticised for paying insufficient attention to the production framework of the CCI. In response, a ne w v ersion of the frame work has been de veloped (DCMS 2003). Interestingly , this document has been de veloped to assist UK re gional development agencies with strate gic development and data collection. T wo crossEuropean studies have been carried out. The first – European Commission (1998) – was a v ery sk etchy outline. Recently , a more de veloped study – KEA European Affairs (2006) – has been carried out. 5 See Pratt (1997) for a discussion of the problems in the UK; these problems are replicated in different countries. 5 See also Feist (2000), and Bodo and Fisher (1997). 4

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Genealogy of an Idea Let us take the idea of a CCI polic y itself. In some respects we can see this being pioneered as an urban polic y in the UK in the 1980s. At the same time, there is theoretical w ork on the cultural industries carried out in France. The tw o come together in polic y proposals for the Greater London Council (Garnham 1987, 2005). These early policies positioned the cultural industries as part of a political mobilisation strategy and as a youth employment approach. Later, they take on the role of economic strate gy (DCMS 1998) and then as a means of social amelioration (DCMS 1999). The UK e xperience has been v ery much of a shifting focus on the creati ve industries in terms of concepts, empirical and polic y objecti ves. Perhaps the most enduring element is that which is relati vely new and that which contrasts most clearly with continental Europe; this is a focus on the commercial aspects of cultural production albeit with the aim of state management or guidance of that field. Elsewhere in the Anglophone w orld, Australia’ s ‘Creati ve Nation’ programme took up the baton, again seeking to find a new role for the CCI that was in this case both about identity politics (and thus an outgro wth of ‘old’ cultural policy) and economic de velopment. Australia had, along with Ne w Zealand, pioneered the systematic collection of cultural data in specif ic accounts; these were both enhanced and e xtended through the use of artists’ labour mark et studies and time use surveys (Throsby and Hollister 2003). On the other side of the Pacific, the Canadian go vernment w as also intent on highlighting the role of culture both in identity terms as well as in economic terms, specif ically, as potential economic drivers. Again, data collection on the CCI took place alongside more traditional cultural polic y commonly link ed to the audio visual and publishing sectors. In turn, British polic y mak ers, notably the British Council, sought to pick on the CCI as an e xport vehicle (echoing a role that had been carried out for man y years by the US). In 1997, a change of administration ushered in a ne w concept, ‘the creative industries,’ and a ne w Department of Culture, Media and Sport. This formation then was some distance from the traditional arts and culture. Again, it is worth noting that in both Australia and Canada, such institutional inno vation had also taken place. At the same time across Europe, similar de velopments were apparent in the Scandinavian countries (with Finland playing a big role) and in German y. F or many years, a pioneering role w as taken by North Rhein W estphalia (NRW). The region, in particular the Rhur valley, had suffered massive de-industrialisation (like Sheffield in the UK – the first location of a ‘cultural industries quarter’). The innovative Emsher P ark, IBM, w as the centre piece. Inno vative policy was developed around en vironmental and cultural themes. Notably , initial policies were under pinned by a substantial research infrastructure de veloped by consultants EricArts who produced the f irst NRW mapping report in 1999. Other notable mapping and policy actions took place in Catalyn ya and Barcelona.

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The Many Worlds of CCI Policy Making As noted above, writers such as Esping-Anderson (1990) ha ve discussed the wide variations of state forms and concepts of social welf are. T oepler and Zimmer (2002) give a partial vie w of ho w such an ar gument may play out in the cultural policy sphere. The task has yet to be completed for the CCI. Ho wever, it is clear that the pattern is far more complex than that of simply mapping different types of welfare states onto cultural provision. There are two further factors: the relationship between market and non-market cultural production, and the scale of interv ention. Traditionally in continental Europe, a strict division of public and commercial cultural industries has been observed, with the former supported and the latter ignored. Cultural policy has been applied at both a regional and national level with differing emphases; notably, the French polic y has stressed patrimon y. The UK model can thus be seen as out of sync, both by its focus on the commercial creati ve industries and its tendency towards a market regulation model although at other times, creative industries are seen as a social cohesion polic y. At the supra-national level, the EU has been notably silent concerning the CCI. EU institutions have not been conduci ve to a European wide cultural polic y; until recently culture was not a European competency but one devolved to states. At the EU level, the concern has primarily been with cultural heritage, with its definitions and acti vities being deri ved from such a conception. Second, the cultural polic y domain is split between a number of dif ferent policy departments (DG). Formally, culture is located under social af fairs and education b ut the DGs for audio-visual, information technology and re gional development are also potential sites of inter est. The importance of the separate areas seems to ha ve militated against a crossdepartmental view of culture and the creati ve industries. As a result, the topic is very much a regional and national concern with no central direction. At the regional level, a number of initiatives have been developed based around three key areas. The first area is cultural quarters and cultural planning. The second is cultural industries and cultural clusters (Bianchini and Parkinson 1993; Bianchini and Santacatterina 1997; Mommaas 2004). Finally, a more traditional place-marketing role of cities and regions has sought to harness the notion of creative cities as well. As yet fe w nation states ha ve articulated a national strate gy for the cultural and creative industries, let alone creative cities. The latter is unlikely as the basis of such branding is inter-city competition. Cultural quarters and cultural planning ha ve primarily had tw o foci: f irst as an effort to achie ve social inclusion, and second, as an attractor for cultural tourism (a consumption space). Commonly , these de velopments are link ed to refurbished built heritage sites (Pratt 2007a, 2008a). Second, cultural industries and cultural cluster policies focus on commercial and industrial production activities. These are most successfully de veloped from e xisting agglomerations. Although a ne w trend has been to establish ‘incubator space’ in lar ge derelict ‘f actories,’ these policies have commonly been linked to more general business cluster promotion as a means of regeneration (Evans 2001).

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It will be clear , from the short summary of the histories and de velopment of concepts, definitions and policies for the CCI, that there is little consensus. Policies bear the mark of their history (social, economic and political) and in Europe, that history is v aried albeit ha ving a common root in state support for ‘high arts and culture,’ and an antipathy to commercial culture in terms of public policy support. It is also clear that many of the examples of CCI policy have been a result of ‘bottom up’ initiati ves, mainly at the local and re gional scale. T op do wn initiati ves are characteristic of ‘cultural policy.’ At best, the ‘model’ that emerges from Europe is idiosyncratic, subjective and contradictory. However, this does not mean that there are no lessons to be learned. What this simply means is that a ‘best practice’ or ‘Xerox’ policy transfer is unlikely to be a useful guide. Moreo ver, that CCI policy is rooted in a whole set of debates about the role of economy , culture and politics in societies. To simply extract or impose a model in such a situation is unlik ely to be useful nor achieve its expected outcomes.

Conclusion I be gan this chapter with the question of whether it w as possible to e xport and import cultural policies. I ha ve ar gued that, in terms of theories about polic y trans fer and about the empirical and specif ic issues of the CCI, this is not a feasible prospect. This fact is underlined by the confusing v ariety of models and practices that constitute the European e xperience. What is required is closer analysis and understanding of the operation of the CCI and their relationship with the rest of the economy (and society). However, there are some lessons that can be drawn to sustain an ongoing debate about the future form of CCI policies. It is clear that the European nations and regions have been engaged in a learning e xercise. One of the challenges has been to consolidate this experience rather than continually reproduce failures. Thus, one lesson that can be dra wn is the need to de velop a more systematic and rigorous evidence-based polic y de velopment, where information is gathered about the objectives and outcomes, as well as the means of polic y evaluation. The ur gency of this task is underlined by the raft of ‘mapping documents, ’ which despite their confusing and varied definitional basis, all point in a similar direction: the CCI is growing and increasingly becoming an important aspect of economies and societies. As such, it has social and economic impacts that could and should be the concern of society and polic y makers. As yet, polic y makers and politicians ha ve found it difficult to see the CCI as separate from the old approach to cultural polic y: the general subsidy model of public goods not sustained by mark et forces. Many CCI make money, therefore this model does not apply . Moreover, as man y studies are beginning to sho w, the CCI does not sit unequi vocally in the commercial sector , but is better seen as the interf ace between the mark et and society and between the formal and informal economies. Polic y mak ers and polic y institutions ha ve not

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been historically well positioned to engage with this sort of issues (Jef fcutt and Pratt 2002; Pratt 2007b). The European Union lacks a fundamental commitment to cultural di versity as expressed in the UNESCO charter (UNESCO 2001). If tak en seriously , such a commitment w ould require polic y across all aspects of the economy to address unequal accesses to the forms and means of cultural e xpression, notably through structural aspects of cultural goods distrib ution. The f allback position of support for a ‘common’ heritage has been the underpinning aspect of the cultural dimension of the EU. This is clearly inadequate as it f ails to provide a basis for decision making about current and future culture; it means that cultural activities will always be backw ard looking. Moreo ver, in this period of adv anced Neo-liberal polic y for trade and globalisation, heritage is increasingly being co-opted into ‘place branding’, an e xercise which is, at heart, a zero-sum game (Pratt 2007a, 2008b). Unfortunately, the other aspect of this polic y debate concerns hi-tech polic y. One thing that emerges very clearly from the European e xperience is that generic policies (cross-national or cross-industrial) do not w ork. The CCI ha ve a number of specific aspects that require dedicated polic y making. The notion of simply applying a science policy to culture and creative industries is not helpful. Finally, it is clear that e ven if many of the abo ve questions were resolv ed more satisfactorily in the European context, the CCI may still fall between gaps between the ‘silos’ of policy making. In short, there is no institutional ‘champion’: a polic y department which has the CCI as a core and high priority, and an agency which has real resources and po wer to implement polic y. This is perhaps one lesson that can be drawn from the UK in its establishment of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (replacing the Department for National Heritage) with a charismatic leader (Chris Smith), and which perhaps begins to account for the early successes.6 Whilst the DCMS made headlines and gathered signif icant legitimacy for the CCI and served as an inspiration 7 to man y nation states, a f act which we can applaud, the policy ‘follow through’ has, as yet, f ailed to materialise and as such, the CCI has once again slipped down the political agenda.

References Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer . 1977. The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In Mass communications and society , eds. J. Curran, M. M. Gure vitch, and J. W oollacott, 349–383. London: Arnold. Becker, H. S. 1984. Art worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sadly, I am not a ware of an y nation where the top career aspiration for the ‘brightest and best’ civil servants, or politicians, is the go vernment ministry that is responsible for culture (in f act, it is usually quite the opposite). 7 I would stress that the impact should be read as one of inspiration, rather than as a template to be copied. 6

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Bell, D. 1973. The coming of post-industrial society. New York: Basic Books. Bianchini, F. and M. Parkinson. 1993. Cultural policy and urban regeneration: The West European experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bianchini, F. and L. G. Santacatterina. 1997. Culture and neighbourhoods . Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Bodo, C. and R. Fisher . 1997. Ne w frontiers for emplo yment in Europe, CIRCLE publications, no 9 (Associazione Economica per la Cultura, Rome). Burns Owens Partnership, A. C. Pratt, and C. T aylor. 2006. A framework for the cultur al sector: A report for UIS/UNESCO. London: Burns Owens Partnership. DCMS. 1998. Creative industries mapping document . London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. DCMS. 1999. A report for polic y action team 10: Arts and sport. National Str ategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. DCMS. 2003. Regional data fr amework for the cr eative industries: F inal tec hnical r eport for the Department of Cultur e, Media and Sport and the Re gional Cultural Consortia. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Duncan, S. and M. Goodwin. 1988. The local state and une ven development: Behind the local government crisis. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Esping-Andersen, G. 1990. The three worlds of welfare capitalism. London: Sage. European Commission. 1998. Culture, the cultural industries and emplo yment. Commission Staff Working Paper Document SEC 98(837). Eurostat. 2000. Cultural statistics in the EU, f inal report of the LEG. Eurostat Working Papers: Eurostat Population and Social Conditions 3/2000/E/No1. Evans, G. 2001. Cultural planning: An urban renaissance? London: Routledge. Evans, M. 2004. Policy transfer in global perspective. Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Evans, M. 2006. Learning from comparative public policy: A practical guide.Public Administration 84: 479–515. Evans, M. and J. Da vies. 1999. Understanding polic y transfer: A multi-le vel, multi-disciplinary perspective. Public Administration 77: 361–385. Feist, A. 2000. Cultural emplo yment in Europe. Cultural Policies Resear ch and De velopment Unit. Policy note 8, Council of Europe, Strasbour g. Florida, R. L. 2002. The rise of the creative class: And how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books. Garnham, N. 1987. Concepts of culture – public polic y and the cultural industries. Cultural studies 1: 23–37. Garnham, N. 2005. From cultural to creati ve industries: An analysis of the implications of the ‘creative industries’ approach to arts and media polic y making in the United Kingdom. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11: 15–30. Girard, A. 1982. Cultural industries: A handicap or a new opportunity for cultural development. In Cultural industries: A challange for the future, ed. A. Girard. Paris: UNESCO. Hall, P. and D. Soskice. 2001. Varieties of capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, P. A. 1993. Polic y paradigms, social learning and the state – the case of economic polic ymaking. Comparative Politics 25: 275–296. Hall, P. A. and R. C. R. T aylor. 1996. Political science and the three ne w institutionalisms. Political Studies 44: 936–957. Hannigan, J. 1998. Fantasy city: Pleasur e and pr ofit in the postmodern metr opolis. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism – the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 71: 3–17. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2002. The cultural industries. London: Sage. James, O. and M. Lodge. 2003. The limitations of ‘policy transfer’ and ‘lesson drawing’ for public policy research. Political Studies Review 1: 179–193. Jeffcutt, P. and A. C. Pratt. 2002. Managing creati vity in the cultural industries. Creativity and Innovation Management 11: 225–233.

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Jessop, B. 1998. The rise of go vernance and the risks of f ailure: The case of economic de velopment. International Social Science Journal 50: 29–45. KEA European Affairs. 2006. The economy of culture in Europe. Brussels: European Commission DG5. Landry, C. 2000. The creative city: A toolkit for urban inno vators. London: Comedia/Earthscan. Miege, B. 1987. The logics at w ork in the ne w cultural industries. Media Culture & Society 9: 273–289. Miege, B. 1989. The capitalization of cultural production. New York: International General. Mommaas, H. 2004. Cultural clusters and the post-industrial city: Towards the remapping of urban cultural policy. Urban Studies 41: 507–532. NACCCE. 1999. All our futur es: Cr eativity, cultur e and education, r eport of the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. London: Department for Education and Employment. Peck, J. 2005. Struggling with the creati ve class. International Journal of Urban and Re gional Research 29: 740–770. Peterson, R. A. 1976. The production of culture. London: Sage. Pine II, J. P. and J. H. Gilmore. 1999. The experience economy: Work is theatre & every business a stage. Harvard: Harvard Business School. Plaza, B. 1999. The Guggenheim-Bilbao museum ef fect: A reply to Maria V . Gomez reflecti ve images: The case of urban re generation in Glasgo w and Bilbao. International J ournal of Urban and Regional Research 23: 589–592. Plaza, B. 2000a. Ev aluating the influence of a lar ge cultural artif act in the attraction of tourism: The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao case. Urban Affairs Review 36: 264–274. Plaza, B. 2000b . Guggenheim museum’ s ef fectiveness to attract tourism. Annals of T ourism Research 27: 1055–1058. Plaza, B. 2006. The return on in vestment of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30: 452–467. Pratt, A. C. 1997. The cultural industries production system: A case study of employment change in Britain, 1984–91. Environment and Planning A 29: 1953–1974. Pratt, A. C. 2000. Cultural tourism as an urban cultural industry . A critical appraisal. In Cultural tourism, ed. Interarts, 33–45. Barcelona: Turisme de Catalunya, Diputació de Barcelona. Pratt, A. C. 2004a. Creative clusters: Towards the governance of the creative industries production system? Media International Australia 112: 50–66. Pratt, A. C. 2004b. The cultural economy: A call for spatialized ‘production of culture’ perspectives. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7: 117–128. Pratt, A. C. 2005. Cultural industries and public polic y: An oxymoron? International Journal of Cultural Policy 11: 31–44. Pratt, A. C. 2007a. Inno vation and creativity. In The sage companion to the city , eds. J. R. Short, P. Hubbard, and T. Hall, 266–297. London: Sage. Pratt, A. C. 2007b . The state of the cultural economy: The rise of the cultural economy and the challenges to cultural polic y making. In The ur gency of theory , ed. A. Ribeiro, 166–190. Manchester: Carcanet/Gulbenkin Foundation. Pratt, A. C. 2008a. Cultural commodity chains, cultural clusters, or cultural production chains? Growth and Change 39: 95–103. Pratt, A. C. 2008b . Creati ve cities: The cultural industries and the creati ve class. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 90: 107–117. Reich, R. B. 2000. The future of success. New York: A. Knopf. Schuster, J. M. D. 1985. Supporting the arts: An international compar ative study , Canada, Federal Republic of Germany , F rance, Italy , Gr eat Britain, Netherlands, Sweden, United States. Washington, DC: Policy and Planning Division, National Endowment for the Arts. Stone, D. 2004. T ransfer agents and global netw orks in the ‘transnationalization’ of polic y. Journal of European Public Policy 11: 545–566. Throsby, D. and V. Hollister. 2003. Don’t give up your day job: An economic study of professional artists in Australia. Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts.

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Toepler, S. and A. Zimmer. 2002. Subsidising the arts: Government and the arts in Western Europe and the United States. In Global culture: Media, arts, policy and globalisation, eds. D. Crane, N. Kawashima, and K. Kawasaki, 29–48. London: Routledge. UNCTAD. 2008. The creative economy report. Geneva/New York: UNCTAD/UNDP. UNESCO. 2001. Universal declaration on cultural diversity. Geneva: UNESCO. Wolman, H. L., C. C. F ord, and E. Hill. 1994. Ev aluating the success of urban success stories. Urban Studies 31: 835–850.

Chapter 3

Creative Industries Across Cultural Borders: The Case of Video Games in Asia Ted Tschang

Introduction This chapter e xamines the relationship between culture, economics and polic y within the creative industries (which for the purposes of this paper , are assumed to be equivalent to the cultural industries), and their manifestation in Asia. Addressing any one of these three issues is a challenge in itself, but addressing all three of them together raises the comple xity e ven further. Early writers on the “creati ve economy” have noted ho w it w orks differently from the traditional economy (Florida 2002; Howkins 2001). 1 Culture is vitally important to understanding ho w creative industries develop, but the role of culture in shaping national competitive advantage is not that clear. The same can be said for polic y, and a discussion of the triad can be quite convoluted. Having said that, all three le vels are still v ery relevant to the proper description of a creative industry – as I will sho w in this chapter. This paper attempts to address this triad of issues primarily with a productionand-innovation-oriented vie w of industrial or ganisation, bringing in creati vity, culture and policy where possible. I shall do this primarily through the lens of one sector in particular – the video games industry – in which Asia has been in vesting heavily lately, and in which Japan has been an early leader . I will also pro vide a limited focus on the animation sector for comparative purposes. I will first provide a summary of ho w creative production in video games occurs in the US, follo wed These works typically suggest that the production economy for technologies and products associated with the industrial age seemed to re volve around economies of scale, b ut that dominance in the creative age appears to be the result of creati vity, specifically, individual creativity. They stop short of characterising this creati vity fully. Increasing returns also tend to apply to these types of creative products. This may be because many creative goods face a mass market, and the “hit” that comes from the mark et “buzz” and the herd mentality of man y consumers will cause dispropor tionate returns to the fortunate product (Ca ves 2000).

1

T. Tschang ( ) Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management Uni versity, 50 Stamford Road, Singapore 178899, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_3, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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by an examination of how Asian patterns compare. In particular, I am interested in whether individual and industrial level creativity differs in Asia. Within Asia, more detailed cases of the Chinese online games industry and the Philippine animation industry will be discussed, b ut relevant observations are also dra wn from general knowledge and a literature review of Japan, Korea and Singapore, as well as inter views which corroborate those observations.

What Do We Know About the Economics of Creative Industries? From the Creativity of One to a Production-Based Economy Understanding whether the economics and structure of creati ve production dif fers from other industries requires understanding what the nature of creati vity is in the creative sectors, and where this creativity is “located.” In some solitary activities such as painting or writing, creati vity is ob viously located at the indi vidual level. Within the literature on individual creativity, some perspectives hold that individuals are the “products” of society, family and the individual’s life course, and that domains, fields and individual contributions (e.g. rejections of the domain) are important – man y of these being social contexts (Csikszentmihalyi 1999; Gardner 1993).2 While creativity in the traditional arts and related sectors is clearly centered around the indi vidual, even in the more recent creative industries such as video games and digital animation, one emphasis, at least in the past, appears to ha ve been on the lead creator as def iner of the vision and the eventual product’s design (Tschang and Szczypula 2006). Other critical f actors that ha ve appeared to influence the nature of a particular creative industry are: the influence of culture, the mode of production (e.g. the organisation of f irms), and the mark et’s preferences (in particular , in shaping the product’s long term acceptance). Culture e xerts a major influence on indi vidual creativity. While the influence of culture on re gional variations in contemporary creati ve industries has not been thoroughly in vestigated, culture – contemporary , historical and otherwise – is widely understood to shape a nation’s creative industries. Studies of artists, writers and other creative people illustrate that the y derive inspiration from e xposure to a variety of influences, including domains of study , experiences and so on. Creators in modern industries such as videogames have also been shown to be heavily influenced by popular culture and media (Tschang and Szczypula 2006). Beyond the indi vidual and the group is the f irm. The f irm, in particular in the form of the studio, continues to be the dominant economic entity as evident in many creative sectors (Epstein 2005). Studios are created to focus solely on creative work, but these are often or ganised around the singular visions of highly creati ve lead creators. However, as products such as video games and animated features become These theories have been formulated most often by studies of individuals in the artistic tradition, although political leaders (e.g. Gandhi), academics (e.g. Freud) and others have also been explained in frameworks such as Gardner’s (1993).

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ever larger and more comple x, the project form, and e ver larger teams are needed to implement the w ork (Grabher 2002; Tschang 2007). 3 In f act, the maturing of the video games industry has been accompanied by ‘T aylorist’ concerns, i.e. the attention to process management, optimisation and profit concerns (Tschang 2005, 2007). Thus, while the studio would appear to pride itself on creativity, oftentimes, as witnessed in Hollywood and the US video games industry, significant financing and attention to mark et preferences are required, and these will tend to influence studios more conservatively (Epstein 2005; Tschang 2007). In f act, early findings from research into the Chinese online game industry suggest that the mode of organising production in Asian societies appears to be no dif ferent from those in Western ones (Tschang and Tsang 2006). 4 Despite the e vident influence of indi vidual creati vity on a product’ s inno vativeness, the mass mark et and its preferences appears to influence the long term viability of a particular form of creative product. This reflects one perspective in the innovation literature, in which the e volutionary path of many traditional industries shifts from a period of v ariating designs to the establishment by the mark et of a dominant design embodying a specif ic architecture (Utterback 1994). This is followed by a period of incremental inno vations, where the objective tends to be one of cost-minimisation, until such time as a new technological discontinuity appears. While creative industries would appear in theory to be free of such “design” domination, in reality, at least in the f ilm and videogame industries, the need to appeal to the mass market does end up establishing certain genres as entertainment norms (Epstein 2005; Tschang 2007). The increasing cost of producing these contentbased products is reaching a point where the lar gest enterprises (those with the financial ‘muscle’) are mainly interested in producing a fe w, high quality “safe” products, rather than a range of creati ve products. One example is Electronic Arts, which has tended to focus on the production of “mo vie quality” and “movie-based content” games over the last few years. While markets for technology continue to be f airly traditional in behaviour (i.e. consumers tending to accept a fe w limited v arieties of a particular product), the Internet offers a starkly contrasting model for ho w content can be produced and distributed. This began partly with the dotcom b ubble, as the increasing use of the Internet to host, deli ver and manage applications, entertainment and commerce led to two major changes. Both can be said to run counter to the mass production

However, even in teams, lead individuals (e.g. directors of films or lead designers of videogames) still have very critical roles in bringing their indi vidual visions and e xperiences to the leadership of teams and projects. At the same time, in products such as video games, indi vidual team members may make substantive contributions in brainstorming sessions as well as in indi vidual work by adding content detail, detailing the design, and so on. Thus, in a modern industrial setting, it is neither individual nor team, neither lead individual nor team member, but all, that contribute to the creative work. This is important as it nuances the notion of project networks and project work that scholars like Grabher have asserted. 4 Based on interviews with online game company leaders by author and S. Tsang in Beijing, May 2006. Other outsourcing-based industries such as the Philippines’ animation sector have also been found to be just as much about process management and di vision of labor as anything else. 3

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paradigm. The f irst phenomenon – popularly kno wn as the “long tail” (Anderson 2006) – is the emer gence of niche mark ets by w ay of the increasing ability to distribute greater varieties of content. The long tail is related to the second phenomena – the increase in user -created content, much of it also happening on the W orld Wide Web. One example of this alternative form of production is the “garage” form of informal creative activity (e.g. Jenkins 2003). These trends ha ve forced existing firms to respond with very different strategies.5 In the US, the dotcom b ubble of the late 1990s w as follo wed by the rush of social networking sites and online games in the early 2000s, both of which included some degree of user-led personalisation of content and websites. Ho wever, it is in the increasing use of the Internet to distrib uted user -created content that we are starting to see a broader sense of creati vity at work. This in a w ay has reached its epoch in virtual worlds such as Second Life, where most of the content (consisting of art, animation behaviours and even “cultures”) is created by users, albeit a small proportion of them. This exploitation of technology for production purposes is also starting to tak e hold in China and Asia, at least in f its and starts. In China for instance, massi vely multiplayer online game (MMOG) and virtual w orld operators are starting to proliferate, even while man y online game studios continue to try to impro ve their production processes. In animation, some studios in the Philippines for instance are training staff in the use of Flash technology – a way of producing animation that is cheaper, and which reduces the scale of the ef fort.6

Creative Industry Production in Asia Keeping this general W estern creati ve industrial trajectory in perspecti ve, I will now turn to an e xamination of the f actors influencing creative production in Asia. This historical o verview is comprised of selected creati ve sectors that ha ve found international prominence. Across Asia, the tendencies in most economies have been first, to allow creative production to flourish in whiche ver way possible, and later , to support the pri vate sector as it develops. However, most of the private sector trend appears at one level to be the serendipitous result of almost accidental forays, follo wed by production in search of ever larger profits. “Mass market” producers lik e George Lucas already tap into this digitalization of content, and Lucas has sought to mo ve away from the 100 million dollar f ilm model into the multi-channel multi-product content form. While most home spun ef forts in the past were of poor quality , the capability of software to model visual as well as audio patterns is increasing rapidly, allowing not only some “garage” efforts (e.g. music) to attain quality as high as commercial ones, but also giving commercial houses such as Lucas Film the ability to re visit their production capability and to develop “digital economies of scope” (http://www.longtail.com/). 6 Authors’ interviews with Top Draw and PASI in Manila, 2005. 5

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We can analyse more systematically the state of creati ve industries in Asia by examining where the y lie along tw o ax es: (a) mark et orientation (domestic and export); and (b) the de velopment lifec ycle of creati ve goods – consisting of the stages of conceptualisation, design and pre-production, production, and postproduction. Generally, the earlier stages (i.e. conceptualisation) of the development lifecycle are the most creati ve. It appears that the follo wing trends are present in many Asian settings. Some countries have done the full development lifecycle, initially for the domestic market, and followed by export, e.g. the Japanese and Korean animation and video game industries. Other countries ha ve gone into the full de velopment life cycle mainly for the domestic mark et, e.g. the Chinese online games and animation industries, but are starting to e xport as well. It is rarer to see the full de velopment lifecycle model used for e xport markets – the Singapore- India production of Sing to the Dawn being an e xample of this. Finally , one common model has been the export-only model, in volving outsourcing or of fshoring for the production stage. In animation, the Philippines, India and Singapore animation industries (and parts of the Japanese, K orean and Chinese industries) are hea vily focused on e xports. Selected game companies (e.g. in China) also engage purely in exports, but tend to do this for the full de velopment cycle. We can analyse these trends as a series of overlapping “stages” of industrial development across the region. The First W ave – Games and Animation in J apan: Japanese animation has long had domestic roots in the comic manga tradition, and foreign influences (e.g. the animator T ezuka dra wing on influences from Disne y) (Ao yama and Izushi 2003). Japan e ventually also de veloped an of fshore animation capability for the US; K orea and the Philippines later follo wed Japanese animation in becoming offshore locations for US animation production (Lent 2000). Many Asian countries actually had animation roots as early as Japan’s (e.g. China’s predated Japan’s with productions as early as 1941), b ut the Japanese domestic mark et for animation blossomed before the others (or some others’ mark ets never did), as did Japan’ s gaming market. The Japanese video game industry be gan in the mid-1970s, partly in order to address the need for coin-operated video games in Japan, as well as for the US, but eventually blossomed into its o wn, especially with the de velopment of Nintendo’s hallmark Famicon console in 1983, as well as later ones by Se ga and Son y. It is quite likely that the producers’ control o ver the hardware is what allo wed them to develop more unique games of their o wn over time.7 The Second W ave – Animation Outsour cing: As noted earlier , many Asian animation companies had focused on e xports since the 1960s, sometimes after they started servicing their o wn domestic markets. This is partly a consequence of the b usiness and economic gro wth-led nature of industrial de velopment in Asia.

Even today, console mak ers tend to focus on def initive titles to sho w off the capabilities and unique content of their machines. W itness the Son y Playstation 3’s arrival with Resistance: The Fall of Man and the X-Box’s Halo series.

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In most parts of Asia, and especially East Asia, exports have been the major source of economic growth over the last 2 or more decades. 8 While animation companies in K orea, the Philippines, Japan and other countries quickly turned to e xports when the y were f irst started, foreign animation producers also often led the w ay by establishing their o wn studios (Lent 2000). In the Philippines alone, early companies were set up as of fshore subsidiaries of Warner, Disney, Hanna Barbera and other major US animation studios, along with domestically-owned studies that serviced the international mark et. The recent near w orld-wide interest in creati ve industries, coupled with these early successes, has led to government interest in supporting this trend. In Asia, this includes India, China and Singapore, as well as resurgent interest in the Philippines. It has been proven that the cultural nature of content is no barrier to a country’s production of animation – even in languages that are not native to those countries: the Japanese firm Toei’s subsidiary in the Philippines and the Korean animation of The Simpsons being two such examples. The outsourcing of animation has been f acilitated by the codification of production stage processes. Typically, the conceptualisation and pre-production stages (which tend to be the most creative and tacit), and post-production, are kept in the “home” mark et. One case in point of a successful transfer of production and its associated technique, was Kanbar studios’ production of Hoodwinked, a full length animated three-dimensional (3D) feature (where 3D was supposedly an adv anced form of animation). All of the production w ork was done in the Philippines (much of which was entirely hidden in the onscreen credits), but the f inancing and much of the creati ve work (including conceptualization and story) were k ept in Hollyw ood. The instability (i.e. a past boom and b ust cycle) of the animation industry in the Philippines as well as in India has not stopped the Philippines government, let alone other countries, from continuing to push for more gro wth in animation (outsourcing) e xports (Tschang and Goldstein 2004). Singapore is only the latest to do so, with the go vernment’s success at attracting Lucas Arts being one of the more well kno wn cases. The Third W ave – New Entrants in Online Gaming : The rise of the ne w online gaming culture in Asia is a ne w trend that can be credited to K orea’s movement into online games. While online games originated in the US, K orean gaming interest took on a ne w dimension. K orea had installed a sophisticated broadband network (partly due to the dotcom b ubble), along with gaming c ybercafés and an acti ve public interest in gaming. K orea’s interest in online gaming can be traced back to the country’ s stimulation by real time strate gy games played o ver cybercafés’ local area netw orks, namely, multiplayer games lik e (the US studio) Blizzard’s Starcraft games. The Chinese online games industry started partly because of the K orean influence, but the real imperative came from piracy. The domestic pirating of PC games

Export-led production in the electronics sector proved a clear path for industrialisation, as experiences in first, Japan, then Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, followed by China and the rest of Southeast Asia, have shown.

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in China was so widespread that it devastated local PC game producers (in addition to its effects on foreign products). Unlike foreign imports, which had the advantage of stable home mark ets, the Chinese PC game mak ers, with their focus on their domestic mark et, could not mak e much return from their product (Tschang and Tsang 2006). When the earliest online games made their w ay into China from Taiwan, and later, Korea, Chinese PC game mak ers learnt that online games were vastly more prof itable, in part because cop ying was nearly impossible (gi ven that the source code and the content resided on the compan y’s servers, as opposed to single player PC games). Much lik e in Korea, the market was stimulated by early play of online games in cyber cafes. The result of this demonstration was a staggering increase in Chinese online game production, rivaling that seen in Korea and the US, but one also associated with a precipitous decline in domestic titles for single player PC games. By the early 2000s, the more mature, sophisticated Korean products managed to capture 70% or more of the Chinese mark et. The Chinese go vernment has sought to redress this with policies, and the strong state protectionist polic y, in conjunction with the rise of domestic firms’ capabilities to produce products with domestic content (e.g. historical themes and myths) and other domestically-desirable features of games, appears to be ha ving the desired effect. The recent mark etshare of Chinese games has now gone up to 70–80%, and of the top 15 games, all but 6 were domestic in origin (Tschang and Tsang 2008). The o verall Chinese online games market itself was approximately 2 billion USD at the end of 2007 and e xpected to grow to 6 billion by 2012 (T akahashi 2008). Thus, to a lar ge degree, the Chinese industry is playing catch up with the more established K orean companies, with a fair amount of success.

Characterising the Asian Industries’ Creativity: Imitation Keeping in mind the multi-level nature of the above inquest, we will now consider how creativity is shaped at the indi vidual, firm and industrial le vels. Imitation has been a standard means of catching up, b ut imitation has its o wn internal rationale. I will follow this with an examination of the leading edge of creati vity. Ultimately, production for the domestic mark et has been one important w ay in which designers in industries such as games and animation ha ve managed to distinguish themselv es internationally (Tschang 2007; for a countere xample, see Tschang and Goldstein 2004). Ho wever, this does not recognise the dif ficulty of producing unique b ut globally-saleable cultural content. Man y Asian countries initially climbed the ladder of industrial de velopment – in traditional and creati ve industries alike – through imitation. This has sometimes occurred as the result of direct production for e xport markets (see Table 1), or may ha ve been a process of “getting a foot in the door”, i.e. learning ho w to produce. Re gardless of the initial motivation, the continuance of an imitati ve state is what interests us here, as this suggests a type of “path dependenc y”, or lock-in to historical patterns.

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T. Tschang Table 1 Market orientation v ersus production life c ycle stage for v arious Asian countries’ creative industries

Production stage

Market orientation

Full production (including conceptualization stage)

Production stage only (no conceptualization or final stages)

Domestic market

Export market

Japan, Korea games Japan animation Korea animation

Singapore-India animation co-production

Chinese games

(new firms do exports) Philippines, India animation

According to interviews conducted by Tschang and Tsang in 2006 in the mobile content and online video game sectors, man y Chinese content pro viders are imitative of domestic or international competitors, this despite the lar ge number of mobile content pro viders in China. While the imitati ve state of production-stage led exports is obvious, the rationale for domestic industries is not so clear at f irst. We will look at the case of China, latecomer as it is to these industries. There are at least four possible reasons for its imitati ve nature. (All this is not to say that there are no innovations in China, but these tend to be f ar fewer in number.) The first reason for the imitative trend in China’s online games industry is that it may be the result of the industry’s focus on catching up with imports (specif ically, Korean ones that had set the standard for gameplay and other aspects of quality). There is a certain amount of lock-in when the players and designers (who are also players) are e xposed to particular influences, e.g. a certain platform or style of gameplay (e.g. massi vely multiplayer online games), which further constrains breakthrough innovations. This is true of the US mark et as well (Tschang 2007). A second reason for the imitati ve beha viour of the mark et in China is the generally conserv ative nature of mark ets. Game playing consumers ha ve pro ven to be some what conserv ative in countries such as the US, and ha ve influenced game developers (Tschang 2007). The same situation might be e xpected in China. Certainly the success that man y online game mak ers ha ve in trying to produce similar types of products with similar content is indicative of the mass market tastes that exist. A third possible reason is the general lack of a social process for de veloping creative individuals or w orkforces. This especially bede vils fast developing markets lik e China and Singapore. De veloping a popular culture, let alone one that is amenable to translation into game and animation content (e.g. back stories or

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characters) tak es on the order of decades – this is perhaps a longer period than bureaucrats who focus on planning for concrete short- and medium-term tar gets – have. In China’s case, the relatively short period of modern economic and societal transformation may not ha ve created enough “matter”, and so game de velopers 9 focus on reusing the long historical cultural tradition that China already has. Many Chinese online games primarily inno vated on this content (though game play tends not to be so much a differentiator in online games, since the latter tends to rely on a limited number of modes of social interaction). This in itself can be considered a type of inno vation, and helps pro vide a cultural uniqueness to the product. The last b ut perhaps most important reason is the prof it moti ve of compan y leadership. Innovation is hard, and man y smaller companies w ant, or only kno w how, to imitate, so as to be a successful “quick follower” or “first mover into a new market”. One b usiness leader whom we intervie wed from a Chinese f irm which created online casual games noted that he imitated successful games because they had been proven to work, and so long as he was first to bring these to the (domestic) mark et, he sa w no reason to in vest in ne w inno vations. Ev en today, when Korean innovations come into China and show that “casual” online games such as Maple Story, with cuter characters and other content (itself possibly deri ved from Japanese popular culture) could sell well, Chinese companies are quick to follo w with their own versions, albeit with Chinese content. With their business designs, many Chinese f irms tend to focus on capturing the e xisting market by changing content while maintaining the basic game design. This reflects the observ ation that content changes are easier and less risk y than creating ne w game designs (Tschang 2005). Imitation may not be such a critical problem if it in volves being the f irst to produce a product (that is imitated from a foreign one) for one’ s own market. This was especially important to China as the feeling was that localising content was an “innovation” in itself. This business-like attitude became a resonant theme throughout the industry , and indeed, man y successful early online game operators were started by businessmen coming in to the industry with non-gaming backgrounds but who had achieved success through their business acumen in more traditional areas such as property and softw are. Examples of these companies include Kingsoft, Sohu and Shanda. This trend to wards imitation is not so dif ferent in other countries. Korean online games ha ve also tak en root across the w orld, although since the early products, Korean online games have become increasingly derivative. This is not surprising, given that the same trend towards a dominant design exists in the US. This is as much a function of what the mass market wants as it is a function of the increasing scale and cost of production, which mak es these products increasingly costly to finance, and therefore, risky to innovate on. A proper venture capital scheme has yet to be invented for the creative industries.

Ancient periods of war and lawlessness as well as myths were especially popular in the first few waves of online games.

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What Differentiates Creative Industries? Creativity, Culture and Adaptation In prospecting the role of creati ve industries in economic de velopment, the natural objective would be to have the capability to de velop one’s own “branded” products, i.e. the opportunity to conceive of native products with a global standing. Four factors might influence the creati vity within a gi ven country’s creative industry’s development: individual creativity as expressed in its highest (most creative) manner; national culture as a part of this expression of creativity; the strategies of firms in “managing” this creativity; and the influence of the state in encouraging this de velopment.

The Nature of Great Creativity At the highest le vel, creati vity should in volve great acts by (so-called) great individuals. In the most adv anced mark ets, designers and other creati ve people have developed unique identities, and in the process, also helped their industries to develop an international identity. This is no where more true than in the Japanese industries, where the top lead designers and animators are kno wn throughout the world for the creati vity and quality of their w ork. Examples of such great creators include Japanese video game designers Shigeru Miyamoto of Mario f ame (Nintendo), Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame, the creator of the rhythm (music) game genre Masaya Matsuura, and the animator Hayao Miyazaki (see for example Baba and Tschang 2001). These creators have emerged as top designers or animation artists by not only nurturing the spark of indi vidual creativity, but also by their situation in a unique culture, and by the fostering of their vision within the ef forts of lar ger organisations. While early Japanese game companies (such as Namco, Se ga and Nintendo) and indi vidual designers alik e may ha ve initially worked on exports or derivative products, over time, the domestic market became a main source of demand for man y of them, creating the opportunity for the uniqueness of their talent to tak e form. At the same time, a lar ge part of Japan’s success derives from the cultural uniqueness of Japan, as well as the ability and willingness of the Japanese to blend their o wn culture with global influences (where the uniqueness of Japanese culture occurs in both historical and futuristic forms). This analysis of the creati vity of creators can be complemented by an e xamination of how great acts of creativity are reflected in the products of creative industries, and whether the Asian e xperience reflects this. The creati ve industries are at their heart def ined by products, and the most creati ve products are based on the ideas (i.e. ‘acts’) of single indi viduals. There is a stored history of ho w to def ine innovation in products. T raditional inno vations, especially technological inno vations, are often def ined as consisting of either product and/or process inno vations. By breaking do wn creative industry products into their dif ferent constituents, we

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see an alternative picture of their de velopment. Specifically, as shown in Tschang (2007), videogames are known to consist of: 1. Design (in terms of gameplay) 2. Content (consisting of art, animation and stories) and 3. T echnological innovations In contrast, animation, like film, consists almost entirely of content innovations (although technological innovations have also helped in creating the 3D animation form). What does it tak e to produce inno vations in at least one of these constituents of a video game? Again, because of the mixture of technology , content and design involved, it is arguably necessary for creative industries to have depth and breadth in the domains related to the respecti ve constituents. F or content, this in volves being steeped in or ha ving access to culture (including national and popular cultures, preferably globally accessible in nature). In the case of (game) design, it has included the need to ha ve broad f amiliarity with a v ariety of games and their design (e.g. board games), and a broader sense of play . While Western designers have certainly succeeded in (occasionally) producing inno vative products, the success of the Japanese and even individual game studios in smaller countries like the Czech Republic or Denmark has pro ven that no country has a lack of creati ve talent. However, with the exception of Japan, hardly any stars have appeared in other Asian countries so far. In most other Asian countries however, there is no “stardom” as yet attached to lead positions, although this is partly a function of there being no definitive products or content. At the same time, there is perhaps no “culture” of having a “lead designer” who is a visionary of sorts. Experience and opportunities (to gain e xperience) may also be a fundamental issue in this. In China, creati ve thinking ability is as great as in an y other culture. When we ask ed a Chinese designer/project head to describe and compare the nature of videogames by their creativity, he noted that they had brainstormed many ideas including at least one that, unbekno wnst to them, w as similar to a leading American designer’s newest design. 10 However, if we broaden the notion of creativity to include the capability to pro vide the complete details and implementation of an idea, this is where the e xperience and background of a great designer lik e Will Wright (the designer of The Sims and Simcity franchises) stands apart. As our interviews with game designers indicate, ideas are “cheap” b ut what distinguishes successful creative people is the experience and ability that they have to implement their ideas (along with the resources). 11 A Spore-like idea was mentioned, where Spore is the latest game by Will Wright – acknowledged by many to be one of the most creative US game designers ever, on the order of being a genius in that field. 11 It is also possible that the Chinese designers may ha ve chosen a different implementation from the one that Wright e ventually created. It is quite lik ely that the y did not ha ve the access to the dozens of systems and models (each instantiating a set of game mechanics and creating a form of gameplay) that Wright had created and combined in order to implement his vision. It w as also mentioned that science fiction, which determines Spore’s form of content, is not a popular context for Chinese gamers. 10

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While this situation may be because of the relati ve immaturity of those industries, and the fact that it takes much time and sustained effort (with innovative hits) before one is ackno wledged with such status, it is as lik ely that industrial le vel forces (e.g. the pressing nature of b usiness and economic needs) may be limiting the e xercise of indi vidual creati vity. This creati vity may also be constrained by “consumption” patterns (e.g. mark et demand for foreign products), and the creativity may be present b ut in a dif ferent nature (i.e. the mark et demand may be ethnocentric in nature). Perhaps the most common form of creati vity seen in video games is the combining of v arious constituents (e.g. content or game play) from dif ferent or e ven disparate products or domains into creati ve products. These domains may include cultural and logical knowledge, amongst others. For instance, putting two genres of games together can lead to a new style of gameplay, albeit one that is not too different from the gameplay of its constituents. The recombination of dif ferent domains of knowledge (e.g. from dif ferent industries) can lead to e ven greater innovations. For instance, Masaya Matsuura’ s bringing of rap music rhythms into game play changed the style of game play and created a ne w genre. This novel combination of constituents in creative products has a related form in the notion of convergence. Convergence has been discussed in media, e.g. different forms of media coming together (Jenkins 2003), such as the “mash ups” seen in music and video; in games, e.g. dif ferent forms of play and media crossing o ver (Tschang and Szczypula 2006); and in technology , the con vergence of dif ferent functions into single devices or platforms. Convergence in media has been helped a great deal by the use of the Internet as a product de velopment and service delivery platform, and the advent of digital forms of media. Most Asian creati ve industries tend to be hea vily specialised in inno vating on particular types of products (e.g. online games), or their constituents (e.g. particular forms of cultural content or gameplay). Many are still derivative or at best combinative of the first imports to their domestic markets. While the section “Characterising the Asian Industries’ Creati vity: Imitation” suggested some general reasons for this state, the main reason may still be a lack of maturity and e xperience, that is, the newness of the industries. The long ‘steeping’ of e xperience which goes into the making of a creati ve product is as necessary for an indi vidual as it is for the industry. Will Wright did not rise up overnight, and while Matsuura was not a game designer initially, he did not acquire his kno wledge of rap music o vernight either. This suggests that a period of ‘steeping’ (in cultural en virons and otherwise) is necessary to the emergence of a great creator.

Culture: An Industry Differentiator or Lock-In for Industry? Culture has the general potential to create a comparati ve advantage for content-based creative products across societies. V arious cases, including the US and Japanese video game industries, suggest that a bedrock of popular culture is necessary for a

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sophisticated intellectual property creation ef fort that can reach across global (and even industry) boundaries. The American e xperience appears to be at one e xtreme – that of presenting a globally accessible culture which its creati ve industries ha ve made, and on which they sustain themselv es. Hollyw ood mo vies ha ve a w orld-wide follo wing, no less in Asia than in other re gions. The US-made online game World of W arcraft (WOW) has become a w orldwide phenomenon, with a lar ge proportion of its re venues coming from China. Another sector is animation, where unique historical culture and social perspecti ves may matter . While it is also possible that digital media lik e games require less cultural depth because of their interacti vity, lesser need for “realism”, and have the potential to be rooted in “interpreted” or derivative (i.e. non-authentic) cultures, some societies still appear to have a higher quotient of science fiction, fantasy and alternative cultural sources to draw upon than others. It can also be argued that there does not necessarily have to be just one universal culture, and that multiple cultures can co-exist. Film and animation are classic sectors where genres or subgenres may also be created based on cultures that are nonAmerican in nature. The consummate e xample is that of Japanese animation and games becoming a worldwide phenomenon (Aoyama and Izushi 2003). Animation creators such as Hayao Miyazaki ha ve woven Japanese mythology with uni versal themes to create products that are globally reno wned. In general, the Japanese anime and manga industry has managed to successfully create alternative scenarios of the future based on universal themes such as the fate of humanity, the degradation of the environment, and the nexus between humans and machine – each one accepted by global audiences. While these “cultural” productsgarnered worldwide acceptance, they also often began as locally “consumed” products that were successful in their own right. Sometimes, the domestic mark et’s interest is not automatically present, but could be seeded by prior e xposure.12 In contrast to Japan and to some e xtent Korea, many developing Asian markets have not yet de veloped culturally-unique products with a uni versal appeal. Nor have they created universally-appealing forms of popular culture, be it science f iction, fantasy or alternate reality genres of literature or f ilm, that can be turned into video games and other creati ve products, let alone a domestic “style” of games or animation. This is true of the two technologically-advanced countries I have examined: China and Singapore. The situation may partly reflect cultural norms, but also the imitative nature of many industries (and possibly size, in the case of Singapore). At the same time, a lack of e xperience in creating inno vations is compounded by the market’s lower desire for such innovative domestic products. What China does have is a deep historical tradition, which like Japan and Korea, provides some adv antage in promoting inno vation based on content. Thus, most online games in China have adapted conventional gameplay but based it on Chinese content, usually historical in nature. One especially popular theme has been the For instance, while W OW was based on f antasy histories that were not originally f amiliar to China, the success of the Lord of the Rings films and the widely pirated Warcraft series of single player PC games helped whet the Chinese public’ s appetites for WOW. 12

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Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history where states were at w ar. On the other hand, while Chinese culture may sell well in countries that neighbour China (e.g. Chinese online games being popular in V ietnam and Taiwan), this does not necessarily carry over to the global market. Other Asian countries’ creative products also appear to be more successful on a re gional basis than a global one. F or instance, even though K orean games made up 70% of China’ s online games mark et at one point, they did not have as great an appeal internationally. The f amiliarity that a domestic mark et may ha ve with a particular constituent of a product, and for the industry as a whole to hone its competenc y on that constituent, creates the possibility for industries to become lock ed-in to those particular competencies (or to be lock ed-out of other, alternative paths). For instance, Japanese animation is focused on anime, and Japan’s weaker performance in online games, compared to K orean and Chinese games, may be as much due to mark et preferences as an y other f actor. These are empirical questions and may be w orth examining further in the future.

Managing Creativity: Business Strategy as a Form of Creativity It is likely that industry structure can play a role in fostering creativity. In Asia as in the West, large companies may act more as rent-seeking entities than as innovationseeking entities, leading them to be less creative than smaller, entrepreneurial firms. This has been some what true in video games, gi ven the conservative nature of the mass markets (Tschang 2007). In fact, in China, many large game companies often operate as “operators” rather than as “product de velopers”. In a sense then, the intermediaries that are so pre valent in the creative industries are also mediating or controlling innovation in parts of Asia. The question really is whether or not, as in the West, there is still opportunity for highly creati ve products to come out of the smaller studios and even individuals, and how (or whether) this can be f acilitated. The case of China is illustrati ve. Gi ven its huge online games mark et, China appears positioned to join other countries in terms of inno vativeness. Ho wever, the actual e vidence is mix ed. Smaller, strong and inno vative companies are rare in China. Interviews with Chinese f irms suggest that the y differentiate themselves from one another as much by changing the platform or the re venue model the y adopt, or by the w ay in which the y engage consumers, as by the game play itself. Occasionally, a different focus from that of foreign products is de veloped, such as the focus on the social netw orking aspects of online games (e.g. ability to form virtual communities within online games). Given this beha viour, as well as their late start, man y Chinese companies continue to emulate, and follo w a step behind, products from lead mark ets like Korea or the US. Some of the online game re venue model ‘inno vations’ seen in China, such as the “free to play” model of playing and char ging for services, also f irst originated in K orea. In virtual w orlds, even though the huge mark et offers great

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potential to Chinese companies to de velop unique and sustainable virtual w orlds, companies like Hipihi have basically copied Second Life, and the Chinese go vernment has even licensed Entropia Universe – a Swedish virtual world. Nevertheless, we can characterise some firms’ recent efforts as being that of refining and adapting basic (imported) models of game play and game design to wards Chinese consumers’ tastes. In that re gard, f irms appear to be situating themselv es well competitively for the domestic market.

The Role of the State: Policy as Enabler or Augmenter? The final issue to be addressed is that of whether the creati vity of creati ve industries can be enhanced by public policy. The traditional public policy levers that the state possesses includes the f inancing of education, f inance (e.g. public research & development), and infrastructure by public pro vision.13 One of the most widely acclaimed successes has been Australia’s creation of a sophisticated public system of support for its film industry, but this industrial growth was first nurtured without regards for returns so as to ensure that capabilities took root. W e also kno w that the absence of government support has hurt countries that do not ha ve sufficiently developed infrastructure and institutions. For example, the Philippine government’s financial limitations made it dif ficult to fund new training programs for its animation industry, with one result being that the industry has fallen behind India’s rising capability in 3D animation. Companies ha ve had to partly meet their ne w training needs through providing their own training schemes. Given the flurry of acti vity and heightened e xpectations around sectors such as animation in the re gion for generating “creati vity-induced growth”, it is w orth addressing the prospects for e xports to be ‘upgraded’ to more original, domestically produced own brand products. It is important to note that part of this acti vity reflects a go vernment tendenc y to stimulate creati ve industry de velopment in a rapid “developmental” way; whether this is the appropriate path to own-brand products is not clear. Some empirical evidence exists. While some countries lik e Japan and Korea had started with the outsourcing of production, but climbed successfully into the global distribution of their own brand products based on their o wn culture and content, others may or may not f ind their culture as saleable. 14 In part, this illustrates the limits of globalisation for certain highly specif ic or less globalised In the neoclassical economics view, public support of research other than long term public goods research could lead to “technology picking” or moral hazard problems (i.e. artificially propped up firms that do not “deserv e” to survi ve), the e xperiences of some countries’ publicly supported creative industries is positive. 14 There are other reasons for this. Filipino intervie wees generally bemoan the lack of capital, of lead creati ve talent and the challenge their cultural content f aces in being “globally rele vant.” Regional relevancy is a lot easier to achie ve. In fact, whenever productions in the Philippines or even Singapore require some “high creati ve” concepts or leadership, this is usually imported in the form of American creative directors. 13

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cultures. This finding is consistent with that of the softw are and hardware industries, where even advanced outsourcing industries like India’s generally find it harder to develop their own brand products. In general, it appears that the safe role for policy has been in augmenting, rather than enabling creati ve industries. Ho wever, Asian states ha ve also look ed at the applicability of a hea vy public investment model to creati ve industries (follo wing the success of se veral Asian countries in pro viding significant public in vestments in the electronics and other industries). Singapore in particular is pushing this envelope further than any country, and offers an interesting case for further study. Thus far, Singapore has been one of the most forward thinking and strategic countries in trying to de velop its creati ve industries, funding research, de velopment and commercialisation of interactive and digital media technologies by spending a few hundred million US dollars over the first 5 year period. The Singapore government has also promoted content de velopment through the v arious arts academies, creati ve thinking skills through nation-wide “creativity” competitions (e.g. essay and storywriting competitions), as well as technology through the funding of research on media technology and its applications. One of the latest initiatives of the Singapore government is an incubation process that will bring technology and ideas together . However, this effort is focused on bringing different parties together to collaborate. The question is whether promoting all these ideas in separate settings and ha ving teams come together in a some what forced w ay (i.e. based on the a vailability of funds over a short period of time) will yield the kind of inte grated innovation that single designers have been able to come up with in the US, Japan and other places made over longer periods of time, and under more ‘natural’ circumstances. It is also worth reminding ourselves how highly creative results have come about in the past – from highly creati ve minds. At its base, creati ve video games ha ve been sho wn to in volve the inte grated application of cultural content, technology and design, all based on a bedrock of creati ve thinking skills, cultural kno wledge and domain expertise in design, sometimes crossing domains pre viously unrelated to games (Tschang 2007). Ho wever, in a broader perspecti ve, there is the need for a deep or broad sense of culture in order to b uild culturally-specific content. Long historical periods may be needed to gestate a traditional “culture”. It is questionable whether polic y can address something that needs to be naturally inte grative as combinative thinking (i.e. thinking that creates con vergence), or something as amorphous and emer gent as culture. There is a shortage of such highly creati ve types, e ven in the de veloped countries, where the leading game designers came to know their craft in a particular historical period – one where short and cheap product cycles allowed high levels of experimentation.

Summary Generally as far as the creativity of creative industries is concerned, we see imitative inno vation trends in most Asian countries. The v arious influences that are common between Asia and the West are the nature of market and business interests

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(with lar ger enterprises being more interested in economic rents than in highly creative products), and the rationalisation of production due to the increasing complexity of products and teams. There are some factors that are unique to Asia, such as the emphasis on exports by companies and government policy alike. This is also partly due to the newness of many Asian industries and how they started (as export bases), as well as the lack of time to de velop creative or innovative capacity. This brings us to the most important ingredient for the success of creati ve industries: the creativity of the people. In a number of countries, especially those with longer historical records or a rich contemporary cultural milieu, the cultural base is deep, which provides the opportunity to inno vate by way of content. The issue for some countries may be the “global reach” of these cultures (i.e. their attracti veness to a global audience), as well as any path dependence that deep cultures may have, with producers or consumers being “tied” to those cultures. The question for countries without this base is that of ho w to build this deeper culture or some other alternative, e.g. a “culture” of technological con vergence. This also ties into the creati ve thinking abilities of the creators themselv es. Since Japan and K orea have shown that creative thinking in at least the most creati ve segment of creators is certainly on par with anywhere else, this suggests that a longer period of cultural gestation is needed, where would-be creators become ‘steeped’ in culture. Public policy may intentionally promote these business-oriented interests. While policy may also attempt to promote the creativity of individuals, its overall effect is not clear. As we have noted, culture, including popular culture, was also not arrived at overnight in almost all cases. Finally , even after putting these in place, and creating successful innovations for the domestic mark et, we cannot be assured of the global popularity of those products. This speaks to the high cultural specificity, and even serendipitous nature, of creative industry products.

References Anderson, C. 2006. The long tail: Why the futur e of b usiness is selling less of mor e. New York: Hyperion. Aoyama, Y. and H. Izushi 2003. Hardw are gimmick or cultural inno vation? Technological, cultural, and social foundations of the Japanese video game industry . Research Policy 32 (3): 423–444. Baba, Y. and F.T. Tschang. 2001. Product de velopment in Japanese TV game softw are: The case of an innovative game. International Journal of Innovation Management 5(4): 487–515. Caves, R.E. 2000. Creative industries: Contr acts between art and commer ce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1999. Implications of a systems perspecti ve for the study of creati vity. In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, E.J. 2005. The big picture: The new logic of money and power in Hollywood. New York: Random House. Florida, R. 2002. The rise of the cr eative class: And how it’ s transforming work, leisur e, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books. Gardner, H. 1993. Creating minds: An anatomy of cr eativity seen thr ough the lives of F reud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Elliot, Graham and Gandhi. New York: Basic Books.

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Grabher, G. 2002. Cool projects, boring institutions: T emporary collaboration in social conte xt. Regional Studies 36(3): 205–214. Howkins, J. 2001. The creative economy: How people mak e money from ideas . London: Allen Lane. Jenkins, H. 2003. Quentin Tarantino’s star wars? Digital cinema, media convergence and participatory culture. In D. Thorb urn and H. Jenkins (Eds.), Rethinking media c hange. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lent, A.J. 2000. Animation in Asia: Appropriation, reinterpretation, and adoption or adaptation. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1100/jlfr11c.htm. Accessed 16 October 2007. Takahashi, D. 2008. Chinese online game mark et forecast to more than triple in f ive years, The Industry Standar d, 2 April 2008. http://www .thestandard.com/news/2008/05/02/chineseonline-game-market-forecast-more-triple-five-years. Accessed 26 June 2008. Tschang, F.T. 2005. Videogames as interactive experiential products and their manner of development. International Journal of Innovation Management 9(1): 103–131. Tschang, F.T. 2007. Balancing the tensions between rationalization and creati vity in the video games industry. Organization Science 18(6): 989–1005. Tschang, F.T. and A. Goldstein. 2004. When do outsourcing and insourcing occur? The case of the animation industry. DRUID Conference. Helsingor, Denmark, July 2004. Tschang, F.T. and J. Szczypula. 2006. Idea creation, constructi vism and e volution as k ey characteristics in the videogame artif act design process. European Mana gement J ournal 24(4): 270–287. Tschang, F .T. and S. Tsang. 2006. China’ s ne w media sectors: Domestic culture as competitive adv antage? SPRIE/CISTP Conference on Greater China’ s Inno vative Capabilities: Progress and Challenges. Beijing, May 2006 (Stanford Program on Re gions, Innovation and Entrepreneurship). Tschang, F.T. and S. Tsang. 2008. China’s New Media Sectors: Domestic Culture as Competitive Advantage, chapter , Innovation in Gr eater China , H.S. Ro wen, M.G. Hancock and W .F. Miller, (Eds.) Shorenstein APARC (center), Stanford University. Utterback, J.M. 1994. Mastering the dynamics of innovation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Chapter 4

Spaces of Culture and Economy: Mapping the Cultural-Creative Cluster Landscape Hans Mommaas

Introduction From the 1980s, the stimulation, nourishing or e ven instrumental creation of culturalcreative clusters has become an important component of both cultural and economic public policy at both the urban and re gional level. Cultural functions, from the ‘classical’ performing and visual arts to more contemporary multi-media, leisure and/or design acti vities, are grouped together in a v ariety of spatial forms: in new building complexes, renovated industrial and harbour buildings, in quarters and districts. Together, they form part of a broader cultural turn in both urban planning and regional development strategies. However, cultural-creative clustering strategies have often been based on notions not usually made e xplicit. In particular , there w as a fragmented understanding of the role of culture and creati vity in the new service economy, and in relation to that, of the economic transformation of cities and re gions. This went together with an under-exploration of the transformations the cultural realm itself w as going through, from a rather hierarchical and canonical reality , to something much more open and horizontal, b ut also more commercial. What did this imply for notions of artistic professionalism, the cultural resourcing of artistic creati vity, the composition of critical audiences, artistic role models, and the reputation of creati ve careers? As a consequence, complex questions about the role of culture and the arts in the future economy and in future cities and regions have been left underexplored, thus resulting in the lumping together of dif ferent models of artistic, cultural, urban and industrial development. One possible result of this w as that the cultural-creati ve clustering agenda either got stuck in former ‘artisanal’ models of creati ve communities or was hijacked by more economically oriented industry , ICT, innovation or real estate policy agendas (cf. Cunningham 2004; O’Connor 2007). In either case, an embryonic

J.T. Mommaas ( ) Full professor in Leisure Studies, Tilburg University, Director Telos, Brabant Center for Sustainable Development, Tilburg University, PO box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_4, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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understanding of the nature of cultural-creati ve clusters, together with unclear aims and objectives, produced a lot of distrust among the parties in volved. With clustering on the increase, not only as a result of culturalusinesses b increasingly tending to wards a high le vel of spatial proximity (Scott 2000; Pratt 2004; Schoales 2006), but also as a result of clustering being tak en up as a dominant urban/re gional cultural/economic development model (Westrick and Rehfeld 2003; Mommaas 2004), the time is ripe to bring some ref inement and differentiation into the debate. In this chapter, I will do so by taking a closer look at the ifeld of cultural-creative cluster developments in North-Western Europe (with a detour via the US). At thecore will be an attempt to trace the dif ferent forms that cultural and creati ve clusters can take in interrelated cultural, economic and spatial terms; what this implies for cultural-creative clustering development trajectories; and how this might be link ed to future cultural/economic development policies. It is important to note that the some what clumsily formulated cultural-creative can be read as a purposeful e xpression of the e xisting confusion. The blurring lines of discussion and distinction mak e it dif ficult to come up with unambiguous terms, or with terms which do not in vite definitional discussions. On the one hand, cultural clusters would be too narrow, because it does not take into account the ways in which cultural forms of creati vity feed into other creati ve realms, such as information and communication technology , science and engineering, research and de velopment, and marketing and communication. On the other hand, notions of creati ve clusters are simply too broad because the y do not sufficiently differentiate between different forms of creati vity, based on dif ferent enabling circumstances. Creati ve accounting may indeed be very creative but this is miles away from the kind of ‘creative’ environment stimulating artistic productions. T o express the kind of midterm reality I w ant to explore here, I will use the phrase “cultural-creati ve”. On the one hand, the term expresses the fact that the realm of what formerly could exist as legitimate culture has today become much broader , with cultural dynamics or cultural forms of thinking, exploring and planning feeding into other domains of creati vity (economics, science and engineering). On the other hand, it e xpresses the ongoing necessity to differentiate between different realms of creativity, due to the different spatial, social, cultural and biographical dynamics involved. I will come back to this later .

From Artistic Districts to Cultural Quarters The recent history of cultural-creative clustering strategies is diverse and complex; from the very beginning, a composite field of developments unfolds. A first strategic ‘layer’ of what later came to be kno wn as a cultural clustering strate gy can be traced back to initiatives developed in the 1970s and 1980s to create what were then called cultural, art or entertainment districts, as sources of urban regeneration, both in the US and in Europe (see e.g. W ynne 1989; Hannigan 1998). Ho wever, there were already then quite different and often opposing models involved.

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A famous and early e xample, well documented by Sharon Zukin’ s (1989) Loft Living, includes the case of do wntown Manhatten, where in the 1970s, public regulation alterations enabled artists to establish themselv es in lofts in Soho and TriBeCa, using these as combined living and working spaces. The central idea was that the use by the artistic community of these vacant spaces would set in motion a chain of developments, which would make these rundown quarters attractive again for middle class residents and consumers. In the 1980s, this model of the creation of artistic districts for the purpose of re vitalising derelict and unsafe do wntown areas was taken up by other former industrial cities in the US. Hannigan (1998) points at cases in Tucson, Arizona and Dallas, Texas. In a certain sense, the Soho developments involved an instrumentalisation of an already older , more oppositional ‘artistic community’ and/or ‘urban mo vement’ model, with its roots both in the US and in Europe. This goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, to cases where urban social mo vements, carried along by groups of ‘marginal gentrifiers’ (Rose 1984) consisting of unemplo yed graduates, artists, students, squatters, etc. took over underused inner city residential and office spaces. This was done as a form of protest against inner city real estate speculations, the lack of housing, the disuse of e xisting b uildings, the dominant sub urban f amily ethos, or just as an opportunity for cheap accommodation. In the course of e vents, these inner city spaces were turned into centres of a ne w urban vibrancy with their lively counter-cultural infrastructure of bars, e xhibition spaces, music centres, and festivals. After the une ven suburbanisation of the 1960s, in the process of which middle class families moved away to suburbia and inner cities became the object of a sometimes rather destructi ve modernist planning, these urban social mo vements brought public life back onto the inner city streets again. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the protest movement growing older (and gaining more purchasing power), but with them retaining their bond to the urban as their ‘natural’ ecosystem or habitat, these inner city cultural quarters gradually became centres of a new middle class based, lifestyle rich urban culture (Featherstone 1987). Almost from the beginning, the ‘artistic district’ model, implicitly b uilding forward not only on the urban social mo vements of the 1960s and 1970s, b ut partly through them, also on the le gacy of the P arisian art communities of the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century (the landscape of the “bohemians”; see Franck 2002), w as accompanied by a much broader f ield of w ays in which cultural spaces were used for re vitalisation purposes. In man y cities, mix ed use “centres” rather than artistic districts became the model. Here, the cultural or artistic component was taken up in a broader , multi-functional, public–private mixture of cultural, commercial, residential and retail functions, again de veloped for urban regeneration purposes. According to Hannigan (1998), the cultural component partly became included for v ery mundane reasons. It could attract public mone y, thus lo wering the in vestment costs for de velopers, b ut it could also strengthen the attraction v alue of parts of the city centre. It w as not so much the creation of artistic communities that w as at stak e, but the re vitalisation of do wntown cultural functions (especially movie, music and drama theatres) as a way to attract the middle classes back to town. Well documented cases include the Baltimore and Boston

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waterfront development projects in the late 1970s, and the Disne y-led revitalisation of Manhattan’ s 42nd Street in the late 1980s. Mixtures of culture, leisure, retail and entertainment were grouped together in close proximity to one another (from clusters in streets and neighbourhoods to complete inner city malls or urban theme parks) to function as attractions for middle class residents and consumers, thus bringing purchasing power and liveliness back to downtown areas. This model of using culture as part of a broader urban re generation strate gy (both in the form of the creation of artistic w orking spaces in rundo wn areas, and in the form of the creation of broader mixed use districts) was from the mid 1980s, rapidly tak en up by man y cities and re gions in W estern Europe. Again, the programmes varied widely. Some were bluntly economic or purely promotional, aimed at using culture as an instrument to raise the economic prof ile of cities or re gions. Here, one could point at cases where subsidised institutions were forced to mo ve, in order to create themed cultural en vironments, ne xt labelled ‘cultural clusters’ or even ‘culture incubator places.’ Others combined economic/promotional tar gets with broader social and cultural values, also aimed at preserving the built heritage, strengthening the civic identity of cities and thus revitalising inner city public space and identity (e.g. Bianchini 1989; Mommaas and Van der Poel 1989). Whatever the case, these urban regeneration projects implied a broadening of the public cultural agenda, stretching the def inition of culture well be yond established pre-electronic, civilising or welf arist notions, to include more technological-cumcommercial forms (e.g. pop-music, festi vals, fashion, design, animation) and thus, more components of leisure and entertainment (e.g. retail, going-out, the night-time economy). In addition, this implied a broadening of the ‘urban re gime’ (cf. Stone 1989; Stoker and Mossberger 1994) involved in the creation of cultural infrastructures. Where in former times, the de velopment of urban cultural infrastructures leaned v ery much on public-ci vic re gimes based on public mone y and subsidy arrangements (with the related contacts and expertise), today this increasingly also involves private parties – thus expanding the developmental network with different kinds of interests and forms of netw ork management. Generally speaking, urban-regeneration-through-cultural-districts projects were primarily aimed at cultural consumption functions, with these functions being instrumental to different sets of economic, social and/or cultural functions. The creation or reno vation of e xhibition spaces, music and theatre stages, cultural e vents and festivals was central, often taken up in mixed-use programmes, and also including elements of bars and restaurants, designer shops and art hotels. F amous examples from the late 1980s and early 1990s include the re vitalisation of the T emple Bar area in Dublin, the reconstruction of the inner city railway station environment of Lille (in relation to Lille becoming a hub in the north-western European TGV network), the arts-directed urban re generation of Glasgow (in relation to Glasgo w becoming the European City of Culture for the year 1990), and the re generation of downtown Barcelona (in the conte xt of the 1992 summer Olympics). The model, however, was also applied at less spectacular (although still impressi ve) scales in numerous other cities, from L yon to Rotterdam, and from Huddersf ield to Bilbao. Bianchini and Landry (1995) denoted these cities, in which culture w as used for

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urban regeneration purposes, as ‘creative cities,’ thus introducing a concept which would have its own complicated evolution in the years to come. Alongside the con ventional urban re generation agenda, another more culturaleconomic approach to cultural spaces started to surf ace rather soon. Here, the inter est in culture, the arts and creativity went beyond the conventional urban renewal through culture agenda (V erwijnen 1999). It is not so much the re generation of urban or industrial quarters through the mix ed use of cultural, retail and entertainment functions, situated in sanitised or stylised spaces at stak e here, b ut the creation or stimulation of culture as a ne w, innovative economic enterprise of its o wn. With this came the idea of the stimulation of cultural industry quarters, in service of the development of the local cultural economy. In the early 1980s, a cultural industries unit w as created within the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB) (Bianchini 1987, 1989). The unit w as aimed at opening up the cultural landscape of the city , not against b ut through the mark et. Noting that most people’s cultural needs were in f act met through the mark et, and not through the public sector , and looking for w ays to strengthen the independent position of ethnic culture, its task w as to use enterprise de velopment tools, typical for the commercial sector (from mark eting to management and ne w technology consultancy) for the stimulation of ethnic cultural enterprises. In the London case (where cultural industries policy would not develop properly because the Greater London Council w as disbanded in 1986 by the conserv ative government), the cultural industries approach was still part of a broader urban cultural policy agenda. In the Shef field case, which started to de velop more or less at the same time, the promotion of the local cultural and media industries w as taken up as part of a more tar geted economic re generation strate gy with the establishment, in 1986, of the Red T ape Studios (a rehearsal, advice and training f acility in the f ield of sound and music) as a f irst physical e xample. Part of the Shef field public strategy was the creation of what was called a cultural industries quarter, an area in which the council owned a large number of buildings, designated to accommodate functions which would support and facilitate cultural economic enterprises. Especially in the 1990s, a whole host of acti vities became established in the area, from managed cultural working spaces and forms of cultural and economic training to cinemas, live arts centers, exhibition spaces, night clubs and bars. In Manchester in the late 1980s, an increasing interest in the role of the cultural industries in the economic regeneration of the city triggered a study into its functioning (Wynne 1989). The study focused its attention on a part of the inner city , situated somewhat in the shado w of strate gic de velopment interests, which w as already starting to function as a space where small cultural b usiness established themselves. In the years to come, the Northern Quarter w ould develop into something labeled as a cultural quarter , housing a broad v ariety of cultural micro-b usinesses. In the 1990s, the area formed the basis of a ne w ‘Creative Industries Development Service’ (CIDS), a local go vernment agency aimed at bringing young enterprises into contact with economic and technological training and support infrastructures. Compared to the Sheffield case, the establishment of a cultural industries quarter in Manchester was not so much the result of a conscious municipal strate gy, but the result of a more or less organic growth model, bringing cultural business into spatial

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proximity with one another due to the a vailability of cheap space, the attracti veness of a common infrastructure of bars, cultural retail and e xhibition spaces, the possibility of an informal exchange of information and services, and possibly most important of all, the cultural reputation of the place (the quarter as ‘brand’). The increasing importance attached to the cultural industries as a ne w source of local/regional economic gro wth and de velopment in the UK w as also tak en up at the national le vel, first in the conte xt of the conserv ative Thatcher administration (predominantly as a part of the urban re generation toolbox of so called Urban Development Corporations), and next by the social-democratic Blair administration (but then as part of a more generalised ‘creati ve industries’ agenda, which we will come back to). At around the same period of time, else where in W estern Europe, an interest in the re gional or urban economic opportunities link ed to the ne w cultural and media industries w as catching up rapidly . A leading e xample w ould be the case of NordRhein W estfalen, German y, which w as in former times the cradle of the German industrial economy . Due to the decline of its gigantic steel and coal economy, the re gion was confronted with the necessity to not only restructure its economy, but also to find a new use for the enormous landscape of heavily polluted derelict steel and coal mills. In 1989, the so-called IBA programme (Internationale Bauaustellung) was founded for a 10 year period of time. Its function w as to give form to a new imagination of what could happen with the former ‘brownfield’ sites. Heavily subsidised by the public sector, some 22 industrial plants were redeveloped into new spaces, housing se veral cultural clusters or ganised around design, architecture, the media, arts and culture, amongst other things. Here, “W andel durch Kulturwirtschaft” (transformation through the cultural economy) w as the central slogan. The combined function w as to gi ve a ne w use to the derelict industrial landscape, energise the region with a new civic culture and creativity, and develop a ne w cultural economy . There w as hence a mixture of economic and re gional regeneration targets. In many ways, both the British and German cases opened up a new layer of cultural clustering strate gies. The model w as quickly copied, especially in industrial and harbour cities all o ver Europe, from Rotterdam to Hamb urg to Helsinki. What these places had in common w as both the necessity to restructure their economic base, the a vailability of a v ast infrastructure of derelict industrial/harbour spaces, and in comparison to established cultural capitals with their established cultural hierarchies, much more openness to electronic, commercial and entertainment culture. This combination of factors made the cultural infrastructure of these cities much more easily available as a new source of economic development. In relation to the f irst layer of culture-led urban re generation projects, which were often oriented towards the creation of arts/culture-based consumption spaces, often forming part of a broader consumption-based landscape, these ne w clusters were much more production-oriented. The central model w as the stimulation of small business networks, grouped together in industrial and/or harbour comple xes, streets or quarters, where the entrepreneurs involved could not only share a common lifestyle of work and play, but also stimulate each other’s creativity, professionalism

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and reputation, thus also using the cultural identity of the place as a common brand. Some of these cultural industry quarters or clusters developed almost organically, with groups of small cultural entrepreneurs taking o ver so called ‘ploaps’ (places left over after planning) in former industrial or harbour areas, transforming these into li vely cultural-economic communities. Ho wever, the model w as also increasingly tak en up at a more strate gic le vel, with local go vernments and/or regional development associations consciously creating clusters of cultural working spaces on the basis of varying forms of public–private collaboration.

From Cultural to Creative Clusters: A Generalisation of the Debate In the course of the 1990s, four de velopments might be distinguished which, because they started to influence one another in man y unreflexive ways, made the situation quite complex. First, in the late 1990s, the UK go vernment, in order to denote one of its focal policy sectors, replaced the notion of Cultural Industries with that of Creati ve Industries. This w as either done because it w anted to distinguish itself from the cultural industries policies of the British cities and re gions, so as to steer free from complicating political connotations, or because it wanted to make a clear statement about the e xpansion of the polic y field to the entertainment and leisure b usiness. In either case, perhaps rather unwittingly , this opened up a totally ne w conceptual space, which in the course of time, would go well beyond the policy field it wanted to indicate. This in turn produced a lot of confusion, which w ould take up a lot of tortuous conceptual energy. Second, a former more concise notion of the ‘creative city’, which, in its original meaning, stood for cities aiming for an arts- and culture-led urban re generation process, was replaced by a much broader notion, addressing, in the w ords of the cover of one of the leading publications, “ho w to think, plan and act creati vely in addressing urban issues” (Landry 2000). Although man y examples in this te xt address cultural projects, the creative city concept now tended to imply a city which was run creati vely, whether this in volved the strengthening of the local cultural infrastructure, the pedestrianisation of the inner city , the stimulation of the night time economy or a more ecologically sustainable collection of w aste. Third, Richard Florida’s (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class started to rapidly hegemonize the debate, thus giving a further spin to existing concepts and perspectives. Here, a rather mixed field of forms of creativity, from purely cultural to technological, organizational to economic, w as brought together under one conceptual agenda. For the US, this included some 30% of the labour force. The k een marketing strategy with which the message was delivered to the wider world was that cities which wanted to face their future would do well to start and attract the creative class as soon as possible, for example, by strengthening their cultural infrastructure. The message not only delivered an additional twist to notions of the creative city, it also

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turned that notion into something of an ‘e xpert citation’ (Kong et al. 2006; Gibson and Klock er 2004). It made it rather easy for polic y mak ers and management consultants to jump on the bandwagon, without really investing much time in trying to inform themselv es about what w as actually being implied or communicated. Hence, ‘creative’ became a catch w ord, a free-for -all term, without much consideration for the comple xities and dif ferentiations involved. The good thing about this was that it produced a wave of attention and enthusiasm across administrations for their local-regional cultural-creative infrastructure, not only from a public par ticipation point of view, but also from a more strategic-developmental perspective. Budgets were made a vailable, sometimes running in millions of euros, and plans were developed to stimulate the creati ve economy by enhancing the w orking and living conditions of ‘creative workers.’ On the other hand, the flow of attention had many of the characteristics of a conceptual hype, with all the dangers in volved. Last, the increasing popularity of Porter’ s general notion of economic b usiness cluster developments (see Porter 1990), in addition to the appearance of v arious publications about ‘The Creati ve Economy’ in which this w as primarily treated as a cop yright and trademark economy (e.g. Ho wkins 2001), ga ve the notion of cultural or creati ve clusters an additional industrial polic y twist. In an increasing number of cases, this w ould turn the sensiti ve balance between culture and commerce decisively to a business development strategy logic. Three consequences can be distinguished. First, from no w on, notions of creati ve clusters involved a much wider possible field of industries (e.g. including science, engineering and technology based sectors), with a much wider v ariation of possible inno vation-inducing eco-systems. Second, the notion of a cluster started to in volve a much wider variation of spatial forms, physical and non-physical, from b uildings, streets and quarters to entire interrelated re gional economies or e ven or ganisationally inter linked global-local netw orks of collaborating f irms, from lar ge conglomerates to small and medium sized f irms. Third, cultural clusters increasingly came to be treated as a mere v ariation of a more general industrial de velopment logic, thus ignoring the intricate and subtle dynamics of the cultural f ield as such. With the notion of creati vity acting as an easy common denominator for a confusingly broad f ield of connotations, discussions about and strate gies for the development of what came to be kno wn increasingly as ‘creative clusters’ started to lose their sense of direction. Less and less people in volved in the debates knew what they were talking about. Arguments directed back and forth related to each other like passing ships in the night. In short, the notion of creati ve clusters became a fuzzy concept. From no w on, modeling creati ve clusters could in volve the stimulation of cultural services clusters, the strengthening of re gional or national cultural production chains, the creation of Silicon V alley type science and industry parks, small cultural b usiness de velopment strate gies, the grouping together of artistic educational f acilities, gi ving old harbour areas or other (industrial) heritage locations a cultural destination, or stimulating one or the other cultural industry sector. This is not to say that cultural cluster policies w ould not be able to learn something from general business cluster development research, that nothing has changed

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in the relation between the local/re gional artistic infrastructure, global culturaleconomic dynamics and the urban en vironment, or that the only w ay forward to cultural cluster strate gies would be to return to con ventional small scale artisanal community conditions. However, in order to understand what has actually changed, we need a more subtle and informed analysis, which does not involve jumping from one extreme, the f alse romance of the artistic village, to the other , seeing the arts and culture as merely another service industry.

Mapping the Field Hence, we are in need of a fe w leads in terms of which we can embark on disentangling the conceptual and strate gic knot the cultural-creati ve cluster concept has turned itself into. Ov erlooking the discursi ve lines behind the v arious models of cultural agglomeration, and aiming at something of a three dimensional space within which we w ould be able to plot those dif ferent models, thus being able to differentiate between dif ferent ‘landscapes of creati vity,’ the follo wing three elements or dimensions assert themselv es. Each of them can also be connected to specific (multi-)disciplinary fields of research. It is important to stress that it is best not to treat these three dimensions in isolation from one another; it is only in their interaction that they produce specific cultural-creative eco-systems. In interaction, the elements or ganise different spaces, inhibiting dif ferent dynamics of interrelation. They also call for dif ferent public–private support structures, and a dif ferent position in the urban conurbation. Together, they bridge something of the separate research lines, along which general cluster research on the one hand and research on cultural clusters on the other have developed themselves, while at the same time keeping a sharp eye on differentiating qualities.

The Role of Culture A first, horizontal element concerns the role and position in the cluster of qualities and values of the cultural, the artistic, aesthetic or symbolic vis-à-vis other (technological, economic, etc.) qualities. Here we might dif ferentiate between clusters which are, for instance, primarily or ganised around a culture and economy of the ‘autonomous arts’ or the ‘artistic, ’ from clusters which function around broader notions of cultural creati vity, also including more ‘applied’ or entrepreneurial ones (e.g. design, f ashion, the media, leisure and entertainment, cultural tourism or mixtures between them). These again can be dif ferentiated from clusters which go beyond this to other, for instance, technological, scientif ic or economic notions of creati vity. T oday, there is ample e vidence of the f act that dif ferent forms of creativity go together with dif ferent f inancial, professional and lifestyle cultures, with a preference for dif ferent kinds of places and en vironments to live, work and

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socialise. It is not the case that all members of Florida’ s ominous ‘creati ve class’ prefer the con viviality of the inner city . Some groups of more technologically and/or economically-oriented professions disproportionately prefer to live and work in more homogenous sub urbs, while more culturally-oriented professions prefer indeed the diversity and small scale informality of inner city cultural infrastructures (e.g. Markussen 2006). As Currid (2007) has made clear in her e xtensive study of the cultural economy of New York, this can partly be related to the fact that cultural qualities, contrary to purely technological and/or economic ones, are dependent on and driven by taste instead of functional performance. Hence, their success depends on other, non-functional criteria of success and f ailure, with higher le vels of risk, implying a dif ferent kind of economy , dif ferent support structures, and a higher importance of ‘thick’ socio-cultural environments. In a similar line of thinking, others have pointed at the risk y, arbitrary and unpredictable nature of cultural goods, thus addressing the importance not only of qualities of trust, but also of inspiration, reputation, mediation (e.g. Banks et al. 2000; Hesmondhalgh 2002). Especially at the be ginning of professional careers, such qualities can only be obtained by positioning oneself in the right places and being in touch with the right people. Hence, it is important to li ve and w ork near the right cultural intermediaries in the right sort of en vironment. Such en vironments are not only rele vant as sources of ideas and contacts, in line with the con ventional spill-over hypothesis, and the related importance of qualities of cultural openness and di versity as conditions for experimentation and ideas; they are also important as sources of image and reputation. In addition, Markussen (2006) sho ws ho w groups of artists still depend on the (semi-)public infrastructure of artists’ centers, li ve/work and studio f acilities, and smaller performing arts spaces, which, most of the time, can be found in more urbanised centers. Besides all these functionalist f actors, there is also the lifestyle element, with groups of cultural entrepreneurs sharing a common cultural space, with its unintended ‘spillo ver’ of social, political, residential and cultural af finities (O’Connor and Wynne 1996). In conclusion, despite the increasing o verlap of culture and technology , with technological products being increasingly dependent on their cultural signif icance or on more associati ve forms of kno wledge, we still do better to dif ferentiate between v arious types of clusters, based upon and or ganised around v arious types of creati vity. Art and culture is not just another service industry . Neither are cultural-creative clusters just another industrial or inno vation cluster. Because of their specif ic economy and culture of creati vity, and the specif ic professional, residential and lifestyle cultures in volved, cultural creati ve clusters stand out as a specific category. Hence, it is important to pay attention to how these unique qualities are embedded within and conditioned upon the functioning of clusters, or ho w they might producti vely be link ed to other technological and/or economic cluster qualities, without destroying these qualities in the long run.

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Levels of Proximity In accordance with the general inno vation and/or re gional studies literature, a second dimension might be labeled the dimension of proximity (e.g. Amin and Wilkinson 1999; Boschma 2005). This in volves the interrelated question of scale and substance. In the cultural cluster research and planning history , the focus has predominantly been on spatially situated clusters, such as on the le vel of industrial parks, quarters, districts (e.g. the Manchester Northern Quarter , the Amsterdam Westergasfabriek, Helsinki’s Cable F actory, Essen’s Zeche Zollv erein). However, as the innovation literature and detailed studies into the functioning of cultural clusters make clear, co-location and co-production are not the same thing. On the one hand, functions can be co-located in a common space, due to locational qualities such as cheap subsidised facilities and a local strategic cultural policy for instance, but not de veloping much or ganisational interaction or collaboration. On the other hand, co-producers, working on a common project, may have a thick organisational interaction without joining a common physical space. Hence, local-global or ganisational and spatial forms of proximity are interrelated in comple x ways, a notion which, so far, has not received much attention from the cultural cluster literature. As soon as we become a ware of this, ho wever, a producti ve field of research opens itself. In its k ernel, this is about the optimal interaction and co-e volution of spatial and or ganisational forms of proximity in order to produce sustainable cultural creative clusters. On the one hand, as indicated above, art and culture seem to profit from specific spatial forms of proximity; cultural inspiration, enthusiasm, learning, reputation seem to thri ve on spatial conte xt, especially in de veloping markets and careers. On the other hand, there is always the danger of a lock-in situation, especially when mark ets and careers are maturing. Hence, it is important to keep long-distance contacts open enabling linkages with new knowledge, new ideas and new markets. In doing so, local spatial and long-distance or ganisational proximity do not necessarily need to be in conflict with one another . On the contrary , in various ways, strong local cultural districts often prove to function as interesting jumping boards for global careers (e.g. Currid 2007). As Oerlemans and Meeus (2005) have made clear, various dimensions of proximity often act as complements rather than substitutes in ef fecting the performance of f irms and clusters. A strong regional innovation and production milieu works as an interesting breeding ground for new initiatives due to the availability of markets and resources, the organisation of tacit knowledge, and the building up of reputations. At the same time, ho wever, at a later stage, strong re gional clusters might start to lock cultural producers into the regional culture and economy, thus restricting career mo ves, or stifling knowledge exchange. Hence, there are complex questions about how local and non-local forms of proximity , both at the le vel of clusters and at the le vel of f ace-to-face interactions, relate to one another, amongst others depending on the developmental stage a cluster and its participants are in (e.g. Oerlemans et al. 2007). In sum, the element of proximity introduces a ne w set of questions into the domain of cultural creati ve clusters. Generally , these questions ha ve to do with the scale, the quality , the interaction and the co-e volution of dif ferent dimen sions

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of proximity of clusters. This opens the door for an a wareness of the dif ferent scales upon which clusters can be found and operate. The y may operate at the level of b uilding comple xes or quarters/districts, such as in the case of the Manchester Northern Quarter , the Amsterdam W estergasfabriek or the Helsinki cable factory. Or they might include entire cities or regions, such as in the case of the media/entertainment cluster of Hamb urg, the f ashion cluster of Antwerp, the architectural cluster of Rotterdam. In addition, e ven thick transnational netw orks might be considered as clusters. Ho w large or small, close or open, local or global, are clusters in terms of these proximity dimensions? Ho w do these qualities support or hinder one another over time? Is there some awareness of these interactions and coevolutions in clusters? How do we keep the interaction sustainable towards the future? How are insights about this tak en up in productive forms of cluster management?

The Political-Economic Landscape The last dimension I w ould lik e to propose concerns what might be called the political-economic setting of cultural creative clusters. This is about the economic/ cultural v alue netw orks that clusters are embedded in and through which the y organise themselv es, and ho w these v alue netw orks relate to both the dominant professional cultures within clusters, the careers of involved public–private participants, and the way clusters are embedded in their wider public–private environment. Cultural-creative clusters differ not only in terms of their cultural programme and in terms of the various spatial and organisation scales they operate upon, they also differ in terms of the institutional landscape they are embedded in. Some clusters are government-led and rely heavily on public money, both in terms of the in vestment in and exploitation of working spaces, and in terms of the organisation of expertise and the support structures implied. This takes them into the public realm of arts and culture, and of education and science, with their specif ic value networks. Others are much more mark et-oriented or part of a mark et-oriented regional economic or industrial policy (e.g. design and technology, media and entertainment), something which might take them into the realm of science and engineering, real estate development, urban regeneration, and the leisure and entertainment mark et. Depending on the specif ic institutional landscapes or the political-economic re gimes from which they are a part of, clusters may not only ha ve a different political-economy of their own, they may also have a different relationship to their environment. This invites different kinds of involvement and investment, attracting a different kind of cultural workers, thus also influencing their future e volutionary trajectory. This political-economic dimension becomes more important as regional-national governments increasingly try to use the arts and culture as v ehicles of re gionalnational economic development. According to Markussen (2006), the publicagendas of artists as a group still cannot be conflated with neoliberal urban political regimes. Artists as a group ha ve an ambi valent if not full-blo wn critical attitude to wards policies which simply instrumentalise artistic spaces and or ganisations for urban

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redevelopment purposes. Others, such as Currid (2007), not only claim an increasing importance of art and culture in stimulating economic growth. In addition, they claim an increasing importance of stronger interrelations between dif ferent art and cultural settings, not only transdisciplinary, but also transsectorally, linking the conventional arts and culture infrastructure to the field of cultural enterprises. In many cases, cultural creati ve de velopment policies are still e xperiencing dif ficulties in finding a producti ve interaction between cultural and economic polic y structures and cultures. Both are captured in their o wn developmental regime, with specif ic interests, e xpectations and professional v alues in volved. Bringing them together in mixed cultural-creative cluster environments is still pro ving to be difficult, with projects either getting lock ed in to the subsidy re gime, or losing touch with the broader urban cultural infrastructure. Hence, given the recent history of western arts and culture policies, and of industrial policies, cultural-creative clusters are based dif ferently in their public–private environment. This not only goes with a dif ferent kind of f inancial and de velopmental regime, with the specific goals and values involved, it can also possibly go with a dif ferent kind of cultural professionalism, with a dif ferent outlook on and evaluation of the relevance of the arts and culture. This still pro ves to be a tension filled situation, especially when governments start to use their conventional arts and culture infrastructure to stimulate the local/re gional cultural-creative economy.

Conclusion In this chapter, an attempt has been made to shed some light on the complex history and current situation with re gard to so-called cultural-creative clusters, both in the field of research and in the field or urban/regional planning and development. This was done using two perspectives: one historical and one conceptual. The first perspective included a disentangling of the comple x discursive history of notions of cultural/creative districts/quarters/clusters and the wider ‘story-lines’ they have been a part of (cultural/creative industries/economies/cities/classes). Two lines overlap and interact. One concerns a replacement of the cultural for the creative, thus moving away from the established arts and culture perspective, to include a broader , partly commercial, f ield of cultural-creati ve w orking and thinking. However, almost at the same time, notions of the creative started to be stretched up to include multiple forms of creati vity, from cultural to technological to economic ones. Next, as part of the popularisation of Florida’ s Rise of the Cr eative Class , the two lines of thinking became mixed up in complicating ways, thus producing a lot of confusion and distrust, with the cultural-creati ve agenda being hijacked by a wider urban/regional economic/industrial development agenda. This chapter can be seen as part of recent attempts to heark en back to what the notion of the culturalcreative w as originally meant to imply . This in volves tracing back the intrinsic character, quality and dynamics of the cultural infrastructure, and at the same time

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bringing that in touch with new insights from innovation, regional and organisation studies. Second, I have developed something of a three dimensional space in terms of which we can start to upgrade and dif ferentiate our current thinking about cultural-creati ve clusters and/or milieux. Clusters or milieux might be dif ferentiated in terms of: (a) The quality and role of the cultural within them (b) The scale and substance of relations of proximity and distance on which the y operate (c) Their political-economic characteristics (i.e. the public–private character of the value networks in which they operate). Plotting types of cultural-creati ve clusters within this three dimensional space would involve distinguishing between different cultural agglomeration models, running from the ‘traditional’ spatially-concentrated arts community on one e xtreme, to the re gional clustering of cultural industry-related v alue chains or theme park type leisure and entertainment infrastructures on the other . Each of these types of cultural agglomeration w ould in volve a dif ferent relation to the local-global environment, a dif ferent relation to the public and/or pri vate institutional conte xt, different developmental paths, different stimulation policies, and last b ut not least, a different set of evaluation factors. As such, the model might allow a more subtle understanding of distinctive culturalcreative agglomeration strate gies, calling for dif ferent cultural industry de velopment approaches, with distincti ve sets of partnerships, and a more f ine-grained strengthening of types of related professional cultures.

References Amin, A., and F. Wilkinson. 1999. Learning, proximity and industrial performance: An introduction. Cambridge Journal of Economics 23: 121–125. Banks, M., A. Lo vatt, J. O’Connor, and C. Raf fo. 2000. Risk and trust in the cultural industries. Geoforum 31: 444–464. Bianchini, F . 1987. GLC/RIP cultural policies in London, 1981–1986. New F ormations 1: 103–117. Bianchini, F. 1989. Cultural policy and urban social mo vements. The response of the ‘Ne w Left’ in Rome (1976–85) and London (1981–86). In Leisure and urban processes, eds. P. Bramham, I. Henry, H. Mommaas, and H. van der Poel, 18–47. London: Routledge. Bianchini, F. and C. Landry. 1995. The creative city. London: Demos. Boschma, R.A. 2005. Role of proximity in interaction and performance: Conceptual and empirical challenges. Regional Studies 39(1): 41–45. Cunningham, S. 2004. The creati ve industries after cultural polic y. International J ournal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 105–115. Currid, E. 2007. The warhol economy. How fashion, art & music drive New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Featherstone, M. 1987. Lifestyle and consumer culture. In Everyday life: Leisure and culture, ed. E. Meijer, 157–168. The Netherlands: Tilburg University, Department of Leisure Studies. Florida, R. 2002. The rise of the creative class. New York: Routledge.

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Franck, D. 2002. The bohemians. The birth of modern art Paris 1900–1930. London: Phoenix. Gibson, C. and N. Klock er. 2004. Academic publishing as ‘creati ve’ industry, and recent discourses of ‘creative economies.’ Some critical reflections. Area 36(4): 423–434. Hannigan, J. 1998. Fantasy city: Pleasur e and pr ofit in the postmodern metr opolis. New York: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, D. 2002. The cultural industries. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Howkins, J. 2001. The creative economy. London: Penguin. Kong, L., C. Gibson, L. Khoo, and A. Semple. 2006. Kno wledge of the creati ve economy: Towards a relational geography of dif fusion and adaptation in Asia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47(2): 173–194. Landry, C. 2000. The creative city. London: Comedia. Markussen, A. 2006. Urban de velopment and the politics of a creati ve class: Evidence from a study of artists. Environment and Planning A 38: 1921–1940. Mommaas, H. 2004. Cultural clusters and the post-industrial city . Urban Studies 41(3): 507–532. Mommaas, H. and H. van der Poel. 1989. Changes in economy, politics and lifestyles: An essay on the restructuring of urban leisure. In Leisure and urban processes, eds. P. Bramham, I. Henry, H. Mommaas, and H. van der Poel, 254–277. London: Routledge. O’Connor, J. 2007. The cultural and creative industries: A review of the literature. London: Arts Council England – Creative Partnerships. O’Connor, J. and D. Wynne (Eds.). 1996. From the margins to the centre. Cultural production and consumption in the postmodern city. London: Ashgate. Oerlemans, L., M. Meeus, and P . Kenis. 2007. Re gional inno vation netw orks. In The learning region. F oundations, state of the art, futur e, eds. R. Rutten and F . Boek ema, 160–184. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Oerlemans, L. A. G. and M. T . H. Meeus. 2005. Do or ganizational and spatial proximity impact on firm performance? Regional Studies 39(1): 89–104. Pratt, A. C. 2004. The cultural economy: A call for spatialised production of culture perspectives. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 117–128. Porter, M. E. 1990. The competitive advantage of nations. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Rose, D. 1984. Rethinking gentrif ication: Be yond the une ven de velopment of Marxist urban theory. Environment and Planning D, Society and Space 1: 47–74. Schoales, J. 2006. Alpha clusters: Creative innovation in local economies. Economic Development Quarterly 20(2): 162–177. Scott, A. 2000. The cultural economy of cities. London: Sage. Stoker, G. and K. Mossberger. 1994. Urban regime theory in comparative perspective. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 12(2): 195–212. Stone, C.N. 1989. Regime politics. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Verwijnen, J. 1999. The creati ve city’s new field condition. In Creative cities, eds. J. V erwijnen and P. Lehtovuori, 12–35. Helsinki: UIAH. Westrick D.G. and D. Rehfeld. 2003 (April). Clusters and cluster policies in re gions of structural change – comparing three regions in North Rhine Westphalia. International Conference of the Regional Studies Association. Pisa, Italy. Wynne, D. (Ed.). 1989. The culture industry. Manchester: Centre for Employment Research. Zukin, S. 1989. Loft living. Culture and capital in urban change. New York: Rutgers University Press.

Chapter 5

Beyond Networks and Relations: Towards Rethinking Creative Cluster Theory Lily Kong

Introduction The concept of “creati ve clusters” is a dif ficult one, complicated not least by the complexity of its constituent components – the concept of “creativity” and the idea of “clusters”. The debates surrounding the e xplanatory value and the promise and potential of creative clusters are particularly significant in the face of the sometimes hypnotic hold of cluster creation on polic y mak ers. Yet, scholars ha ve observ ed that the heightened popularity of the cluster concept may mask its weak conceptual and empirical basis (Martin and Sunle y 2003; Simmie 2004). In this chapter , I will e xamine the nature of creati ve clusters, and particularly , “cultural creati ve clusters” – i.e. clusters in which creati ve activity take place in the cultural f ield. This analysis is undertaken through detailed study of a specific visual arts cluster in Singapore and seeks to contribute to the development of a more nuanced theoretical position about the nature of creative clusters. The terms “creati ve cluster” and “cultural cluster” ha ve oftentimes been used interchangeably in the literature. If some distinction is to be made, it is that studies stemming from Europe (with the exception of UK) commonly use the term ‘cultural clusters’ while those from US and Australia appear to f avour the term “creati ve clusters”. Often, this is a reflection of the lack of conceptual clarity around the ideas of “cultural industries” and “creati ve industries” themselv es. These dif ferences are not merely semantic and are not inconsequential. The nature of clustering does differ depending on the specif ic acti vities under consideration, and cultural clusters focused on performing and visual arts, for example, may have quite different dynamics at work from clusters focused on television and film work, or fashion and design, just to use a fe w examples. All may be termed “creati ve clusters” but the nature of activity is not all the same, and the specif ic dynamics deserv e careful scrutin y and analysis. Certainly, they differ from business and industrial clusters as elaborated by

L. Kong () Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, 1 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_5, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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Michael Porter (1998, 2000) and Alfred Marshall (see Markusen 1996) respectively. Yet, in much of the literature, creati ve clusters are often treated as a subset of b usiness clusters, and subjected to the same economic analysis and polic y responses as other industries. I have used the term “cultural creative cluster” to draw attention to my focus on creative work in the cultural, and specif ically, arts, sector. The conflation of various ideas as highlighted above is not only inappropriate but can be dangerous should unsuitable policies be de vised on erroneous logic. Man y creative clusters are in fact “de facto cultural quarters with assorted cultural consumption and not for prof it activities”, thus meriting e valuation through a dif ferent lens. Evans et al. (2005: 26) observ e that different methodologies are required to capture the cluster based interactions and interdependencies given the unusual organisation of creative and cultural businesses as compared to other business segments. Be that as it may, much of the literature on creati ve clusters recites a similar formula for success. The oft-adopted logic and language of analysis (and indeed, policy) is exemplified in Wu’s (2005) discussion of cities like San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Washington DC, Dublin and Bangalore. The y are labeled successful creative cities, in part because the y are characterised by the concentration of outstanding university research and commercial linkages, v enture capital, anchor f irms and mediating organizations. The availability of an appropriate base of knowledge and skill as well as a desired quality of services and infrastructure, contrib utes to the success of these clusters, and hence, cities. O’Connor (2004), like others, argues further that clusters succeed because of the development of tacit as opposed to formal, codified knowledge. As tacit knowledge is embedded locally, cultural producers thus need to be ‘inside’ the circuit of knowledge. Clustering is hence essential as inno vation has to do with the transformation of signs – ‘a style, a look, a sound’ by local culture – and the city consequently acts as a crucible where ‘inno vative consumption meets ear to the ground production’ (O’Connor 2004: 134). Thus, rather than being an industry along ‘F ordist’ lines, the cultural sector relies on a scattered and fluid netw ork of creative producers. It is precisely at the small-scale, local, heterogeneous cluster that “the creati ve work gets done, and it is here that insiders’ kno wledge and immersion in the local scene produce the vital inno vations and mutations” (O’Connor 2004: 136). Ov erall, the effect of linkages between firms, the existence of structures that encourage learning and innovation, as well as an e xternal environment for inno vation and indi vidual expressions of creativity (Scott 2006: 6) constitute a “creati ve milieu” (Hall 2000) or “creative field” (Scott 1999, 2006). This logic may indeed hold w ater, b ut I ar gue in this chapter that it is neither inevitable nor even necessary as a condition for the persistence of clusters. There is as yet insufficient nuancing and detail in our understanding of different types of creative clusters, and especially cultural creati ve clusters to conclude with such ine vitability. Indeed, part of the tendency to assume this logic is due to the conflation of b usiness, industrial and cultural clusters, which encourages adv ocates to o verstate agglomerative benefits at the e xpense of understanding global flo ws, national interv entions in the re gulation of production, and inter -scalar dimensions of cultural economic activities (see Kong 2006a, and Coe and Johns 2004). Theoretically , therefore, there is need for greater clarity of the processes at w ork in dif ferent types of clusters.

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This cannot be achieved without careful detailed empirical work, involving in-depth ethnographies. Only then can sound policy be made.

Singapore: An Empirical Case In this chapter , I tak e a v ery grounded approach by e xamining a particular conte xt (Singapore, a small city-state), identifying a particular concentration of visual arts activity there for in-depth analysis. As a small diamond-shaped island no more than 25 by 40 km at the extremities, the scale at which clusters are imagined are quite different from Europe and the U.S. Further , given Singapore’s significant global reach in man y facets of its e xistence (Yeung and Olds 1998; Y eoh and Chang 2001), the question arises as to how important internal clustering may be in relation to global linkages and networks. Another reason why Singapore presents an interesting case for analysis is in relation to the prospects of creativity in a state perceived to be “too tame” and “straightlaced” for creative work (Tan 2006), and where arts and cultural acti vities have traditionally not been seen as central to the nation’ s development till recent years. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, Singapore’ s go vernment agencies ha ve enthusiastically adopted a range of related ideas surrounding the “creative economies” (creative/cultural industries, creative manpower, creative workforce, creative clusters, creative to wn, cultural capital). This follo ws after an earlier period during which pronouncements were made re vealing go vernmental recognition of the economic potential of the arts dating to the early 1990s. In 1990, as part of the promotional strategy, the Economic De velopment Board (EDB) had set up a Creati ve Services Strategic Business Unit, later renamed the Creative Business Programme, to “develop Singapore into a centre of excellence for the various creative industries” (EDB 1992: 2). In 1991, it developed a Creative Services Development Plan as the blueprint for the development of the four major sectors, defined as film and music, media, design, and arts and entertainment (EDB Press Release, 10 December 1991). However, there was then a hiatus, and it was not until year 2000 that a further push was made in the form of the Renaissance City Report (MITA 2000), followed by a green paper by the then Ministry of Information and the Arts (now Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts – MICA) titled Investing in Singapore’s Cultural Capital (MITA 2002) and a Creative Industries Development Strategy by the Economic Review Committee (Economic Review Committee Services Subcommittee Report 2002). In 2002, the Creati ve Industries W orking Group of the Economic Re view Committee’s Service Industries Sub-Committee recommended a three-prong strategy to achieve the vision of a creati ve economy propelled by the creati ve industries. The three initiatives, known as Renaissance City 2.0 , Design Singapore and Media 21 , target the arts and cultural sector, the design sector and the media sector respecti vely. Renaissance City 2.0 b uilds on the foundation of the original Renaissance City Blueprint of 2000. The focus of this initiati ve is to maximise the potential of existing and ne w arts infrastructure through de velopment of the softw are aspects – nurturing the talents and encouraging creati ve expression. It also proposes that MICA agencies (National Arts Council, National Heritage Board, and National Library Board) which have traditionally been dealing with non-profit cultural work,

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collaborate with the Singapore Tourism Board (which has traditionally approached arts from a commercial angle) to unleash the economic potential of arts and cultural activities. Recognising the role of design as a major dri ver of enterprise, national competitiveness and v alue creation, Design Singapor e aims to promote and de velop design excellence in Singapore. The initiati ve has led to the establishment of the Design Singapore Council – a national design agenc y – to nurture a vibrant design community, attract young talents to the industry and b uild up Singapore’ s design capabilities and standards. Looking outw ards, Media 21 en visions Singapore as a global media city and a thriving media ecosystem with roots here b ut with strong e xtensions internationally. Through the formation of the Media De velopment Authority, the initiati ve aims to promote and develop the media industry and the local media production community .

Creative Clusters in Singapore While spatial clustering and physical proximity constitute specif ic dimensions of urban and cultural polic y in man y cities (e.g. Manchester , Shef field, Dublin, Adelaide), in of ficial discourse in Singapore, the notion of a ‘creati ve cluster’ is most commonly non-spatial, or at best, aspatial. The ‘creati ve cluster’ is used as the defining nomenclature for industrial groups. Three clusters ha ve been identified: ‘arts and culture’, ‘design’ and ‘media’. W ithin each are specif ic industries, grouped by sectors (see Table 1). This aspatial use of “cluster” does not, ho wever, imply that there are no spatial clusters in Singapore, whether conceptually or empirically. In official discourse, the idea of a creative cluster appears in the concept of a ‘creative town’, an idea contained in the Renaissance City 2.0 initiative. The idea w as that Community De velopment Councils (CDCs) would work to develop “Creative Towns”, to be piloted first with a selected township. This town would serve as a developmental model for a “vibrant, creative, culturally rich, entrepreneurial and technologically sa vvy community”. This prototype w ould then be f ine-tuned and eventually, adopted by the rest of the CDCs to evolve a creative and connected Singapore. The “Creative Towns” proposal was endorsed during the Mayors’1 Committee Meeting on 19 August 2002. A multiagency taskforce in volving pri vate, public and people sectors w as then set up to prototype the “Creative Towns” concept at a selected township, so as to: unleash the latent creativity and passion in each individual; integrate arts, culture, business, design, and technology into community planning and re vitalization ef forts; enhance the ideas-generating capacity and entrepreneurship qualities of the community; increase cultural awareness among people; and promote community bonding, local pride and participation through arts and cultural e vents, and the emplo yment of the ne west infocomm and media technologies. (Economic Review Committee Services Subcommittee Report 2002: 17)

1

Each CDC is headed by a Mayor.

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Table 1 Singapore’s creative industries: clusters, sectors and industries Cluster Sector Industry Arts and culture

Heritage

Literary arts Performing arts

Trades and crafts Visual arts

Design

Advertising Architecture

Exhibition design Fashion design Graphic design Industrial design

IT and software services

Interior design Landscape design IT and software services

Cultural villages Museums Museums activities and preservation of historical sites and buildings NEC Other cultural activities NEC – Dramatic arts, music and other arts acti vities NEC Music and dancing schools Operas, wayang and puppet show Orchestras and dance bands Theatres and concert halls Theatrical producers except motion picture – Art galleries Photo finishing services (e.g. Developing and processing of photographic films) Photographic activities NEC (incl. Micro-image decorating services) Retail sale of antiques, works of art, handicrafts, collectibles and gifts Wholesale of antiques, works of art, handicrafts and gifts Retail sale of cameras and other photographic goods Wholesale of optical and photographic equipment and supplies Advertising activities Architectural services Quantity surveying and building appraisal services Quantity surveying and building appraisal services Exhibition stand designers and contractors Fashion designing services (incl. accessories) Art and graphic design services Electronics-related industrial design services Furniture design services Other industrial design services Transport-related industrial design services Interior design services Landscape care and maintenance services/activities Landscape design and architecture Development of e-commerce applications Development of other software (incl. maintenance) Data communications services NEC Satellite uplink and downlink services Third-party telecommunications/value added network operators Web hosting services Internet access providers (including ISPs) Cyber cafes (continued)

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Table 1 (continued) Cluster Sector Media

Broadcasting

Digital media

Film and video

Music Printing

Publishing

Industry Radio broadcasting Radio programme production and distribution Television programme distribution Television programme production TV broadcasting (incl. cable, satellite and terrestrial TV) Renting of video tapes and the lik e Retail sale of record albums, cassette tapes, LDs and CDs (including VCDs and DVDs) Wholesale of record albums, cassette tapes, LDs and CDs (including VCDs and DVDs) Other radio and television related activities Development of computer games Manufacture of electronic games (e.g. TV games) Publishing of computer games Retail sale of PC games (including electronic games and video games consoles) Wholesale of PC games (including electronic games and video games consoles) Motion picture/video production Motion picture/video/TV post-production services Services allied to motion picture/video production and distribution Video filming and other recording services (incl. video taping of events) Cinema services Motion picture projection NEC Motion picture/video distribution Reproduction of recorded media Sound recording production and distribution Printing of newspapers Printing of periodicals, books and magazines Service activities related to printing NEC (e.g. plate-making) Bookbinding (e.g. book packaging) Colour separation Typesetting Commercial printing (e.g. brochures, cards and labels) Retail sales of books, magazines and stationery Wholesale of books and magazines Wholesale of paper and paper products News agency activities Publishing activities NEC Publishing of books, brochures, musical books and other publications Publishing of journals, periodicals and magazines Publishing of newspapers Libraries and archives Publishing of directories and databases

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The programme w as e ventually rolled out in 2005 under the name “Creati ve Community Singapore”. Comprising a S$10 million fund to be disb ursed o ver 3 years, the programme was implemented nation-wide instead of the original plan to pilot it with a selected to wn. The CDCs were still to be in volved. However, the more distinct cluster concept became dissipated and aspatial. The “Creati ve Community Singapore” programme became directed at nurturing creative projects and building capabilities to support the development of the creative industries through (i) seed-funding creati ve projects from the people, pri vate and public sectors; and (ii) providing facilitation, co-branding and mark eting assistance to these projects, with no trace of the idea of a physical anchor in a stipulated territory . Despite the disappearance of the “spatial cluster” from of ficial discourse in those terms, the phenomenon of creati ve clusters can in f act be found in dif ferent ways in Singapore, including in official policy, only adopting different terminology. This is most e vident in the National Arts Council’ s (NAC) Arts Housing Scheme in which old b uildings (disused w arehouses and old shophouses) are identif ied and converted into suitable housing for arts use. These old b uildings may house a single arts group, or the y may be multi-tenanted, with se veral arts groups and artists of the same or dif ferent art forms. T o date, o ver 90 arts or ganisations and artists (66 arts or ganisations and 28 artists) ha ve been housed in 19 b uildings, 20 units of shophouses and 2 co-located facilities in Marine Parade (Marine Parade Community Building) and Ghim Moh (Ulu P andan Community Building) (www . nac.gov.sg/fac/fac03.asp). Some are stand alone b uildings, such as in T elok Ayer Street (Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre) and the Substation, while others constitute what might be characterised as “arts belts” of several arts housing properties in close proximity to one another (on the same street). The most prominent arts belts are at W aterloo Street, Chinato wn, Little India and T elok K urau, and the y have been identified through collaborative and strategic site planning by the Urban Redevelopment Authority with the National Arts Council. The buildings are leased to selected artists and non-prof it arts groups at highly subsidised rates. T enants pay 10% of the rental char ged by Singapore Land Authority, while the NAC pays the remaining 90%. The premises may be used for offices, studios, administrati ve, rehearsal or performance space. The scheme w as first implemented in 1985 to pro vide affordable spaces for arts and cultural acti vities, in order to support the de velopment of the arts in Singapore. Most of the N AC arts belts are multidisciplinary in nature, with a range of co-existing performing and visual arts acti vities. Telok K urau is an e xception; it houses only visual artists (T able 2). The N AC’s vision for the v arious arts belts is encapsulated in its vision for the Little India (K erbau Road) arts belt: that “the diversity of arts groups housed here presents a good opportunity for e xchange of ideas and learning from each other” (see www .nac.gov.sg/fac/fac0303.asp). The idea of knowledge sharing (whether tacit or codif ied) to enhance artistic creati vity is thus part of the explicit impetus for clustering artist(e)s together. It is also envisaged that the arts will help to re vitalise forgotten areas. However, while it is easy to be seduced by the cluster rhetoric, it is impor tant to remember that the empirical case for clustering remains unclear , and that “explanation of causality and determination” has become “overly stretched, thin and

68 Table 2 Key NAC “arts belts” and their occupants Location Occupants

L. Kong

Remarks

Nearby are the Selegie Arts Centre Sculpture Square, a theatre group (with photography), the Singapore (Action Theatre), the Singapore Art Museum, the Nanyang Calligraphy Centre, the YMS (Young Academy of Fine Arts, and the Musicians’ Society) Arts Centre and Stamford Arts Centre the Dance Ensemble Singapore Chinatown Arts groups that specialise in Cantonese (Smith Opera, Beijing Opera, Teochew Street and Opera, music, theatre, calligraTrengganu phy as well as literature: Chinese Street) Theatre Circle, the first non-profit professional performing Chinese Opera company in Singapore; Ping Sheh, or The Singapore Amateur Beijing Opera Society; Xin Sheng Poets’ Society; Toy Factory Theatre Ensemble, a bilingual theatre company; Er Woo Amateur Musical and Dance Society (for Teochew Opera); and Shicheng Calligraphy and Seal-Carving Society Little India Bhaskar’s Arts Academy (Indian); From traditional to avant-garde (Kerbau Sri Warisan Som Said (Malay); Road) Dramaplus Arts, Wild Rice Ltd. and Spell #7 (contemporary performance groups); Plastique Kinetic Worms (contemporary art space) Telok Kurau All visual arts occupants. Two societies and 29 artists

Waterloo Street

fractured” (Martin and Sunle y 2003: 28). Ev en though Martin and Sunle y (2003) were mostly focused in their critique on the economic benef its of clustering, their concern to have sound empirical evidence of causality is pertinent here in relation to the arts and cultural or ganisations under consideration, though the y differ in being non-profit groups, and the questions ask ed about the v alue of physical proximity must thus be focused on other kinds of benef its. In this spirit, my aims in this chapter are to e xamine the w ays in which cluster ing gathers meaning for visual artists in the N AC arts housing premises kno wn as the Telok Kurau Studios. Specif ically, I focus on ho w clustering is meaningful and adds v alue for the artists, whether it is in social and community terms, in artistic and creative value, or by way of economic benefit. Only by such “descent” to detailed case study might a small step be taken in the “ascent” to theory, and an empirical case be made to support (creative) cluster theory. As part of this research, artists and arts administrators associated with the Telok K urau Studios and the National Arts Council were intervie wed in 2008. These studios represent a unique en vironment in Singapore. Originally T elok

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Kurau South Primary School (1960–1984), the b uildings were turned o ver for use by the La Salle-SIA Colle ge of the Arts (an arts colle ge) until it mo ved out in 1996. In February 1997, the f irst artist tenants be gan to mo ve in e ven as the National Arts Council helped to bring in electrical supply . Today, there are two societies (the Singapore Colour Photography Society and the Singapore Watercolour Society) and 29 artists using the premises. The artists include wellestablished award winners as well as up-and-coming younger ones, w orking in various media from w atercolours to acrylic to charcoal to oils to sculpture, and others. Some ha ve been there from the be ginning; others are more recent additions. While none li ve there, some do w ork through the night and occasionally stay over as their art engrosses them. Each unit of about 45 to 50 m2 is rented to artists for only S$100 (10% of the actual rental) while N AC pays the rest to the Singapore Land Authority. There is an exhibition space, opened in 1998, to allow the artists to sho wcase their w ork. There is a Management Committee, elected from amongst the occupants as well as an arts administrator whose role is to maintain the b uilding, handle the of fice administration and help with or ganising of exhibitions. Official discourse about the cluster comfortably adopts the compelling logic and language of proponents of cluster theory . F or e xample, at the 2007 10th anniversary exhibition, a commemorati ve magazine w as produced, which captured some of the works of artists in the Telok Kurau studios, and contained key messages from the Chairman (Edmund Cheng), and the Director , Visual Arts and Resource De velopment (Lim Chwee Seng) of the National Arts Council. In these messages, the y reinforced the hopes e xpressed about arts clusters. Specifically, Cheng wrote that the “Telok Kurau Studios [had] grown into a centre for synergistic, creative relationships where ne w and interesting Singapore art is concei ved, developed and shared amongst its established tenants ” (TKS 2007: 3, emphasis added). Similarly , Lim suggested that T elok K urau Studios was a reminder that “arts housing is not just a space for the production of w ork but also an incubatory space where artists can engage each other through practice and discour se” (TKS 2007: 5, emphasis added). Whether their language about engagement and producti ve relationships constituted rhetoric necessary for the occasion, sincere hopes to be realised or honest evaluation of the cluster’s achievements, the seemingly inevitable conclusion had to be drawn that productive relationships must develop when a group of artists with similar interests are housed in a cluster. In the ne xt section, I analyse the w ays in which the visual arts cluster at T elok Kurau Studios has gathered meaning for the artist inhabitants themselv es. I illustrate how productive relationships in clusters are neither ine vitable nor in variable. I ar gue that reputation (cultural capital), repose (en vironment) and rentals (economic value) seem much more important and positi ve f actors in constituting the identity and v alue of the cluster , defining and supporting its continued e xistence, rather than social relations, which in f act, seem devoid of trust, understanding and mutual support.

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Reputation, Repose, and Rentals: The Value of a Cluster In the cluster literature, social networks, tacit knowledge and trust relationships are valorised. The social capital (Fukuyama 1995) thus deri ved is belie ved to constitute and/or enhance relationships to the e xtent that individuals and firms are more prepared to undertak e risky ventures and re-or ganise their relations in support of mutual goals. Although there is nothing e xplicitly spatial about this, such social network relationships are said to be easier to maintain when participants are located in close proximity to one another (Gordon and McCann 2000; Simmie 2004: 1098). Geographical propinquity thus stimulates productivity. However, in a cluster where the “b usiness” is art, and in a national conte xt where the area is small, do these assumptions that are repeated by theorists and policymakers alike hold? I illustrate below how social relations are weak and trust is all but non-existent in Telok Kurau Studios, although it remains an important site in the visual arts landscape in Singapore because of its reputation, because of the repose it offers to artists seeking quiet and contemplati ve isolation, and because of the affordable rentals. The accruance of cultural capital (reputation), the en vironmental effect (repose), and the economic realities (rentals) thus supersede social networks and trust relationships in making the art cluster viable and v aluable. The identity of the T elok Kurau cluster, its national signif icance and its dra w for artists are premised on its reputation as the site of concentration of nationally (and arguably internationally) well-re garded artists. When ask ed the k ey reasons why artists w ould want to locate at T elok Kurau Studios, artist A 2 says “I think it is the prestige. There are a lot of big names here” (Personal intervie w, Artist A, 7 Mar 08). Indeed, several of the artists readily named Cultural Medallion winners who have studios there. The Cultural Medallion is Singapore’ s highest a ward for artist(e)s, and among the a ward winners in T elok K urau Studios are Chng Seok Tin, the late Chua Ek Kay, Goh Beng Kwan, Lim Tze Peng, the late Anthony Poon, Tan Kian Por , Tan Swie Hian, T eo Eng Seng, and Thomas Y eo. There are also Young Artist Award winners, UOB P ainting of the Year Award winners and other accolades, which “give a certain luster” to the place (Personal intervie w, Artist B, 22 Feb 08). The congre gation of indi viduals who ha ve achieved high standing in the visual arts world makes Telok Kurau “our so called national studios” (Personal interview, Artist A, 7 Mar 08), which is lik ened to the national studios of China and France (Personal interview, Artist C, 22 Feb 08). In this sense, the reputational effect is what k eeps the cluster going, generating a momentum for the addition of new artists and keeping pioneers in the place. A second w ay in which the cluster gathers meaning for the artists is in the atmosphere and environment of the setting, one of repose, quiet, relati ve isolation and solitude. Se veral artists e xpressed gratitude that there should be af fordable space made available so that the y can concentrate on their w ork. Artist D says: “I can k eep the windo ws and door closed and quietly concentrate on my w ork. 2

Interviewees are anonymised throughout for ethical reasons.

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Because for art, we ha ve to sit do wn and think about it, and not just go and do it any old ho w” (Personal intervie w, 7 March 2008). Ha ving the studio also allo ws separation between work and home: “When my children were very young, I worked at home. But my children took my brushes and cut off the hair! That’s why I found it v ery hard. And then sometimes, when I w as halfw ay through a painting, the y wanted me to play with them” (Personal intervie w, Artist D, 7 March 2008). A third reason why the artists have found the cluster to be attractive is because of the affordable rentals. As one artist put it, “Even though the space is quite small and not ideal – it does not allow me to produce big works of art, like in New York – the rents are cheap and you can’t get this anywhere else in Singapore. So I exercise my creativity and w ork with the physical constraints because the f inances work well here” (Personal intervie w, Artist E, 7 March 2008). The economic realities thus prevail and indeed, shape (the type of) artistic w ork. Cultural capital, environmental effects and economic realities are not often qualities that are foregrounded in the academic literature or policy documents as reasons for the establishment, e xistence and persistence of arts clusters. The y certainly do not feature as benef its of clusters. Instead, relationships (social netw orks, tacit knowledge and trust relationships) are celebrated as positi ve and powerful rewards for co-location. Having demonstrated the f actors that contribute to the persistence of the Telok Kurau Studios, the ne xt section will e xplore the v alidity of the often presumed benefits of agglomeration – networks and relations.

Rivalry in Relationships: The Detracting Factor Contrary to established wisdom, the optimism about social relationships in clusters is not borne out in the empirical case of the T elok Kurau Studios. Indeed, with the exception of one voice, the reverse is true. The e xceptional case is that of an artist whose teacher also has a studio in the cluster , and who feels he continues to learn from his mentor. All other artists interviewed spoke (with varying degrees of candour) about the hostilities that mark the relationships within the cluster: You know right, in Telok Kurau, there is a lot of fighting, a lot of quarrelling, I’m sure you’ve heard about it through all your intervie ws. (Personal interview, Artist F, 18 March 2008) For ten years, at T elok Kurau, there ha ve been f ights, fights, fights. (Personal intervie w, Artist G, 17 March 2008) What does he do? He sues fello w artists, uses the go vernment, uses the media, uses big names! Don’t offend him for he knows a lot of rich and powerful people and if you offend him, he’ll sue you. He sued ten artists in the past and now he is suing one writer, and don’t know what ne xt. What to do? The media supports him, the authorities support him. (Personal interview, Artist A, 7 March 2008)

The lack of dense and mutually supportive intra-cluster relationships and the glaring absence of cooperation are manifest in v arious ways: in complaints, in of ficious rather than humane relationships, and in reluctance to engage in or sheer absence

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of collaborative artistic endea vours. For example, one artist elaborates on a complaint against him when his spouse (also an artist in T elok K urau) and children stayed over: We don’t live here, but sometimes we stay overnight when my wife has a project going and I have painting to do. Then people complained – two studios complained about how we all stayed here and slept here and li ved here! (Personal interview, Artist A, 7 March 2008)

Another artist offered by way of example two instances in which he felt the cluster was characterized by officious relationships rather than those thick relations of trust that enable support of mutual goals: Recently, I w as sick. I had lymphoma, and only just got well. When I got sick, I told the committee but the committee didn’t care, didn’t tell the NAC, which we’re under. Because of chemotherapy, my hand was numb, I wasn’t able to sign my name. They sent me a letter to remind me about the utilities payment b ut never mentioned an ything about my illness. They even cc-ed the letter to N AC, to let N AC know that I o wed money for the utilities. But since 1997, I ha ve never been late with an y payments. N AC knows that”. (Personal interview, Artist D, 7 March 2008) This year’s committee chairman came to tell me that because I ha ve a lot of students, they want me to pay more for utilities, because the y say my students use the toilet often. But I told them I won’t pay because I don’t go out and recruit these students, they come to me.… But the committee insisted that I ha ve a lot of students who use a lot of w ater. That’s just ridiculous. So I told them, if you want, you should hire someone to sit at the toilet door and collect money (Personal interview, Artist D, 7 March 2008).

Given such experiences, it is unsurprising that there are hardly any artistic interactions and cooperative efforts. As one artist observed: I don’t see any exchange or interaction in Telok Kurau. It’s very sad. Maybe it’s the arts circle or maybe it’s Telok Kurau. They very seldom really sit down to discuss. … I f ind it very difficult. We have nearly 30 artists; we ha ve nine committee members. When we want to organize any talks or any activities or any exhibitions, we have very little support. They don’t come in to help you. I ha ve to w ork a lot as a v olunteer. The administrator also helps. We get very little support. … I find it very disappointing. It’s very hard. There are those who might know about art theory, art movements in the world, what’s happening recently, this and that. They might have new ideas, but they don’t share. Some of the good artists, the y don’t share. Ev erybody is lik e this! (Personal intervie w, Artist C, 22 February 2008)

The fact that visual artistic w ork is lar gely an indi vidualistic enterprise (certainly by comparison to the performing arts), and that there is intellectual property involved in the creati ve work may be part of the reason for the lack of more shar ing, cooperation and collaboration, and the more atomistic e xperience in a visual arts cluster such as T elok Kurau. This raises the question of whether , in this f ield of art, cluster logic cannot pre vail, and collaborations cannot ensue e ven if common interests intersect and relationships de velop. The artists themselv es belie ve in the possibility, even if in reality, there has been little cooperation. As one artist lamented: there can be v alue in the cluster , for e xample, exhibitions can be done collecti vely, and shared experience can mak e the e vent better. Unfortunately, this positi ve benefit has not been realized. (Personal interview, Artist D, 22 February 2008)

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This vie w is echoed by another artist, though his vie w of a more hierarchical approach would not be the only model nor indeed the most appropriate one for this group of artists, more than several of whom have been lauded in their own right and who may not see themselves working to someone else’s lead: This place will be better if we could cooperate. Cooperate and listen to one leader , one art director. Then we can w ork and follow the lead, ha ve shows and work towards them, like the New York schools. But here, we f ight, fight, fight. Mine is better , no, special arts is better, or must be Cultural Medallion winner , or w ater colour is out. (Personal intervie w, Artist A, 7 March 08)

That cooperation of this sort, with an art director setting the direction, may be difficult is evident in one artist’s assessment of what the root cause of the problem is: ri valry. This is because I am a threat to them. My wife and I are from [name of school]. It isamous f and has produced some of the best artists. But we get no of ficial support because the official support goes to the same fe w ones. Still, I lea ve them alone or the y might come and sue me. (Personal interview, Artist A, 7 March 2008)

Beyond percei ved personal jealousies, there can sometimes be real conflicts of interest: We are in the same trade, and sometimes you don’ t even know when you ha ve offended them. It’s conflict of interest. If I secure this project, it’ s mine, and someone else doesn’ t get it, so there’s hatred and such. (Personal interview, Artist H, 7 March 2008)

Evidence suggests, therefore, that there is no causal relationship between geographical propinquity and the development of positive social relations. Indeed, the close proximity puts strains on relationships which may not be as immediate or as apparent if it were not for co-location. Indeed, it is not dif ficult, when suspending for one moment the somewhat hypnotic grip of cluster logic, to see that there is really no reason to believe that physical proximity should be determinate on the development of mutual understanding, tacit knowledge, social networking and a conducive environment for inno vation and e xpressions of creati vity. As I ha ve demonstrated through the case of Telok Kurau Studios, the opposite may sometimes be true, that proximity brings its o wn tensions and conflicts. If netw orks and relations are not inevitable, what then is the value of a cluster?

Rethinking (Creative) Cluster Theory: The Next Brush Stroke Rather than a cluster in danger of demise, T elok K urau continues to be a wellknown site in Singapore’s visual arts landscape. Indeed, despite the quarrels, artists are reluctant to give up their space in T elok Kurau, “even if they don’t fully utilise it” (Personal intervie w, Artist C, 22 February 2008). One such artist e xplains that he is not al ways at T elok K urau because he has more than one studio, and the other location is more vibrant. His reluctance to gi ve up the T elok Kurau space is practical: the rental is cheap and he needs tw o studios for his tw o different genres

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of work (sculpture and painting). Ev en those whom fello w artists believe have not contributed significantly to the art scene continue to stay, and the NAC has difficulty moving them out because “[t]hey will appeal. They will get somebody to write them a letter, to appeal for them to stay” (Personal interview, Artist C, 22 February 2008). The cluster thus has a sustaining momentum. If geographical propinquity does not in itself generate fruitful relationships amongst the artists, and this in turn yields no accruing e xternalities, socially and culturally, why then does the cluster ha ve a sustaining momentum? In this case, I have shown that the answers lie in reputation, repose and rentals. The concentration of well-kno wn artists in T elok Kurau, often a ward-winning, has created a reputational effect so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Artists (perceive that they) derive cultural capital from location in the cluster . Further, the environment is conduci ve for quiet contemplation and solitary w ork, which the artists value. Finally, the pragmatic economic benef its of cheap rentals, conditions made possible by the National Arts Council, help to win the day . In rethinking cluster theory, therefore, this grounded approach of researching a singular visual arts cluster in Singapore is important in adding one more b uilding block in the ef fort to b uild a more nuanced theoretical understanding of (cultural creative) clusters. The grounded comple xities of this specif ic case alert us to tw o more general issues. First, the unique nature of the particular cluster acti vity matters. The activity in question here is one in which indi vidual(istic) effort and style are f iercely guarded, and where replication is neither desired nor v alued. This heightens the sense of ri valry and competition amongst cluster constituents and hampers collaboration. This is distinct from man y other kinds of industries and businesses where the creation of a product is often dependent on a chain of inputs from various actors, and where inter -firm and interpersonal relationships are thus important. The nature of much (visual) artistic w ork – particularly its independent quality – gives these clusters a different character and dynamic than other types of clusters, and affects the ways in which the cluster gathers meaning and v alue. Second, the relative spontaneity and organic origins of the cluster matter, shaping the ways in which members of the cluster v alue it. The cluster in question in this chapter is a state-vaunted and state-supported one, and in these premises made available to artists by the state, there has been no collective struggle for space that brings the community together. Each is comfortable, even if not completely satisfied, with their indi vidual units, and prefers the solitude and quietude the space af fords to do their work, rather than to engage collectively in the making of even more and better spaces. This is different from other situations where organically evolved clusters seem to have a different dynamic, borne of more spontaneous congregation and the need to pull together to mak e the circumstances work (see Kong 2006b). In conclusion, this chapter has demonstrated how the received wisdom about the agglomerative benefits of clusters needs to adopt a more e xpansive understanding of what is benef icial. In part, this is because of the specif ic nature of the cluster activity, and the specific circumstances under which cluster creation has occurred. For cluster theory to ha ve better e xplanatory value, these ref inements are critical. Only then can such w ork be helpful to polic y makers looking to the establishment of clusters to enhance creative work.

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References Coe, N.M. and Johns, J. (2004). Beyond production clusters: Towards a critical political economy of networks in the film and television industries. In D. Power and A. Scott (Eds.), The Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture, London/New York: Routledge, 188–204. EDB (Economic Development Board) (1991). Press Release, 10 December 1991. EDB (Economic De velopment Board) (1992). Film, V ideo and Music Industries , Singapore: Economic Development Board. Economic Re view Committee Services Subcommittee Report (2002). Creative Industries Development Strategy, Singapore: Ministry of Trade and Industry. Evans, G., F oord, J., Sha w, P., Ruiz, J., Bro wne, O., Gertler , M., T esolin, L. and W einstock, S. (2005). Strategies for Cr eative Spaces: Phase 1 Report , London: London De velopment Agency; Toronto: City of T oronto Economic De velopment and Culture Di visions; Ontario: Ministries of Economic Development & Trade and Culture. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social V irtues and the Cr eation of Pr osperity, Ne w York: Free Press. Gordon, I.R. and McCann, P. (2000). Industrial clusters: Complexes, agglomeration and/or social networks? Urban Studies, 37(3):513–532. Hall, P. (2000). Creative cities and economic development, Urban Studies, 37(4):639–649. Kong, L. (2006a). Conceptualising cultural and creative spaces, Paper presented at Conference on Cultural/Creative Clusters, Beijing, 19–21 October. Kong, L. (2006b). Creati ve clusters: Arts and cultural acti vities in Singapore, P aper presented at Conference on Creative Cities, Creative Economies, Shanghai, 16–18 October. Markusen, A. (1996). Sticky places in slippery space: A typology of industrial districts, Economic Geography, 72(2):293–313. Martin, R. and Sunle y, P. (2003). Deconstructing clusters: Chaotic concept or polic y panacea? Journal of Economic Geography, 3(1):5–35. MITA (Ministry of Information and the Arts) (2000). Renaissance City Report , Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts. MITA (Ministry of Information and the Arts) (2002). Imagi, a Ne w Ag enda for a Cr eative and Connected Nation: In vesting in Singapor e’s Cultur al Capital , Singapore: Ministry of Information and the Arts. National Arts Council (2005). Arts Housing, <www .nac.gov.sg/fac/fac03.asp>, accessed on 2 Dec 2008. O’Connor, J. (2004). ‘A special kind of city knowledge’: Innovative clusters, tacit knowledge and the ‘creative city’, Media International Australia, 112:131–149. Porter, M.E. (1998). Clusters and the ne w economy, Harvard Business Review, 76(6):77–90. Porter, M.E. (2000). Location, competition and economic development: Local clusters in a global economy, Economic Development Quarterly, 14(1):15–34. Scott, A.J. (1999). The cultural economy: Geography and the creati ve field, Media, Culture and Society, 21(6):807–818. Scott, A.J. (2006). Entrepreneurship, inno vation and industrial de velopment: Geography and the creative field revisited, Small Business Economics, 26(1):1–24. Simmie, J. (2004). Inno vation and clustering in the globalised international economy , Urban Studies, 41(5/6):1095–1112. Tan, H.L. (2006). Technologically tight – now loosen up, Singapore!, Today, 7 July 2006. Telok Kurau Studios: Commemorating a decade (2007). Singapore: Telok Kurau Studios. Wu, W.P. (2005). Dynamic Cities and Cr eative Clusters, World Bank Polic y Research Working Paper 3509, Washington, DC: World Bank. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Chang, T.C. (2001). Globalising Singapore: Debating transnational flows in the city, Urban Studies, 38(7):1025–1044. Yeung, H.W.C. and Olds, K. (1998). Singapore’s global reach: Situating the city-state in the global economy, International Journal of Urban Sciences, 2(1):24–47.

Chapter 6

The Capital Complex: Beijing’s New Creative Clusters* Michael Keane

Introduction: Growth Frenzy The scale of urban de velopment in Beijing during the past decade is nothing short of astonishing. Construction w orkers ha ve relentlessly cleared space for high-rise apartments while historic f actories are demolished or turned into centres for creative industries. The view flying into Beijing resembles a pancak e-like development sprawl dotted with five-star tourist hotels, modernist business centres, hyper-modern television towers, eye-catching sports comple xes, overpasses, underpasses, ring roads, technology parks, theme parks and con vention centres. Meanwhile, city streets are congested by cars, residents suffer increasing instances of respiratory illness and traditional w ays of living vanish amid the dust of b ulldozers. This is progress Chinese style, reflecting the idea of modernity as “a coming into being,” as process, rupture and even disruption. It is also an unprecedented phase in China’ s history as the nation harbours aspirations of becoming a world power, a harmonious civilisation and an advanced society. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of ho w the idea of creati ve industries has pro vided the impetus for a ne w phase of cultural infrastructure construction in Beijing. A w alled city of four separate enclosures during Y uan, Ming and Qing dynasties, by the 1950s Beijing had transformed into a spra wling city of industrial districts. The economic reform period, which be gan in 1979, sa w a transition from Maoist revolutionary class struggle to a pragmatic model of economic reconstruction and modernisation under Deng Xiaoping. An ensuing boom in de velopment led to a sur ge in urban migration, putting further pressure on infrastructure. During the mid-1980s, several of China’s large cities, notably Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Beijing began to compete with one another, attempting to lure international * Thanks to Weihong Zhang, Li Siling and Hui Ming for their assistance with parts of this chapter . M. Keane () Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creati ve Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Z1-515 Musk Avenue Kelvin Grove QLD 4059, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_6, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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investment. Beijing assumed a capital complex; not only was it the centre of political power, it saw itself as the cultural centre of the ne w China. Following the announcement of the site of the 2008 summer Olympics, a sense of anticipation and conf idence prevailed: Beijing w ould establish itself as a w orld city (Friedmann 2002). 1 With an international reputation at stak e, the f irst decade of the ne w millennium w as a time of frenetic reassessment, and e ven reinvention. The “creative city” idea w as moving rapidly through the international community .2 In this confluence of aspiration, internationalisation and local identity , the association of creativity with industrial clusters deepened. Polic y advocates in all le vels of government were quick to engage with clustering, believing that agglomeration was a means of ‘catch-up.’ Echoing the spirit, if not the political instrumentality of the Great New Leap Forward (1958–1960), China’s great ‘new leap forward’ is already scripted. Factories, fields and even abattoirs are now transformed into creative clusters. It is perhaps too early to kno w if these creati ve clusters will fulf il the high expectations and in this chapter , I do not intend to pre-empt judgement. Rather , in investigating how these ideas ha ve played out, I look at some of the initiati ves that have broken out in the past fe w years, the cultural resources the y draw on for their sustainability, and the relationships with district go vernments. I tak e a macro vie w of de velopment. I ar gue that whereas west and north-western districts of Beijing have accommodated digital content clusters, the centre has opted to retain a cultural tourism focus together with performing arts, e xhibition and traditional culture. The east of Beijing, meanwhile, is increasingly shaped by craft and visual arts. In a sense this recent clustering of cultural v alue reflects the geopolitics of Beijing. Since the Ming dynasty, the west of Beijing had established a reputation as the po wer centre, home to aristocrats and bureaucrats. The east attracted wealthy families with cultural capital while the south of Beijing became notorious for its po verty.3

Creative Clusters: The New Development Script As manuf acturing and processing of intermediate inputs (Rosen 2003; Baldwin 2006) continue to mo ve offshore from adv anced economies to China, the role of innovation in economic development has assumed an almost religious fervour. The development mantra of the Chinese go vernment since 2006 has been ‘independent innovation’ (zizhu chuangxin), ostensibly a strate gy to reduce reliance on W estern science and technology . Similarly, the concept of “creati ve industries” ( chuangyi chanye) has captured the attention of China’ s city-makers. The creative industries idea came to Beijing in 2004, b ut ran into an ideological barrier in the form of a pre-existing state polic y frame work of “cultural industries” ( wenhua c hanye), articulated by the Fourth Session of the Ninth People’ s Congress in 2001(Keane 2007; The terms world city and global city are sometimes used interchangeably . Since 2004, this had been championed by UNESCO. See http://portal.unesco.or g/culture/en/ ev.php-URL_ID = 28053&URL_DO = DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION = 201.html. 3 This is encapsulated in the adage, ‘the wealthy li ve in the east, the aristocrats and bureaucrats in the west, while in the south there is only po verty’ (dongfu xigui nanqiong). 1 2

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Zhang et al. 2004). Ho wever, while Beijing’ s of ficials ar gued the distinction between cultural and creative industries, Shanghai seized the moment; by 2005 Shanghai had established the Shanghai Creati ve Industries Centre, together with the Shanghai Creati ve Industries Association (see Chapter 11, Li and Hua, this volume). Operating under the combined management of the city’ s Propaganda Department and Economic Commission, these bodies instigated the de velopment of a range of creative clusters in Shanghai. Desmond Hui (2006) notes that by the 11th General Meeting of the 9th P arty Committee of the Beijing Government on 27th December 2005, the term “cultural creative industries” was formally instituted. The Beijing Committee of the Chinese People’s Consultati ve Conference subsequently green lighted man y proposals earmarked for development as “cultural creative industries” projects. Many of these are accommodated within the Beijing Urban Planning Scheme 2004–2020; others are initiated under the city’ s 11th 5 Y ear plan. As with “independent innovation” (zizhu c huangxin) in science and technology , “cultural creati ve industries” is mentioned frequently and with great significance by propaganda officials, humanities academics, digital content developers, advertising executives, fashion designers, publishers and even real estate developers. In examining the nexus of culture and economy , Andersson and Anderson (2006) employ the concept of “cultural infrastructure, ” and note the interplay between tangible and intangible. The tangible infrastructure includes f acilities such as churches, temples, museums, theatres and amusement parks. These primarily represent slo w changing goods. Other f acilities (concerts, e xhibitions, festivals and sporting e vents) support faster changing cultural acti vities. The intangible, what Landry (2000) calls “soft infrastructure,” is the recipe of culture, namely cultural ideas. In many instances, the intangible infrastructure is a precondition for the tangible: think of Modernism and its effect on architecture and industrial design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Intangible ideas, expressed as creativity or innovations, facilitate the transformation of infrastructure and therefore the broader economy. For that reason, the cultural or creative economy is a dri ver of economic gro wth.4 According to Potts and Cunningham (2008), there are many possible explanations of dynamism, but all are some variation of either the notion that the creative industries introduce novel ideas into the economy, which then percolate to other sectors (e.g. new designs), or that they facilitate the adoption and retention of new ideas or technologies in other sectors (e.g. ICT). In contrast to the romantic vie w of the indi vidual heroic artist, both the contemporary polic y approach and the b usiness literature on creati vity f avour project teams and productive interchange of ideas in a creati ve process. It was only a matter of time before the concept of agglomerations of small-scale creati vity emerged to counter the political economy of the media approach, which saw creativity “contained” within lar ge industrial agglomerations or monopolies. Indeed, the concept of “creati ve industries,” which informed polic y developments in Beijing, was itself borne out of widespread industry restructuring and disintermediation in The terms cultural and creati ve economy are sometimes used interchangeably . Gibson and K ong (2005) ar gue, for instance, that because of the needs for a highly dif ferentiated and o verlapping workforce, a full blown cultural economy is only really found in lar ge cities. See also Hall (1999).

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global media industries. 5 Evidence for the dynamic role of independents within the value chain can be found in the Hollyw ood film industry whereby the “integrated film studio system” of the 1950s gradually transformed into a netw ork of specialist f irms collaborating in pro viding services for majors, as well as for other independents. Nevertheless, despite the reframing of creati vity as less of an individual act of genius and more dependent upon relationships between individuals and organisations, geographical location has maintained a key role in policy making. By the 1990s, an influential school of b usiness literature had championed the idea of clusters, not just for their production ef ficiencies, but as places where competition was fostered through interaction, cooperative networks, job switching and competition: in short, knowledge transfer processes. Following on from the work of Alfred Marshall in the 1920s on industrial districts (Marshall 1920/1986), writers such as Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter (1990) ar gued that while localities such as Silicon Valley were initially generated by market forces, governments can play an interventionist role. The idea of seeding clusters in the hope that they might generate rewards f aster than mark et forces alone is a v ery appealing one. Then again, the current attention to clusters frequently issues from a desire to establish a first mover advantage, before other nations and re gions. In particular, it has been widely demonstrated that clusters situated close to uni versities and research institutes are able to take advantage of technology transfer and knowledge workers. The Chinese “de velopment script” reads that clustering will assist media and cultural industries to become more competiti ve. The appeal of clusters in this post-World Trade Organization (WTO) period is “freshness, ” albeit a re version of an old socialist de velopment script. 6 Porter’s consultancy with numerous national and re gional go vernments appeared to add weight to the cluster ar gument e ven if as some ha ve argued, his def inition of cluster is eclectic and often misleading (Desrochers and Sautet 2004). In the main, ho wever, Porter w as dra wing on the success of places lik e Silicon Valley (California), Route 128 (Boston) and numer ous other manufacturing districts from Denmark to Italy, from Thailand and Japan. Porter argued that the geographical concentration of companies w orking within a particular field produces “competitive advantage,” which in turn impacts upon the business, the area and even the wider economy. Such was the persuasive force of US business expertise that the idea quickly took root in China’s cultural institutions, at least those seeking to capitalise on the consumer boom of the past decade in China’ s cities. The idea of media and creati ve clusters translated well, not altogether surprising gi ven the le gacy of collecti ve production: the Peoples’ Communes (1950s–1960s), the town and village enterprises (TVEs) (1980s–1990s), the science and technology parks (1990s–2000s), and the media conglomerates (instigated For a good discussion of the genesis of creative industries and disintermediation within the creative value chain, see Bilton (2007). 6 China joined the WT O in December 2001, a mo ve that signalled an intensif ication of foreign interest in China’s creative industries, notably adv ertising, design and v alue-added services such as consulting and management. For a good discussion of the advertising environment post-WTO, see Wang (2008). 5

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in the late 1990s–early 2000s). In dif fering ways, these collecti ve models responded to social and economic reforms. The common ingredients were a high de gree of hierarchical management, f avourable in vestment policies and state supervision. By mid-2006, Beijing already had ten established cultural creati ve industry clusters or bases; many more are scheduled to begin development over the next few years.

History: Geo-politics, Geo-architecture These contemporary plans to re vitalise Beijing’ s cultural infrastructure stand in stark contrast to the idea of the producti ve city, which had underwritten Beijing’ s redevelopment during the 1950s and 1960s. Be ginning in 1953, a series of city Master Plans w as implemented. Mao and Jin (1997) ha ve noted that the vision of the day w as about serving the ordinary w orking people as well as f acilitating the growth of industries. In ef fect, this serv ed the needs of the central go vernment. Beijing w as set to become a national economic centre with a strong industrial base, as well as being a national political and cultural centre. Old b uildings and civil engineering structures – those that were seen to impede these objecti ves were demolished, a precursor of things to come in the post-Mao era. De velopment in suburban areas progressed lar gely through the establishment of manuf acturing industries, with the exception of the city’s north-western sector where an independent uni versity and research zone w as established. Urban infrastructure, such as roads and public transportation, w as categorised under government provision. The priority project of assuring urban w ater supply recei ved considerable attention in the first Master Plan owing to water shortages in the area. The first 5 Year Development Plan (1954) led to the xpansion e of several industrial districts, a socialist strategy to transform cities into productive centres (Visser 2004; Friedmann 2005). The Chinese Communist P arty’s utopian plan to catch up with the developed capitalist countries, the Great Leap F orward (1958–1961), had led to the elimination of difference between workers and peasants, between urban and rural, and between intellectuals and w orkers. The early years of the ne w republic witnessed a considerable influx of people into the big cities, the urbanised propor tion of the total population doubling between 1949 and 1960 (Friedmann 2005: 11). City migration was eventually held in check by the hukou household permit system introduced in 1960. 7 The centre of Beijing e xpanded into the sub urbs, Chang’an Street w as widened and e xtended, and the ne w go vernment constructed se veral symbolic edifices including The Great Hall of the People, the Museum of History and Revolution, and the subway system. Set up in 1958 in order to control mass urbanisation, China’ s hukou registration system effectively divides the population into two – “the haves” (urban households) and “the have nots” (rural households). Having a hukou registration provides residents with greater social freedom, for instance, the right to purchase a vehicle, to receive education and health welfare. Migrant populations without a city hukou lack such rights.

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A new phase of urban transformation follo wed during the 1980s. During this decade, Beijing set its sights on asserting its authority as China’ s cultural and political centre. Pri vate capital stimulated the architectural transformation of the Central Business District (CBD), concentric ring roads were added, and highw ays constructed to link Beijing with south-eastern T ianjin and northern Shijiazhuang. Already by this time, man y of Beijing’ s hutongs were tar geted for demolition. The factories that 20 years pre viously had symbolised socialist producti vity were shifted further to the mar gins. Relaxations on migration sa w many more pouring into the capital looking for economic gain. By 1995, o ver a quarter of the population was made up of migrants from the countryside (V isser 2004: 284). The current phase of urban development recognises the dual impact of modernisation and urban congestion. Beijing’ s 2004–2020 de velopment plan articulates a sustainable vision for this me ga city of 13.5 million people. The Beijing Plan Document emphasises economic use of resources and ecological sustainability .8 It argues that the capacity of land, water, and ultimately productivity, is contingent on natural resources and the reduction of pollution. These challenges of diminishing natural resources contrast with current ar guments about the increasing returns of knowledge-based industries, service industries and cultural industries. By 2006, the proportion of Beijing’ s economy occupied by services w as 70.9% while tourism accounted for almost 22.9% of Beijing’s GDP (Beijing Statistics Yearbook 2007).9 Indeed, the question of ho w much of Beijing’s economy is culture-related is open to scrutiny. The city trades hea vily on its cultural je wels, including the F orbidden Palace (gugong), the Summer P alace (yihe yuan), Tiananmen Square ( Tiananmen guangchang), the T emples of Hea ven ( tian tan ) and Earth ( ditan), and the Ming Tombs (mingchao shisan ling ). In 2003, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences calculated the v alue added contrib ution of culture to Beijing’ s economy at just 4.89%, less than Shanghai at 5.84%. By 2005, a ne w data calculation system had recalibrated Beijing’s cultural value added as 10.2% (Keane 2007).10

Capital Culture While Shanghai is unquestionably a more cosmopolitan b usiness metropolis, Beijing is the national capital. W ith the possible e xception of Shenzhen in South China, Beijing is China’s most multi-cultural city. As was the case in the imperial past, man y are dra wn to the capital for a v ariety of reasons. According to Jerry Beijing City Plan (2004 ~ 2020 仟) appro ved by the State Council in 2005. See http://www . bjghw.gov.cn/ztgh/. 9 Figures such as these should be noted with a de gree of critical distance. The idea of service industries incorporates everything from housekeeping to foot massage. Unquestionably, however, Beijing and Shanghai are the centres of producer services such as management and public relations, consulting, advertising and education. 10 See http://www.beinet.net.cn/enews/200612/t146634.htm. 8

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Wang, a digital content entrepreneur who mo ved from Shanghai to Beijing in 2002, “Beijing has more culture and is closer to the core idea of Chinese culture. Shanghai is more lik e a cop y of Ne w York or Hong K ong,” (Personal intervie w, 20 July 2005). In addition to its cultural assets, Beijing is the central node in the Chinese communications industries. Wang adds: “[i]n Beijing the communications environment and the relationships are dif ferent. W e are engaged in a telecommunications business and we need relationships with the Internet, broadband and mobile companies. ” T elecommunications companies based in Beijing include China Telecom, China Mobile, China Netcom and China Unicom. In this sense, the concept of “inner and outer” (neibu waibu yinsu) encapsulates Beijing’s capital complex. Echoing the authoritarian hierarchy of the past, polic y makers working in the cultural and media industries in Beijing are acutely a ware of state agendas, while at the same time attending to dif ferent interests. This tension between inner (political conformity) and outer (the interests of people) is more e vident in Beijing than elsewhere in China (Chen 2004a). Proximity to decision mak ers and to the machinations of po wer pro vides incenti ves for media industries to locate in the capital. It is easier to gain access to po wer brok ers, whether this contact occurs within the actual corridors of power or within informal social activities. In many respects, Beijing would appear to satisfy the requirements of technology and talent, the f irst two of Richard Florida’ s indexes for a city’ s creative success (Florida 2002). Ho wever, tolerance, the third of Florida’ s indexes is less ob vious, especially when e xpressed in his pro vocative term “gay inde x.” Nonetheless, despite a reputation as resolutely political and b ureaucratic, Beijing can also claim a certain ethos. By ethos, I refer to the interdependence of indi vidual attitudes, the intangible network effect of a common identif ication with the city (Co wan 2002). According to Chen Guanzhong, the co-author of Bohemian China, Beijing’s complex hybridity dates back hundreds of years. Proximity to Mongolia and the former Manchuria (the re gion no w collecti vely termed Dongbei) has contrib uted to the Beijing ethos. The authors of a recent book about Beijing contend that “the border location of the city not only serv ed strate gic purposes b ut also fostered cultural creativity” (Li et al. 2007: 27). In modern times, the city has “absorbed” migrant populations; this is no better illustrated than in Zhejiang V illage, a community situated at Dazhongmen in Fengtai District 5 km south of the centre of Beijing. During the 1990s, the area had become a locus for small scale clothing b usinesses from Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang Pro vince. Despite being e victed due to local government pressure in 1995, the migrants returned the follo wing year to set up close relations with the local people, eventually establishing a recognised cluster of clothing production factories (see Fig. 1). This absorption of di verse elements adds to the capital comple x. While some like Jerry Wang assert that Shanghai is a reflection of New York, Chen Guanzhong argues that Beijing’s cultural ethos is closer to Ne w York: “whether you have long hair or a shaved head, whether you wear well-fitting clothes or clothes whose style and colour don’ t match, in public Beijing people are indif ferent.” He also adds, “Beijing is ‘cool’, lik e New York: you can praise or deride Beijingers. The y just don’t care” (Chen 2004b: 54).

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Fig. 1 Beijing creative clusters [See separate file for the map]

Beijing culture is often associated with a certain muted rebellion, e ven bohemianism. The Beijing writer , Wang Shuo, dre w heavily on street life and v ernacular culture for his short stories about hooligans ( liumang), many of which were made into TV serials and mo vies in the early 1990s. The director , Feng Xiaogang, who has collaborated with W ang on se veral projects, w as responsible for the 1993 hit serial Beijingers in New York (Beijing ren zai NiuYue), in which the entrepreneurial aspirations of a Beijing nati ve play out in the capitalist milieu of the Big Apple (Keane 2001). In ef fect, this w as less a critique of W estern capitalism and v alues than a precursor of Beijing’s emergence from political city to modern business centre. Beijing has shaken off the popular image as a political city. Avant-garde art and rock music has contrib uted greatly to the Beijing ethos. In the late 1980s, Beijing witnessed the cultural spark of Cui Jian, a folk rock musician whose lyrics dre w on generational ennui, culminating in spectacular and idiosyncratic performances during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (Huot 2000).

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The dynamics of Beijing’s creativity are collectively assembled in hutongs, bars and clubs, and mix ed and shaken in a milieu created by the international b usiness fraternity and foreign embassies. Bar areas lik e Sanlitun (Chao yang District) and Houhai (Dongcheng District) attract a mix of w ould-be artists, musicians, tourists and entrepreneurs. The city welcomes a vibrant gay culture despite the go vernment’s spiritual ci vilisation edicts against bohemianism and homose xuality. In addition to the signif icant income generated from cultural tourism, Beijing’ s cultural economy is supplemented by the infrastructure of its man y performing and convention venues. In f act, the Great Hall of the People, the splendid monument to the Communist Re volution b uilt in 1959 adjacent to T iananmen Square, has become a commercial venue for hire, accommodating international popular culture acts such as Ri ver Dance (Ireland) and Richard Clayderman, while also servicing the requirements of prestigious conferences.

Beijing’s New Creative Clusters Beijing’s abundance of cultural resources ne vertheless required planning in order to e xploit their economic potential. By 2005, the creati ve cluster idea ( chuangyi jijuqu) had surf aced as a solution to stimulate the gro wth of Beijing’ s cultural resources. It seemed a classic solution dra wn from Marxist economic theory and justified by the success of industrial clusters else where in China. The ne w great leap forward, the clustering of cultural v alue, is an example of ideas that are paradigmatic or infrastructural. The value of clustering, from a manufacturing economy perspective, rests on a pre-e xisting tradition of collecti vism. The paradox here is that collectivism is no w associated with creati vity. In addition to the influence of Michael Porter, the creati ve cluster found support through the “super -sign” of the creative industries, already mo ving from Hong K ong into the mainland (K eane 2007; Hui 2006; Mok 2006; K ong et al. 2006). During 2005, Beijing’ s planners worked feverishly to nominate clusters that w ould be included as part of its ne w cultural and creative industries (CCI) development agenda. On 14 December 2006, Beijing’s cultural and propaganda of ficials gathered at the Sheraton Hotel to e xtol the virtues of creative excellence and the shift from “made in China” to “created in China.” Ten designated cultural creati ve clusters were announced, the representatives of these projects recei ving silver plaques of e xcellence. This w as an auspicious time. Beijing’s coming of age in the creati ve economy signified a deepening of the creative zeitgeist. By the time of the Second Beijing International Cultural Creati ve Industries Expo in November 2007, the cluster momentum had reached a new level. The logic of agglomeration had by then resulted in vigorous competition among districts to erect “cultural creative parks,” in sectors such as design, animation, digital content, visual and performing arts and f ashion (Fig. 1). To understand these aspirations, it is helpful to visualise various concentrations of creative investment, human capital and infrastructure. In the follo wing sections I look at the north-west, centre and

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the east of Beijing. In the western and north-western districts of Beijing, we f ind well-developed digital content clusters, as well as spectacular architectural projects associated with the Beijing Olympics. 11 The centre of Beijing trades of f cultural tourism together with performing arts, e xhibition and traditional culture, while the east of Beijing is increasingly shaped by craft and visual arts.

Digital Capital in the West and North-West Formally launched in 1988, Zhongguangcun Haidian P ark is widely re garded as China’s Silicon Valley, serving as a major cradle of the knowledge-based economy in China. 12 Some 6,000 high-tech companies operate there, 70% of which ha ve their core business in the IT industry. The Zhongguancun “high tech zone” claims two key clusters: the Zhongguancun Software Park and the Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneer Base. The former , which was instituted in 2001, splits into tw o “national bases”: one for softw are development and the other for softw are export. Large transnational technology companies positioned in this 292 ha zone include Oracle, IBM, Siemens, Iona, Fle xtronics, TCS and WIPR O. In addition to these anchor tenants, there are more than 100 small and medium enterprises. It is estimated that more than 108,000 softw are engineers w ork in the zone. The Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneer Base is a more recent addition. Established in 5 May 2005, it covers a total area of 9.89 ha with a construction area of 7 ha (Keane 2007). The base includes digital media technology , internet-based industries, and digital entertainment software enterprises, cartoon and animation incubators. Companies in the centre include Yahoo China, Tengxun and China Netcom. The Pioneer Base is undoubtedly the creative edge of the technology district, with commercial enter prises ranging from software, video games, animation, music to publishing. A range of go vernment policies pro vide industry assistance to those b usinesses that qualify as “cultural creati ve enterprises.” Sweeteners include a 2-year tax freeze, following which a 15% tax threshold applies. Universities that engage in research and development that embodies technology transfer are e xempt from operational taxes in addition to receiving an income tax dispensation on fees earned from their consulting activities. Eligible creative enterprises in Beijing can claim 150% deduction on technical development costs as well as 2.5% of staff education costs (Keane 2007). Generous management fee depreciation benef its also apply to enterprises depending on their The idea of creative clusters in this chapter refers specifically to spatially concentrated agglomerations of creati ve businesses that seek to e xploit and v alue from location. Projects such as the Olympic Stadium, The Olympic Green and the CCTV to wers, which are situated in Chao yang District, are signif icant in that the y mak e a statement about national creati vity, albeit hea vily dependent on international design. In this sense I refer to such projects as cultural assets. That is not to say that the y may in future function as core attractors of creati ve businesses. For a discussion of Olympic architecture see the July 2008 issue of Urbane http://www.urbanechina.com. 12 For a discussion of Zhonguancun as an evolving set of relations among the state, MNCs, local firms and research institutes, see Yu Zhou (2008) The Inside Story of China’s High-Tech Industry. 11

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level of investment. The Beijing Municipal go vernment has established an RMB 0.5 million “cultural creati ve industries de velopment fund” as well as similar “cluster infrastructure fund.” In summary, these policies are broad and strate gic, although the question always remains as to how transparent the governance of the schemes will be, taking into account the guanxi that inevitably seems to follow investment. As China edges closer to the inno vation frontier, Zhongguancun is repositioning itself as more than just a massi ve high-tech agglomeration: it is reaching out into adjoining districts and de vouring projects. Close to Zhongguancun, an ambitious project is taking shape on the site of the Beijing Capital Iron and Steel f actory. In 2007, the Beijing Iron and Steel Factory in the western district of Shijingshan began to reduce its operation allo wing construction to commence on the ne w “integrated services district.” The polluting f actory will be mo ved further outside Beijing in Hebei Province and with it, most of its 10,000 w orkers. Some of the more fortunate workers will be retained in the ne w digital industries, while others will pro vide the muscle to construct the ne w infrastructure. The new modern district will accommodate China’s creative class, to use Richard Florida’s felicitous phrase. There is more than a degree of irony in this post-industrial prescription for sa ving this “distressed area” and moving redundant workers away to new pastures. Blue-collar workers were formerly the “working class” (gongren jieji) under Maoist revolutionary culture; they were the backbone of China’s future. Intellectuals and entrepreneurs, the nerds of the information industry, are the newly approved “engineers of the nation’s progress.” The Capital Recreation District (CRD) will feature an animation production base, a digital entertainment and leisure centre, conference and e xhibition f acilities, and business offices. These will be supplemented by purpose-b uilt education and training centres. The CRD, with the support of the local go vernment as part of the district’ s 11th Five Year plan, offers relocation benefits to firms, including software developers, mobile communication, animation and video games companies. The development will also lure creati ve talent by of fering incenti ves including Beijing residenc y permits and rent-free apartments. The site is already being referred to as the Beijing Cyber Recreation Industry Base. There are hopes that spillo vers from Zhongguancun High Tech area will occur , especially as Zhongguancun rents are no w increasing. The Shijingshan high-tech de velopment space with the CRD will be administered by Zhonguancun district government. According to the pre-publicity for the development, the registered population of the CRD is estimated to remain under 520,000 people with services industries accounting for 40% of the economic output (K eane 2007).

The Centre and the East Dongcheng and Chao yang districts lie on the Eastern side of Beijing. W ith Tiananmen Square, Zhongnanhai and the National People’ s Congress, Dongcheng District is the site of the nation’ s political po wer. It is also the locus of man y of Beijing’s culture relics, a term used to describe an ything from architecture to artefacts. Established in 1958 and encompassing the former Dongsi and Dongdan districts, Dongcheng captures a large slice of Beijing’s tourist market. The cultural

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assets of Dongcheng include the Forbidden City, Ditan Park (Temple of Earth), the Gate Tower of Zhengyanmen, the former residences of writers Lao She and Mao Dun, the China National Museum, the National Theatre, Central Opera Academy and the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The district also includes Zhongshan P ark, Beihai P ark, Nanluo guxiang Hutong, the W angfujing Shopping Mall and the Beijing Train Station. Within the Yonghe cluster itself, we f ind four “cultural relics”: the Lama Temple (yonghegong), the Bell Tower (zhong lou) and Drum Tower (gulou), the Confucius Temple (kong miao) and the Imperial College (guozi jian). The term “Creati ve Central”, initially concei ved by a consortium of cultural bureaucrats and “creative industry” lobbyists, pro vides the inspiration for the redevelopment of Dongcheng. The k ey driver of these cultural initiati ves is the Gehua Cultural De velopment Group, a state-o wned conglomerate which manages and operates three key subsidiaries: the Beijing Gehua Technology Centre located within the Gehua Tower on the North Second Ring Road, the Gehua Broadcasting Centre in the Huabei Hotel and the China Millennium Art Museum (in Xicheng District). Gehua began life in December 1997 through a mer ger of tw o state-owned companies – advertising and arts group under the administration of the Beijing Municipal Cultural Bureau and a cable tele vision subsidiary of the Beijing Administration of Film, Radio and Television. Like many cultural conglomerates in China, Gehua is a state-owned enterprise “but has a share-holding structure and operates in a mark etoriented f ashion f inanced by its o wn re venues” (Beijing Creati ve Centre 2007). Gehua’s b usiness scope includes cable TV netw ork pro vision, construction and management of large cultural venues, organising and undertaking cultural and sports events, as well as cross-cultural e xchanges between China and foreign countries. In 2006, the Beijing Gehua Cultural De velopment Group recei ved the green light to construct and operate one of the ten ne w cultural creati ve clusters, the Yonghe Science and Technology Park, located in the proximity of the Lama Temple (Yonghegong). The f irst stage be gan in September 2006 with the inauguration of the Beijing Centre for Creativity. The BCC is a non-profit organisation set up to promote international exchange and collaboration, to incubate creative ventures, provide training, conduct research and or ganise e vents and acti vities (Beijing Creati ve Centre 2007). In November 2007, another layer of organisation was formalised with the incorporation of the International Creati ve Industries Alliance, located in the Gehua Tower. The ICIA’s mission is to manage a project called the Creati ve Hub within the Gehua Tower, with a combined floor space of 2,700 m2. The ICIA will be responsible for administering resources for creati ve businesses, many of which will be situated in the Yonghe Science and Technology Park, and which will subsequently be beneficiaries of tax incentive schemes and other forms of industry support. These incentives are offered to international businesses as well as local players. 13 13 The founding members of ICIA are the China Culture Administration Association, the Beijing Academy of Science and T echnology, the Hong K ong Design Centre, the Beijing Industrial Design Promotion Or ganization, the Z-P ark Brand Inno vation and De velopment Association Beijing, the Corporate Design Foundation (US), Made In China (UK), the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creati ve Industries and Innovation (Australia), and the Datong Foundation China Desk (Netherlands).

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Whereas Dongcheng lays claim to Beijing’ s cultural cro wn jewels, Chao yang District is the commercial po werhouse of Beijing. Identif ied as Beijing’ s CBD, Chaoyang has the highest proportion of the w orld’s top 500 companies in China and houses 159 foreign embassies (Hui 2006). Chao yang was the f irst district in Beijing to identify with the cultural creati ve industries movement, commissioning a report entitled “Study on Cultural and Creati ve Industries for Chaoyang District, Beijing” in 2005 (see Hui 2006). One of the cultural landmarks of Chao yang is the contemporary artists’ district (yishu qu) at Dashanzi. The name 798 is well-kno wn internationally. A former electronics factory in the 1950s, 798 is a tourist attraction for man y visitors to Beijing. For both artists and visitors alike, the district is a symbol of Beijing’s new openness. 798 is situated within a lar ger industrial cluster initially called Joint F actory 718 between ring roads 4 and 5 on Beijing’s central north-east, occupying a total land area of 290,000 m2, 225,000 m2 of which are occupied by b uildings. The area originally contained multiple factories designed in the Bauhaus style by East German architects in 1952, occupying 93,000 m2 of the whole f actory complex. In 1964, the 718 Joint Factory was disbanded and six sub-factories (700, 706, 707, 718, 797 and 798) took on their own lives. In 2001, the f actories joined together under the name Se ven Star China Electronic Group ( qixing huadian jituan). The area includes a po wer generation Factory 751, which is adjacent to the arts centre and currently remains under heavy security. The area w as initially used for public art projects by the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts when it moved during its transitional period to a semiconductor factory one block a way from 798 in September 1995. The precinct w as first made available for individual studios in 2000 when the Academy mo ved out. Within 2 years, the area had transformed into an e xhibition space featuring China’s avant-garde. The design elements of 798 were further enhanced by Chinese artists who had experienced loft style living overseas (He 2004). The Beijing-based architect-writer Bert de Muynck has written about the transformation of 798 into a cultural concept. He quotes Bérenice Angremy , director of Thinking Hands Co. Ltd., an international art consultant, who w orked for 5 years in 798: “[i]n the f irst phase, 2002–2005, we mo ved into a lar gely empty f actory and or ganically turned it into an art district. The f irst galleries entering here had a mission, to f ill a space in Beijing’s creative society.” During this phase, 798 was open to all, the occupants believing that it w ould soon be demolished. After 3 years, participation in the project w as subject to a rene wing yearly contract. Angremy continues: “[i]n the second phase, after 2005, the Se ven Stars Group stopped renting to foreigners and artists” (cited in de Muynck 2007). On 28 March 2006, the comple x came under the joint management of the Chaoyang government and the Seven Stars Group. A management group called the Beijing 798 Arts District Construction Management Compan y was formed. From 28 September to 14 October of that year , the site hosted the “2006 Beijing 798 Cultural Creative Festival.” In December 2006, the site was officially recognised as one of Beijing’s ten designated cultural creative clusters. The future of 798 is currently under local go vernment review. Urban planners have recommended e xtending cultural tourism aspects to include the adjacent

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751 factory and even turn one of the gas tanks into a boutique brewery, together with further landscaping. Investment has flo wed into the site, enhancing the contemporary look of the art district. By April 2007, the co-owners had positioned three large projects for 798’ s future status. T ogether with impro ved road access and further greening of the site, 798 w ould house a Chinese Contemporary Art Academy , the 798 Creation Factory, and the Beijing 798 International Cop yright Trading Centre. Despite these enhancements to 798’ s brand, man y artists ha ve look ed further afield to Songzhuang (see belo w) and another eastern district, Gaobeidian. The drift away from 798 is orchestrated to some extent by Huang Rui, the figurehead of 798’s emergence. Whether Gaobeidian, currently a production centre for furniture, will function as a kind of clearing zone between the commercialism of 798 and the more aesthetic milieu of Songzhuang remains to be seen. De Muynck notes that the Gaobeidian plan includes international brand-name stores, a traditional cultural street to be called Qingming Shanghe Street, 14 a bar and club area called Peach Blossom Island, an avant-garde centre aptly named Creative Land and of course, a business district with five star hotels and conference centres. In China, the future of art and culture is irreversibly tied to developers as much as to cultural of ficials. Elsewhere in Chaoyang, there are ambitions to develop a media cluster. CCTV is relocating from western Xicheng district to the eastern third ring road in Chaoyang. This is a massive project, only topped by the Beijing Olympics Stadium construction, significantly also in Chaoyang district. The new CCTV headquarters has been designed by the Dutch architect Rem K oolhaas, a 230-m-high arch formed by tw o L-shaped towers containing o ver 400,000 m2 of floor space. K oolhaas himself is upbeat about China as a place of creati vity, a place where international companies can design and e xperience “new architecture,” free from the restrictions placed on development in the Netherlands presumably. The relocation of CCTV will reshape Beijing’s CBD, bringing the talents of media professionals closer into the b usiness services milieu. Chao yang is already the most clustered b usiness centre in China, taking into account the high proportion of foreigners w orking in embassies and in businesses. The district has 60 tourist hotels, 12 of which are f ive or six-star . However, the relocating of CCTV and the re-imagining of Chaoyang will also mean that thousands of people will be forced to relocate else where. Real estate prices, already high, will escalate, making the district unaf fordable for poorer Beijing residents. The Songzhuang Creati ve Arts and Cartoon Cluster in T ongzhou District (for merly Tong County) is another ambitious project, the scale of which is dif ficult to imagine in de veloped countries. In the Jin and Y uan Dynasties (twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE), the re gion was the northern axis of the Great Canal leading to Hangzhou. The district’s economic success to date has come from high-tech industries as well as manuf acturing, food processing and garment production. The Songzhuang cluster dra ws together more than 2,000 contemporary artists: the best w orks are to be found in a lar ge e xhibition comple x funded by

This is based on the famous Qingming Scroll, a portrait of daily life in the Northern Song. The original Qingming Park is found in Kaifeng, Henan Pro vince. For discussion, see Keane (2007).

14

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the local go vernment. Songzhuang is the node of a number of small art villages: Xiaobaocun, Daxingzhuang, Xindian and Xiao yangzhuang. One of the leading art figures in the area is Huang Y ongyu, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Arts. The open and natural en vironment of the district has attracted man y younger artists. The infusion of artists into the community has in turn created a ne w aesthetic immediately apparent in the design of shop fronts. In other w ords, the artists have pro vided a mak eover for this former industrial area. The local go vernment has thrown its weight behind the value-adding capability of the artistic community, establishing and supporting the Songzhuang Artists’ Promotion Society together with an annual Songzhuang Arts Festival in the hope that this creative development model will attract more tourists to the area, perhaps those that ultimately f ind 798 too commercial and Gaobeidian too pretentious. However, commercial concerns also remain at the forefront of Songzhuang’ s ambitions despite some artists’ claims that their w ork is less tainted by the lure of the tourist mark et than their compatriots closer to the CBD. The Songzhuang district plan anticipates brok ering synergy between the creati vity of contemporary art and the modern medium of animation and video games. The relocation of the Sunchime Cartoon and Animation Group’ s administration from Hunan Pro vince to Beijing in 2006 has pro vided the impetus for the rescaling of creati ve industry ambitions. Plans for the ne w Cultural Creati ve Park in T ongzhou include the Sunchime Cartoon and Online Game Industrial Base. The 34 ha park is described as “integrating cultural resources, technological innovation and artistic creativity to form an industrial cluster” (Sunchime 2006).

Conclusion: Clusters or Real Estate? What do these de velopments re veal about China’ s creati ve economy? W ill the recent proliferation of clusters, parks, precincts and zones (T able 1) produce real innovation or will the y struggle with each other to survi ve? In the be ginning of the chapter, I suggested that clustering follo ws the logic of socialist de velopment theory more than mark et principles of competiti ve advantage. In China, the question often asked is: what is needed? Under the current in vestment friendly regime, at all levels of government, it is relatively easy to convince city planners of the logic of agglomeration. The deeper question is: what is possible? Is it possible to harvest creative dynamism in such clusters? As one ne w media entrepreneur wryly commented to me: “parks are for nerds,” (Personal interview, Wang 2005). As I ha ve mentioned, clusters are not a ne w idea in China. Ho wever, the cur rent phase of clustering signals intent to incorporate disparate elements, including greater degrees of international human capital and investment. Size is also an issue. China’s economic development since 1978 has been a story of many small empires rather than national champions de vouring competitors. The term “duplicate construction” ( chongfu jianshe ) describes the process by which enterprises replicate one another’ s acti vities, e ven including infrastructure, resulting in a fragmented marketplace typified by parasitic localisation and little real inno vation.

Shijingshan (West)

Fengtai (S)

Xuanwu (West)

Chongwen (South CBD)

Chaoyang (East CBD)

Xicheng (West CBD)

Dongcheng (North-east inner CBD)

Recreation and ecological entertainment zone in construction incorporating Shijingshan Amusement Park, Beijing International Sculpture Institute, Radio China International, a digital amusement e xperience town and Post-industrial civilisation experience centre

Cultural tourism: Yonghegong (Tibetan Temple); Guozijian, Temple of Earth, Tiananmen Square; Forbidden Palace; Culture lanes (hutongs) New media: Internet gaming and animation base (Gehua Group anchor tenant) Conventions: Great Hall of People Cultural tourism: Millennium Art Museum; Great Hall of the People, National Grand Theatre, Chinese Beijing Opera T roupe; publishing and print groups; west Chang’an street culture zone Religious culture (Daoist Temple); hutong culture Business and content industries: Centre for business consultancy services, advertising, emerging potential in service and content oriented industries (CCTV, BTV and Phoenix TV relocation) Fine arts and design: Contemporary performing arts, publishing, arts, design, fashion and antiques International: Foreign embassy district Sports: 2008 Beijing Olympic Stadium Education: Chinese University of Communication (Cultural Industries Research and Training Base); Academy of Art and Design of Tsinghua University; Central Academy of Fine Arts Cultural tourism: Temple of Heaven; Traditional medicine; Religious culture (Daoist Temple, Christian and Muslim Mosque); hutong culture Sports and recreation: Sports development base Traditional cultural district: Tianjiao performing street artists; Dream of the Red Mansion backlot. Religious culture (Christian and Muslim Mosque) Fashion design; clothing production and retail

Table 1 Beijing’s cultural creative clusters, bases and centres by district (Compiled by author) District Cultural and knowledge based assets

International Media Avenue; Liulichang, Dashila commercial culture District incorporating cultural creative industry park China Vogue Brand & Fashion Promulgation Base in Dahongmen area (also known as Zhejiang Village) Capital Recreation District (CRD), National demonstration base of digital media technology industrialisation, National base for animation and game industry development

798 contemporary arts cluster, Panjiayuan antique market, Jingyuan digital photography base, Sanjianfang international animation base, Jingmian No 2. Textile Factory reconstruction project: international fashion and media centre), Zhengdong Creative Industry Park, Beijing Happy Valley, Olympic Contemporary Sports Culture Centre, Chaoyang Culture Park, Sanlitun-Gongti Fashion Culture Street, Wenyu River Green Environment district, Dahuan Culture Park, Gaojing Film, TV and Communication Park, Gaobeidian Folk-custom Culture Park. Planned Beijing Fashion Business District (FBD)

Beijing DRC Industrial Design Creative Industries Base in Deshengyuan

Beijing Gehua Cultural Creative Industry Centre; Yongheyuan Science and Technology Park; International Creative Industries Alliance (ICIA), National Performance Art Centre

Clusters, bases and centres

Film and TV production: Film distribution and services, exhibition and new releases (festivals); Copyright trade centre Fashion: Textile design (Cultural Creative Park) Visual arts and traditional culture

Huairou (North)

Cultural tourism: Great Wall (emphasis on tour groups) Traditional culture

Media: One zone, three parks (backlots) and three centres (training in software, animation and creative arts)

Daxing (South)

Changping (North) Yanqing (North) Miyun (North)

Visual arts: Large scale artist collectives and projected animation centres

Airport zone: New international airport; folk artists’ village (Banqiao) Design: Projected design zone and joint training institutes Print: Printing industry production base Exhibition: New Beijing International Exhibition Centre

Intellectual property: High tech and software centre of China; telecommunications, TV and movie institutes, emphasis on IP (patents); Digital and media content: Electronics, Internet and gaming industries, film, animation and media content production; Education: Top level universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Science Park; Telecommunication University; Beijing Film Academy: Performance arts; Creative talent training Tourism and intangible cultural heritage

Tongzhou (East)

Mentougou (outer West) Shunyi (NE)

Haidian (North-west)

The Great Wall Culture Tourism Miyun Cultural Creative Industry Street (planned)

Western Beijing Culture Corridor incorporating visual arts, film and photography (projected) Zhongbei film & TV base; New International Exhibition and Advertising Centre within Beijing International Airport creative industry park, Shunyi Creative Industry Centre (planned), Guomen Fashion Industry Centre Sanchen cartoon and animation base, Songzhuang artists village (both incorporated within planned Beijing Cultural Creative Park) National (Weishanzhuang) New Media Production Base, Xingguang film and TV Park, Beiputuo film and TV Park; Dasenlin film and TV Park China (Huairou) Film and TV Base projected to be biggest in Asia (16 studio backlots); currently operational base of China Film Group Beijing Fashion Island Shangyuan artists village, Xiangtang Culture Village

Zhonguancun Software Park; Zhongguancun Creative Industry Pioneer Base

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The question of whether these creati ve clusters can break a way from duplicate construction is a moot point. The k ey point is, e ven in a mark etplace as lar ge as China, even in a country so diverse, how many “creative” clusters can you sustain? The advantages of clustering – the reduction in transport costs, accessibility to services and human capital, associational activity, knowledge spillovers etc. – are likely to be ne gated by cities, districts and re gions competing for in vestment in similar sectors. Furthermore, in a city such as Beijing, ho w many digital, ne w media and fashion “bases” can co-exist? Rather than providing the basis for China’s entry into the fast lane of the creative economy, many of these proliferating clusters will eventually finish as road wrecks. In some respects, the problem is an absence of creativity more than a creative zeitgeist. Creativity is something that is added, like a façade, to show loyalty to the 11th 5 Year Plan. Likewise, “cultural creative industries” has become an e xpedient term to justify real estate speculation and the construction of creati ve training centres, often based on b ureaucratic models b ut lacking real imagination and a sense of risk-taking. Time will tell if this latest stage of collective organisation will move China forward or retard the regime’s creative vision.

References Andersson, A. E. and E. A. Andersson. 2006. The economics of e xperiences, the arts and entertainment. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Baldwin, R. 2006. Globalisation: The great unb undling(s). Economic Council of Finland. www . tinyurl.com/2ol2n8. Accessed on 17 May 2008. Beijing Creative Centre. 2007. Promotional material. Gehua Group. Beijing Statistics Y earbook. 2007. http:www .bjstats.gov.cn/tjnj/2007-tjnj/. Accessed on 17 May 2008. Bilton, C. 2007. Management and cr eativity: From creative industries to cr eative management. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Chen Guanzhong. 2004a. Boximiya Beijing (Bohemian Beijing). In Boximiya Zhong guo (Bohemian China), eds. Chen Guanzhong, Liao Weitang and Yan Jun, 21–51. Guilin: Guanxi University Press. Chen Guanzhong. 2004b . You yibai ge liyou b u gai zai Beijing shenghuo wei shenme hai zai zhe? (Given a hundred reasons that one should not li ve in Beijing, why is one still here?). In Boximiya Zhong guo (Bohemian China), eds. Chen Guanzhong, Liao W eitang and Y an Jun, 53–59. Guilin: Guanxi University Press. Cowan, T . 2002. Creative destruction: How globalization is c hanging the world’ s cultur es. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. De Muynck, B. 2007. The rise and f all of Beijing’ s creative business district. Commercial Real Estate 4 (April 2007). See http://idash.or g/pipermail/my-ci/2007-May/000299.html. Desrochers, P. and F . Sautet. 2004. Cluster -based economic strate gy, facilitation policy and the market process. The Review of Austrian Economics 17(2/3): 233–245. Florida, R. 2002. The rise of the creative class and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books. Friedmann, J. 2002. The prospect of cities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Friedmann, J. 2005. China’s urban transition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, M. and L. K ong. 2005. Cultural economy: A critical re view. Progress in Human Geography 29(5): 541–561.

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Hall, P. 1999. Cities in civilization: Cultur e, innovation and the urban or der. London: Phoenix Giant. He, W. 2004. 718 gongchang: 798 yishu: yifen shehui shiyan de baogao (718 f actory, 798 art: A report on a social e xperiment). In Beijing 798: Reflections on art, ar chitecture and society in China (Chinese language section), ed. Huang Rui. Hong K ong: Timezone 8. Hui, D. 2006. From cultural to creati ve industries: Strategies for Chaoyang district. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 317–332. Huot, C. 2000. China’s new cultural scene: A handbook of c hanges. Durham/New York: Duke University Press. Keane, M. 2001. By the w ay, FUCK Y OU! Feng Xiaogang’ s disturbing tele vision dramas. Continuum 15(1): 57–66. Keane, M. 2007. Created in China: The great new leap forward. London: Routledge. Kong, L., C. Gibson, L.-M. Khoo and A.-L. Semple. 2006. Knowledges of the creative economy: Towards a relational geography of dif fusion and adaptation in Asia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47(2): 173–194. Landry, C. 2000. The creative city: A toolkit for urban inno vators. London: Earthscan. Li, L., A. Dray-N ovey and Haili K ong. 2007. Beijing: From imperial capital to olympic city . Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Mao, Q. and Jin, Y. 1997. Development issues and planning strategies in the Beijing metropolitan region. Ekistics 64(385–387): 203–210. Marshall, A. 1920/1986. Principles of economics. London: Macmillan. Mok, K. W. P. 2006. In search of the mark et in China: The re gional dimension of Hong K ong’s creative industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 333–347. Porter, M. E. 1990. The competitive advantage of nations. New York: The Free Press. Potts, J. and S. Cunningham. 2008. F our models of the creati ve industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy 14(3): 233–248. Rosen, D. H. 2003. Ho w China is eating Me xico’s lunch. The International Economy Spring: 22–25. Sunchime. 2006. Using motion to create emotion. Promotional material. Sunchime Group. Visser, R. 2004. Space of disappearance: Aesthetic responses to contemporary Beijing city planning. Journal of Contemporary China 13(39): 2777–3310. Wang, J. 2005. Author interview with Jerry Wang, CEO Goyoo Media. June 22. Wang, J. 2008. Brand new China: Advertising, media and commer cial culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zhang Xiaoming, Hu Huilin and Zhang Jiangang. 2004. Only thorough reform can gi ve fresh impetus to the rapid de velopment of China’ s cultural industry . The Blue Book of China’ s Culture 2004: 1–18. Zhou, Y. 2008 The inside story of China’ s high-tech industry: Making Silicon V alley in Beijing . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chapter 7

The European Creative Class and Regional Development: How Relevant Is Florida’s Theory for Europe? Høgni Kalsø Hansen, Bjørn Asheim, and Jan Vang

Introduction Since Florida published his provocative book, The rise of the creative class, in 2002 it has spurred an impressive amount of attention and occasionally, heated debate among academics and policy-makers. With this paper, we aim at pushing this debate further, but not by summarizing, re viewing or contrib uting to the v arious types of critiques of Florida (for a detailed critique, see Glaeser 2004; Malanga 2004; Peck 2005; Markusen 2006; Hansen et al. 2005; Asheim and Hansen 2008; Hansen 2007; see also Chapter 8, Oakle y, this v olume; Chapter 9, Mok, this volume). Instead we test and discuss the relevance of the core hypotheses in Florida’s work for 445 European regions and thus contrib ute critical yet constructi ve insights into the relevance of Florida’s work for Europe. The re gions are distributed across Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and the UK. There are good reasons to undertake this exercise in a European context especially as Florida is central to policy-making in Europe as well. The creative class (or classes) in Europe is carrier of dif ferent cultures, historical e xperiences, educational backgrounds and possibly, different value systems. The re gions are embedded in dif ferent nations and super-national regimes of regulation, have different histories and cultures, and levels of urbanisation from the US. Thus, one can neither a priori assume that Florida’s work will automatically be rele vant in a European conte xt, nor tak e it for granted that its degree of relevance is the same across the di verse European space. The conte xt for Florida’ s w ork is the recognition that creati vity and talents are important f actors underpinning re gional de velopment (Florida 2002, 2005a, b). According to this stream of research, time–space compression has resulted in the emergence of a re gionalised knowledge economy (Asheim et al. 2007) where competition for talent has increased as inno vation becomes crucial for maintaining competitiveness. These insights ha ve entered the re gional polic y agenda. Sub-

H.K. Hansen ( ) Centre for Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) Lund University, P.O. Box 117, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_7, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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sequently, it has forced local and re gional authorities to implement ne w political actions to ward supplementing traditional policies aimed at attracting in vestments (business climate) with people climate policies. This is done with the purpose of attracting and retaining talents and members of the creati ve class as such. Florida’ s work has played a crucial role in spurring these interests. Be yond a doubt, this literature on the creati ve class and the competition for talent has pro vided v aluable insights. Yet, despite attempts at undertaking studies outside the US (and Canada), this stream of research has not been properly tested and discussed in the conte xt of Europe’s regions. Most studies thus f ar have either been aggre gated on the national level or focused on isolated cases (e.g. Florida and T ingali 2004). Our goal is to reduce this omission. This is done by asserting the rele vance of the core of Florida’s theory by identifying and developing the key hypotheses in his work and testing them on the aforementioned 445 European re gions. The empirical case study is based on original data, and allows for targeting the specific weaknesses of the current research on Florida and Europe as we use a regional dataset that includes several regions.1 This implies a more systematic approach compared to isolated case studies. The chapter be gins by outlining the central elements of the creati ve class approach, with the aim identifying and de veloping the central hypotheses we later test in the empirical section. The ne xt section introduces the method and dataset. This is followed by a section presenting and discussing the central findings. Finally, we round off the chapter by presenting some concluding remarks and pointing out the need for further research.

The Creative Class Approach: Unpacking Florida The aim of the section is to clarify what is meant by talents and the creati ve class, and which role the y are attrib ute as engines in re gional development in Florida’ s approach. The section does not stri ve towards giving a detailed introduction and discussion of Florida’s work, but merely to provide sufficient content to legitimize four central hypotheses which are then tested in the empirical section.

The Creative Class and Regional Development: Theory and Development of Hypotheses Florida’s conceptualization of the importance of talents stands on the shoulders of insights generated by research in economic and urban geography on the link between globalization and the crisis of F ordism. According to this research, the ‘Technology, Talent and Tolerance in European Cities: A Comparative Analysis’ was a European Science Foundation project in collaboration with national science foundations and other funding agencies. The Swedish part w as funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project included eight national research teams and w as aimed at e xamining the claims put forw ard by Florida (2002) in a conte xt of European city re gions. The project w as coordinated by professor Bjørn Asheim, Lund University.

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mismatch between the institutions that underpinned theordist F mode ofaccumulation through the 1970s and 1980s transformed the F ordist state into a re gionalised knowledge economy (Asheim et al. 2007; Lundv all 1992), where inno vative industries constitute the foundation for the competiti veness of economies of the developed world. Harvey (1989) e xamined this shift in strate gic go vernance of city-re gions as a mo ve from a managerial to wards an entrepreneurial approach. According to Harvey, four strategies were used in shaping competitiveness. They are: 1. Exploitation of particular advantages for the production of goods and services 2. Improvement of the competiti ve position with respect to the spatial di vision of consumption 3. Acquisition of k ey control and command functions in f inance, government or information gathering and processing, and f inally 4. Competition on the redistributed surplus from central governments These strategies were seen as elements in the increasing competition among cities at national and transnational levels. In Florida’s vocabulary, the policies mainly focusing on improving the business climate were, in Harvey’s words, building regional competitive advantage based on allocative efficiency. The core of business climate policies refers to policies targeting firms’ economic incentives. Due to the focus on business policies, the strategies were blind to the specif ic requirements of inno vative industries and subsequently , the importance of attracting and retaining talents.

The Creative Class as Engines of Regional Development According to Florida, the creative class constitutes the core of innovative industries. Compared to other classes, the creative class poses new conceptual challenges since members of the creative class do not see themselves as members of a class (Florida 2002). In other words, the creative class fails to fit into the traditional class concept as it is def ined by creati ve occupation, within a v ariety of inno vative industries. The creati ve class can be di vided into tw o occupational sub groups: the Super Creative Core being persons carrying out creati ve tasks within computing, architecture, arts, science and education, and the Creati ve Professionals being persons working with management, b usiness, f inancial and le gal issues, health care and sales management (Florida 2002: 328). The creati ve class – especially the Super Creative Core – contrib utes with the ‘ra w material’ of inno vative production: new ideas, new approaches and visions. Compared to research stressing the importance of the indi vidual genius, Florida links idea-generation and thus, inno vativeness to the availability of a heterogeneity of voices and perspectives. The more heterogeneous the creative class is, the more possibilities it opens for combining and mixing different ideas and vie wpoints, which in turn leads to a lar ge supply of potential innovations.

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These insights go against earlier insights that link ed innovative performance to social capital. Putnam (1993) is used in man y analyses of regional development to argue that social capital, understood as netw orks and connections, trust, common rules etc., is of crucial importance for creating learning environments, transforming knowledge into product or process innovations (e.g. Maskell and Malmberg 1999). According to this literature, innovation within industries will have better odds when strong ties between people are present. Florida (2002) comes to dif ferent results when analysing the creati ve class. He argues that social capital, as defined by Putnam (1993), is exclusive in the sense that social interaction is based on communities of lik eness. The problem of Putnam’ s social capital is that its e xclusive nature eliminates di versity and hence strangles space for inno vative thought. Simultaneously , the e xclusive nature of strong ties makes it v ery difficult for outsiders, e.g. migrants, to enter social circles and, hence, mobility is lowered.2 Based on the ar guments of Grano vetter (1973) and Grabher (1993), Florida (2002) f inds that the creati ve class f avours quasi-anon ymity based on weak ties rather then strong ones. He ar gues that a ne w social structure is emer ging. People in the creative class do not w ant neighbours peering o ver the fence. F ormer social structures have proven restrictive and ha ve been substituted by ne w ones that are weaker and hence, open to innovative and diverse mindsets. At the same time, weak ties allow for a much faster inclusion into communities favouring rapid absorption of new ideas as well as adjustment of norms and v alues. This, together with other factors such as labour mark ets characterised by high demand for qualif ied personnel, cultural di versity and tolerance, lo w entry barriers and high le vels of urban service, largely determine the economic geography of talent and of creati vity. This leads to hypothesis 1 (H1): H1(a): Regions with a high de gree of heterogeneity will attract and retain a relatively high proportion of the creative class. H1(b): Regions with a high de gree of heterogeneity will display rapid re gional development. One reason why Florida has gained momentum in strate gic planning is his argument that it is not enough to attract f irms; the ‘right’ people also need to be attracted. Thus, he calls for complementing policies for attracting f irms (business climate) with policies for attracting people (people climate). People climate can be understood as a series of ingredients that spice up the city , making it ‘cool.’ On the supply side, this co vers different amenities, such as cultural or ganisation, bars, nightclubs, parks and Florida’ s notorious bik e tracks. Recently, in his 2005 w ork, he has also emphasised a well-functioning welf are state pro viding social, educational and economic comfort and security. This leads to hypothesis 2 (H2): Asheim and Hansen (2008) ar gue that Florida’s reference to Putnam’ s work suggests an under standing of social capital as bonding, i.e. rooted in civicness and thus limits, diversity and creativity. However, social capital can also be considered as ‘bridging.’ As such, it can co-exist with weak ties as this form of social capital is a result of or ganizational and institutional inno vation at the societal level (e.g. labour market regulation and legislation in the Nordic countries).

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H2(a): Regions with social and cultural amenities will attract and retain a relatively high proportion of the creative class. H2(b): Regions with social and cultural amenities will display a relati vely f aster regional development. Along with the importance of attracting inno vative people, Florida refers to the importance of technology and kno wledge-intensive industries in fostering re gional development. High concentrations of these industries are seen as the derived effect or outcome of a well-developed people climate, and a rough proxy for the business climate. An indicator of the importance of a region’s high-tech production is measured by the Tech-Pole Index. Here, we also use the T ech-Pole Index as a measure of the importance of high-tech production, b ut add knowledge-intensive business services and the automotive industry to the original list made by DeVol (1999). By modifying DeVol’s original index, we believe that we have transformed the index into a measure that makes a better fit for a European context, as high-tech production in Europe is not as dominating as in the USA. This leads to the follo wing hypothesis (H3): H3(a): Regions with a relati vely high proportion of technological and kno wledgeintensive industries co-locate with the creative class. H3(b): Regions with a relati vely high proportion of technological and kno wledgeintensive industries display a relatively faster regional development. Inspired by Jacobs (1985), Florida (2002) emphasizes the importance of cities as the ultimate location for innovative industries (see also Scott et al. 2001; Scott and Storper 2003; Storper and Venebles 2004). He suggests that the heterogeneity found in cosmopolitan cities is the backbone of creativity and innovativeness. He argues that companies agglomerate in cities to dra w on the concentration of talented people who generate innovation and economic development. The ability to rapidly mobilise talent from such a concentration of people is considered a tremendous source of competiti ve advantage for companies and subsequently, for regions. Constellations of talents and creative people, he argues, are most commonly found in lar ge city regions, where the di versity of urbanisation economies is more abundant. This leads to hypothesis 4 (H4): H4(a): Larger city-regions will attract and retain a relati vely higher proportion of the creative class than smaller city-regions. H4(b): Larger city-regions will witness a f aster regional development than smaller city-regions. The importance of these f actors has, according to Florida (2002), been documented by himself and his colleagues in numerous studies in the US and Canada (Florida and Gates 2002; Gertler et al. 2002). The studies ha ve attracted much attention and sharp criticism from economic geographers. Critical researchers have alluded to ho w Florida’s research has been used to tak e attention away from the needs of the poor and mar ginalised (e.g. Markusen 2006; Peck 2005). Others have pointed to the weak theorising in Florida’s work and occasionally, to the existence of circularity of arguments in his work (Asheim and Hansen 2008). Finally, his data and econometrical work have been severely criticised (Glaeser 2004; Malanga 2004). The v erdict is still open on these issues and it is be yond the scope of this chapter to comment in detail on these debates.

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For our purposes, it is more interesting to note that Florida and his colleagues have undertak en a lar ge number of studies outside North America (e.g. Florida and Tingali 2004). These studies conf irm the central tenets of Florida’ s work. Yet, the majority of these studies ha ve ignored the re gional dimension and w orked on a highly aggre gated level, most often that of the national le vel. This pre vents the establishment of an y firm conclusions on the link between the creati ve class and regional development in a European context. To be able to answer these questions, there is a need for testing the aforementioned hypotheses on a dataset that allo ws for including the regional dimension. The next section will present the dataset and methods used to construct it. This pro vides the empirical input for the subsequent section which presents the statistical f indings, that is, the statistical testing of the hypotheses in the 445 European re gions.

Dataset and Methods Although North America and Europe share man y common values and institutions, there are aspects of their respecti ve societal de velopment that sho w strong di vergence with re gard to political priorities, economic gro wth processes and social outcomes. Theoretical reflections on how to adapt the study to Europe ought, therefore, to take place within a broader analytical context of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach. Soskice (1999) and others 3 con vincingly ar gue that dif ferent national institutional frameworks support different forms of economic acti vity, that is, that coordinated market economies have their competitive advantage in diversified quality production, while liberal mark et economies 4 are most competitive in industries characterised by radical inno vative activities. F ollowing Soskice, the Nordic and West European welfare states can be referred to as coordinated mark et economies. The main determinants are the degree of non-market coordination and cooperation which e xists inside the b usiness sphere and between pri vate and public actors, as well as the de gree to which labour remains ‘incorporated, ’ and the financial

Numerous authors ha ve presented research emphasizing both the importance and enduring geographical divergences of incentives and constraints regulating collective action. These include Richard Whitley (1999) and his concept of b usiness systems, as well as Robert Bo yer and Bruno Amable, with the concept of ‘social systems of inno vation and production’ (Amable 1999). The central common characteristic is a focus on complementary mechanisms of coordination, i.e. the structure of collective action in general – for instance between indi vidual companies, capital and labour – and to what extent different sub-systems of coordination counteract or complement each other. 4 While Soskice (1999) distinguishes between coordinated and un-coordinated mark et economies, Hall and Soskice (2001) distinguish between coordinated and liberal mark et economies, thus accepting that market coordination (liberal systems) should not be equated with lack of coordination (un-coordinated economies). Hence, this must be understood as a distinction between de grees of relational versus market coordination, not a distinction between coordination and non-coordination. From a conceptual viewpoint, the market is a coordination mechanism equal to others. 3

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system’s ability to supply long term f inance (Soskice 1999) is b uilt on in-depth rather than proxy-based allocation, monitoring and e valuation (Porter 1998). The analyses in this paper are based on data from eight European countries accounting for more than 160 million people in total. The dataset includes 445 European regions, and the proxies used in the correlations belo w are the result of mutual work by the partners of the European research project. Aiming at generating comparable data for 445 regions across eight countries have resulted in compromises in order to get comparable measures. Therefore, some of the critique that the proxies used in this chapter might meet can be e xplained by a trade-off between being able to say something based on compromises or being able to say nothing. Most data originate from national or federal central re gisters and consequently covers the total population. Dutch data is census based and multiplied by factors to mak e it reflect the actual number of inhabitants. Ho wever, all in all, data can be viewed as highly reliable. One important comment has to be made though. The creati ve class in Norw ay does not include people in the health sector. This results in a lower share of the creative class in Norway compared to the rest of the countries included in the analysis below. The consequence is that the correlations of the creati ve class might be less significant or less strong. If the creative class within health care was included in the data, we could expect more convincing correlations than the one presented belo w.

The Variables In the quantitative analyses, variables like talents, creative class, openness, and the Tech-Pole Index were used. These mirror v ariables employed in previous research by Florida (2002) and Gertler et al. (2002) on the geography of talent and the rise of the creative class. In addition, indicators for cultural and recreational amenities are introduced along with indicators de veloped to reflect characteristics of European cities and their national political economies. Further , a proxy on entrepreneurship is introduced to complement the Tech-pole variable. A v ariable from Florida’ s original w ork that has spurred much debate is the Gay Index used as a proxy for openness and tolerance. Data on se xual relations are impossible to get from central re gisters in Europe. Therefore, this v ariable is not included in the analysis belo w. However, the v ariable may also be considered inappropriate in a European conte xt, partly because gay relationship is not as controversial in Northern and W estern Europe as it is in North America, and partly because no European city has concentrations of homose xuals to the same de gree as, for instance, San Francisco. The Creative Class Variable Florida’s ambition is to create a ne w w ay of measuring talent by identifying creative occupations and thereby people who are creati ve and inno vative in their

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everyday work. This Creative Class Variable is measured as the share of people in creative occupations compared to total occupied population. The creati ve class is the variable running through all hypotheses. The Human Capital Variable To test whether or not the creati ve class is a better indicator of the link between talent and regional development, we add a Human Capital Variable. Human capital is widely accepted as ha ving a crucial impact on a re gion’s competitive potential (Rauch 1993; Romer 1986; Lucas 1988; Glaeser 1998), and a central critique of Florida’s work is that he is actually measuring human capital b ut is simply wrapping it in ne w, ‘f ancy’ concepts (Glaeser 2004). The Human Capital V ariable is based on the share of the population between 18 and 65 that holds a bachelor de gree or above. The Bohemian Variable In England in the nineteenth century, canaries were taken deep into the coal mines. The canaries were used to determine the gas le vel of the air that the miners were breathing. If the gas le vel was too high, the canary w ould die and the coal miners would hurry up to the surface. The Bohemian Variable should be understood in the same way. If openness and tolerance to ward differentness are absent in a re gion, bohemian people will tak e flight. Bohemian occupations include authors, artistes and others of such nature, and the Bohemian V ariable is measured in terms of bohemians as a proportion of the total occupied population between 18 and 65. The bohemian index is used in testing hypothesis H1a and b . The Openness Variable Openness to wards people representing dif ferent norms and v alues is dif ficult to measure quantitati vely. We try, ho wever, by looking at the foreign-born population as a proxy of tolerance of dif ferentness. The Openness V ariable indicates all foreign-born people as a share of the total population. A high score on the Openness Variable, equal to a high rate of foreign-born people, is understood as a positi ve indication of a tolerant en vironment. This is of course not unproblematic. High concentrations of foreign ethnic groups can lead to conflicts, and to collapse of whole city districts. Consequently , Hansen (2007) has constructed an Inte gration Index that measures the difference between share of ethnic Swedes and ethnic nonSwedes on the labour mark et in Sweden. Such a v ariable is seen as a supplement to the Openness Variable to get a better indication of tolerance. Unfortunately, this index is not possible to construct based on the data available in this database. Thus, the openness measure used in this chapter does not say an ything about tolerance in terms of inte gration, acceptance, etc. Ho wever, when put together with the

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Bohemian variable, it provides an impression of the openness towards ‘difference.’ This index is used for testing H1a and b . Public Provision Variable (PPI) The Public Pro vision Variable (PPI) is de veloped to analyse the supply of public sector services, such as education, health care and social security, that is offered to the population. The underlying argument for this is that talented and creative people are believed to be drawn toward regions that can offer a high level of public service. The index primarily includes people employed within education and health care. It is measured as the number of employed people in public service industries by every 100 inhabitants in a re gion. For welfare states lik e the Nordic countries, man y of the welfare functions are centrally decided and therefore, re gional differences are small and often politically influenced. This creates some dif ficulties in the direct interpretation of the results. Furthermore, it has to be stressed that the PPI does not address the quality or producti vity of the service that is pro vided in a re gion. Moreover, Hansen (2007) has sho wn that the v ariable has a tendenc y to be ne gatively correlated with the size of the population. The most plausible e xplanation is the relatively high threshold le vel for the initial pro vision of f ace-to-face-related public services, and the producti vity gro wth with increased scale of production. The index is used in hypothesis H2a and b . Cultural Opportunity Variable (COI) While the PPI is a proxy for the public service le vel of a particular re gion, the Cultural Opportunity V ariable (COI) should be seen as an attempt to measure the cultural supply within a re gion. The COI measures cultural supply and thus indicates the dif ference in supply between re gions. The v ariable is calculated as people employed in the cultural industries by e very 100 inhabitants. This v ariable includes not only the cultural economy, that is film and video production, museums, libraries, theatres, etc., b ut also amenities that mak e a city life more attracti ve, entertaining and in viting. Therefore, emplo yment in bars, restaurants, sports activities, etc. are included. The inde x is used for testing hypothesis H2a and b . The Tech-pole Variable – Knowledge Based Production Florida refers to the importance of high-tech industries in b uilding a competiti ve region. An indicator of the importance of a re gion’s high-tech production is measured by the Tech-Pole Index. Here, we also use the Tech-Pole Index as a measure of the importance of high-tech production but contrary to Florida, we add knowledgeintensive b usiness services and the automoti ve industry to the original list made by DeVol (1999). These additions include consultanc y services, and research and development. We do, however, still use the term the Tech-Pole Index. By modifying

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DeVol’s original inde x, we belie ve that we ha ve transformed the v ariable into a measure that makes for a better fit with a European context as the high-tech production in Europe is not as dominating as in the US. However, it has to be stressed that the adjusted high-tech/kno wledge-intensive production in Sweden only accounts for 10% of the total emplo yment. Thus, 90% is not addressed with this inde x. The variable is used for testing H3a and b . New High-Tech Firm Formation Variable – Entrepreneurship The future economic perspective of a region is naturally very difficult to predict. The New High-Tech Firm F ormation rate brings along a proxy for the entrepreneurial spirit within a region, and this can be used as a proxy for the business climate. The variable is measured as new firms in high-tech and knowledge-intensive sectors per 1,000 inhabitants. The variable is used for testing H3a and b . Total Population Variable and Population Density Variable To investigate whether the creati ve class thesis is an urban phenomenon, if one at all, we introduce two variables that in theory will control for the urbanisation factor. The first variable is the total size of the population. Thus, re gions will be rank ed based on the number of inhabitants. The second v ariable is population density based on inhabitants by square kilometers. This v ariable will, in combination with the variables based on total population, take urbanisation into account. As opposed to the former variable, this variable will distinguish between larger and thus potentially population rich re gions, and re gions that are rich on population due to an urbanised landscape. Both variables are used for testing H4a and b .

The Proxies As we are mainly concerned with the impact of v arious v ariables on re gional development, we include three direct proxies for de velopment: population growth, employment growth and unemployment. Annual Average Population Growth Rate: 1993–2002 The first variable is the annual a verage population growth between 1993 to 2002. The rationale for this v ariable is that e verything else being equal, we can e xpect population growth to have a positive effect on the economic dynamics of a re gion. Tax incomes and demand will rise, etc. This is not in itself a suf ficient proxy for regional de velopment b ut when combined with the follo wing tw o v ariables, we believe that regional development is measured from several important angles.

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Annual Average Employment Growth Rate: 1993–2002 In a w ay similar to the v ariable above, the annual emplo yment growth rate from 1993 to 2002, is based on changes in the economic structure of a re gion. The variable indicates a development in economic activities that can stimulate consumption based on a growing number of people with income. Unemployment Rate: 2002 Lastly, we use the unemplo yment rate as a proxy for re gional development. Here, we argue that if variables correlate negatively with this variable, then it is an indication of economic improvement. By combining all three indicators on re gional development, we believe that we have a broad understanding of re gional de velopment. On the one hand, population growth can generate a gro wing consumption but on the other hand, it is not a guarantee unless job growth follows suit. Job growths, however, do not necessarily bring along more jobs per capita, consequently we add the unemplo yment rate as well. By doing so, we bring together three central and interrelated indicators of regional development. Figure 1 pro vides a diagram linking the abo ve presented v ariables to technology, talent and tolerance, and further stress the link between the 3T’ s and regional development. Details of the constructed variables can be seen in the Appendix.

Fig. 1 Variables as proxies for technology, talent, tolerance and regional development

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Europe, the Creative Class and Regional Development: Statistical Findings We shall analyse, in the follo wing sub-sections, the relationship between the v ariables presented above on the basis of the eight hypothesis that we ha ve generated. Florida sees regional development as a combination of two elements: people climate and business climate. People climate addresses elements that satisfy peoples’ needs and thus, choice of location. Business climate addresses the conditions for firms and thus, the location of economic activities. All hypotheses can be linked to one of the tw o climates – making people climate and b usiness climate the dimension of the analysis.

People Climate According to Florida the right people climate will attract inno vative people. Coming from this line of ar gument, the first hypothesis is that regions with a high degree of heter ogeneity will attr act and r etain a r elatively high pr oportion of the creative class. Table 1a shows that strong and significant correlations can be found between the bohemian variable and the creati ve class, whereas this relationship is less strong between bohemians and human capital. The same pattern is identif ied for the openness v ariable though the correlations are less strong. This outcome suggests that creati ve class people are more sensitive to tolerance then the human capital cate gory. Further, the correlations pro vide evidence that creati ve class people (to a lar ger e xtent than people in the human capital category) locate in settings that can be interpreted as tolerant and open, and consequently, Table 1a supports H1a. The next hypothesis stated that regions with a high degree of heterogeneity will display a r apid regional development (H1b) . Table 1b illustrates the relationship between tolerance and indicators of re gional development. The correlations are signif icant and correspond with the theoretical ar gument though stronger correlations w ould ha ve pro ven the logic of Florida more Table 1a Tolerance variables correlated by creative class and human capital Bohemians 2000 (Sweden 2002, UK 2001, Openness 2002 Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) (Denmark 1999) Creative class 2000 ,664(**) (Sweden 2002, UK 2001, Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) Human capital 2002 ,309(**) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

,395(**)

,245(**)

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Table 1b Tolerance variables correlated by indicators of re gional development Bohemians 2000 (Sweden 2002, UK 2001, Openness 2002 Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) (Denmark 1999) Annual average population ,314(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Denmark 1995–2002, Switzerland 1990–2000) Annual average employment ,311(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Switzerland 1991–2001, Norway and Denmark 1995–2002) Unemployment rate 2002 −,010 ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed). * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed).

,340(**)

,116(*)

−,148(**)

convincingly. Further, the ne gative relationship between emplo yment growth and openness goes against Florida’ s claim b ut on the other hand, unemplo yment rates are negatively correlated with areas where multiculturalism is high. This suggests that tolerant and heterogeneous re gions witness population gro wth and f alling unemployment rates, but that employment growth is not as intense as it is in regions that witness lower population growth rates. However, all put together, it seems that the results are in favor of H1b. Besides tolerance, the attracti veness of places are belie ved to be important for attracting creative and highly educated people. Here, the supply of public services and cultural amenities are often stressed. Consequently , we test if Regions with social and cultur al amenities will attr act and r etain a r elatively high pr oportion of the creative class (H2a). While human capital is strongly and signif icantly correlated with both PPI and COI, T able 2a displays positi ve significant correlations between the cultural opportunity variable and the creative class, but not between the creative class and public provision. This outcome can be understood in tw o ways. First, the f indings may suggest that the creative class is more concerned with cultural amenities than with the provision of social welf are goods. If this is the case, the f indings document a need to differentiate between these two variables as attractors for the creative class and subsequently, that policy-makers do not need to pay attention to the provision of social welfare goods. However, another and more plausible explanation can also be drawn from the findings. The PPI variable is very evenly distributed in Europe. Due to its political character, PPI is often used proactively to generate regional developments in more peripheral areas. Further, as mentioned when it was presented, the variable has a relatively high threshold level for the initial pro vision of face-to-face-related services and increased producti vity with the scale of production. Consequently , more peripheral regions can be e xpected to get higher ratings on this v ariable and consequently, a ne gative correlation will be the outcome. So in sum, H2a is only

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partly supported by the empirical findings, but most likely because the PPI does not reflect its theoretical starting point. The next step will be to see ho w the variables correlate with re gional development. This corresponds with the testing of hypothesis H2b on whether regions with social and cultural amenities will display a r elatively faster regional development. Like in Table 2a, Table 2b provides a converse relationship between PPI and population, which differs from what we have hypothesised. Again, we have to point out the weakness of the v ariable in the sense that scale production and the even distribution most likely has a major impact on the outcome. Further, we cannot say an ything about the quality of the public services by using the variable. That which is making the picture e ven ‘fuzzier’ is the f act that PPI is positive though not signif icantly correlated with emplo yment growth, and fairly strong and significantly negatively correlated with unemplo yment, suggesting that the PPI actually has some kind of a positi ve effect on regional development. The COI v ariable and its linkage to the three indicators on re gional development also supports Florida’ s approach to re gional de velopment. Consequently , except for the problematic character of the PPI v ariable, the empirical f indings support H2b.

Table 2a Social and cultural amenities correlated by creati ve class and human capital PPI 2002 (Switzerland 2000) COI 2002 Creative class 2000 (Sweden −,485(**) 2002, UK 2001, Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) Human capital 2002 ,306(**) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

,370(**) ,480(**)

Table 2b Social and cultural amenities correlated by indicators of regional development PPI 2002 (Switzerland 2000) COI 2002 Annual average population −,212(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Denmark 1995–2002, Switzerland 1990–2000) Annual average employment ,072 growth rate 1993–2002 (Switzerland 1991–2001, Norway and Denmark 1995–2002) Unemployment rate 2002 −,304(**) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

,239(**)

,514(**)

−,343(**)

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Business Climate The creative class thesis underscores the positive relationship between the creative class, the technology and kno wledge-intensive f irms and re gional de velopment. Two variables are used as indicators – the T ech-Pole Index indicating the concentration of knowledge-intensive production based on shares of regional and national employment, and entrepreneurship in knowledge-intensive sectors measured as the rate of ne w firm formation. Thus, we proceed to test H3a that states that regions with a relatively high proportion of tec hnological and knowledg e-intensive industries co-locate with the creative class. The findings from Table 3a leave us with yet another ‘fuzzy’ picture. Firstly, the creative class is positi ve and significantly correlated with the T echpole Index but at the same time, negative and significantly correlated with start-ups of knowledge-intensive firms. Secondly, human capital is ne gative, however insignificantly correlated with the T ech-pole Index but at the same time, positi ve and significantly correlated with start-ups of knowledge-intensive firms. Consequently, the creati ve class tend to be co-located with high concentrations of kno wledgeintensive firms. Meanwhile, high start-up rates of these f irms tend to tak e place in regions with relatively low shares of creative class people, but where concentration of human capital is relatively high. This implies that the creative class is relevant for the competitiveness of kno wledge-intensive industries b ut cannot be look ed upon as an entrepreneurial asset. Hence, the f indings here suggest that if re gions wish to build a knowledge-intensive industrial structure, regional planning should focus on attracting human capital. However, if a knowledge-intensive industrial structure already exists, then it would be wiser to target regional planning towards retaining the creative class. Consequently, we must conclude that the hypothesis cannot be confirmed. Yet, due to the diverse character of the correlations, it is also premature to reject it. As Table 3b sho ws, it seems dif ficult for us as well to f ind strong support for H3b, which suggests that regions with a r elatively high pr oportion of tec hnological and knowledg e-intensive industries display a r elatively faster r egional development.

Table 3a Technology and knowledge-intensive industries correlated by creative class and human capital Tech-pole index 2002 New high-tech firms by (Denmark 1999) 1,000 inhabitants 2002 Creative class 2000 ,280(**) −,229(**) (Sweden 2002, UK 2001, Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) Human capital 2002 −,011 ,240(**) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

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H.K. Hansen et al. Table 3b Technological and knowledge-intensive industries correlated by indicators of regional development Tech-pole index 2002 New high-tech firms by (Denmark 1999) 1,000 inhabitants 2002 Annual average population ,159(**) ,233(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Denmark 1995–2002, Switzerland 1990–2000) Annual average employment ,000 ,144(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Switzerland 1991–2001, Norway and Denmark 1995–2002) Unemployment rate 2002 ,045 −,109(*) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed). * Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (two-tailed).

Significant correlations are identif ied b ut the y are too weak to lead to f irm conclusions. Thus, strong conclusions on b usiness climate are dif ficult to dra w. Based on this, results are not uni vocal in favor for or in rejection to H3a and H3b . A Swedish study by Hansen (2007) also suggests this lack of a f irm univocal relationship between Florida’ s creative class approach and indicators of re gional development: the technology dimension seems dif ficult to underpin theoretically both in Sweden and on a European re gional le vel. This is further supported by Andersen et al. (2008a) who in a study of the creati ve class thesis in a Nordic context, only shows convincing results when regions with less then 100,000 inhabitants are left out of the analysis. This brings us to the last set of hypotheses (H4a and b) on the questions of whether the approach is mainly rele vant when lar ge cities and places with high population density are addressed. H4a suggests that larger city regions will attract and retain a relatively higher proportion of the creative class than smaller city-regions. Table 4a shows that the creative class is positively correlated with size and density (also more so than the human capital variable, which again underpins its specificities). This conf irms the hypothesis as the correlations document that the lar ge and densely-populated cities and re gions have a higher proportion of members of the creative class and thus, better preconditions to attract and retain lar ger numbers of the creative class given equal preferences for location. The last hypothesis tests if larger city-r egions will witness a faster r egional development than smaller city-regions. The correlations of Table 4b are not as con vincing as one could suppose. There is some kind of positi ve tendency towards size b ut size and population density is not a dominating element. Therefore, based on the European data, one could ar gue that while the creati ve class is attracted by the lar ger cities, it does not automatically translate into mark ed higher rates of re gional development and thus, there is no clear support for H4b.

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Table 4a Size correlated by creative class and human capital Total population 2002 (Switzerland 2000) Population density 2002 Creative class 2000 (Sweden ,466(**) ,321(**) 2002, UK 2001, Norway 2004, Denmark 1999) Human capital 2002 −,131(**) ,204(**) ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed). Table 4b Size correlated by indicators of re gional development Total population 2002 (Switzerland 2000) Population density 2002 Annual average population ,163(**) ,095 growth rate 1993–2002 (Denmark 1995–2002, Switzerland 1990–2000) Annual average employment −,067 ,182(**) growth rate 1993–2002 (Switzerland 1991–2001, Norway and Denmark 1995–2002) Unemployment rate 2002 ,248(**) −,026 ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).

Conclusion The study has set out to test and discuss the rele vance of Florida’s much discussed and influential attempts at identifying the importance of the creati ve class for regional growth in a European conte xt. The results are ‘fuzzy’ and do not solely favor Florida or his opponents. On the one hand, adding the more traditional human capital variable to the above analysis provides evidence that the creative class does not share location patterns equal to people in the human capital cate gory. Some patterns are equal b ut not all, and the correlations are dif ferent. This enables us to conclude that Glaeser’s (2004) critique of Florida (2002, 2005b) for presenting old wine in ne w bottles might be misleading. The concept of the creati ve class does add value to our understanding of what conditions re gional development. On the other hand, Florida’s understanding of people climate is already much more robust than his understanding of business climate and in that sense, his thesis has a severe problem. If conclusions should be dra wn from this analysis, we ha ve to state that the creative class actually tends to be co-located with tolerant and attracti ve environments and further , that linkages between tolerant en vironments and re gional development are present in Europe. Ho wever, ha ving said that, we also ha ve to point to the lack of a con vincing and positi ve relationship between the creati ve class, re gional de velopment and kno wledge-intensive production and start-ups. Entrepreneurial spirit is actually better explained by location of human capital than

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by location of creati ve class people. So what this e xercise tells us is that linkages between the creati ve class and f actors that influence re gional de velopment are identifiable in a European conte xt, but the technology dimension is not necessar ily one of them and consequently , Florida’s 3Ts might ha ve to be narro wed down to 2Ts: talent and tolerance (Hansen 2007). Further , we can state that the creati ve class thesis favours larger city regions and thus, must be understood as a lar ge city phenomenon in Europe, which is also supported by the f indings of Andersen et al. (2008a) in a Nordic context. The present results also serve to raise some questions. What will happen if public provision was measured differently, for example, on the basis of quality or centres of excellence, such as uni versities, highly specialised sections within healthcare etc.? What will happen if we leave out high-tech production from the Tech-pole Variable and only focus on knowledge-intensive services, or leave knowledge-intensive services out of the T ech-pole Variable and only measure high-tech production? These questions are worth addressing in future research in order to obtain a better under standing of Florida’s theoretical basis on the one hand, and the relationship between creative class and human capital and indicators of people climate on the other . The dif ferences between the results from eight countries representing 445 regions in Europe and the f indings in North America are substantial; at least one of three cornerstones has proven to be doubtable. Consequently, we call for further research on the topic, but with some important elements in mind. First, we believe that research within this area w ould benefit from a knowledge base perspective. Hansen et al. (2005), and Asheim and Hansen (2008) ha ve taken the first step towards a conceptualisation of the creati ve class based on kno wledge bases, ar guing that not all creati ve class people ha ve equal preferences. Asheim and Hansen (2008) ar gues that to claim that 30–40% of the occupied population share common interest for housing, urban life political statement and the lik e is a substantial simplification of reality. Instead, it is ar gued that by di viding the creative class into groups drawing on synthetic, analytical or symbolic knowledge bases in their e veryday w ork, a more di verse understanding of the trade-of f between people climate and b usiness climate is permitted. The line of reasoning is that the more dependent people are on cultural impulses in order to fulf il their profession, the more important factors that can be seen as proxies for people climate become. Second, we believe that future research would benefit from diversifying between phases in life. Andersen et al. (2008b) pro vide a qualitati ve study of the creati ve class thesis in a Nordic conte xt. Based on intervie ws with creative class people, it is suggested that their preferences change in the course of life. What is interesting is that while young creati ve class people tend to be attracted by urban li ving and certain types of cultural amenities, creative class people with children tend to ha ve preferences that lean towards suburban living, with the traditional house and garden and a safe community. The last element that we suggest should be touched upon in future research is that variety of capitalism plays a major role for Florida’s line of argument (Asheim and Hansen 2008). Florida ar gues that the creative class is highly mobile and the y easily move from one place to another. This is, however, not the case in large parts of Europe for se veral reasons. First, Europe is not a single lar ge labour mark et

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sharing the same language. Second only a fe w European countries have more than a fe w lar ge cities that can of fer dense labour mark ets for the creati ve class and highly educated people. Finally, at least in Northern Europe, both men and w omen have careers, which implies that mo ving from one region to another often requires two attractive jobs rather then one. Thereby, friction on labour mark ets rises while mobility drops. Consequently, models taking national and re gional specificity into account should be the first step in a second generation creati ve class theory.

Appendix Table 1 Creative class (SSYK) Occupations

Occupations

• •

• •

Business professionals Legal professionals

•

Legislators, senior officials and managers Physicists, chemists and related professionals Mathematicians and statisticians

•

•

Computing professionals

•

•

Architects, engineers and related professionals Life science professionals

•

Archivists, librarians and related information professionals Social science and linguistics professionals (except social work professionals) Public service administrative professionals

Health professionals (except nursing) Nursing and midwifery professionals College, university and higher education teaching professionals Secondary education teaching professionals Primary education teaching professionals Special education teaching professionals Other teaching professionals

• • •

Physical and engineering science associate professionals Life science and health associate professionals Finance and sales associate professionals Business services agents and trade brok ers

•

Administrative associate professionals

• •

Police officers and detectives Social work associate professionals

• • • • • • • •

•

Table 2 High-tech industries Industry • • • • • • • •

Manufacture of pharmaceuticals, medicinal chemicals and botanical products Manufacture of office machinery and computers Manufacture of electronic valves and tubes and other electronic components Manufacture of television and radio transmitters and apparatus for line telephon y and line telegraphy Manufacture of television and radio receivers, sound or video recording or reproducing apparatus and associated goods Manufacture of medical and surgical equipment and orthopaedic appliances Manufacture of instruments and appliances for measuring, checking, testing, na vigating and other purposes, except industrial process control equipment Manufacture of industrial process control equipment (continued)

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Table 2 (continued) Industry • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Manufacture of optical instruments and photographic equipment Manufacture of watches and clocks Manufacture of motor vehicles Manufacture of bodies (coachwork) for motor vehicles; manufacture of trailers and semi-trailers Manufacture of parts and accessories for motor v ehicles and their engines Manufacture of aircraft and spacecraft Telecommunications Hardware consultancy Software consultancy and supply Data processing Data base activities Maintenance and repair of office, accounting and computing machinery Other computer related activities Research and experimental development on natural sciences and engineering Research and experimental development on social sciences and humanities Architectural and engineering activities and related technical consultancy Technical testing and analysis Motion picture and video activities

Table 3 Bohemian occupation Occupations • • •

Writers and creative or performing artists Artistic, entertainment and sports associate professionals Fashion and other models

Table 4 PPI Industry • • • • • • •

Primary education Secondary education Higher education Adult and other education Human health activities Veterinary activities Social work activities

Table 5 COI Industry • • • • • • •

Restaurants Bars Motion picture and video activities Radio and television activities Other entertainment activities Library, archives, museums and other cultural activities Sporting activities

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References Amable, B. 1999. Institutional complementarity and diversity of social systems of innovation and production. CEPREMAP (Working Paper). Andersen, K. V., H. K. Hansen, A. Isaksen, and M. Raunio. 2008a. Nordic city re gions in the creative class debate – putting the creati ve class thesis to a test. In The Urban turn – and the location of economic activities, ed. H. K. Hansen, pp. 165–198. Lund: Lund Uni versity. Andersen, K. V ., M. Bugge, H. K. Hansen, A. Isaksen, and M. Raunio. 2008b . Re gional development in Nordic re gions: The impact of peoples climate and b usiness climate. In The Urban turn – and the location of economic activities , ed. H. K. Hansen, pp. 201–224. Lund: Lund University. Asheim, B. T. and H. K. Hansen. 2008. The creati ve class, people climate and b usiness climate: Knowledge bases, variety of capitalism and social capital. In The Urban turn – and the location of economic activities, ed. H. K. Hansen, pp. 227–259. Lund: Lund Uni versity. Asheim, B. T ., L. Coenen, and J. V ang. 2007. F ace-to-face, buzz and kno wledge bases: Sociospatial implications for learning, inno vation and inno vation policy. Environment & Planning C 25(5): 655–670. DeVol, R. 1999. America’s high-tech economy gr owth, development, and risks for metr opolitan areas. Santa Monica, CA: Milken Institute. Florida, R. 2002. The rise of the cr eative class – and how it’ s transforming work, leisur e, community, & everyday life. New York: The Perseus Books Group. Florida, R. 2005a. The flight of the creative class. New York: Harper Business. Florida, R. 2005b. Cities and the creative class. New York: Routledge. Florida, R. and G. Gates. 2002. T echnology and tolerance – di versity and high-tech gro wth. The Brooking Review Winter(20): 32–36. Florida, R. and I. T inagli. 2004. Europe in the cr eative a ge. Pittsb urg, CA: Carne gie Mellon Software Industry Center. Gertler, M., R. Florida, G. Gates, and T . V inodrai. 2002. Competing on cr eativity: Placing Ontario’s cities in a North American conte xt. A report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Inno vation and the Institute for Competiti veness and Prosperity. Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. Glaeser, E. 1998. Are cities dying. Journal of Economic Perspective 12: 139–160. Glaeser, E. L. 2004. Re view of Richard Florida’ s the rise of the creati ve class. http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/ papers /Re view_Florida.pdf. Accessed 15 September 2006. Grabher, G. 1993. The weakness of strong ties. InThe embedded firm, ed. G. Grabher, pp. 255–277. London: Routledge. Granovetter, M. 1973. The strength of weak ties. The American J ournal of Sociolo gy 78(6): 1360–1380. Hall, P. and D. Soskice. 2001. An introduction to varieties of capitalism. In Varieties of capitalism: The institutional foundations of comparative advantage, eds. P. Hall and D. Soskice, pp. 1–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, H. K. 2007. T echnology, talent and tolerance – the geography of the creati ve class in Sweden. Rapporter och Notiser 169. Department of Social and Economic Geography , Lund University. Hansen, H. K., J. V ang, and B. T . Asheim. 2005. The creati ve class and re gional gro wth: Towards a kno wledge based approach. CIRCLE Electr onic Working Paper Series 2005/15. http://65.19.180.219/PublicationDetails.aspx?PubId = 64. Harvey, D. 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler B 71: 3–17. Jacobs, J. 1985. Cities and the wealth of nations . New York: Vintage. Lucas, R. E. 1988. On the mechanics of economic de velopment. Journal of Monetary Economies 22: 3–42.

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Lundvall, B.-Å. 1992. User -producer relationships, national systems of inno vation and internationalisation.In National systems of innovation, ed. B-Å. Lundvall, pp. 45–67. London: Pinter. Malanga, S. 2004. The curse of the creati ve class. City Journal Winther: 36–45. Markusen, A. 2006. Urban development and the politics of a creative class: Evidence from a study of artists. Environment and Planning A 38: 1921–1940. Maskell, P. and A. Malmberg. 1999. The competitiveness of firms and regions – ubiquification and the importance of localized learning. European Planning Studies 6: 9–25. Peck, J. 2005. Struggling with creati ve class. International J ournal of Urban and Re gional Research 29: 740–770. Porter, M. 1998. Clusters and the ne w economics of competition. Journal of the Economics of Business 1: 35–40. Putnam, R. 1993. Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rauch, J. E. 1993. Producti vity gains from geographic concentration of human capital: Evidence from the city. Journal of Urban Economies 34: 380–400. Romer, P. M. 1986. Increasing returns and long-run gro wth. The Journal of P olitical Economy 94: 1002–1037. Scott, A. J. and M. Storper . 2003. Re gions, globalization, de velopment. Regional Studies 37: 579–593. Scott, A. J., A. John, S. Edward, and M. Storper. 2001. Global city regions. In Global city-regions: Trends, theory, policy, ed. A. J. Scott, 11–32. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press. Soskice, D. 1999. Di vergent production re gimes: Coordinated and uncoordinated mark et economies in the 1980s and 1990s. In Continuity and c hange in contempor ary capitalism , eds. H. Kitschelt et al., pp. 101–134. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press. Storper, M. and A. J. Venebles. 2004. Buzz: Face-to-face contact and the urban economy. Journal of Economic Geography 4: 351–370. Whitley, R. 1999. Divergent capitalisms – the social structuring and c hange of business systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 8

Getting Out of Place: The Mobile Creative Class Takes on the Local. A UK Perspective on the Creative Class Kate Oakley

Introduction Richard Florida’s notion of a “creati ve class” and the role that mobile kno wledge workers can play in the economic de velopment of cities and re gions ha ve been highly influential in UK polic y circles. In a climate of hunger for “e vidence-based policymaking,” Florida’ s attempt to quantitati vely measure, through the use of “indices” of v arious sorts, the conditions that he deems necessary for successful city-regions, have proved popular with polic ymakers, keen for what appear to be empirical approaches to policy development. This chapter aims to trace and critically examine that phenomenon. In particular, it seeks to understand why the w ork of a hitherto respected b ut relatively obscure economic geographer, should prove so popular with policymakers. It argues that the combination of some much-needed “good ne ws” for British cities, still reco vering from de-industrialisation and job losses, and a technocratic approach, well-suited to the “post-ideological” politics of the time, pro ved an irresistible combination. Florida’s adoption of the term “creati ve,” for his class of kno wledge w orkers and professionals enabled his w ork to become entangled with e xisting debates about “creative cities”, “creative industries” and the “creati ve economy,” and thus to gain wider currency, despite the fact that his focus is largely on high technology growth, rather than the cultural or creative industries (Pratt 2008). In other words, it appeared to build on an existing set of approaches to developing the creative industries, though I will argue that it in fact took them in a different direction. The chapter then seeks to ask three basic questions about Florida’ s work on the creative class: does it w ork? does it tra vel? and is it a producti ve policy approach for cities in the UK and else where? In examining these questions, we will look briefly at the range of methodological, economic and political critiques that ha ve been le vied at Florida’s work inter

K. Oakley () Kate Oakley, City University and University of the Arts London, 22 Stansfield Rd, London SW9 9RZ, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_8, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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alia (Donald and Morrow 2003; Gibson and Klocker 2005; Peck 2005; Berry 2005; Montgomery 2005; Markusen 2005; Scott 2006; Rausch and Ne grey 2006) and in particular, at the ar gument that while his f indings may be well-suited to a North American environment, its translation into polic ymaking in dif ferent geographic and social contexts has proved problematic (Nathan 2005; Oakle y 2006; Hui et al. 2004). The chapter concludes by considering the challenges and issues that Floridastyle approach to urban policy leaves unresolved.

The Lure of Evidence Puzzling over Florida’s apparent celebrity, Jamie Peck (2005: 741) comments, “In the f ield of urban polic y, which has hardly been cluttered with ne w and innovative ideas lately , creati vity strate gies ha ve quickly become the policies of choice, since they license both a discursi vely distinctive and an ostensibly deli verable development agenda.” And indeed one of the paradox es of Florida’s reception has been the de gree to which his work has been taken up, even in relatively small, economically struggling cities and regions, despite the fact that much work in this field (Scott 2006; Hudson 2006; Masse y 2007) suggests that path dependenc y and the polarising nature of recent economic changes generally serv e to reinforce the economic supremac y of particular cities and regions, rather than offer a counterbalance to them. But as Peck states, the appeal of Florida’ s work lies both in the notion that “an ywhere can do it,” and, more importantly, in the absence of many other ideas for realisable economic development. In the case of UK policymakers, another attraction was that Florida’s work appeared to build on pre-existing creative industry strategies. The degree to which economic needs, brought about by the global economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, were the dri vers behind creati ve industry and creati ve city strategies in the UK should not be underestimated. This restructuring created highly differentiated cities, and parts of cities, pri vileging some economic sectors and types of employment (Massey 2007). Britain’s 20 largest cities lost half a million manuf acturing jobs between 1981 and 1999 (Turok and Edge 1999), for example, with inner cities being particularly hard hit. This in turn led to a concentration of economically deprived households in some inner city neighbourhoods, as prosperous households moved out in a general shift of population from urban areas to sub urbs, market towns and rural locations. In response to this, cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle have all undertak en what might be described as “culture led” economic de velopment strategies (Evans and Shaw 2004). The low barriers to entry in some creative industries, combined with strong traditions of popular culture from pop music to comic books, convinced policymakers that developing small firms in these sectors was a realistic strate gy for job generation. Their approach has been to of fer a mix of subsidised workspace, job-training and support for intermediary networks in the creative industries, largely aimed at small firms. Yet despite some early success, particularly in the de velopment of digital industries in the late 1990s, creati ve industry adv ocates and sympathetic policymakers

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generally felt mar ginalised. The majority of the UK Go vernment’s “knowledge economy” and inno vation polices remain focused on science and tech nology (NESTA 2006), and while most British cities be gan to re verse the decline of previous decades (Athey et al. 2007), at least to some degree, the gap between them and London and its surrounding re gion, in terms of economic performance, gre w wider (Reed et al. 2007; Masse y 2007). Policymakers at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport had successfully exported the idea of creati ve industries, by no w renamed from cultural industries (Cunningham 2003), b ut at home it w as not only subject to criticism (Garnham 2005), b ut had in general f ailed to lead to lar ge-scale national in vestment in these sectors or what might be considered an y sort of industrial polic y for them (O’Connor 2007). The dot com bust just after the millennium resulted in job losses and some restructuring in the creati ve industries that af fected e ven London, the centrepiece of Britain’s creative economy (Freeman 2007). Into this anxious mix, what Lloyd (2006: 68) calls Florida’s “relentlessly cheerful account of a creati ve economy in which alienation is a thing of the past, ” was received as a ringing endorsement, both by some urban polic ymakers, and by arts and culture advocates. As Ann Markusen (2005: 21) has commented, these people welcomed Florida, “because the y feel it mak es them visible. ” But not only did it make creati ve industry adv ocates in the UK feel visible, it conferred that most elusive and highly-prized quality in an area that has hitherto struggled to produce a convincing evidence base – it had numbers behind it. It is sometimes difficult to fathom, and always easy to mock, the enthusiasm of contemporary policymakers for what appears to be empirical evidence that policies “work.” And it is certainly the case that in the cultural policy world, used to endless problematic debates about culture, scarred by “culture w ars,” and often accused of unsupported advocacy (Selwood 2002), the presence of what look ed like serious data, not to mention data that had such a positi ve story to tell, was always likely to be greeted by a degree of uncritical enthusiasm. However, as others started to take a more critical look at Florida’s work itself, not only did the policy prescriptions start to look problematic, but the data itself was brought into question.

Methods and Madness Despite, or perhaps because, of its ease of reception and popularity with polic ymakers, Florida’s work has been subject to a remarkable degree of testing and analysis, much of it critical. Alongside his o wn attempts to reproduce his methodology outside the US (Florida and Tinagli 2004), researchers from Dublin (Bo yle 2006) to Melbourne (Berry 2005) and man y places in between, ha ve tested his approach in their o wn cities. Other cities, notably in Asia, ha ve adopted v ariations of Florida’ s indices to measure their o wn aspirations to wards “w orld city” status (K ong et al. 2006; Hui et al. 2004). Even rural areas (Mcgranahan and Wojan 2007), an unlikely setting for “hipsterisation strategies,” one might think, have been subject to the treatment. While it is impossible to do justice to the full range of critiques of Florida’ s work, it is possible to group them into particular sets of issues, namely those to do

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with methodology, with economic problems and with political or social concerns. Many critiques co ver one or more of these issues simultaneously , though for ease of discussion they are treated separately below. Florida’s distinctive contribution is his attempt to quantitatively measure, through the uses of “indices” of various sorts, the conditions that he deems necessary for successful city-regions. His famous analysis of the “three T’s” – talent, technology and tolerance – leads him to argue that there is a relationship between cities and regions that have high numbers on these various indices and their growing economies. As with other human capital researchers, Florida is forced to use proxies for many of these characteristics and some commentators ha ve seized upon what the y see as a lack of rigour in this approach. P atents are generally ackno wledged to be an inadequate proxy for technology-led inno vation, all same-se x households are probably not gay , and ha ving a qualif ication is not the same as being able to do something (Berry 2005; Markusen 2005; Sheamur 2007). Transposing these proxies to the UK or other countries is e ven more problematic. Both the “gay index” and the “bohemian index” are said to measure a region’s tolerance and lifestyle diversity – based on Florida’s (2002: 256) argument that “a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people.” His measure is of coupled, same se x households li ving in a particular metropolitan area. The numbers are dra wn from the US Census, though as the UK Census does not contain a question about sexual orientation, UK researchers attempting to do the same thing, as in the Demos “Boho” Index,1 are forced to use proxies such as number of gay clubs, bars, networks, support groups, businesses and so on – a measure of the relative confidence and openness of a gay community perhaps, b ut not necessarily of its size. Likewise his “bohemian” inde x attempts to measure the number of indi viduals employed in “artistic and creati ve occupations,” in a particular area. This aspect receives support from Markusen and King (2003: 11), who ar gue that not only do those emplo yed in cultural occupations directly contrib ute to economic gro wth, but, “Artists’ creativity and specialised skills enhance the design, production and marketing of products and services in other sectors. ” This argument about spillover effects is a live one and a current topic of research and policy interest (Work Foundation 2007). Empirical e vidence for this assertion remains under -developed, ho wever, particularly in the conte xt of specif ic places (rather than the economy as a whole), one problem in the UK being that data about creative occupations is rather unreliable at the local le vel. Elsewhere ho wever, Markusen is rather critical of what she sees as Florida’ s conflation of the rather fuzzy notion of “creati vity” with academic qualif ications, and she argues that in doing so, Florida simply tells us that high human capital is associated with economic growth, which may be so, but has little to do with creativity. On the other hand, she ar gues, the creati vity, inventiveness, or adaptability of large sections of the non-graduate w orkforce is left out. Florida’ s numbers tell us little about the content of peoples’ job or the skills required to perform them. 1

See http://www.demos.co.uk/media/pressreleases/bohobritain.

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As Shearmur (2007) observ es, the ar gument that better qualif ications lead to economic growth is in itself highly contested, not least because rising qualification levels may simply be an indicator of “credentialism, ” and, perhaps more impor tantly, it is dif ficult to separate “kno wledge” in the form of qualif ications from social status and family background. Although Florida recognises that creati vity is present in a v ariety of jobs (including, f amously, his hairdresser and housek eeper, Florida 2002: 76), his public polic y prescriptions, by concentrating on particular occupations, are firmly aimed at attracting elites, a strate gy which may well result in shutting out other workers essential to the running of cities (Masse y 2007). Other commentators object to what the y see as Florida’ s simplistic treatment of comple x urban economies. Berry (2005) comments that while Florida’ s data presents correlations between distinct phenomena, he ignores the systematic linkages, hierarchies and asymmetries between urban centres and the de gree to which this is a product of their history. As Montgomery (2005: 10) puts it, “Perhaps the most serious shortcoming is that Florida f ails to relate the emer gence of leading cities in the creati ve economy to pre-established traditions of wealth creation and innovation.” Yeoh (2005) argues similar problems are arising in South East Asia, where she claims “the use of cultural imagineering, urban me ga-projects and iconic architecture” in urban re generation is e ven more spatially concentrated, than else where, widening the gap between those cities that see themselv es as global players and those, “at the bottom of the hierarchy which are percei ved to be structurally irrelevant to the current round of global capital accumulation” (Y eoh 2005: 955). This is not to say that in terms of economic performance, cities are static and that being a world city or the dominant city within a national economy is the sole criterion for either attracting a “creative class” or developing creative sectors. But it does suggest that Florida’s bandwagon is not perhaps one onto which e very city should leap.

Running to Stand Still Another important question to ask about Florida’ s work is the de gree to which a prescription developed in the specif ic conte xt of North America can be made to work elsewhere. The f irst thing to say is that economic de velopment based lar gely on labour mobility is unlik ely to w ork in the UK, as Britons are much less geographically mobile than people in the US. Only about 10% of households mo ve every year in England, of which only about 1% mo ve between regions (Donovan et al. 2002). Moreover, even in countries where geographic mobility is higher,such as Australia, the number of favoured places to which the creative class will move is generally very small. In a re gional analysis (National Economics 2002), based on Florida’ s work, those parts of Australia deemed to be “winning regions” (that is, those with high level of patenting, with a highly-qualif ied labour force, and that attracted migrants) were all in the central areas of state capital cities, predominantly Sydne y and Melbourne.

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A central thrust of Florida’ s argument, that w ork now moves to people, rather than people to work (Florida 2002: 7) is also contradicted by evidence on migration from else where. Various commentators (e.g. Shearmur 2007; Bo yle 2006) ha ve argued that Florida’ s ar guments about causality are simply wrong – high le vels of labour mobility do not in themselv es create gro wth, rather gro wing cities and regions suck in migrants. In Shearmur’s analysis of migration data for Canadian cities, he finds large flows of migrants towards Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa, and only modest flows towards Montreal, which Florida lauds as particularly creative (Stolarick and Florida 2006). Shearmur’s conclusion is that it is more reasonable to assume that human capital flows increase as economic performance improves, rather than the other way round. As he comments, it is not that the processes Florida describesnever occur; no doubt some cities ha ve managed to de velop their economies by attracting or retaining graduate labour, but this cannot be generalised across cities and re gions. Moreover even where cities appear to be “winning” in the contest for global talent, is it really the amenities, cultural facilities and sense of tolerance that attracts them? In a series of interviews with graduate migrants to Dublin, a city which has benefited from an economic boom in recent years, Boyle (2006) finds some evidence that the lifestyle of the city , in Dublin’s case, particularly its bar scene, does attract young migrants. But his research concludes that “differential labour market opportunities,” in other words, better jobs, remain the primary reason for migration. As Max Nathan (2005: 4) argues from his own work on UK cities, the growth of “city centre” living “has not yet changed the basic patterns of life cycle migration – people come to big cities as young singles and lea ve as older families”. And, as in Boyle’s work on Dublin, it appears to be consumerism, rather than the arts, which provides the lure. As one of Bo yle’s Dublin migrants comments, “Dublin is so cosmopolitan it’s untrue, here they drink every night, like during the week, it doesn’t matter what night you go out” (Bo yle 2006: 421); a notion of “cosmopolitan” that some arts advocates might find difficult to get fully behind. A more interesting question is why , in a country lik e Britain, with a relati vely low level of internal migration and where graduate labour tends to move in only one direction, from the rest of the country to London and the South East (Massey 2007), such a prescription would ever be so heartily embraced. One answer is undoubtedly to do with contemporary politics. At a time when, as Doreen Massey (1994) has commented, “the seeking after a sense of place, has come to be seen by some as necessarily reactionary ,” Florida’s hymn to mobility chimed with much “ne w economy” rhetoric about globalisation, fluidity and fle xibility. This rhetoric of course sits paradoxically alongside what Turner (2007) calls the “immobility re gime” of surv eillance and control o ver migrants, refugees and other “undesirable” aliens. Ne vertheless, a positi ve view of “desirable” migration suits those of a neoliberal persuasion (Gibson and Klock er 2005) who vie w cities and regions simply as players in a global mark et or, in Florida’s case, in a global competitiveness league. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the UK go vernment and others had absorbed the idea that there w as an inevitability, and even desirability, in the destruction of

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old industrial capacity and the reinvention of the economy as post-industrial. In this story, the industrial v alues of craft, traditional skills, and embeddedness in local community had became defunct, if not do wnright dangerous, and the future lay in a kind of economic bohemianism, or what Eagleton (2003) calls, “the postmodern cult of the migrant.” For regional cities in the UK, this approach represents a very real challenge. On the one hand, many city leaders have absorbed the rhetoric of the “ne w economy” completely, economic development documents are full of rhetoric about innovation and no velty, the notion of an increasingly globalised economy is unquestioned, and the virtues of competition among places are generally celebrated. On the other hand, the shift in jobs from manuf acturing to services, undoubtedly benef its some parts of the UK more than others (Masse y 2007). The difficulty with competitions is that they tend to produce more losers than winners. One of the attractions of the creati ve industries strate gies adopted hitherto by UK cities was that they were seen as attempts to release the talents and abilities of the local population. The great majority of emplo yment in the creati ve industries was in the freelance, small and micro-b usiness sectors, all of which had lo w entry barriers (Leadbeater and Oakle y 1999), and the distincti veness and rootedness of much cultural activity seemed to offer an opportunity for places to ne gotiate a role within global flows of ideas, rather than simply be “subject” to them.

Local Heroes – The Case of Sheffield A good example of this approach can be seen in the case of Shef field in the north of England. With a history of popular music from Joe Cock er in the 1960s by w ay of Jarvis Cocker in the 1990s to the Artic Monkeys, two universities, and a fragile, though intermittently successful, videogames sector , Shef field has man y of the ingredients that are considered necessary in the development of creative industries. Hence the decision w as taken, as f ar back as the late 1980s that, as part of a plan of economic diversification resulting from the collapse of the city’ s steel industry, there would be a clear focus on the de velopment of these industries. Paul Skelton who led the (then named) Cultural Industries team at the Council was aware of the need for di versification when he arri ved in Shef field, but argued2 that you needed to look at what local people can do. “Financial services were considered,” he says, “but Sheffield had no track record in it and in f act it all went to Leeds.” An approach to economic de velopment “rooted in the community” w as favoured, which resulted in the opening of the Leadmill Arts Centre, follo wed by Red Tape studios, a publicly-o wned recording studio, and then what became the Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ), a set of supported workspaces for small cultural businesses, on the edge of the city centre. This commitment to stimulating local production, rather than a focus on inw ard investment was not uncharacteristic of 2

In an interview with the author.

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creative industries de velopments of the time, though it w as perhaps particularly pronounced in the case of Sheffield. The relati ve slo wness to de velop consumption space around the CIQ w as attributed by some commentators to the city’ s historical focus on steel production (Leadbeater and Oakle y 1999). Shef field had al ways been about “making things” rather than buying them, and this proved a hard habit to lose. The CIQ Agency, the body that now runs the quarter, reports that there are now over 300 or ganisations, employing over 3,000 people, within three quarter square miles of the site, a mix of private sector creative businesses, publicly-funded agencies, social enterprises and traditional or “non-creati ve” companies (see www . ciq.org.uk). Yet it remains dominated by micro and small b usinesses, in a pattern repeated across the UK. Although many cities, smaller towns and even rural areas have developed some level of economic activity in creative industries, London and the South East remain by far the biggest concentration of them, accounting for 57% of all British creative workforce jobs (Freeman 2007). Importantly , London’s concentration of b usiness and financial services helps maintain this uneven distribution, as over half (53%) of the demand for creative industry products comes, not from households or individuals, but from other businesses. Between 2001 and 2004, creative industry employment fell by 10% in London, compared to 5% for financial and business services employment. The last year for which data is available, 2004/2005, shows a significant rebound for both. This close link between creati ve industries and other b usiness and f inancial services allo ws London to confidently predict that it will “remain at the centre of creati ve industry growth in the UK as a whole” (Freeman 2007: 3). While other countries, e ven those with more “federal” political systems, such as Canada or Australia, also show this pattern of concentration of creative industry sectors, the attempt to develop creative industries in regional cities faces particular problems in the UK. The UK has a highly centralised political culture, and public investment, from sporting facilities to universities, remains concentrated in London and the South East. The development of a “kno wledge economy” model of economic de velopment in the UK has e xacerbated this une ven picture (Masse y 2007; Hudson 2006). As Hall (2004) argues, the UK is unusual, a small island dominated by one huge city and the “me ga-city re gion” around it, thus as Nathan (2005) ar gues, even if the creative class theory worked, it would not benefit most UK cities, competing for a “creative core” of workers who will be thinly spread outside of London. Other countries will f ace similar choices. Although China has 90 cities with more than a million inhabitants, three re gions, the Y angtze Ri ver Delta (including Shanghai), the Pearl Ri ver Delta (including Guangzhou) and the BoHai Rim (including Beijing) account for 15% of the population, b ut 45% of GDP. There is thus a clear question about the de gree to which concentration matters, about the links between the creati ve sector and other b usiness services, and about what le vel or scale is required to realistically undertak e de velopment in these sectors. But rather than investigating these questions and perhaps developing

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strategies that genuinely play to local strengths, man y policymakers have seemed content (or ha ve seen little option) b ut to play a sort of ‘me too’ game; e ven one they can only lose. In this way, the acceptance of Florida’s arguments, in many ways the reverse of what Sheffield and other UK cities were trying to do in the 1980s and 1990s, represents an exhaustion of possibilities, rather than an opening up of them.

Creative Anywhere A look at the latest attempt to re vise and restore Shef field’s fortunes sho ws how Florida’s idea has been absorbed into the bloodstream of economic de velopment thinking in the UK. The current incarnation comes in the form of a “city re generation company” branded Creati ve Sheffield. The title is not an accident, though its remit in f act co vers the whole economy and has nothing to do with the creati ve industries per se. Like man y “city mark eting” strate gies, the primary audience for “Creati ve Sheffield” appears to be outside the city . “People, b usinesses and in vestors,” we are told, “are all becoming increasingly sophisticated consumers of place, ” (Creative Sheffield 2005: 13). No longer is this distinctiveness understood as being inherent in the place, it is now the job of the city regeneration company to “create a distinctiveness for Shef field,” in order to combat what is described as its “lo w profile” nationally. As Barnes et al. (2006) ar gue, in the UK, creati ve city strate gies had hitherto concentrated on or at least prioritised, the de velopment of creati ve industries, whereas in Australia, and in parts of South East Asia (Yeoh 2005) it has been more common for councils to interpret creative city strategies as being focussed on consumption spaces such as cafe districts, retail, landscaped parks and public spaces. Sheffield, it seems, is now following this route. For “Creative Sheffield,” while the creati ve industries are mentioned as part of the city’s economy, they are simply listed alongside a collection of other economic acti vities, from sports science to biomedical and healthcare technology . Inward investment, which w as very consciously not promoted as a dri ver of the city’s earlier creati ve industries strate gy, has no w become the foremost part of the “wealth creation agenda, ” and Creati ve Shef field’s mission is to “increase demand” for the city. Far from building on its heritage in steel production and manuf acturing, we are told that the city does ha ve an easily recognised raison d’etre, something which will presumably come as something of a surprise to its citizens. The vision of the future presented is that of one decoupled from the past. Unlike another former steel town, Florida’s old home of Pittsb urgh, which he lambastes for being “trapped in the culture of a bygone era (2002: 216), ” Sheffield is being made ane w. The question is, does such an approach stand any greater chance of success than the creative industry strategies that preceded it?

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The Politics of Attracting the Creative Class Perhaps the most stinging critiques of Florida’ s w ork ha ve been those that ha ve concentrated on the potential social consequences of a Floridian urban strate gy. North American critics (Peck 2005; Scott 2006; Markusen 2005) ha ve accused him of legitimising gentrification, and paying insufficient attention to the issues of inequality and racial discrimination. Hui et al. (2004: 30), while refraining from criticising Florida directly, suggest that his attack on social capital (Putnam 2000) and seeming celebration of more individualistic pursuits and weak community ties are unlikely to work with the grain of “Asian values.” Markusen (2005) ar gues that Florida’ s treatment of di versity is “glib, ” focussing on the presence of gay people and migrants in the population, while paying relatively little attention to the e xclusion of African-Americans from the picture. Florida admits (2002: 80) that the paucity of black faces in “the world of high tech creativity,” poses an “intriguing challenge to the kind of di versity that members of the creative class are drawn to.” Given the undoubted cultural influence of African Americans in everything from popular music to f ashion and the language patterns of young English speak ers e verywhere, it is hard not to conclude that Florida’ s slight treatment of the race issue reflects his desire to present an optimistic picture of the urban changes his creative class is leading. Others argue that Florida’s urban policy prescriptions are not only insufficiently attuned to the problems of inequality, but actively promote them. In terms of public spending on culture, for e xample, Florida’ s (2002: 259) preference for “streetlevel culture” means that resources may be made a vailable for certain kinds of cultural consumption (restaurants, bars, night-clubs, a music scene), while others (such as historic buildings) may be neglected. While funding for cultural amenities has always reflected certain kinds of taste preferences (traditionally high art o ver popular culture), an o ver-concentration on the amenities that attract the young or bohemian at the e xpense of others could be equally counter -productive, as well as undemocratic. Other sorts of public spending can similarly be sk ewed. As Barnes et al. (2006) argue, in their study of Port K embla (a sub urb of W ollongong in Ne w South Wales), undergoing a “revitalisation” strategy, Florida’s ideas have become almost “canonical” among Australian local government policymakers. The refashioning of Port Kembla as an idealised “urban village” is not a simple process of a particular urban vision being imposed on disempo wered social groups b ut nevertheless, the preference of elderly residents for a high street that provided basic services such as a supermarket, a doctor or a bank, is lik ely to be superseded by one with “alfresco dining, street markets and decent coffee (Barnes et al. 2006: 348).” It is clear that focusing attention on the actions and investments needed to attract the creative class (for which read young, single men) may well lead to a ne glect of other policies, from af fordable childcare to good schools, or public transport that may apply to older or poorer citizens or female w orkers. The “non creati ve” class are thus marginalised twice; once because their consumption preferences and needs do not reflect that of the creative class, and secondly because the effect of an

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influx of the creative class may well raise land and housing prices and drive out the provision of more basic services (Masse y 2007).

Conclusions While it b uilds on the w ork of other human capital researchers and attempts to quantitatively measure the phenomena it describes, there are clear problems with the uncritical acceptance of Florida’s work by many urban policymakers. The first is that v ery few cities and re gions in the w orld are lik ely to be successful in this particular global race; the second is that where they are, “success” will be unequally shared in a context of growing inequality. While Scott ar gues that the recent resur gence of f ilm and music industries in different parts of the globe, together with changes in technology and rising education levels, presents at least the potential for a more polycentric global future with a variety of centres of global cultural production, he also w arns that, “a vision of the world’s cities marching to wards some sort of creati ve utopia, needs to be held strongly in check” (Scott 2006: 12). As we have seen in our discussion of the UK, the number of cities that can realistically hope to ha ve the creative industries as a major sector in their economy is relatively small and even in this case, as Scott (2006: 12) argues, “developments of this type will most lik ely continue to e xist only as encla ves in an urban landscape where poverty and social deprivation still widely prevail.” Florida’s prescriptions and the acceptance of them by polic ymakers thus tak e place within a context of knowledge-based development that is leading to increasing polarisation and inequality (Berry 2005; Hudson 2006; Masse y 2007) across the world. Florida’s o wn w ork suggests that in the US, city-re gions that rank highest in terms of the de velopment of a “creati ve economy” (using his measures) also rank highest in economic inequality . Similarly, Hudson (2006) ar gues that in the UK, regions with a more service-based economy and higher -levels of highly qualif ied workers have more unequal patterns of income distrib ution. Even in London, the UK’s most “successful” kno wledge based economy and the centre of its creati ve industries, of ficial accounts admit that “formidable wealth-generating capacity coexists with truly staggering levels of economic disadvantage” (GLA 2002: ix). As Hudson (2006) comments, this means that e ven go vernments with stated egalitarian aims or political histories will find themselves “running to stand still” in terms of tackling income inequality. This leaves them with formidable challenges, particularly in the context of cities, where many of these issues are concentrated. While criticism of Florida’ s work within an Asian conte xt has focussed on its normative prescriptiveness (Kong et al. 2006) or its insensiti vity to Asian cultural values (Hui et al. 2004), rapidly gro wing spatial and social inequality will increasingly pose a series of political questions that current “kno wledge based” economic approaches seem unable to answer.

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The UK’ s story may be instructi ve here. Creati ve city and creati ve industry strategies, explicitly developed in the context of de-industrialisation and job losses, have been replaced by ones that look certain to e xacerbate the problems brought about by those changes. In the former case, it could well be ar gued that creati ve industry economic development has done little to impro ve the position of re gional cities vis a vis London or the position of marginal groups vis a vis the already advantaged (Oakley 2006); in the latter case there is no intention to e ven attempt this. The challenges f acing polic ymakers should not be underestimated, as e ven Florida’s most se vere critics (Peck 2005) admit there appears to be precious fe w options out there, particularly in developed economies. The UK’s particular experience in these sectors has not been without its failures, but the embrace of a new set of approaches, based on Florida’s creative class idea, seems lik ely to bring neither greater economic success, nor a liveable urban future for many citizens. Acknowledgements Thanks to Justin O’Connor , Lily Kong and Mirko Petric for comments on an earlier draft.

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Gibson, C. and N. Klocker. 2005. The cultural turn in Australian regional economic development discourse; Neoliberalising creativity? Geographical Research 43(1): 93–102. GLA. 2002. London divided: Income inequality and po verty in the capital. London: GLA. Hall, P. 2004. Is the greater South East a me ga city re gion? P aper for IPPR Commission on Sustainable Development in the South East. London: IPPR. Hudson, J. 2006. Inequality and the knowledge economy: Running to stand still? Social Policy & Society 5(2): 207–222. Hui, D., Ng, C-H., and P . Mok. 2004. A Study on Hong K ong Creativity Index, Interim Report. University of Hong Kong: Centre for Cultural Policy Research. Kong, L., Gibson, C., Khoo, L.M., and A. Semple. 2006. Kno wledges of the creati ve economy: Towards a relational geography of dif fusion and adaptation in Asia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47(2): 173–194. Leadbeater, C. and K. Oakley. 1999. The Independents. London: Demos. Lloyd, R. 2006. Neo-Bohemia, arts and commer ce in the post-industrial city . Ne w Y ork: Routledge. Markusen, A. and D. King. 2003. The Artistic Di vidend: the Hidden Contrib utions of the Arts to the Re gional Economy. Minneapolis, MN: Project on Re gional and Industrial Economics, University of Minnesota, July. Markusen, A. 2005. Urban de velopment and the politics of a creati ve class: Evidence from the study of artists. Paper presented to RSA Conference on Re gional Growth Agendas, Aalborg. Massey, D. 1994. Space, place and gender. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Massey, D. 2007. World city. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Mcgranahan, D. and T. Wojan. 2007. Recasting the creative class to examine growth processes in rural and urban counties. Regional Studies 41(2): 197–216. Montgomery, J. 2005. Be ware the ‘creative class,’ creativity and wealth creation re visited. Local Economy 20(4): 347–343. Nathan, M. 2005. The wrong stuf f, creati ve class theory , di versity and city performance. Discussion Paper No 1. IPPR Centre for Cities. National Economics. 2002. The state of the regions, national economics and the Australian Local Government Association. Melbourne. NESTA. 2006. The innovation gap, why policy needs to r eflect the r eality of inno vation in the UK. London: NESTA. Oakley, K. 2006. Include us out – economic de velopment and social policy in the creative industries. Cultural Trends 14(4): 283–302. O’Connor, J. 2007. The cultural and cr eative industries: A r eview of the liter ature, A r eport for creative partnerships. London: Creative Partnerships. Peck, J. 2005. Struggling with the creati ve class. International Journal of Urban and Re gional Research 20(4): 740–770. Pratt, A. 2008. Creative accounting? From the creative class to cultural production as the dynamic of urban regeneration. Forthcoming in a special issue of Geografiska Annaler Series B, Human Geography, 90(2): 107–118. Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and r evival of American community . New York: Simon & Schuster. Rausch, S. and C. Ne grey. 2006. Does the creati ve engine run? A consideration of the ef fect of creative class on economic strength and gro wth. Journal of Urban Affairs 28(5): 473–489. Reed, M. and M. Johnson. 2007. The Northern Economic Agenda. IPPR North (forthcoming, 2007). London: Institute for Public Polic y Research. Scott, A. J. 2006. Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions. Journal of Urban Affairs 28(1): 1–17. Selwood, S. 2002. Measuring Culture. www.spikedonline.com. Accessed on 25 August 2008. Shearmur, R. 2007. The ne w kno wledge aristocrac y: The creati ve class, mobility and urban growth. Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation 1(1): 31–47. Stolarick, K. and R. Florida. 2006. Creativity, connections and innovation: A study of linkages in the Montreal region. Environment and Planning A 38: 1799–1817.

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Turner, B. 2007. The encla ve society: Towards a sociology of immobility . European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 287–303. Turok, I. and N. Edge. 1999. The jobs gap in Britain’s cities: Employment loss and labour market consequences. Bristol: The Policy Press. Work Foundation. 2007. Staying ahead, the economic performance of the UK’ s creative industries. London: Work Foundation. Yeoh, B. 2005. The global cultural city? Spatial imagineering and politics in the (multi)cultural marketplaces of South-east Asia. Urban Studies 42(5/6): 945–958.

Chapter 9

Asian Cities and Limits to Cr eative Capital Theory Patrick Mok

Introduction Richard Florida’ s (2002a) highly cited book, The Rise of the Cr eative Class, has stirred an ongoing debate on the relationship between culture, creati vity and economy, and on the usefulness of the concept in de vising policy prescriptions for urban de velopment (Lang and Danielsen 2005; Peck 2005). Written in accessible language appealing to b usiness and polic y-making audiences, the book popularizes a new concept of the “creative class,” arguing that creative people are a key driver of urban economic gro wth. Urban cities with such specif ic conditions as the presence of creati ve talents, and the a vailability of technology industries and en vironments embracing cultural diversity are conducive to the accumulation of “creati ve capital”, which can be turned into economic value. In the sequels, including The Cities and the Creative Class (Florida 2005a) and the Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent (Florida 2005b), Florida continues to elaborate this refreshing, compelling but controversial “creative capital theory.” In essence, the theory explains why “people climate” matter in attracting talents, and how such a socio-cultural environment of diversity and openness correlates with economic prosperity in the urban cities of “creativity-haves” and economic failure in the cities of “have-nots.” Disputes that ha ve arisen from the creati ve capital theory are not just about the methodology in measuring the creati ve class or in v erifying the causation between the presence of the class and economic growth. It is also about how likely policy prescriptions can be designed so that policymakers who are looking for the elixir of urban economic growth can turn their cities into an attraction for talents and in vestments (see Chapter 8, Oakle y, this v olume). This paper of fers a brief re view of Florida’ s theory and highlights its limitations, particularly when applied to Asian city contexts. It argues that there are different paths to economic growth, as seen in the case of two Asian cities. The processes of socio-economic restructuring as demonstrated in the

P. Mok ( ) Cheung Kong Centre for Creative Industries, Shantou University 3/F, Tower E3, Oriental Plaza, 1 East Chang An A venue, Beijing 100738, China e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_9, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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cases of Hong K ong and Macau are f ar more dynamic and comple x than Florida’s creative capital theory suggests. More importantly , e ven though we recognize the positive impact of the creative class on employment, there are heightening concerns about the socio-economic discrepancies that a creati ve city will lead to.

The Myth of the Creative Class There now exists a rich body of literature on the de velopment of the contemporary urban economy. In contrast to the “old economy,” these studies project a new economy, fueled by intellectual assets and kno wledge instead of physical resources or capital that had once been the most important economic inputs (APEC 2002; OECD 2002; UNESCO 2005). Florida subscribes to this view and postulates that what follows the transformation of knowledge economy is the emerging class of creative workers; the creative class generates new ideas and innovations for economic growth, and it forms the core of the w orking population. Those countries or places where there is a high concentration of creati ve people w ould have a brighter economic future and enjo y greater competitive edge in the global economy than those places where the creati ve class is underdeveloped. Statistical figures presented in Florida’s study are appealing and indeed, of fer evidence in f avour of his ar gument: the American creati ve class, for instance, accounts for about 30% of the w orkforce in the 1990s, and the rising population of the creati ve class in the United States has increased from less than 20 million in the 1980s to 38.3 million by 1999 (Florida 2002a: 72–77). The growing number of the creati ve class in America is indeed impressi ve. More importantly, the rise of the creati ve class underlines the changing social structure in American society. The notion of the creative class, however, refers to not just creative artists, but is defined more broadly according to Florida. It has two major sub-components – a super creative core and creative professionals. While the first group comprises a wide range of occupations from computer and mathematical-related occupations, to architecture and education, arts, design and media occupations, the creati ve professionals include management, b usiness and f inancial operations, le gal and healthcare practitioners, and high-end sales and sales management (Florida 2002a: Appendix A). Florida justifies this definition by arguing that the notion of the creati ve class is more accurate in defining the real source of economic value-creation. People in the creative class add value through their creativity and they are compensated monetarily for their creative output (Florida 2005a: 4). In short, the creative class is the economic locomotive, adding economic value to and driving the knowledge society by and large. Besides, according to “creati ve capital theory ,” the creati ve class serv es as the indicator of changing class structure, reflecting shifts in v alues, norms and attitudes. Florida believes that members of the creati ve class share similar ideas, desires, preferences, consumption and b uying habits as well as social identities. Throughout the book The Rise of the Cr eative Class , Florida portrays a social class that embraces individuality, meritocrac y, di versity and openness; members of the creati ve class would place high value on challenging jobs, flexibility, flexible working hours, casual dress code, latitude po wer and or ganizational structure, and e xperimental lifestyles (Florida 2002a). In a recent publication, The Flight of the Cr eative Class , Florida

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extends the theory to track the global creative class. Based on the statistics obtainable from the International Labour Organization (ILO) database, he draws the conclusion that there are man y countries in the w orld that are in transition to wards a creati ve economy, where the creative class is growing and makes up a sizeable percentage of the workforce. By comparison, the United States ranks 11th w orldwide in the per centage of its workforce in the creative sector, while Ireland, Belgium, Australia and the Netherlands have taken the first four rankings (Florida 2002b: 135–136). 1 The exercise of measuring the size of the creative class is a key component of creative capital theory. Taking one step forw ard, the theory e xplains why a high concentration of the creative class is found in some cities b ut not in others, and ho w the geographic distribution of the class in the United States is correlated to economic doom and failure in individual regions. The “3T’s” for economic growth, or the “creative capital theory,” which is statistically manifested in terms of the measurement of the Creati ve Index, offers the k ey to understanding the geography of the creati ve class and its ef fects on economic outcomes. There is no need to reiterate the statistical f indings of the Inde x which Florida devised in an early attempt for measuring the creative class of the United States. The essence of this index tool lays the argument that places that possess the vital factors – technology, talent and tolerance – attract creative people to come and look for jobs. Florida posits that a healthy ecology is one in which there is a strong combination of these three factors, conducive to the growth of new ideas, innovation and economic prospects. Creative people are highly mobile; they come in flocks, looking not only for job opportunities but also a quality place where the social and cultural en vironment is open, diverse and offers low barriers to entry. Once the cluster of creative people grows, a high concentration of the creati ve class produces a positi ve spiral effect that attracts more talents to come, and more importantly, this helps foster the exchange of new ideas and innovation for local and/or regional economic development.

The Riddle Indeed, Richard Florida’ s creati ve capital theory is v aluable for placing v alue on human creati vity, taking it to be the essential f actor accounting for economic growth. It is not disputed that creati vity is central to all economic acti vities. Additionally, the notion of cultural diversity and openness is universally embraced. Yet, there is doubt as to whether the theory is really more po werful than other theoretical ideas in e xplaining economic gro wth. In particular , the rich tradition of human capital theory e xplains economic gro wth in terms of the e xogenous factor – education. Generally speaking, in vestment in education (human capital) will promote economic gro wth in the long run. In a number of studies of a broad

In fact, Florida has exported his creative capital theory for some years. In 2002, he gave a measure of the creative occupations of Ontario in Canada (2002b), and his theory w as adjusted to the European context in 2004. The latter study composes the Creative Index by measuring the creative class in 14 European, Scandinavian and Nordic countries and comparing the findings with the data of the United States.

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set of countries, including both de veloped and less de veloped ones, measures of human capital based on educational attainment generally support a positi ve effect on economic growth (Mankiw et al. 1992; Barro 2001; Glaeser 2003). Florida does not oppose the human capital thesis, and his creati ve index has even included a sub-index of human capital. If human capital theory has already of fered a convincing analysis, what is the contrib ution of Florida’s creative capital theory? Answers to this question are mix ed. According to Glaeser (2004: 3–4) who ran regressions using Florida’ s data, the creati ve class v ariables become ne gative and statistically insignificant on the urban economic gro wth in the United States in the 1990s. However, in the European conte xt, Florida’s thesis recei ves warm support. One study using data for more than 450 re gions in eight European countries sho ws that there is a close relationship between the presence of bohemians and other categories of the creati ve class according to Florida’ s definition at the re gional level in Europe (Boschma and Fritsch 2007: 20–22). Another study by tw o economists examines Florida’s claims that the creative class offers a more accurate methodology than the con ventional human capital theory measured by educational le vels. Based on the data obtained from a cross-section of Dutch cities, it ifnds positive correlations between a city’s share of creative class and highly educated people respectively with employment growth. The measure of creati vity using Florida’s definition is as good as human capital theory, and in technical terms it is a better measure of those persons who are in the mark et (Marlet and Van Woerkens 2004). Therefore, the only dif ference between the two frameworks – human capital and creative-class – is the use of human capital. For reasons good or bad, highly educated people may end up without jobs, leaving their human capital lar gely unused. Since highly educated people are not necessarily w orking at all, using human capital measure may serv e as a weak predictor of job creation. While the creative class are essentially working, it can offer a slightly improved measure of economy with real gro wth in occupational jobs. Creative capital theory also places high v alue on technology . Florida strongly believes that high-tech industries should be the driving force of regional economies. To stay at the leading edge of high-technology industries enhances the overall competitiveness of a place. Not surprisingly , he included three sub-indices in creati ve capital theory relating to this dimension – high-tech inde x, high inno vation index and R&D index. They are measured respecti vely by the numbers of patents, share of high-tech industries in the local economy (or number of high-tech patents in the European survey) and the share of R&D e xpenditure in GDP. Although there exist studies which agree that increasing outputs of patents and high-tech industries in some countries are correlated to the gro wth of the re gional economy, it is ar guable whether high-tech industries are the only promising pathfinder of local or re gional economic development. Research done by the National Commission on Entrepreneurship, for instance, using data of 394 areas from the US Labor Mark et Areas (LMA), e xamines fast-growing companies which create new jobs during the period from 1992 to 1997. Its f indings show that fast-growing companies are widely distrib uted across all industries, including manuf acturing, business services and retail industries (NCE 2001). In a recent study , Amar Bhidè (2006) examines the idea of the innovation system and the diffusion and economic impacts of IT sectors in the United States in the past tw o decades. He ar gues

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that polic y mak ers may misapprehend the economic contrib ution of upstream high-technologies while at the same time, ne glect the consumption and use of innovation, which is also generating economic producti vity. As Bhidé ar gues, the productivity growth of the US economy in the 1990s is v ery much attrib uted to the perv asive consumption of IT products (products of inno vations). Dif fusion of information technology in the US sweeps across sectors not only in the hightech industries b ut also in retail, wholesale and f inancial intermediation. It is this intensive use of IT that dri ves the overall growth of productivity. For the diehards who believe that producing more cutting-edge technologies will lead to economic growth, a lesson can be learnt from Bhidé’s study. Contrary to the hope that adding to the stock of kno wledge in terms of increasing numbers of patents or high-tech innovations means wealth generation, excessive focus on the upstream elements for innovation will lose sight of the re wards of middle- and do wn-stream application of innovation, leading to an unproducti ve and excessive stock of patents without generating economic value. Instead, widespread use of inno vations in the US, particularly in the business sector as reflected in the ratio of IT expenditures to GDP, helps to improve productivity in many sectors of the economy. For this reason, the US is still leading other competitors in Europe, Japan and China, though the latter group of countries are catching up in producing more high-tech inno vations. The riddle of creati ve capital theory is not just about whether or not it pro vides a useful and better measure than human capital theory . It is also about its selfindulgence in the statistical construction of an economic class. Knowledge and skills required in local economies v ary from one conte xt to another, and that is reflected in the respecti ve constituents of their occupational classes. Therefore, the right question to ask is not whether the presence of a particular economic class w ould have an effect on economic gro wth, but what kinds of forces determine the pattern of occupational structure in a local economy . In short, it is all about ho w the creative class (if there is one) emer ges, and what f actors take effect on a society where knowledge, skills and creati vity are translated into occupations and emplo yment. Besides, creative capital theory aggrandizes the role of high-technologies in driving economic growth. The urban economy is always a complex and dynamic system that may lead to diverse paths of growth and decline. It is neither theoretically sound nor realistic to assume the uni versal path of economic de velopment largely driven by technological creativity, and by the generic notion of di versity and openness. The section that follo ws e xamines the rele vance of creati ve capital theory in e xplaining the economic de velopment of some Asian cities, and pinpoints ho w the theory neglects the multiple trajectories of local economies in their dri ve for growth.

Creative Capital Theory and Its Rele vance to Asian Economies For man y understandable reasons, the mass media is obsessed with ranking. Certainly, city rankings of creati vity offer appealing stories for co verage (Spiegel 2007a, b). In China, Florida’ s The Flight of the Cr eative Class has recently been

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translated into Chinese. Meanwhile, lifestyle magazines embrace the notion of the creative class wholeheartedly. One magazine has declared the da wn of the creative age, and that the creative class in China is booming. 2 The Hong Kong government has even commissioned research on its creativity index. The objectives of the study are to draw comparisons with Florida’s work, and to offer a more general framework for measuring creative outcomes in Hong Kong and the various underpinnings that affect the nurturance and articulation of creati vity (HKSAR 2005). Similarly , the Shanghai Creative Industry Centre has invented its own creativity index comprising five sets of sub-indices (creati ve industry index, R&D index, cultural environment index, human capital index and social environment index) (SCIC 2006). However, uncritical adoption of creati ve capital theory without appraisal of its rele vance to Asian conte xts does not help us comprehend the dynamics of economic development of Asian cities. T aking the creati vity issue seriously , it is better to start with a thorough e xamination of the changing economic structure of individual Asian cities in order to test the v alidity of the notion of the creati ve class. The following discussion draws on two cases – Hong K ong and Macau – to highlight the limitations of the theory .3 It argues, following Florida’s broad definition of the creative class, that these economies have been or are moving towards the knowledge-driven economy where creati vity is an essential asset. Ho wever, the y are not the type of economy that Florida en visages, which thri ves on technology inventions and flourishing high-tech industries. Hong Kong is one of the few Asian cities enjo ying signif icant economic gro wth in the past decades. Although the economy w as hit by the Asian f inancial crisis in 1997 and the global economic downturn in 2001, Hong Kong rebounded in recent years and its economy remains in a course of sustained gro wth. Macau, renowned for being a gambling city , also recovered from the recession between 1997 and 1999, and has set a ne w course towards an economy based on cultural tourism, leisure and gaming activities. It has also attained impressive economic growth in recent years. 4 Yet the two cities have been outperformed by well-developed countries in the OECD on several technology measures including patents applications, R&D in vestment as well as numbers of researchers per million people (see Table 1). According to Florida’ s def inition, the y are hardly the city economies dri ven by high-tech industries. Ho wever, Hong K ong maintains a higher le vel of ICT expenditure than the average of high-income countries in the OECD, which reflects that do wnstream inno vations or use of technologies could be e xtensive in the city. Further e vidence in support of this observ ation could be found in increasing investment on IT equipment and softw are as a ratio of gross f ixed capital formation in the b usiness sector. In 2005, it accounted for 8% as compared to 4.9% in See “Creative Class”, Xin Shijiao (New Vision), issue 48, April 2006. The two cities are selected because of the f ast-changing structure of the tw o economies as well as their occupational structure, which sheds light on the de velopment path of the cities. There is no claim to representativeness of an “Asian model”, but they do help to highlight the uniqueness and different development paths Asian cities could ha ve. 4 A summary of the two cities’ GDP growth is attached in Appendix 1. 2 3

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Table 1 Measures of high-tech innovation in OECD, Macau and Hong Kong, 2002 (From World Development Indicators Database) OECD (high income) Macau Hong Kong Patents applications (non-residents) Patents applications (residents) ICT expenditure as % of GDP R&D as % of GDP Researchers in R&D (per million people) a Based on figure in year 2000. N.A. – Data not available.

349,357 734,686 7% 2.4% 3,776.5

12 N.A. N.A. N.A. 40.5*

9,018 112 7.6% 1% 1,563.7

1998. Besides, the proportion of b usiness firms undertaking acti vities relating to organizational, marketing or strategic innovation rose from 16% in 2001 to 48.5% in 2005 (C&SD 2007). These findings would validate the limitation of the growthmodel based on technological creati vity, which seems to be feeble in e xplaining the economic growth of Hong K ong and Macau. City economies lik e Hong Kong and Macau absorb creati vity and mark et-driven innovations in the service sector . Furthermore, even the path of economic development in these cities is significantly different from each other if one looks closely at their occupational and economic structure. Florida places high v alue on creati ve people and their contrib ution to local economic de velopment. While enormous ef forts ha ve been spent on counting the creative class, there is little interest in ho w the class emer ges (Boschma and Fritsch 2007; Acs and Me gyesi 2007; Marlet and V an Woerkens 2004). Yet, it is far more important to in vestigate the factors and economic environment that place substantial demand on kno wledge workers than to focus only on ho w substantial the numbers of the creative class might be. Looking at the occupational structure of Hong Kong and Macau in the past decade, a rising trend of the creative class based on Florida’s broad definition is noticeable (see Table 2).5

Figures presented in the table are compiled from the ILO dataset which allo ws us a de gree of comparability of occupational f igures in Hong K ong and Macau. Ho wever, some limitations are noted. The ILO classification code (ISCO-88) has nine categories of occupation, of which the first three groups are roughly equi valent to the creati ve occupations according to Richard Florida’ s concept of the creati ve class. Florida has not produced corresponding codes of the ILO and his own classif ications although in the study Europe in the Cr eative Ag e (Florida and T inagli 2004: 42), he made use of the former for comparisons between European countries and the United States. Therefore, the corresponding codes between the ILO classif ication and the creative occupations, enclosed in Appendix 2, are based on Boshma’ s surv ey (Boshma and Fritsch 2007). Besides, we do not make further distinction among the “creative core,” “creative professionals”and “Bohemians”, for they are basically co vered in the ILO data. The corresponding table, ho wever, reveals inconsistencies on the criteria that distinguishes creati ve from non-creati ve occupations. For instance, “teaching associate professionals” are e xcluded in Boschma’s survey but the exclusion seems lacking sufficient justification. Details of employment figures by occupation in Hong Kong and Macau are enclosed in Appendix 3.

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Table 2 Total employment by occupation, Hong K ong and Macau, 1996 and 2006 (From ILO Online Database) Hong Kong Macau AAG % AAG % (1996–2006) (1997–2006) Senior officials and managers a 1.27 Professionalsa 3.71 Technicians and associate professionals a 4.37 Clerks −0.56 Service, shop and sales workers 1.71 Skilled agricultural and fishery workers −5.03 Craft and related trade workers −2.61 Plant and machine operators and assemblers −2.89 Elementary occupations 1.89 Average annual growth of total employment (%) 1.05 a Creative class according to the def inition of Richard Florida. AAG – average annual growth.

4.85 7.27 6.01 5.93 3.19 0.00 −0.20 −1.04 4.28 3.42

In general, people working in the fields involving management and professional skills increase in substantial numbers, though the degree of growth varies from one place to another. The share of the creati ve class in Hong K ong’s total w orkforce, for instance, rose from 28.9% (or 888,100 persons) in 1996 to 36% (or 1,226,900 persons) in 2006. In Macau, only 15.3% (or 30,000 persons) of the w orkforce belonged to the creati ve class in 1997, b ut this rose to 18.8% (or 49,900 persons) in 2006. Besides, tw o salient features are noted. First, the tw o urban economies are speeding up in the successful transformation of their occupational structure by increasing managerial, professional and skilled jobs while at the same time recording negative growth in employment in low-skill sectors and marginalised industries (particularly in the case of Hong K ong). That is clearly reflected in the a verage annual gro wth of these occupations, which is higher than the gro wth of o verall employment market in both cases. Second, along with the increase in creative occupations, lo w-skill jobs such as service w orkers (e.g. housekeeping, salespersons and restaurant services w orkers) have also gro wn in numbers. Elementary occupations and clerks such as construction w orkers and of fice and customer service clerks have increased substantially in Macau, reflecting the positive effect brought by new investments in hotels, casinos and construction projects. Urban economists, who are concerned with the economic transformation of Hong K ong, point out that the city has been turned into a producer -service economy, where it no w serves as the headquarters for f inancial, banking, logistic, manufacturing and trading companies with their economic acti vities spreading over the neighboring re gions and countries in South Asia, South East Asia and in mainland China (Wong and Tao 2000; Zhu et al. 2002; Hutton 2004). This process of transformation cannot be attributed only to such generic factors as openness and diversity. Of course, Hong K ong is well kno wn for its free mark et economy, and its b usiness-friendly en vironment ranks high in a couple of w orld indices

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relating to economic freedom and competitiveness (World Bank 2006; IMD 2006). The transformation of Hong K ong, ho wever, went through dif ferent stages and contingent developments. The historical f actor of the city as a long-time entrêpot and regional centre, undertaking a large portion of China’s trade in the past century, is favourable for the city’s economic restructuring. More importantly, recent developments, such as the relocation of manufacturing industries to China’s Guangdong province since the late 1970s, and the gro wing foreign direct in vestment in the province, helps build a web of economic nexuses – the vital linkages that facilitate the flow of goods, talents and monies between Hong K ong and its hinterland. While Macau enjo ys an increase in the creati ve class, the w orking population in low-end service sectors is also increasing, sho wing a robust service economy in place. It w ould be a misconception to cate gorise Macau as an economy weak in the creative sector, or rank ed low according to creati ve capital theory because of its lack of high-tech industries and relati vely slo w de velopment of the creati ve class. Macau has reco vered from the ne gative growth in 1998 to achie ve a growth of 2.9% in GDP in 2001, and 16.6% in 2006. International tourism at Macau has boomed in recent years, and the number of arri vals has increased from 7 million in 1997, to 21.9 million in 2006 (DSEC 2007). These f igures strongly support the notion that the economic prospect of Macau is dri ven by international tourism and a rob ust service sector; in particular , the gaming industry is the most important pillar of the local economy .6 In The Rise of the Cr eative Class , Florida did f ind a case of a city with a sound record of economic gro wth but which ranks lo w in creative capital theory, and this is Las Vegas. It is a major tourist centre, known for its casinos and for the gaming industry . Drawing parallel comparisons to the case of Macau, Florida might rank Macau the least creati ve. However, as argued in this paper, occupational pattern is structured by dif ferent paths of economic de velopment. While Hong K ong has been successfully transformed into a re gional centre of trade, service and finance, Macau prospers on the base of a tourism economy or in Florida’s conception, a lo w-end service economy . Yet, it is this so-called lo wend service economy that creates wealth and job opportunities, promotes economic growth and more importantly, attracts further investment for the development of the local economy 7 Indeed, foreign investors in gaming, hotel, real estate and banking industries are interested in the flourishing economy of Macau; not only do investors come from Las V egas, they also come from Hong K ong, pouring further monies into hotel, retail and banking b usinesses in the city. It w ould be a misconception to vie w the creati ve class as lar gely referring to artists, designers and other cultural practitioners with distincti ve lifestyles. In fact, the creative class described by Florida is a broad stratum, comprising mainly The number of casinos in Macao rose from 11 in 2002 to 27 in 2007. Gross revenue from different gaming activities surged from 23.4 billion patacas (MOP) in 2002 to 57.5 billion in 2006. The city has dethroned Las Vegas and has become the world’s biggest gaming centre (Economist 2007; DICJ 2007). 7 According to one estimate, the gambling industry contrib utes about 50 billion patacas (MOP); and unemployment rate in 2005 is 4% (Ceng 2006). 6

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managerial, professional and skilled occupations. This definition is still meaningful only in the sense that it gives us a convenient category for measuring the changing occupational structure in Asian cities, as sho wn in the cases of Hong K ong and Macau. However, creative capital theory has profound weaknesses when it comes to explaining the underlying economic forces that w ork in favour of the growth in these cities. The main weakness of the theory , as f ar as the empirical cases ha ve shown, is its incapability of understanding the dif ferent strate gies for economic growth. It fails to point out, for instance, the k ey sectors with economic potential, the resources and conditions conduci ve to gro wth, and ho w local economy could be developed. Translating this into the language of polic y, creative capital theory might even offer little insight to address the de velopment issues of cities. Labour issues such as unemployment patterns in the creative class, economic upgrading of low-skill labourers, or e ver widening income disparity between the creati ve-haves and have-nots are recurrent issues that the so-called creative cities would encounter. Yet, the theory sidetracks the real issues b ut serves as accomplice to flatter those policymakers who are indulgent in e xcessive design and beautif ication of urban en vironments (Peck 2005; Malanga 2004), or in e xaggerated promotion of a “live-work-learn-play community” with b uzzing street-level culture, di verse neighborhoods and mix ed-use f acilities (Florida 2002a: 164–170, 2005a: 167). Believing that these strate gies work, and that the y help attract talents and in vestment, would reinforce the myth of the creati ve class but would not offer a creative solution to city development issues. Appendix 1 Real GDP growth in percentage in Hong Kong and Macau, 1990–2006 (From Commission on Strategic De velopment, HKSAR, Creation of Employment, Paper No. CSD/EDC/7/2006, 31 October 2006; The Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), Macau, Online Database) Hong Kong Macau 1990 4.0 1991 5.7 1992 6.5 1993 6.3 1994 5.6 1995 3.9 1996 4.2 1997 5.1 1998 −5.5 1999 4.0 2000 10.0 2001 0.6 2002 1.8 2003 3.2 2004 8.6 2005 7.3 2006 8.0 a a First quarter figure. N.A. – not available.

N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. N.A. −4.6 −2.4 5.7 2.9 10.1 14.2 28.4 6.9 16.6

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Appendix 2 Corresponding table of the ILO occupational classification and the creative occupations defined by Richard Florida (From Boschma and Fritsch 2007, T able 1) ILO occupational classification (ISCO-88) Definition of the creative class Major Group 1 Legislators, senior officials and managers 11. Legislators and senior officials 111. Legislators 112. Senior government officials 113. Traditional chiefs and heads of villages 114. Senior officials of special-interest organisations 12. Corporate managers 121. Directors and chief executives 122. Production and operations department managers 123. Other department managers 13. General managers 131. General managers Major Group 2 Professionals 21. Physical, mathematical and engineering science professionals 211. Physicists, chemists and related professionals 212. Mathematicians, statisticians and related professionals 213. Computing professionals 214. Architects, engineers and related professionals 22. Life science and health professionals 221. Life science professionals 222. Health professionals (except nursing) 223. Nursing and midwifery professionals 23. Teaching professionals 231. College, university and higher education teaching professionals 232. Secondary education teaching professionals 233. Primary and pre-primary education teaching professionals 234. Special education teaching professionals 235. Other teaching professionals 24. Other professionals 241. Business professionals 242. Legal professionals 243. Archivists, librarians and related information professionals 244. Social science and related professionals 245. Writers and creative or performing artists 246. Religious professionals Major Group 3 Technicians and associate professionals 31. Physical and engineering science associate professionals 311. Physical and engineering science technicians 312. Computer associate professionals 313. Optical and electronic equipment operators 314. Ship and aircraft controllers and technicians 315. Safety and quality inspectors 32. Life science and health associate professionals 321. Life science technicians and related associate professionals

Creative professionals

Creative professionals

Creative professionals Creative core

Creative core Creative core Creative professionals Creative core

Creative professionals Creative professionals Creative core Creative core Bohemians [x]

Creative professionals

Creative professionals (continued)

146 Appendix 2 (continued) ILO occupational classification (ISCO-88)

P. Mok

Definition of the creative class

322. Modern health associate professionals (e xcept nursing) 323. Nursing and midwifery associate professionals 324. Traditional medicine practitioners and faith healers 33. Teaching associate professionals [x] 331. Primary education teaching associate professionals 332. Pre-primary education teaching associate professionals 333. Special education teaching associate professionals 334. Other teaching associate professionals 34. Other associate professionals Creative professionals 341. Finance and sales associate professionals Creative professionals 342. Business services agents and trade brok ers Creative professionals 343. Administrative associate professionals [x] 344. Customs, tax and related government associate Creative professionals professionals Creative professionals 345. Police inspectors and detectives Bohemians 346. Social work associate professionals [x] 347. Artistic, entertainment and sports associate professionals 348. Religious associate professionals Major Group 5 Service workers and shop and market sales workers 51. Personal and protective services workers [x] 511. Travel attendants and related workers 512. Housekeeping and restaurant services workers 513. Personal care and related w orkers 514. Other personal service workers 515. Astrologers, fortune-tellers and related w orkers 516. Protective services workers 52. Models, salespersons and demonstrators Bohemians 521. Fashion and other models [x] 522. Shop salespersons and demonstrators [x] 523. Stall and market salespersons [x] – occupational groups not included in the creati ve class.

163.3 523.7

584.6 439

10.2

356

276.5

563.2

161 426

561.6 434.4

11.9

341.2

300.8

535.4

–

3,073.3

Total employment

3,163.6

–

247

301.1

Senior officials and managersa Professionalsa Technicians and associate professionalsa Clerks Service, shop and sales workers Skilled agricultural and fishery workers Craft and related trade workers Plant and machine operators and assemblers Elementary occupations Miscellaneous

1997

1996

Hong Kong

3,122

–

568.9

270.9

347.5

9.1

578.2 443.8

165.4 490.2

248.2

1998

3,112.1

–

571.3

259.5

327.8

8.5

568.1 440.6

168.5 525.2

242.6

1999

3,207.3

–

586.9

263.4

332.7

8.9

588 461.5

182.7 549.8

233.3

2000

3,251.3

–

606.7

248.8

306.4

6.5

558.4 474.3

198.1 573.7

278.4

2001

3,220.3

–

610.1

236

286.4

9

535.1 468.7

198 574.3

302.6

2002

3,197.4

–

616

232.8

269.3

7.1

527.3 481.1

204.5 586

273.3

2003

3,276.5

–

607.2

232.9

265.8

7.9

542.3 513.6

212.4 611.9

282.4

2004

3,340.8

–

612.4

224.3

265.4

7.8

544 524.9

230.2 617

314.8

2005

Appendix 3 Total employment by occupation in Hong Kong and Macau, 1996–2006 (1,000 persons) (From ILO Online Database)

3,411.6

–

645.4

224.3

261.9

7.1

531.1 514.7

231.8 653.4

341.7

2006

1.05 (continued)

–

1.89

−2.89

−2.61

−5.03

−0.56 1.71

3.71 4.37

1.27

AAG % (1996–2006)

9 Asian Cities and Limits to Creative Capital Theory 147

35.9 41.7 1.3 26.8 28.2 31 196.5

36.2 41.3 1.4

28.4 27.8

30.8 195.8

a

Creative occupations according to Florida’s definition.

10.9 5.3 15.5

11.1 5 13.9

Senior officials and managers Professionals Technicians and associate professionals Clerks Service, shop and sales workers Skilled agricultural and fishery workers Craft and related trade workers Plant and machine operators and assemblers Elementary occupations Total employment

1998

1997

Macau

Appendix 3 (continued)

32 196.1

24.5 28.8

35.5 39.2 1.2

11.9 5.9 17.2

1999

33.3 195.3

24 24.9

37.4 39.4 1.3

12 6.1 16.8

2000

36.3 205

25.1 30

37.3 40.7 1.3

10.7 6.2 17.4

2001

35.3 204.9

23 27.7

36.2 43.4 1.3

12.2 6.9 18.9

2002

36.4 205.4

22.7 25.3

39 40.8 1.9

12.2 7.8 19.3

2003

36.8 219.1

23 25.8

44.7 45.3 1.9

13.5 7.8 20.4

2004

40.4 237.5

24.8 26.7

51.1 48.5 1.2

15.8 7.5 21.4

2005

44.9 265.1

27.9 25.3

60.8 54.8 1.4

17 9.4 23.5

2006

4.28 3.42

−0.20 −1.04

5.93 3.19 0.00

4.85 7.27 6.01

AAG % (1997–2006)

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References Acs, Z. J. and Me gyesi, M. I. 2007. Creati vity and industrial cities: A case study of Baltimore. JENA Economic Research Papers 2007-024: 1–29. APEC. 2002. The ne w economy in APEC: Inno vations, digital divide and policy . Singapore: APEC Secretariat. Barro, R. J. 2001. Education and economic growth. In The contribution of human and social capital to sustained economic growth and well-being, ed. J. F. Helliwell, Proceedings of an OECD/ HRDC conference, Quebec, 19–21 March 2000. Otta wa: Human Resources De velopment Canada, OECD, 14–41. Bhidè, A. 2006. V enturesome consumption, inno vation and globalization. Joint Conference of CESIFO and Center on Capitalism and Society: Perspecti ves on the Performance of the Continent’s Economies. Venice, July 2006. Boschma, R. A. and Fritsch, M. 2007. Creati ve class and re gional growth? Empirical e vidence from eight European countries. JENA Economic Resear ch P apers 2007-066 (September): 1–33. Ceng, K. 2006. Gro wth of the Macau tourism and gambling industries is getting slo w do wn. Zijing Magazine, no. 185 March. http://www .zijing.com.cn/200603/GB/channel3/index.html. Accessed 4 July 2007. Census and Statistics Department (C&SD), HKSAR. 2007. Hong Kong as a knowledg e-based economy: A statistical per spective. Hong K ong: Science and T echnology Statistics Section, Census and Statistics Department. Commission on Strate gic De velopment, HKSAR. 2006. Creation of emplo yment. P aper No.: CSD/EDC/7/2006, 31 October. Economist. 2007. Betting on growth. http://www.Economist.com. Accessed 25 January 2007. Florida, R. 2002a. The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books. Florida, R. 2002b. Competing on creativity: Placing Ontario’s cities in North American conte xt. A report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Inno vation and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Florida, R. 2005a. Cities and the creative class. London: Routledge. Florida, R. 2005b. Flight of the creative class: The new global competition for talent . New York: HarperCollins. Florida, R. and Tinagli, I. 2004. Europe in the creative age. London/Pittsburgh: Software Industry Centre, Carnegie Mellon; co-published with DEMOS. Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, Macau (DICJ). 2007. Online database. http://www. dicj.gov.mo/EN/index.htm. Accessed 25 January 2007. Glaeser, E. 2003. The ne w economics of urban and re gional growth. In The Oxford handbook of economic g eography, eds. G. Clark, M. Feldman, and M. Gertler , 83–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glaeser, E. 2004. Re view of Richard Florida’ s the rise of the creati ve class. www .economics. harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/papers/Review_Florida.pdf. Accessed 25 January 2007. HKSAR. 2005. A Study on creative index. Hong Kong: Home Affairs Bureau. Hutton, T. A. 2004. Service industries, globalization, and urban restructuring within the AsiaPacific: Ne w de velopment trajectories and planning responses. Progress in Planning 61: 1–74. IMD. 2006. The IMD world competitiveness yearbook 2006 . Lausanne, Switzerland: IMD International. Jacobs, J. 1993. The death and life of great American cities. New York: Modern Library. Lang, R. E. and Danielsen, K. 2005. Re view roundtable: Cities and the creati ve class. Journal of the American Planning Association 71(2): 203–220. Malanga, S. 2004. The curse of the creati ve class. City Journal Winter 14 (1): 36–45. Mankiw, N. G., Romer , D., and W eil, D. N. 1992. A contrib ution to the empirics of economic growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(2): 407–437.

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Marlet, G. and V an Woerkens, C. 2004. Skills and cr eativity in a cr oss-section of Dutc h cities . Discussion Paper Series 04-29, Utrecht School of Economics, Tjalling C. Koopmans Research Institute, October, 1–32. National Commission on Entrepreneurship (NCE). 2001. High-growth companies: Mapping America’s entrepreneurial landscape, 28 pp. OECD. 2002. Measuring the information economy 2002. Paris: OECD. Peck, J. 2005. Struggling with the creati ve class. International Journal of Urban and Re gional Research 29(4): 740–770. Shanghai Creative Industry Centre (SCIC). 2006. 2006 Shanghai creative industries development report. Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technological Literature Publishing House. Spiegel. 2007a. An inside look at Europe’s coolest cities. Spiegel online international. http://www. spiegel.de/international/europe/0151850229700.html. Accessed 28 August 2007. Spiegel. 2007b. Berlin tops Germany for creative class. Spiegel online international. http://www. spiegel.de/international/europe/0151851060900.html. Accessed 10 October 2007. Statistics and Census Service, Macau (DSEC). 2007. Online database. http://www .dsec.gov. mo/e_index.html). Accessed 10 October 2007. UNESCO. 2005. Towards knowledge societies. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Wong, R. Y. C. and Tao, Z. 2000. An economic study of Hong Kong’s producer service sector and its role in supporting manufacturing . Hong K ong: APEC Study Centre, Uni versity of Hong Kong. World Bank. 2006. Doing business 2007: How to reform. Washington, DC: The World Bank. World Bank. 2007. World de velopment indicator s online . http://www.worldbank.org/reference/. Accessed January 2006–December 2007. Zhu, J., Lean, H. S., and Y ing, S. K. 2002. The third-party logistics services and globalization of manufacturing, International Planning Studies 7(1): 89–104.

Chapter 10

The Creative Industries, Governance and Economic Development: A UK Perspective* Calvin Taylor

Introduction The title of ‘creati ve economy’ is much sought after by cities around the w orld. This new soubriquet in the v ocabulary of urban esteem captures at a glance the zeitgeistian coupling of culture with economic v alue. W ith a rene wed emphasis on place and the qualities of locality as the locus of de velopment, there is a strong interest from policy-makers in the role of culture in economic development, particularly in the guise of the so-called ‘untraded inter -dependencies’ (Storper 1995) of shared values, trust and social capital. Similarly, once seriously neglected in studies of economic de velopment, culture as both the conte xt for and possible source of economic growth also now appears at the heart of new ways of thinking and practising economic development (Radcliffe 2006; Clammer 2005). Whilst dif ferent conceptualisations of the creati ve economy abound, the most common approaches reference the idea of the creative industries as a potential driver of industrial and economic de velopment. Since 1997, there has been in the United Kingdom an upsurge of government, private and third sector interest in the contrib ution of the creati ve industries to the UK economy and society (DCMS 1998, 2001, 2007; The Work Foundation 2007), a contribution which a number of commentators have posited as a k ey source of future competiti ve advantage (NESTA 2006; Cox 2005). With annual gro wth rates at twice the a verage for the economy as a whole (DCMS 2007), the attraction of the creative industries for policy-makers is clear. With a combination of abo ve-average growth statistics and something of the zeitgeist, the creative industries feature in virtually e very regional and local economic strate gy in the UK. However, it is this widespread adoption that needs to be scrutinised.

* This chapter is, in part, based on project work undertaken for the Huddersfield Creative Town Initiative in 1998–2000. Some of the material presented here w as previously published in Taylor(2000).

C. Taylor () School of Performance and Cultural Industries, Uni versity of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_10, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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This chapter argues that current conceptualisations of the creati ve industries within development thinking in the UK are o ver-economised at the e xpense of the cultural dynamics of creati vity. The desire to accrue the economic pay-of f from creati ve industries investment strategies has obscured what it is about such industries that have historically made them attracti ve to localities. The chapter dra ws on critiques of early experiments in local culture-led re generation – the forerunner of the contemporary interest in the creati ve industries – to consider the issues that are raised when creati ve industries strategies are seen in the conte xt of ne w models of local and re gional economic development. The chapter ar gues that current strate gic thinking about the creative industries underplays the ‘cultural’ role of such industries within a locality, and that it is this cultural role, with all its connotations of shared identity , vision and historical narrative, that requires strategies for promoting the creati ve industries to also tak e into account local political cultures. The chapter concludes that the apparent aspiration for a ‘politics-lite’ route to successful economic de velopment through culture risks both repeating past errors and missing out on what these industries can genuinely of fer. This chapter draws on a number of studies of city development in which culture has figured as a key feature to re-connect the debate about the v alue of the creative industries to questions of politics and ideology . The chapter be gins with a brief re view of how earlier commentators addressed the politics of culture-led city de velopment and draws out a number of themes that inform the ar gument of the chapter. These themes might be broadly stated in the follo wing terms. First, the earlier literature pointed to what was the inherently political nature of culture – as a space of negotiation and contest. This would suggest a critical reading of contemporary creati ve industries strategies in which in general terms this politics goes unacknowledged. Second, if creativity is an essential part of culture, we ha ve to question models of the creati ve industries that see creativity as simply an individually-held ‘factor of production.’ If creativity is not culture-neutral, then strate gies for promoting creati vity must attend to its situated nature and part of that situated-ness is the inherently political nature of culture.

The Creative Industries and Local Economic De velopment Contemporary political discourse has clearly identified the media (publishing, film, software and music, for e xample) and their associated producer services (design and advertising) as the source of the particular comparati ve economic adv antage thought to be enjo yed by the creati ve industries in the UK. The tendenc y towards technological convergence in information technology, e-commerce and media communications heralds their ascendancy to the pinnacles of advanced industrial development. However, whilst contemporary political discourse favours the term creative industries, this has de veloped on the back of nearly 20 years of localised strate gic development in the uses of culture, often in the guise of the cultural industries, in the context of urban regeneration. These kinds of strategies have been the subject of much academic analysis, especially in the f ield of local and regional development. The potential social and economic contrib ution of cultural acti vity appears to have been f irst acknowledged in the US in the 1970s (Snecdof 1985; Whitt 1987;

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Zukin 1989). One response to the urban f allout of the oil crises of the 1970s w as to find strategies for encouraging the re-population of neighbourhoods blighted by industrial closure and shrinking government aid budgets. By attractinga demographic mix of artists, crafts-people, media w orkers, students, middle-class professionals in pursuit of bohemian lifestyles and migrants, it w as thought that neighbourhoods could stabilise their populations and economies (Zukin 1989, 1995). In Europe, man y localities adopted a related kind of culture-led re generation in the early 1980s. Initially with the aim of re generating Europe’ s rapidly deindustrialising major cities as embodiments of a European civilised ideal (Bianchini and P arkinson 1993), in more recent years, the programmes of the European Structural Funds ha ve increasingly highlighted the emplo yment and economic growth potentials of culture, particularly through the w ork of the creati ve and cultural industries (European Commission 2005). In the UK, city-based initiati ves were de veloped in London (Le wis 1990; McGuigan 1996), Shef field (Shef field City Council 1988; Oatle y 1996), Li verpool (Comedia 1991), Manchester (Urban Cultures Limited 1992), Birmingham (Boden 1988) and the North-east (Cornford and Robbins 1992). These strategies have been extremely varied in their objectives, in man y cases ha ving to address seemingly quite competing constituencies and audiences. The ways in which the y have been strategically used are usefully summarised by Bassett (1993, 1996) in the follo wing terms: 1. A concern with opening up traditional institutions such as museums and theaters to wider public use, by increasing access and encouraging more in volvement in the local community 2. An expanded program of support for community arts, ethnic minority cultures, and socially and culturally deprived neighborhoods 3. A new focus on the infrastructure necessary for cultural production, embracing investment in studios, workshops, marketing and support organisations, and the planning of ‘cultural districts’ 4. An extension of traditional cultural policies to include support for ne w technology sectors, such as tele vision (cable and video), central to the whole f ield of popular culture 5. A recognition of the role of the arts in urban re generation, typically in volving the launch of ‘flagship’ development projects for arts centers, theaters and concert halls in inner-city areas 6. The launching of high prof ile events or festi vals often link ed to local heritage themes, to encourage cultural tourism However imaginative and varied these programmes and initiati ves have been, they have often found themselv es ne gotiating a number of polic y dilemmas (Bassett 1993; Lim 1993; Grif fiths 1995). In their re view of a number of urban-based cultural strate gies, Bianchini and P arkinson (1993) highlighted three of these dilemmas in particular. First, they point to the inherent dangers of center-periphery conceptualisations in urban cultural planning, which can foster gentrif ication and exclusivity. Second, the y identify the potential conflict o ver resources and influence that can arise from strategies torn between calls for investment in cultural

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production and facilities for cultural consumption. Third, the y point to the tension that can arise between the short term v alue of one-off events – festivals, for example, which help to raise the profile of a locality and temporarily engage it s citizens and visitors, and the demand for longer term sustainable solutions. Lewis (1990) and McGuigan (1996) similarly point to the political complexities facing the urban cultural strate gist resulting from the potential range of competing local demands and objecti ves. A fundamental polic y conflict may e xist between social and economic priorities. Should cultural strate gy address itself to issues of social e xclusion, educational opportunities and the problems f aced by mar ginalised communities (Matarasso 1997), or should it be geared to industrial de velopment in the form of emplo yment initiati ves in the cultural industries (W illiams 1997)? This is particularly acute where dif fering def initions of culture operate within the policy networks of localities, a situation often compounded by the competition for scarce resources.

Culture, Creativity and the Contemporary Politics of Local Economic Strategies It is against this historical background that some of the debates about the cultural and creati ve industries intersect with debates about the characteristic modes of economic organisation in post-industrial economies. Indeed, for some commentators, in their or ganisational characteristics, w orking practices and products, these industries are re garded as paradigmatic of the netw orked v ertically disinte grated post-industrial economy (Schapiro et al. 1992; Lash and Urry 1994). What guar antees the significance of the policy issues and tensions identified above is that the cultural and creati ve industries are also to some e xtent, by def inition, regarded as highly localised assets. In his re view of the economic ar guments for de veloping these localised creative and cultural industry assets, W illiams (1997) observes that economically peripheral regions appear to have been more adept at exploiting their cultural resources than the more ob vious metropolitan centers (1997: 140): Is it, for example, the economic restructuring experiences of peripheral regions which have resulted in their being more acti ve? Or is it the political cultures pre valent in such areas? Moreover, is activism in policy formulation any indicator of their success in cultural industry development?

Tony Bennett’s (1998) Culture: A Reformers Science reminds contemporary readers of the relationship between culture and politics, at a time when the contemporary proliferation of initiatives in the cultural realm risks losing sight of this connection. In his book, Bennett demonstrates that the V ictorian pioneers of public cultural initiatives (Great Exhibitions, design schools, trade f airs, public museums and galleries, etc.) harboured no reserv ations about this connection. In the nineteenth century’s ‘multiplication of culture’s utilities’ (Bennett 1998), it celebrated Empire, humanised industry, instructed the illiterate and redeemed the immoral. Modern sensibilities may feel uncomfortable with the patrician moti ves of such nineteenth century cultural entrepreneurialism, b ut what it re veals is the inherently political

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nature of cultural polic y-making. What that prompts is to ask an analogous set of questions about the contemporary relationship between culture, creati vity, politics and development.

Regions, Local Economies and Models of Economic Development For us to be able to pose those questions, we need to briefly re view the main characteristics of the local economic de velopment f ield. Concern for the resur gence of the re gion as a le vel of economic co-ordination sui generis (cf. Asheim et al. 2006) has arisen for a number of reasons while the f act of globalisation poses the more general question of whither the re gion and locality? In his discussion of the re-territorialisation of the European economy , Rhodes (1995) ar gues that re gions now matter for three rather more specif ic reasons. First, liberalisation and globalisation ha ve restricted the capacity of nation-states to undertak e unilateral macro-economic management. Second, re gions have, in an y event, been a major consideration in earlier periods of structural economic adjustment. Third, the recent experience of particular re gions sho ws that some are capable of generating the conditions for the development of significant growth. Piore and Sabel’s (1984) no w famous claims concerning the Second Industrial Divide and the re gional nature of the fle xibly specialised systems of production that typify it have given rise to a range of inter-locking analytical issues. The main ones concern: the role of institutionalised relationships in fostering local economic development, particularly in the form of industrial districts; and the role of inter firm networks in embedding kno wledge and securing comparati ve advantage and the region as a v ehicle for inno vation and learning. W e will re view each of these briefly in turn and then consider their implications for understanding the role of the creative industries within models of local and re gional development.

Institutional Relationships, Networks and Embedded Knowledge In their original contrib ution, Piore and Sabel (1984) ar gued that e xamples of industrial districts such as ‘Third Italy’ sho w that fle xible specialisation requires extra-economic underpinning from the political and social spheres. In their examples, support is pro vided by arrangements as di verse as f amily ties, trade associations, co-operative enterprises and so on. In ef fect, the creation of dynamic industrial districts, and the processes of industrial agglomeration on which they are based, are premised upon the existence of common cultural ties supported by institutions. Agglomeration economies can be achie ved either formally or informally. For example, at the le vel of formal institutions, agencies concerned with design, innovation and technology transfer ensure that inno vations arising at one point

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in the netw ork can be disseminated throughout, in theory , to the adv antage of all. Examples of informal agglomeration economies include personal contacts, membership of associations, clubs and what are often described as the ‘cafeteria effects’ of close working proximity. This is one approach to conceptualising the economic architecture of industrial co-operation. Storper (1995) de velops a further insight. One f acet of the industrial district literature that has risen to prominence concerns not so much the transferable aspects of agglomeration, b ut their non-transferable features. This is what Storper (1995) describes as their ‘un-traded interdependencies. ’ This is in part deri ved from ideas contained in the w ork of Nelson and W inter (1982) on e volutionary economics and Dosi and Orsenigo (1985) on path-dependent technological de velopment. In essence, choices concerning the uses of technology are based upon interdependent relationships between enterprises, between users and producers and between producers and other producers. Choices tak e place against a broader cultural background and are dependent upon a range ofun-traded factors, including the state of local labor markets, public institutions, locally or nationally-deri ved rules of actions, customs, values, etc. The importance of un-traded interdependencies is the role the y play in securing, for a given region or industrial district, a non-transferable and by and large, non-replicable economic advantage. Moreover, that advantage is grounded in culture. Storper does admit that the identif ication of such un-traded interdependencies is somewhat difficult. However, other contributors to these debates have sought to flesh out what these might be in more detail (Amin and Thrift 1994a; Raco 1998, 1999). A necessary, but necessarily insufficient condition for the creation of un-traded interdependencies is the presence of interacting institutions within a gi ven region. This includes “f irms; financial institutions, local chambers of commerce; training agencies; trade associations; local authorities; de velopment agencies; inno vation centres; clerical bodies; unions; government agencies providing premises, land and infrastructure; business service organisations; marketing boards” (Amin and Thrift 1994b: 14) and so on. The successful institutionalisation of these relationships and the development of a sense of common purpose bears six results (Amin and Thrift 1994b): the persistence of local institutions; the localised accumulation of both codified and tacit kno wledge; institutional fle xibility; a commonly enjo yed innovative culture; the e xtension of trust and reciprocity and a sense of inclusi veness that helps to a void, for e xample, having to re-invent the wheel e very time change occurs. In other words, they become locally and culturally embedded. Assuming that the right kinds of relationships can be instituted, the major problem faced by local economies is the degree to which such relationships possess any degree of permanenc y. The e xtent of such permanenc y is subject to a number of factors including changes of personnel, changes of roles, e xternally impacting factors and so on. In response to these potential difficulties, the literature on local and regional economic development has turned to the concept of embeddedness. The key to embeddedness is the formation of a culture of trust within netw orks of enterprises. In his account of the role of trust in economic transactions, Granovetter (1985) ar gued that concrete social relationships between economic actors are a determining f actor in, for e xample, the placing of contracts and the passing of

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information on customers and suppliers. Such concrete relationships should not be regarded as the unackno wledged social content of otherwise wholly economic relations (neo-classical economics) nor as the ultimately socially determining context of economic transactions (sociology). According to Grano vetter, empirical analyses of actual transactions demonstrate that on-going economic relationships require more than simply rationally calculating indi viduals and automatic mark et clearing mechanisms. As he explains: “[t]he widespread preference for transacting with individuals of known reputation implies that few are actually content to rely on either generalised morality or institutional arrangements to guard against trouble” (Granovetter 1985: 490). The important point of Granovetter’s ideas is that the economic relations between enterprises in a netw orked industrial district are enabled by the development of trust between businesses. This brings the analysis to the third major strand of the re gional economic development literature – the idea of regions or networks as learning and innovation vehicles. There ha ve been a number of approaches to the idea that territoriality is the basis for the de velopment of a culture of inno vation. The idea is particularly important in connection with current ideas about re gional economic de velopment because security for future development will depend upon the extent to which such capacity is embedded and therefore relatively place-dependent. There are at least four subtly different approaches to the concept of territoriallybased innovation. These include the learning region (Asheim 1996; Simmie 1997), the regional innovation system (Cooke et al. 1997; Braczyk et al. 1998), the milieu innovateur (Camagni 1991a, 1991b, 1995) and collective learning or regional innovative capacity (Nelson and W inter 1982; Lawson and Lorenz 1999). The essence of such approaches to the development of innovation is the idea that knowledge, its dissemination, development and implementation flourishes best in practice, when it is territorially grounded within a specific set of localised relationships. Where the above-named approaches differ is their respective accounts of the innovation process. In the idea of the learning region or the regional innovation system, the focus is placed upon the contribution of both inter-firm and inter-agency relationships to the innovation process. By contrast, the idea of the innovation milieu and the collective learning process, whilst not specifically excluding the role of other agencies, accent the collective innovatory capacity of inter -firm relationships. In addition, as Raco (1999) observes, these are constructed from interacting sets of social, political and economic relations. In order to understand, therefore, what occurs in the context of local economic development, an analysis of the relationships between local capacities and wider political processes is required.

Economic Development and Local Governance Perhaps the most often cited consequence of the globalising tendency of contemporary capitalism is the widely held perception that national governments have had to learn to live within new disciplinary constraints. Administrations with historically

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strong commitment to the principles of universal provision and social redistribution have been obliged by a complex of economic, political and demographic factors to respond to the disciplines of global competition. The pressures of globalisation are perhaps most acutely felt at the local and regional levels. It is at these levels where de-industrialisation, industrial re-location and their concomitant social and personal impacts tak e ef fect. One potentially countervailing tendency to globalisation has been the recognition (albeit often in limited and begrudging ways) by governments of the signif icance of the local and the regional as distinct spheres of economic and political activity. This has particularly been the case in the European Union (Michie and Fitzgerald 1997). In Europe, the regional accent has been underpinned by the emphasis of many European Union programmes (European Social Fund [ESF], European Regional Development Fund [ERDF], etc.). This intensifying local and re gional economic focus has seen parallel changes in the form and function of local go vernance. In the UK, openly hostile central government attitudes to local government in the 1980s gave way, in the 1990s, to a centre-local political accommodation based upon the reformulation of local government from service provider to strategic enabler. This impacted local governance in a number of w ays. Perhaps the most important of these were the competiti ve privatisation of certain public services, the corporate reor ganisation of internal management and policy-making structures, the adoption of performance measurement in the pro vision of customer services and the fostering of a co-operati ve attitude towards working with the pri vate and third sectors. What these in particular ha ve meant is the creation of more distrib uted models of local governance. These models ha ve been particularly important in the conte xt of economically peripheral re gions. The gro wing emphasis upon the localised focus of economic development has shifted attention from an e valuation of the f actors that contribute to indi vidual b usiness competiti veness, to the identif ication of those f actors that constitute local competiti ve adv antage as a collecti vely held social attrib ute (Brusco 1986). This necessarily entails a shift of focus from the operational to the strategic. Thus, whilst a locality’ s competitiveness may depend upon the e xtent to which it can capture the new industries, their potential to give the locality a competitive edge depends upon a number of other signif icant factors. Those have already been identified above: institutional capacity , embedded e xpertise and kno wledge, networked relationships and a localised culture of trust. In theory, therefore, the key to competitive advantage is the identif ication of potential gro wth sectors that not only bear the characteristics of post-fordist industrial or ganisation, but which are also inextricably intertwined with these local assets. A number of regions and industries have achieved a relatively high profile upon these activities. What is particularly telling in the combined literatures of re gional studies, local economic de velopment and the economics and sociology of institutions and or ganisations is an ackno wledgement of the centrality of political cultures to the patterning of successful economic development. At a more general le vel, this acknowledgement of the key role of political cultures and the gro wth of ne w models of go vernance is clearly at the heart of what has become known as the ‘new urban politics’ (Cox 1993, 1995).

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The New Urban Politics and Governance Towns, cities and regions at the periphery of the global economic arena ha ve been obliged to re-think how they address their roles (Oatley 1998). In the UK, a number of factors have created a ne w context within which the apparatus of local go vernance has been both expanded beyond the traditional institutions of localgovernment and internally re-structured. It has been ar gued earlier that these de velopments have occurred as a result of local, national, international and increasingly re gional responses to the more directly felt pressures of global economic forces. Thus, the global–local interface in economic development is matched in the local imprint of global politics. Indeed, in the realisation of the direct global–local interf ace, local politics has increasingly been redesigned as the re gulation of local economic competitiveness (Moore 1991). A number of features characterise the changes in local and urban go vernance in the UK in the course of the last 20 years. Ar guably, the most important feature is the changing nature and quality of the relationship between central and local government, in which ne w forms of local go vernance ha ve been required that permit a much wider range of stak eholders to contrib ute to the shaping of local policy (Hoggett 1991; Stewart 1994; Oatley 1998). The second factor is that local governance began to undergo a process of redef inition driven by two imperatives. On the one hand, a combination of measures specif ically targeted at public sector service deli very and management (mark et-testing, competitive tendering and performance measurement) changed the characteristic w ays of w orking for local authorities. On the other hand, the increasing number of centrally-controlled bidfunds, including the administered European Structural Funds, requiring local co-ordination changed what it w as that local authorities did. In practical terms, these twin pressures lead to the translation of the function of local authorities from that of primarily service pro vider to that of enabler of service pro vision, whether by the pri vate sector , the v oluntary sector or by public–pri vate partnerships (Cochrane 1993; Atkinson and Moon 1994; Hambleton 1998). The third f actor is closely related to the second. Local authorities could no longer see themselv es as the sole arm of local go vernance. In ha ving to w ork with the pri vate and v oluntary sectors in more structured and deliberate w ays, local authorities found the y had to enhance their enabling role by strate gically placing themselv es alongside representatives of other sectors (Hutchinson 1994). As Ste wart (1998: 78) puts it: “competition (through City Challenge and the Single Re generation Challenge Fund) demanded the creation of new structures of local interest representation and leadership.” The fourth f actor concerns the change of emphasis in urban polic y from an essentially welf are model of priorities and objecti ves, to a model geared to enterprise and place promotion (Jessop 1997; Griffiths 1998). As Oatley (1998) explains, this process has three factors. First, under the pressures of global economic re-structuring, towns and cities no w have to compete for their places in the urban hierarchy. This means aligning urban polic y with “improving the competitiveness of business and localities” (Oatley 1998: 4). Taking a European-wide perspective,

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Newman and Verpraet (1999: 488) detect this as a more generalised process with particular implications: European economic inte gration has dra wn cities into international competition and to a reorganisation of space around zones for high level services, new technologies, airports and leisure uses.

This process is in particular reinforced by the de velopment of competitive funding mechanisms (Grif fiths 1998). The competiti ve funding mechanisms established by the UK government and their corollary in European Structural Funds ha ve presented local economies with the resources to exploit their local cultural and creative industrial assets.

The Creative Industries, Local Economic Development and Governance A number of contrib utors to the debates about the economic signif icance of the creative industries ha ve focused less on the quantif ied extent of their contrib ution than on their particular qualitati ve characteristics. These ha ve centered upon tw o issues. First, the e xtent to which the creati ve industries are re garded as e xemplars of flexibly specialised acti vities. The second issue is the signif icance of place for the development of the creative industries. To this, however, we need to add a third: the role of political cultures in fostering such industries. The general case for re garding the creati ve industries as typical e xamples of flexibly specialised producti ve organisation has been made by a number of commentators. Acknowledging that a variety of neo-fordisms might e xist in some creat ive industries (some types of publishing and tele vision broadcasting), Schapiro et al. (1992) ar gue that not only does it appear that the creati ve industries are in the vanguard of industrial development, but that one in particular – advertising – is the paradigmatic industry of a post-fordist w orld. Their prognosis in 1992 w as that: Not only are the cultural industries de-differentiating from each other, but industry in general is de-differentiating from the culture industry. As they get more alike, we are suggesting that what they get more alike is advertising. (Schapiro et al. 1992: 192)

From their first-hand research, they identified a number of organisational and product characteristics of the creati ve industries that more generally supported their vie w of the de velopmental trend to wards post-fordist fle xible specialisation. These are evidence of flexibility, the growing contractual significance of intellectual property rights, the intrinsically innovative nature of the product, the v alue of branding as a commodity, and evidence of the creative industries evolving as business services. They discuss a number of examples of different creative industries. One in particular, however, illustrates the processes of v ertical and horizontal disinte gration that have characterised the movement towards flexible specialisation. This is the film industry. Dra wing upon initial w ork by Christopherson and Storper (1986), the y argue that the economic pressures upon f ilm, brought about by mass tele vision

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consumption, heralded the way for the accelerating flexibilisation of the production process. Fle xibility, the y ar gue, w as e videnced in three w ays. First, directors, actors and writers (the creati ve capacity of the f ilm industry) achieved a degree of autonomy from the f ilm studios. Second, studio functions such as technical labor and production skills were packaged into smaller production v ehicles. Third, the facilities and infrastructure of the f ilm industry, for e xample, movie theaters, f ilm archives and studios were themselves hived off into separate companies. The fordist vertically integrated structures of the old studio system ha ve increasingly been replaced by geographically concentrated netw orks of transaction-rich small enter prises (Schapiro et al. 1992) that ha ve the capacity to innovate. The innovatory process by itself, however, is not enough. The danger inherent in the development of re gionally-based innovatory industries is that once the y begin to inno vate, the y can only fully realise the potential of their inno vation once it has an identity that can be recognised and identif ied with by potential customers. Undifferentiated innovation, however good, will be short-li ved if it cannot achie ve a degree of shelf-life. Schapiro et al. refer to this, in the language of accounting for intangibles, as “branding. ” In practice, it is the establishing of a recognisable identity for the product that forms the basis for generating v alue. In their updating of Schapiro et al. ’s original paper, Lash and Urry (1994) dre w a v ery specific conclusion from this process. One tempting conclusion is to ar gue that the translation of culture into branding is further e vidence of the on-going and deleterious processes by which culture is increasingly industrialised. In their view, this conclusion is erroneous. The objecti ve of achie ving brand status, on the part of creati ve industry enterprises and those who w ork within them, is the routine objecti ve of post-industrial producer and business service industries. Increasingly, the competitiveness of other industries is dependent upon the e xtent to which the y can secure brand identities and other intangible qualities for their products. The ef fectiveness of these is dependent upon precisely the qualities that mark out the cultural product, and are the stock-in-trade of creative industry activity. Thus, in general terms, as those such as Schapiro, et al. and Lash and Urry ar gue, the creative industries should be regarded as the paradigmatic industries of flexibly specialised economies. However, that insight carries with it much more far-reaching implications than the well-rehearsed contemporary creative industries strategic narrative seems to be a ware. When culture is conceptualised as the neces sary underpinning of economic processes – in the form of social and cultural capital, shared identity, language, etc. –, and as a typifying adv anced industrial activity, it cannot become anything other than highly politically char ged. Commentaries on cultural approaches to urban re generation in the 1990s understood the cultural politics of the cultural and creati ve industries e xplicitly e ven before the creati ve industries had become subject to the le vel of polic y scrutin y that the y ha ve recei ved since the late 1990s. Re-connecting the creati ve industries with questions of go vernance and ideology is particularly timely . As the creati ve industries are adopted around the world by countries with deeply dif fering systems of go vernance, it is perhaps more appropriate now than ever to ask under what political conditions the creati ve industries can best flourish?

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References Amin, A. and N. Thrift (eds). 1994a. Globalisation, institutions and r egional de velopment in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amin, A. and N. Thrift. 1994b . Living in the global. In Globalisation, institutions and r egional development in Europe, eds. A Amin and N. Thrift, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press. Asheim, B. 1996. Industrial districts as ‘learning re gions.’ European Planning Studies 4: 379–400. Asheim, B., P . Cook e, and R. Martin (eds). 2006. Clusters and r egional de velopment: Critical reflections and explorations. London: Routledge. Atkinson, R. and G. Moon. 1994. Urban policy in Britain: The city , the state and the mark et. London: Macmillan. Bassett, K. 1993. Urban cultural strate gies and urban re generation: A case study and critique. Environment and Planning A 25: 1773–1788. Bassett, K. 1996. Partnerships, business elites and urban politics: New forms of governance in an English city. Urban Studies 33: 539–555. Bennett, T. 1998. Culture: A reformer’s science. London: Sage. Bianchini, F. and M. Parkinson. 1993. Cultural policy and urban regeneration: The West European experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boden, T. (ed). 1988. Cities and city cultur es. Birmingham: Birmingham Film and T elevision Festival. Braczyk, H.-J., P. Cooke, and M. Heidenreich (eds). 1998. Regional innovation systems: The role of governance in a globalised world. London: UCL. Brusco, S. 1986. Small f irms and industrial districts: The e xperience of Italy. In New firms and regional de velopment in Eur ope, eds. D. K eeble and E. W ever, 184–202, London: Croom Helm. Camagni, R. (ed). 1991a. Innovation network: Spatial perspectives. London: Belhaven. Camagni, R. 1991b. Local ‘milieu’, uncertainty and innovation networks: Towards a new dynamic theory of economic space. In Innovation networks: Spatial per spectives, ed. R. Camagni, 121–144. London: Belhaven. Camagni, R. 1995. Global network and local milieu: Towards a theory of economic space. In The industrial enterprise and its en vironment: Spatial perspectives, eds. S. Conti et al., 195–216. Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Avebury. Christopherson, S. and M. Storper . 1986. The city as studio; the w orld as back lot: The impact of v ertical disinte gration on the location of the motion picture industry . Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 4: 305–320. Clammer, J. 2005. Culture, de velopment, and social theory: On cultural studies and the place of culture in development. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 6(2): 100–119. Cochrane, A. 1993. Whatever happened to local go vernment? Milton K eynes: Open Uni versity Press. Comedia. 1991. The cultural industries in Liverpool: A report to Merseyside Taskforce. Liverpool: Liverpool City Council. Cooke, P. M., G. Uranga, and G. Extebarria. 1997. Regional innovation systems: Institutional and organisational dimensions. Research Policy 26: 475–491. Cornford, J. and K. Robbins. 1992. De velopment strate gies in the audio-visual industries: The case of North-east England. Regional Studies 26: 421–435. Cox, G. 2005. Cox review of creativity in business: Building on the UK’s strengths. London: HM Treasury. Cox, K. R. 1993. The local and the global in the ne w urban politics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11: 433–448. Cox, K. R. 1995. Globalisation, competition and the politics of local economic de velopment. Urban Studies 32(2): 213–224.

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DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport). 1998. The creative industries mapping document. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. DCMS (Department of Culture, Media, and Sport). 2001. The creative industries mapping document. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport). 2007. Creative industries economic estimates. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Dosi, G. and L. Orsenigo. 1985. Order and c hange: An e xploration of mark ets, institutions and technology in industrial dynamics. Brighton: SPRU Discussion Paper. European Commission. 2005. The future of the creative industries. Brussels: European Commission. Granovetter, M. 1985. Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology 91(3): 481–510. Griffiths, R. 1995. The politics of cultural polic y in urban re generation strate gies. Policy and Politics 21(1): 39–46. Griffiths, R. 1998. Making sameness: Place mark eting and the ne w urban entrepreneurialism. In Cities, economic competition and urban policy , ed. N. Oatley, 41–57. London: Sage. Hambleton, R. 1998. Competition and contracting in UK local go vernment. In Cities, economic competition and urban policy, ed. N. Oatley, 58–76. London: Sage. Hoggett, P. 1991. A new management in the public sector? Policy and Politics 19(4): 243–256. Hutchinson, J. 1994. The practice of partnership in local economic de velopment. Local Government Studies 20(3): 335–344. Jessop, B. 1997. The entrepreneurial city: Re-imaging localities, redesigning economic go vernance, or re-structuring capital. In Transforming cities: Contested governance and new spatial divisions, eds. N. Jewson and S. MacGregor, 28–41. London/New York: Routledge. Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1994. Economies of signs and space. London: Sage. Lawson, C. and E. Lorenz. 1999. Collecti ve learning, tacit kno wledge and re gional inno vation capacity. Regional Studies 33(4): 305–317. Lewis, J. 1990. Art, culture and enterprise: The politics of art and the cultural industries. London: Routledge. Lim, H. 1993. Cultural strate gies for re vitalising the city: A re view and e valuation. Regional Studies 27(6): 589–595. Matarasso, F. 1997. Use or ornament? The social impact of participation in the arts . Stroud Green: Comedia. McGuigan, J. 1996. Culture and the public sphere. London: Routledge. Michie, R. and R. Fitzgerald. 1997. The evolution of the structural funds. In The coherence of EU regional policy: Contrasting perspectives on the structural funds, eds. J. Bachtler and I. Turok, 14–28. London/Bristol, PA: J. Kingsley; London: Regional Studies Association. Moore, S. 1991. Reflections on the ne w local political economy: Resignation, resistance and reform. Policy and Politics 19(2): 73–85. Nelson, R. and S. W inter. 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic c hange. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. NESTA. 2006. Creating gr owth: How the UK can de velop world class cr eative b usinesses. London: NESTA. Newman, P. and G. Verpraet. 1999. The impacts of partnership on urban governance: Conclusions from recent European research. Regional Studies 33(5): 487–491. Oatley, N. 1996. Sheffield’s cultural industries quarter. Local Economy 11(2): 172–179. Oatley, N. (ed). 1998. Cities, economic competition and urban policy . London: Paul Chapman. Oatley, N. and C. Lambert. 1998. Catalyst for change: The city challenge initiati ve. In Cities, economic competition and urban policy, ed. N. Oatley, 109–126. London: Paul Chapman. Piore, M. J. and C. F . Sabel. 1984. The second industrial divide: P ossibilities for pr osperity. New York: Basic Books. Raco, M. 1998. Assessing ‘institutional thickness’ in the local conte xt: A comparison of Cardif f and Sheffield. Environment and Planning A 30: 975–996. Raco, M. 1999. Competition, collaboration and the new industrial districts: Examining the institutional turn in local economic development. Urban Studies 36(5–6): 951–968.

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Chapter 11

Shanghai’s Emergence into the Global Creative Economy Li Wu Wei and Hua Jian

Introduction China has been e xperiencing rapid industrialisation e ver since the be ginning of the twenty-first century. At the same time, China also f aces challenges of the ne w knowledge economy. Within this conte xt, China is e xperiencing the de velopment of creative industries, a context that differs from the process in developed countries such as in Western Europe or Japan where the notion of creati ve industry emerged during the post-industrialisation era. Instead, Chinese economy has maintained a growth rate of up to 7% for more than 20 years since the early 1980s (T able 1). The need for high v alue-added industry is gro wing as a mark ed result of economic growth. From the late 1990s to the early twenty-first century, China’s cultural creative industries1 have been developing. During this period, China is e xpected to change considerably into an ener gy-saving, ecologically-friendly, land-saving and highly efficient economy, relying mainly on scientif ic and technological progress. The central go vernment, provincial and city administrations are paying more and more attention to the creati ve industries. This chapter documents Shanghai’ s creative industries in the terms framed by the city government, and describes the tracking and documentation, policies and regulations in this rapidly developing city. Among various cities and re gions in China, Shanghai is where creati ve industry is developing fastest and which has the most potential. Shanghai has a conduci ve In 2004, China’ s central go vernment produced statistics on Chinese cultural industries for the first time. These statistics included the GDP contrib uted by cultural industries, the number of employees as well as identifying the main sub-sectors. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen had also begun to use the concept of “cultural industry”; but at the same time they began to adopt the term ‘creative industry’ from the UK, Singapore and Hong K ong. However, in man y Chinese cities, ‘cultural industry’ and ‘creative industry’ are often used interchangeably. Therefore, we adopt the term ‘cultural creative industry’.

1

J. Hua ( ) Culture Industry Research Center, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Room 1504, No.1610, Zhong Shan Xi Road, Shanghai 200235, China e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_11, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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Table 1 Growth of Chinese GDP, 1980–2006 1980 1990 2000 2002 Chinese 4,517a 18,548 99,215 GDP a Unit: RMB (100 million yuan).

164,791

2003

2004

2005

2006

121,103

159,878

183,085

209,609

700 650

600 549.4 493.1

500 400 300 200

279.2 240.8 201.3

100

consultation and planning

building design

88.2

170.2 136.8 114.4

100.3 98.7 41.2 49.4

research and design

60.1 20.8

culture and media 2004

fashion innovation 2005

23.6

40.2

Total production value

2006

Fig. 1 Shanghai’s creative industries, production value (2004–2006)

environment for the de velopment of creati ve industry due to a number of f actors. First, Shanghai has a well-developed industry infrastructure. Second, as the cradle of modern Chinese industry, Shanghai possesses a historical industrial heritage. Third, historically as well as today , the mix of Eastern and W estern cultures has gi ven Shanghai a distinctive diversity in culture. Fourth, Shanghai has attracted talent from all over the country and around the w orld due to the China’s open-door policy.2 In spite of the promising conte xt and conditions, Shanghai’s creative industries are still in their primary phase. In 2006, Shanghai’ s creative industries comprised five chief parts, 38 categories and 55 segments3 (Fig. 1). Compared with other top cities in china, Shanghai’ s creative industry Shanghai’ s creative industries display their o wn distinctive characteristics, borne of the combined conditions of industrial clustering, go vernment agenc y promotion, and polic y support. Attention to the creati ve industry section became especially apparent from 2005 when the city go vernment defined the k ey sectors, learning from their e xperience of

Since the 1980s, China’ s central go vernment has adopted a series of open-door policies, which include attracting foreign investment, establishing industry parks and hiring foreign talents. 3 Total production v alue was 65 billion yuan, with a gro wth rate of 18.3%, forming 6.3% of the city’s GDP. Among them, the research and design industries contributed 27.92 billion yuan, building design 10.03 billion yuan, culture and media 6.01 billion yuan, consultation and planning of 17.02 billion yuan, and the f ashion industry 4.02 billion yuan. 2

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developed countries. A statistical indicator for creati ve industry was developed within the larger framework of statistical indicators used by the state. In the same year , the “11th 5-year Plan for creati ve industry in Shanghai” w as completed, follo wed by the publication of the inno vative “City creati vity indicators for Shanghai” and the “2006 Shanghai creative industry de velopment report”. Shanghai also gradually established a set of policies and re gulations for enhancing the de velopment of creative industries. The most important is the “Re gulations for the Construction and Administration of Shanghai Creative Industry Concentration Areas” passed in Shanghai in 2006, on the instruction of the Shanghai Economic Committee. Accordingly , each district has set corresponding policies for their creative industry concentration areas including policies for tax reduction or exemption, for the physical environment, attraction of investment, attraction of talents, offering of discount loans, and other forms of f inancial support.

Key Sectors in Shanghai’s Creative Industries In 2005, the Shanghai Economic Committee together with the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics published “Guidelines for Shanghai’ s Creati ve Industry De velopment”. This document highlighted five key sectors of Shanghai’s creative industry development from 2006 to 2010. These were: research design; architectural design; culture and media; consultancy and planning; and f ashion. Research design refers mainly to research and de velopment related to industrial production and computer softw are, including industrial design, arts and crafts design, software design, etc. Architectural design refers mainly to design related to architecture and en vironment, including project investigation design, architecture and interior design, etc. Culture and media refers mainly to the production and distrib ution of culture and arts, including artistic creation, li ve performance, broadcasting, tele vision and mo vies, etc. Consultanc y and planning refers mainly to providing various business consultancies and planning services to both individuals and enterprises, including market surveys, stock counselling, and exhibition planning etc. Fashion mainly refers to creative industries related to everyday consumption and entertainment, including sports leisure, entertainment leisure, wedding planning and photography production etc. Among them, some industries are already gaining prominence, such as softw are design, animation and games, fashion design, architectural design and craftw ork design. The development of software design is especially striking. Shanghai’ s software industry has maintained more than a 50%, gro wth rate in the last 5 years. In 2005, the operating income w as 45.5 billion yuan, which w as 9.6 times the operating income in 2000, and 1,596 softw are enterprises with 120,000 emplo yees. In May 2006, the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, themed “Chinese software engineering is in harmon y with the w orld”, was held in Shanghai. It w as the first time in 30 years that the conference was held in a developing country, demonstrating how the Shanghai softw are industry is poised to join the global mark et. Within China, Shanghai is the most de veloped in the software industry. The main features of the city’ s software industry are tw ofold. Most important is the rapid gro wth of softw are exports. In 2000, Shanghai softw are exports were

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worth $52 million, while in 2005, it had increased to $681 million, taking up 19.4% of the nation’s total software exports. Instead of solely carrying out overseas orders, independent software corporations ha ve developed their o wn software and be gun to sell these products o verseas. In addition, a huge number of softw are enterprises have emerged as mark et leaders. Currently there are 43 enterprises with a yearly income of more than 100 million yuan each. Among them, are 27 state-k ey enterprises,4 generating up to one-sixth of the nation’s yearly income. Six of Shanghai’s software enterprises have been listed overseas. As a result, man y softw are product brands ha ve emer ged. In basic softw are research & development, the accumulated number of independent intellectual property softw are products has no w reached 3,332. In 2005, independent intellectual property product sales income took up 40% of the nation’ s software sales income. In companies lik e China Standard Softw are Co. Ltd., the operating system and office ware produced have already been bought by the General Of fice of the State Council and more than 20 pro vinces and municipal governments.

Existing Creative Industry Cluster Parks One of the key areas in which the Shanghai government has concretely implemented its creative industry policy is in its development and support of creative clusters. By the end of 2006, 75 Creati ve Industry Cluster Parks with a total area of 221 ha had been established by the Shanghai government. More than 3,500 creative enterprises from more than 30 countries including the United States, Japan, Belgium, France, Singapore and Italy ha ve located in these clusters. These companies ha ve hired over 27,000 employees. Each employee’s production value reaches 600,000 RMB, which is far beyond the country’s average level of production. Within these 75 Creative Industry Cluster Parks in Shanghai, there are four distinct types. The first is located close to universities. Creative industries are the product of the wider kno wledge economy, and are supported by reputable uni versities and academic institutions through technical support and human resources. When located in close proximity , the enhanced interactions can promote co-operation through collaborati ve research and production. F or e xample, Chifeng Road in Yangpu District is a cluster called Architectural Design Street, and its proximity to Tongji University, one of the top uni versities in architectural design in China, benefits from the synergies and collaboration with university researchers. The second kind of creative industry cluster park includes old factory workshops and warehouses, located in the central areas of the city which have been renovated. The development of the creative industries is mainly reliant on personal creati vity, which in turn demands a level of self-cultivation. However, the creative role of the 4

State-key enterprises are large state-owned corporations which receive central government support.

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environment cannot be neglected. The unique atmosphere in these old warehouses, combining traditional and modern, eastern and western, classical and popular elements, is v ery attracti ve to artists. F or e xample, the art street T ianZiFang is considered the “Soho of Shanghai”, though Moganshan Lu by the Suzhou Creek is probably more authentic as an artists’ cluster. The third kind of creati ve industry cluster park arises from ne w urban spaces created especially for the creative industries. With increased urbanisation and economic growth, some new development zones have been established, and they offer a great opportunity to set up creative industry cluster parks. Zhangjiang Culture and Technology Creative Industry Base (located in Zhangjiang High-tech Industry Park in the Pudong District of Shanghai) is a good example. The General Administration of Press and Publication of the People’s Republic of China has recognised it as the National Online Game & Cartoon Industry base. The last kind of creative industry cluster park is based on the existing infrastructure of more traditional cultural industries. For example, the largest animation film production base in China is located in Shanghai, supported by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, which was established in 1957.

Institutional Infrastructure In order to support the de velopment of creati ve industries in Shanghai, there exists an elaborate institutional infrastructure, comprising more than a dozen different go vernment departments. In particular , a close collaboration has formed between the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist P arty (Shanghai Committee) and the Shanghai Economic Commission. The former is a department which aims to control ideology and the media. The latter is a department in the Shanghai Go vernment which aims to guide Shanghai’ s economic de velopment. These are also supported by about ten related departments of the Shanghai government and each of the city’ s district go vernments. The departments include the Shanghai De velopment and Reform Committee, Shanghai Construction Commission, Shanghai City Planning Administration, Shanghai Real Estate Administration, Shanghai State Assets Inspection and Management Committee, Shanghai Science and T echnology Commission, Shanghai Statistics Bureau, Shanghai Intellectual Property Administration, Shanghai People’ s Go vernment External Af fairs Of fice, and Shanghai Municipal Bureau of F oreign Experts. Meanwhile, professional centres such as the Shanghai Creati ve Industry Center have also been established. With the support of these multiple agencies, se ven public service systems ha ve been established. They deal with intellectual property internet information, in vestment consultanc y, human resources training, trade e xhibition, R&D design and international communications. Of these, the issue of intellectual property is particularly significant for China and will be elaborated upon belo w.

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Intellectual Property Creativity is crucial to the stimulation of inno vation. In turn, inno vation systems rely crucially on the protection of intellectual property . In Shanghai, the creator , the enterprise and the professional association are all seen as essential components of the creati ve industry sector , and play dif ferent roles in protecting intellectual property, in concert with one another (Table 2). In particular, some related professional agencies were established to support these operations. In October 2006, the Shanghai Creati ve Industry Intellectual Property Center was established with the joint in vestment of Shanghai Creati ve Industry Center , Shanghai Intellectual Property Service Center , Intellectual Property Center of Shanghai Xieli La w Firm and Shanghai Creati ve Industry Investment Compan y. As one comprehensi ve service agenc y for intellectual property, it specialises in the application, management and strate gy of intellectual property, and engages in pro viding creative enterprises with intellectual property services, from de velopment to the industrialisation of intellectual property. At the be ginning of 2007, the Shanghai Creati ve Industry Center proposed the forming of the Shanghai Creati ve Industry Intellectual Property Protection Alliance, which is a professional de velopment organisation for its members. It has a number of objectives. First, it aims to improve professional self-discipline, monitor the conduct and promotion of intellectual property management systems in accordance with national la ws and regulations and restrict the violation of intellectual property . Second, it is to carry out training and publicity and improving member enterprises’ capacity for protecting intellectual property . Third, it is to guard the intellectual property rights of member enterprises and provide related services. F ourth, it is to mediate disputes related to intellectual property among member enterprises. Fifth, it is to communicate the member enterprises’ opinions and suggestions to government. Sixth, it is to provide member enterprises with consultation and information services in volving intellectual property issues. Table 2 Roles of creative industry principals in protecting intellectual property Principal players Task Function Government Professional associations

To make regulations and policies for protecting intellectual property To provide services for protecting intellectual property

Enterprises

To develop intellectual property and make them into products

Creators

To tap into creativity, with knowledge and skills

To maintain balance between benefits to creators and those to the wider society To offer suggestions to enterprises and ensure the development and protection of intellectual property To become the principal part and major force for developing intellectual property To become the original source of developing intellectual property

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Challenges and Opportunities Despite the strong potential, Shanghai’ s creati ve industry f aces some problems. First, compared with New York, London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, Shanghai’s creative industry sector is still in infancy in terms of both the number of employees and productivity per worker. Second, the strategic development policies for Shanghai’s creative industry sector need further improvement. More effort needs to be put into encouraging investment and f inance, offering tax concessions, pro viding import and e xport support and conducting talent training, especially for small and medium sized enterprises which need more go vernment attention in terms of their capacity for intellectual property protection. Third, the market system of the Shanghai creati ve industry sector needs further improvement. The de velopment of a city’ s creati ve industries calls for a multilayered mark et en vironment. Ho wever, at present, service and retailing systems for creative corporations are relatively primitive. An evaluation system and a trade system of creative products should be introduced in order to f acilitate the business development of creative ideas and products by both indi viduals and enterprises. However, with the 2010 World Expo approaching, the Shanghai creati ve industry sector is f aced with ne w opportunities. EXPO 2010 Shanghai will open on May 1 and close on October 31. It is estimated that this e vent will attract around 70 million visitors from both home and abroad, becoming the greatest e vent with the lar gest audience after the London 1851 W orld Expo. By May 2007, around 130 countries and international or ganisations had conf irmed their participation in EXPO 2010 Shanghai, including the United Nations, the W orld Bank, Arabian Alliance and the United States, Japan, France, German y, Ukraine, Sweden and New Zealand. The 2010 W orld Expo is undoubtedly a signif icant opportunity for Shanghai’s creative industries. The 2010 World Expo will have multiple impacts on Shanghai’s creative industry sector. In particular, inputs from creative industries are needed in many aspects of the 2010 W orld Expo, including theme design, park planning, e xhibition hall design, activity design, brand design, souv enir design and others. A rapid gro wth in these sectors is e xpected. At the same time, global creati ve industry resources are likely to be attracted to Shanghai, while local creati ve industries will be drawn ever more into the global arena. Finally , there is lik ely to be an enlar gement of Shanghai’s creative industry market. In sum, the Shanghai creati ve industry sector f aces great opportunities as well as competition during a v ery important period of de velopment. Amidst economic globalisation and China’ s rapid economic de velopment, a unique city brand is emerging: Shanghai as a creative city.

Chapter 12

Shanghai Moderne: Creative Economy in a Creative City? Justin O’Connor

The Writing on the Wall How are we to approach the question of creative industries in China? Understanding the narrative framework within which the creati ve industries are embedded seems to me critical for an y coherent approach to the issue. This becomes all the more pressing when we address the specific question of the city – in this case Shanghai – as one of the pri vileged sites for the de velopment of a creati ve industries polic y narrative. That the creati ve industries are produced discursi vely as an object to be acted on by polic y has been discussed by man y commentators (Cunningham 2001; O’Connor 2004; Pratt 2005), as has its transposition or ‘e xport’ from the West (or even the UK) to East Asia (W ang 2004; O’Connor and Gu 2005; K ong et al. 2006; Keane 2007). In this chapter I want to expand the time frame slightly within which this narrative is positioned. The issue of creative industries is part of the question of China’s future – its relationship of difference from and similarity to the West – as it is also a question of China’ s past – what influence will that past have on its future trajectory , is it a resource for , or b urden on, this future? Shanghai embodies these dif ficult issues in a particularly heightened form. It is China’s historic ‘modern’ city , no w freed to pursue a ne w round of economic expansion, its past re-activated as resource for a new global market. It is Beijing’s only rival for the position of China’ s creative capital. Ho w then do these questions play themselves out within the specific context of Shanghai? Let us try and look then at what is at stake in these narratives of past and future around creative industries and creative cities in China. I want to use Will Hutton’s The Writing on the Wall (2007) as a particularly useful e xemplar of the sort of narrati ve frame work we should a void; useful because it is a particularly cogent ‘Ne w Labour’ ar gument for the historical

J. O’Connor () Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct Z1-515, Musk Avenue Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059, Australia e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_12, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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superiority of western-style capitalism in an era of the ‘kno wledge economy’. 1 Hutton ar gues that China needs to adopt western political democrac y and its attendant values not just because these are more desirable in themselv es (though they are) but because they underpin the economic success of western capitalism, the only viable model on offer. The book is given some extra interest in the context of this paper because Hutton has recently been in volved in a series of major research and polic y papers for the UK’ s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (W ork Foundation 2007) embracing strongly the notion that the creative economy is to be one of the UK’s (and indeed the West’s) main sources of economic competitiveness in the coming decades. Hutton’s argument is straightforward. Western capitalism became globally dominant because it grew up in conjunction with ‘Enlightenment v alues’. These values emerged out of a new public sphere mediating between the state and the individual. This allowed a free circulation of knowledge and the contestation of tradition; the rule of law facilitating new forms of property, trade and finance; and the increasing restraints on the action of states by ‘opinion’, demanding that its actions should be rationally justif ied. The emergence and global success of European capitalism is absolutely inseparable from these Enlightenment values and it is the y that made the dif ference when the European system encountered the powerful Qing Empire in the early nineteenth century. These four elements – the pluralism developed by nearly continual war and state competition; profitable long-distance trade and the companies it created; a rob ust soft institutional infrastructure; and the uni versalisation of technology – kindled Europe’ s miracle and allowed it to o vertake China…. Uniting, underpinning, and embodying all four elements was the Enlightenment, and the public institutions it underwrote. (Hutton 2007: 58)

For Hutton, the collapse of communism has no w remo ved an y doubts as to the superiority of capitalism b ut the linkage of capitalism to these Enlightenment v alues has been forgotten by the existing global great power and ignored by that emergent state which aspires to global status. The USA is retreating into protectionism and neo-liberal distrust of an y state re gulation of, or ‘interference’ with, the free market. The national and international (public) institutions which it helped establish, enabling a flourishing of the global trading system after WWII, are increasingly seen as ‘drags’ on US competiti veness and to be jettisoned. The Chinese, on the other hand, are stuck in a half-w ay house – the y have pushed state-led mark et reforms as far as they can go. Only by introducing more economic pluralism, political democracy and strengthening civil society – that is by embracing Enlightenment values – can an immanent economic and therefore political collapse be a voided. Only if the USA, rather than demonising China, remembers its commitment to global democratic values and China embraces these too, will we a void serious global economic problems and maybe large scale military conflict. How does this geo-political ar gument relate to that of the creati ve industries policy discourse? F or Hutton and others, the lack of economic pluralism, deri ved Hutton has long been associated with the New Labour agenda since his ‘The State We Are In’ – an intelligent and forceful call for a break with Conserv ative neo-liberalism – and has become increasingly part of the ‘think tank’ cluster around the current go vernment.

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from the dominance of the Chinese Communist P arty (CCP) across all aspects of state and society , leads ine vitably to real problems with producti vity, competitiveness and inno vation. The state can use the mark et to dri ve the economy to a certain level – as recognised by Deng Xiaoping – b ut it hits a limit. The absence of democratic accountability , an independent judiciary , really independent public companies and the scrutiny of an open civil society have allowed corruption, business appointments based on political considerations, cronyism, aversion to risk, bad loans and appalling pollution to proliferate. Where these problems really bite is in the sphere of the knowledge economy, and this is of direct relevance to the creative industries debate. The absence of economic and political pluralism has seriously hampered creativity and inno vation within the kno wledge intensive high-tech and service industries. The W est has much higher le vels of producti vity and inno vation; more tellingly, democratic India is overtaking China in terms of software just as other ne wly democratic countries such as South K orea, Taiwan and Japan are producing global brands at a much greater rate than China. Crucially, China is lacking not just Enlightenment v alues b ut ‘Enlightenment attitudes’ (Hutton 2007: 51). The separation of state and society , the accountability of the latter to the ‘reasoned collecti ve judgement’ (Hutton 2007: 170) of the former is the essence of Enlightenment, and this public sphere also underpins ‘good economy and society’ (Hutton 2007: 170). These are non-market institutions which allow the mark et to be so successful because the y link it to the aspirations of the individual to ‘substanti ve freedom and the capacity “to choose a life that one has reason to value” ’ (Hutton 2007: 171). So here is the mechanism, plural public institutions; and here is a consequence, human happiness. Enlightenment institutions need Enlightenment people to breath life into them; modernity has to be won by real people who are prepared to imagine a life that they themselves want to make and are prepared to act on that concept, leaving behind the universe in which preferences are inherited and f ixed…. [T]his involves a mental shift from the traditional to the modern. (Hutton 2007: 171)

Getting these non-mark et institutions is not about a ‘technocratic transplant or copying’ (Hutton 2007: 170) but of a revolutionising of the Chinese public sphere. However, as the above quote makes clear, this is also a cultural change – it demands the production of modern Enlightenment subjects who can breathe life into Enlightenment institutions. I shall return to the implications of this cultural def icit in section “Brushing History Against the Grain” belo w, but there are ob vious implications here for the creative industries. Hutton does not address them in an y great detail, b ut is clear from his discussion in the conclusion and else where that it is the kno wledge economy that will continue to represent the W est’s great advantage – not just the ‘hard knowledge’ of science, technology and skills (which is no w more easily acquired by countries such as China) b ut ‘soft knowledge’: … the b undle of less tangible production inputs in volving leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, the disposition to innovate, and the creation of social capital that harnesses hard kno wledge and permits its ef fective embodiment in good and services and – crucially – its customisation. Their interaction and combination are at the heart of the knowledge economy. (Hutton 2007: 311)

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Soft knowledge, soft skills – what he calls ‘tacit interactions’ – are central to the knowledge economy; it is these which will continue to gi ve the W est its edge. These skills in turn rest on a shift to the kind of ‘post-materialist’ v alues that Inglehart and W eizel (2005) ha ve repeatedly identif ied. Creative industries then, like the kno wledge economy as a whole, demand a cultural as well as a political revolution from the Chinese. One is not possible without the other . Hutton makes clear what often only implicit in the literature on creati ve industries in China. Here, short-term imitation, corruption, cronyism (guanxi), political before business considerations (duplication of infrastructure as well as political appointments), lack of public debate (around clusters for example), an uncreative education system and, of course, censorship are all seen to be obstacles to the de velopment of a creati ve economy. These lock Chinese creati ve industries into pirating, subcontracting, imitation and so on, rather than a really creati ve and innovative sector (cf. Keane 2007). But for Hutton, no amount of e xhortation to be more creati ve will work unless the Chinese political system and the culture which it sustains are changed. This change will represent a transition to a complete modernity , a break from the Chinese past and a full embrace of those universal values derived from the European Enlightenment which alone can underpin the global community .

Enlightenment and Violence The pluralist economic and political system of the West, derived from the Enlightenment, has no w generated a ne w spate of kno wledge-based de velopment. It has allowed the W est to mo ve beyond manufacture – the historical sign of its global superiority – to the knowledge economy with its soft skills, tacit interactions and sophisticated consumer mark et. Inglehart’ s ‘post-materialist’ or ‘postmodern’ values are ‘reflected in the quest for spirituality and happiness, but also in the quest for goods and services that exactly meet the specifications of particular consumers’ (Inglehart and W eizel 2005: 310). China has been trying to mo ve be yond cheap assembly and manuf acture into the ‘hard kno wledge’ of science and R&D, b ut, lacking the requisite public institutions and the cultural dispositions deri ved from these, it is a long w ay from being able to compete with the W est in the crucial softer end of kno wledge economy. This might gi ve comfort to Hutton’ s anxious western readers – as it is intended to do – b ut for Chinese readers it could be seen as a restatement of the classic western-centric account of de velopment. The West represents the only viable future and the rest must play catch-up. Except that the y never do, or not fully – and ne ver on terms that they set themselves! The notion of ‘catching up’ raises the spectre of China’ s confrontation with ‘the West’, and the whole issue of imperialism – a w ord Hutton studiously a voids (preferring ‘global trade’). I w ould suggest that the possible connections between Enlightenment values and imperialism must be examined if we are to avoid falling into some v ery old traps. The dialectic of violence and Enlightenment of course forms the central part of the book in which the term ‘culture industry’ w as first coined. In that book, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) argue that universal reason of

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Enlightenment refused to acknowledge particularity and difference, resulting in an ever more barbaric recourse to violence. But at this stage I w ould prefer to address this question via the historiographical debates around ‘the great di vergence’ between East Asia and the West. The debate is far too big to discuss in anything like its full detail here, b ut I think it is important to re gister that there is such a debate when faced with a new round of calls – pro voked by the knowledge economy and creative industries policy – for China to ‘become modern’. For Hutton, the tak e-off of capitalism in Europe relies upon the emer gence of a public sphere, which in turn w as made possible by the lack of a single dominant state. Incessant inter-state competition and warfare both made room for the migration and circulation of kno wledge, required increased taxation which ga ve rise to demands for political representation, and ga ve new autonomy and po wer to those who f inanced the competing states – the merchants and bank ers. This combination of knowledge, a public sphere and the b urgeoning institutions of business and finance allowed long distance trade to tak e off, giving rise in its turn to the notion of the public compan y and all the attendant institutions and le gal arrangements that went with these. ‘Gro wth produced its o wn culture of modernity: a willingness to accept that economic and social systems would not remain static but would always evolve’ (Hutton 2007: 58). Capitalism, driven primarily by The Netherlands and Great Britain, spread across the globe alongside the culture and v alues of Enlightenment/modernity. The question as to how Enlightenment/ modernity encountered ‘tradition’ outside of its European heartlands will be discussed below. First it is important to clarify that markets are not the same as capitalism. Mark ets and money economies have existed since classical times. Polan yi (1957) puts e xtended systems of monetary e xchange back into pre-modern times. China had an e xtended market economy which could be favourably compared to that of Europe; Hutton (2007: 39) tells us that in 1800 it accounted for around 33% of global GDP . The West’s encounter with China w as emphatically not that of a market- with a feudal-agrarian non-market-society. ‘China had markets, technology, sophisticated agriculture, and pri vate property rights. The ingredients that had produced economic success in Europe all e xisted in China’ (Hutton 2007: 49). The k ey dif ference w as that ‘Europe succeeded in creating a network of independent, empo wering, nonstate, b ut nevertheless public institutions that acted as mediators and arbitrators of the relationships between the state and the individual’ (Hutton 2007: 49). In Hutton’ s account it w as these that enabled the ‘experimentation, cross-learning, openness, and competition’ which ga ve rise to ‘cultural and economic dynamism’ (Hutton 2007: 49). It is the cultural dimensions of modernity which are k ey, all made possible by the public sphere. Hutton (2007: 50) quotes Joel Mok yr, who ar gues that the spirit of the philosophical enlightenment – Kant’s ‘dare to know’ – was transplanted to the economic sphere in a parallel ‘industrial enlightenment’. The state then, despite its origins in violent conflict, is gradually brought within the public sphere and e volves into democracy: If the competition between warring European states set in motion the construction of this public sphere and the accompan ying institutions and culture, then the European enlightenment completed it, be ginning the western European democratic tradition. (Hutton 2007: 50)

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There are ho wever other stories to be told about the role of the state in the emergence of capitalism. K eith Pomeranz’s recent (2000) surv ey of the e vidence around ‘the great di vergence’ further underlines the notion of China and the W est being economically on a par , and for him nothing suggests in the mid eighteenth century that Europe w as about to tak e-off in the w ay it did. F or him tw o things made a dif ference. First, Britain’s access to cheap ne w resources of ener gy in the form of coal allowed a capital intensive and technology-led high growth economy. Second, the raw materials and food stuffs made available for import from the North American colonies allowed the rapid and extensive shift of labour from agriculture to industry. It w as not that China w as someho w ‘isolated’, looking inw ard and refusing foreign trade. In f act it imported e xtensively from its South Asian hinterland (along with huge amounts of American silv er) – but its relationship to this hinterland was not that of guarantor for companies running e xport-led commercial colonies. It dealt with long settled communities and states not amenable to the sort of capital intensive exploitation found in the North American colonies. T o a large extent, for Pomeranz, it was these two geographical accidents (especially the huge American ‘windfall’) rather than some intrinsic politico-institutional essence that released Europe from its Smithian ‘high-le vel equilibrium trap’ 2 that had begun to seriously impact on China as it had on Europe. Others have argued that the ability to e xploit this windf all was not fortuitous. The commercialisation of the North American colonies w as inconceivable without the active involvement of powerful states. The Chinese state might have encouraged and regulated trade and e xchange – and there were po werful merchant dynasties and trading empires across Southeast Asia linked to the Chinese diaspora – but their agenda never captured that of the state. This is what happened in Europe. Hutton portrays this in classic Whig terms suitably updated for the age of the kno wledge economy: the rise of the middle classes and the subjection of the state to the control of the public sphere allo wed a ‘rational’ space within which land, labour , capital – and no w, knowledge – could circulate freely . The mark et economy captures the agenda of the state and both become subject to the re gulation of modern Enlightenment values. Marx, of course, f amously suggested that the modern state had become a committee for managing the common af fairs of the bour geoisie; whilst this is f ar too reducti ve e ven for Marxist historians, it underlines a clear distinction between the states of Europe (or maybe northern Europe) and China. Historians such as Braudel (1985) and economists such as Polan yi (1957) ha ve argued in great detail that the mark et economy becomes fully capitalist only when the state adopts its agenda. Hutton ignores the w ays in which the state monopoly of violence was able to push through this agenda against a whole array of oppositions and obstacles. The process described by Polan yi (1957) in The Great Transformation is one where a series of small isolated mark ets centred on the to wns were gradually organised into a national mark et regulated by mercantilist states (in certain w ays A vicious circle in which increasing le vels of prosperity increased population and put more and more pressure on land, energy and other resources.

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comparable to China, though he does not say this). For Polanyi it was the next step, the separation of the market from its regulation by the state and ‘social authority’ – indeed the separation of the market from society as such and the creation of a separate ‘self-regulating’ economic sphere – that resulted in the industrial re volution. Crucial to this was the transformation of land, labour and money (which for Polanyi were not commodities at all) into commodities lik e any other, subject e xclusively to the laws of the market. In many ways Polanyi’s work is a plea to bring back the self-regulating market under the control of ‘social authority’; and I have little doubt that Hutton places himself very much in this tradition. He w ants to recall the USA back to its enlightenment values and bring the mark et under social control; but his willingness to elide questions of state and capital with Enlightenment seriously undermines this position. Three key points emer ge from Polan yi’s account. First, the state itself became an agent of a new, aggressively expansionary capitalism. The British state played a central role in remo ving the traditional social, political and cultural barriers to the conversion of land, labour and mone y into commodities – with disastrous consequences for nineteenth and early twentieth century society (and leading to collapse of the international system between 1914 and 1945). The second point – again something Hutton ignores in his re-writing based on kno wledge economy – is that the industrial re volution was simply not possible without the systematic commodification of labour, including acts of violent dispossession which Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’. It allo wed the shift of industrial production from the orbit of mercantile commerce to that of capital intensive manufacture and drove the search for profits beyond Europe onto the global stage. Third, we might therefore see the industrial revolution not as some natural outgrowth of a European modernity rooted in the late middle ages but as a distinct acceleration or ‘take-off’ which was a clear break or di vergence from a pre vious European history. This interpretation certainly can be disputed; what seems less disputable is that the ‘great transformation’ came at a price of huge social, political and cultural dislocation and violently suppressed internal opposition which is completely ef faced by Hutton’s royal road of Enlightenment and knowledge. Braudel also charts this in terms of the increasing mercantilism of states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mark ets organised around independent cities (or city-states) are gradually absorbed into markets organised around big cities closely bound to the increasingly po werful states that used and promoted them. These big cities not only created and dominated their domestic mark ets but they were already involved in an international trading and f inancial system which had emer ged in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The salient point here is the w ay in which Venetian and Genoese bankers began to finance European states, initially their wars but gradually their commercial and imperialist acti vities. The Genoese financing of the Iberian Empires brought huge profits and (mostly invisible) influence. But of course the Spanish state w as never capitalist. It w as the United Pro vinces which first began to link a commercial agenda directly to that of the nation-state (or protonation-state) and used this to systematically create a trading empire. Hutton puts The Netherlands with Great Britain as first developing the modern form of the company;

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but the absolutely crucial link between this and their gro wing mercantile empires (rather than simply ‘long distance trade’) is ne ver discussed. For Hutton, the invention of the public company is crucial to the ‘soft infrastructure’ of capitalism – but this a capitalism directed outwards towards the systematic exploitation of colonies and international trade. The Dutch East India Compan y and its British and French successors certainly pro vided the or ganisational model to deal with e ver more long distance, capital intensi ve and f inancially comple x trade. But it w as also backed by the po werful nation-states who could pro vide the military resources to systematically impose its trading frame work on its target territory as well as defend it against ri vals. In North America and in a dif ferent way in the East Indies, these companies were sponsored by the state to systematically exploit natural and trading resources at e ver higher levels of capital intensity. The expanding global mercantilist system generated not only the raw materials to allow the industrial take off in the late eighteenth century but also the high levels of capital necessary to sustain it. It also e xpanded the w orld trading system under a ne w dynamic – the endless drive to accumulate. The old debates about indigenous versus exogenous factors in the emergence of capitalism have in man y ways become less rele vant; those w orking around w orld systems theory suggest that European capitalism w as implicated from the be ginning in an e xpanding w orld system which demanded increasing re gulation and intervention by increasingly po werful and territorially ef fective states. Such state action did not simply involve ‘holding the ring’ for the rule of law, it opened up new areas for the ever more hungry requirements of capital e xpansion. For this is what capitalism becoming the agenda of the state means – as Arrighi (2007) forcibly argues in his e xtensive discussion of Adam Smith. A sophisticated mark et society following what Smith called the ‘natural path’ (and Polan yi called the mercantile system) e xists on the e xchange of commodities to increase wealth. The formula might be G(oods)-M(one y)-G(oods). Capitalism in verts this relation and its logic of M-G-M means that accumulation without limit is the central goal of the system. Thus a Chinese state concerned with the promotion of trade for the prosperity of its citizens is confronted by those western states amongst whose primary goals is the f acilitation of capital’ s dri ve to endlessly accumulate more capital, irrespective of how or in what form this is achie ved. A capitalist world system is driven to expand; but this expansion is not just about Schumpeterian entrepreneurial ener gy, it requires a state that re gulates the whole commercial, f inancial and military system within which this endless accumulation tak es place. Arrighi and others ha ve shown how this task of managing the ‘w orld system’ became ever greater as the sphere of its operation expanded – the city-state (Genoa) gives way to a proto-nation-state (United Provinces), then to a fully fledged nationstate (Great Britain) and eventually, in the twentieth century, to a continental sized state commanding v ast global resources (USA). From this perspecti ve ‘primitive accumulation’ is not some original sin, a one off act of force necessary for the transition to modernity – which is how it was justified by Stalin and Mao – but is part of an ongoing requirement of the international capitalist system for social and spatial ‘fixes’. David Harvey prefers the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’, and this is

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built into the system in a w ay that gives it a restless dynamism that has systematic recourse to destruction and violence. The aggregate effect is…that capitalism perpetually seeks to create a geographical landscape to f acilitate its acti vities at one point of time only to ha ve to destro y it and b uild a wholly different landscape at a later point in time to accommodate its perpetual thirst for endless capital accumulation. Thus is the history of creati ve destruction written into the landscape of the actual historical geography of capital accumulation. (Harv ey 2003: 217)

We need not go further along this line of ar gument. The k ey points I w ant to make here concern the historic transformation of mark et society into a capitalism driven by unlimited accumulation; the link between this and Europe’ s capital and technology intensi ve industrial tak e-off; the continuing need for spatial f ixes across ever great territory; and, crucially, the key role of the state in these on-going transformations at all levels of the national and international system. In this context Hutton’s identif ication of European capitalism’ s dynamic e xpansiveness with its Enlightenment generated knowledge economy and cultural values risks that elision of one into the other , the one as mask for the other, which was the key contention of its communist opponents. W e need to f ind a space between the tw o, and this can only be done by an ackno wledgement of the implication of Enlightenment in violence. Recent accounts, for e xample, have stressed the w ay in which the Dutch East India Compan y w as responsible for generating ne w, distincti vely modern, ‘scientific’ accounts of the world as part of its creation of commercial opportunities (cf. Cook 2007). Longer established critiques of the association of the human and social sciences with imperialism’s drive to classification and the production of ‘useful’ knowledge need only be acknowledged here. Without some internal critique, the kind of historical account found in Hutton, concerning Europe’ s knowledge economy and its impact on the w orld beyond, cannot but fall into ideology. In Hutton’s work specifically, the Western-centric view of the world risks being imported lock, stock and two-smoking-barrels into creative industries policy discourse. This becomes ab undantly clear in Hutton’ s staging of the encounter between China and the West in the nineteenth century . Very quickly this turns from one of parity in everything – technology, markets, private property etc. – except ‘Enlightenment’ into a stark opposition of modernity and backwardness. A dynamic economic maritime po wer encounters a Qing state which has become closed on itself, the over-bureaucratic state weighing on its people and unable to think outside the tried and tested ruts of feudal tradition. The Qing state could not modernise, so it fell and a much harsher route to modernisation took place. The shift from V oltaire (‘enlightened despotism’) to He gel (‘Asiatic despotism’) is played out in a fe w pages, just as the word ‘feudal’ becomes increasingly prominent in his narrative (cf. Peyrefitte 1992). Hutton’s chapter refuses to consider the role of military violence as anything other than a symptom of Europe’s more advanced knowledge economy. At the same time he ignores the clear f act that it w as not, as Marx had it, British commodities that f inally brok e do wn the ‘Chinese w all’ of tradition, b ut British cannon shot. And despite the favourable treaties negotiated as a consequence western commodities still barely penetrated nineteenth century China. It took a state backed opium cartel to achieve this.

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It is not my intention to directly debate the rights and wrong of imperialism, nor to reduce Enlightenment to capitalism, or to violence. I simply wish to ackno wledge the links between them as a basis of self-critique and to f ind a different way of writing a contemporary account of the new round of knowledge-economy driven modernisation in China.

Brushing History Against the Grain China’s encounter with Western modernity was, for Hutton, mainly about ‘humiliation’; he is not insensitive to this nor to its role in driving forward its modernisation projects, from the 1911 republican re volution through to its more ambitious and successful 1949 communist one. But Hutton has nothing to of fer this humiliation but the plea to become more modern, more W estern. For him China’s ‘century of humiliation’ w as only superf icially caused by military defeat; at bottom lay the backwardness of its institutions and culture. Communist modernisation, both under Mao and his ‘mark et-socialist’ successors, has certainly brok en with the ‘feudal’ past b ut it remains at a basic le vel. The modernisation e voked by the current Chinese leaders will be a chimera without a final bout of western-inspired political and cultural modernisation. This Euro-centric theory of modernisation ignores tw o historical realities. First, the dif ficulty in transforming a huge country such as China (compared to the smaller, more centralised Japan, for e xample) cannot be reduced to questions of ‘openness to ne w ideas’ or the ‘dead hand’ of a feudal state. Not only is this reduction of the issue to ‘backwardness’ a travesty of the complexities and conflicts in nineteenth century China, it also ignores the systematic disruption of Chinese attempts to self-modernise by W estern po wers. Second, it massi vely underplays the traumatic impact of western knowledge on China and the radical fractures in its sense of history, identity and imagined future that this provoked. In these and other ways, discourses of modernisation ha ve presented non-Western countries with the challenge of always catching-up, always being in ‘the waiting room of history’, the forever ‘not yet’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 8–9). The impact of modernity on non-western nations and peoples has been to underline an e ver incomplete present trying to emerge out of an always redundant past. Here we might look at Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt to put post-colonial theory and history together in his book Provincializing Eur ope (2000). In this account there are tw o histories. History 1 is the history of capital and modernity – of the nation-state, labour , capital, citizenship, secular politics and the social sciences which codified these. Interleaved with this is History 2 (or 2s), those other aspects of ‘pre-modern’ intellectual and artistic traditions, customs and li ved experiences which mak e up the e veryday life-w orld running alongside and intersecting with History 1 in w ays that are only occasionally ackno wledged. History 2(s) are either ignored, or rele gated to pre-modern ‘remnants’ or ‘drags’ upon full political modernity. Chakrabarty’s project for a post-colonial history is not a rejection

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of this modernity (historical justice cannot be thought of outside the modern le gal categories of e vidence and justif ication) but an attempt to put it into some sort of tension with the traditions and li ved experiences that modernity sees as irrele vant or as obstacles. It is an attempt to retranslate the abstract uni versals of modernity into the lived experience of history 2(s), to allo w these lived experiences to speak from the gaps opened up in the dominant secular political-economy language of modernist social science and history. In trying to b uild on Chakrabarty’ s w ork, Meng Y ue, writing about Shanghai (2006), mak es tw o k ey points. First, that this putting into tension need not be conceived just as the task of the historian (reco vering or ‘retranslating’ these lost experiences) but also a project of historical actors themselv es. These actors might actively attempt to re-translate History 1 – western modernity and capitalism – into the terms of their o wn distinct life-e xperience and cultural traditions. The second point then is that History 2 need not be considered as al ways somehow inside that of History 1, already absorbed within the frame work of capitalist modernity , but can also stand outside it – locating itself in a dif ferent history of ‘non-capital’. For Meng Yue the very size and power of China did place it outside the history of western capital well into the nineteenth century . China’s gro wing confrontation/ encounter with the W est produced zones of tension – ‘unruly spaces’ – in which this encounter could be thought and rethought by local actors in a range of dif ferent ways, not just in terms of the opposition between modernity and backwardness. Meng Yue suggest that, rather than seeing Shanghai as the place in which western modernity made its f irst landfall on a pre-modern China, we can also see it as a space in which both Western modernity and the orthodoxies of the Qing state could be contested and re-translated into a ne w Chinese context. It was an unruly space, in short, where alternative modernities might be imagined and elaborated. The issue here is how to think of China’s encounter with the West in a way that goes beyond the f ixed oppositions of modernity/backw ardness found in the ‘selfstrengthening mo vement’ and the more radical May F ourth mo vement. The f irst held to a notion of ‘W estern means, Chinese essence’ – a formula which allo wed for the survival of the Qing state and its orthodox le gitimation but made room for the acquisition of ‘hard’ commercial, technological and especially military techniques. May F ourth, coming after the collapse of the Qing dynasty , w as more radical in its wholesale rejection of the Chinese political and cultural past in order to push through a rapid and thoroughgoing modernisation programme – something realised by the CCP after 1949. Hutton sees the Maoist le gacy as having achieved a basic level of economic modernity but without any western political values. Deng Xiaoping might have continued this adaptation of ‘western means’ to the Chinese communist essence, but remaining purely external to the system it is a project destined to failure. The economic reasons put forw ard by Hutton for this impending f ailure are extensive, and not something we can discuss here. The main point is that for Hutton there can be no Chinese essence – maybe local colour but no substantive alternative to western modernity . He e xplicitly rejects an y specifically ‘Asian values’ which might be set as alternati ves to western democratic pluralism (cf. pp. 199–207).

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Indeed though a Chinese sense of humiliation has gi ven great ener gy to its modernisation dri ve – and is welcomed as such – the main ef fect of ‘Chinese essence’ is the stultifying le gacy of the Chinese state. T ime and again the CCP is made equivalent to the Imperial state and its Confucian bureaucratic infrastructure, weighing down on a barely existent civil society, keeping the system intellectually and politically closed. W e are back to the classic colonial bind: a full transition to modernity is the only option b ut the local resources of history and identity are at best peripheral and at w orst a debilitating drag on this path to modernity . To become modern is to become W estern; but the reality of the local past means that this achievement will be endlessly deferred. Meng Yue’s portrait of Shanghai attempts – follo wing Walter Benjamin – to ‘brush history against the grain’. 3 Shanghai emer ges as site of encounter between a Chinese culture already be ginning to challenge the orthodox Confucian heritage (and, gradually, the le gitimacy of the Qing state) and ne w ideas coming not only from ‘the W est’ but also Japan, the colonial w orlds of Southeast Asia and India, the ‘subaltern nations’ of Europe itself – such as Ireland and Poland – and rebels, revolutionaries and malcontents from all o ver. The nature of Shanghai, sited at the edges of empires, allows it to rethink not just Chinese history in the face of modernity, but western modernity itself in the light of Chinese cultural traditions. These ‘unruly spaces’, made possible by the o verlapping jurisdictions of dif ferent states, staged (unequal and pro visional) encounters between History 1 and History 2(s). The examples used by Meng Yue are aesthetic (public gardens), intellectual (a publishing house) and urban cultural (popular theatre entertainment). The y represent attempts to re-en visage the w orld as a Chinese cosmopolitan space, a space of a more equal, open and fluid encounter between cultures than that of ‘backw ard’ China and a modern W est. They set up dialogues with ne w ideas and other places which put a question mark ne xt to both the orthodoxies of the Qing state and an ever more powerful Western modernity. For example, the Jiangnan Arsenal project attempted to f ind a w ay of putting Chinese and W estern kno wledge into some sort of producti ve dialogue; the Commercial Pr ess educational publishing house attempted an enc yclopaedia in which the universalisation of the Linnaeus plant classification system could be put next to the context of both Japanese and Chinese botanic traditions, including those of popular medicinal uses. Meng Yue also discusses the New World and the Great World entertainment centres where local Chinese entrepreneurs were given space to present a version of the World Exhibition or World Fairs that had proliferated across the globe after the mid-century . These imperialist visions of the w orld, displayed as objects for consumption/contemplation for the western e ye, were re-translated into a particular melange of a Chinese cosmopolitanism. These huge shopping and entertainment malls, financed by local Chinese capital, were read as vulgar parody by western observ ers. For Meng Y ue, they were a uniquely cosmopolitan site in which the Chinese w orld (including its diaspora) could represent its interactions and aspirations with regard to the world(s) outside – and not just the West. 3

The phrase is from Benjamin’s ‘Theses of the Philosophy of History’ written in 1938.

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Meng Yue contrasts this unruly Shanghai with the decadent Shanghai Moderne of the 1930s, which remains the image most available to the western imaginary. The harsh, chaotic, commercial city in which all forms of exotic spectacle and pleasure were available for those who could pay w as in fact already controlled and policed by the Kuomintang (KMT) and its underworld allies. The Shanghai of the 1880s to the late 1920s, one of great intellectual and cultural ferment, is effaced by the decadent playground of the 1930s, where cultural and political dissent w as curtailed. The ‘unruly spaces’, in which Chinese culture took an active role in envisaging different modernities, were shut down by the radical, western inspired modernisation programmes of the KMT and the CCP. The Communists of course saw Shanghai’s decadence as a symbol of W estern (and to some e xtent Japanese) Imperialism and to be ef faced accordingly. P aradoxically it is this Shanghai Moderne which is currently being revived as a crucial resource for contemporary Shanghai, as we shall see.

Modernity and the Cultural Critique of Capitalism These glimpses of alternative modernities evoked by Meng Yue are not just part of a West/non-West encounter, nor even of anti-colonial struggles but are equally part of an internal critique endemic to modernity itself. The singular universal of capitalist modernity, has been contested since its inception. Lea ving aside the political challenges to the dominance of capital, we can see, for e xample, Romanticism and its various rejections of industrialism, parliamentary democracy, urban society, rational self-interest and so on, as a po werful and continuing critique of modernity itself. Carlyle and Ruskin, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, W agner and Nietzsche, Pushkin and Dostoyevsky all founded their w ork on a radical rejection of modern society . Modernist art itself was always caught in an ambiguous place between a celebration and condemnation of modernity. Europe then has al ways had its glimpses of alter native modernities. But this endemic and powerful cultural critique is ironed flat by Hutton, becoming just another indicator of Europe’ s superior knowledge economy and to be mobilised as part of its competitive creative industries policy; it becomes part of ‘culture as resource’ that, as Geor ge Yudice (2003) argues, has become the dominant logic in the globalisation of culture as ‘symbolic capital’. This mobilisation of an unruly past into a contemporary cultural resource can be seen in Shanghai. Ackbar Abbas’ (2002) discussion of historical preserv ation during an ‘unprecedented b uilding boom’ points to the mobilisation of the city’ s past (as embodied in its built heritage) not as a corrective to the disruptions or disorientations of the present but as a process of amnesia. [A]n unproblematized sense of continuity with the past can only be achieved at a price; that is, by for getting the history of imperialism by inducing a kind of historical amnesia. ‘Historical continuity’, then, is not a solution to the problems of the present; it is more a symptom of how the present appropriates the past for its own purposes. (Abbas 2002: 48–49).

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These purposes are about real estate and the global image of Shanghai: Invoking a continuity with a legendary past – no matter how ambiguous that past may be – enhances the city’s attractiveness, gives it historical cachet and, hence, allows it to compete for foreign in vestment and tourism on more f avourable terms. It creates symbolic capital. … Recreating Shanghai as a City of Culture then means … creating it as a series of spectacles that is marketable. … The spectacle of Shanghai produces a delirium of the visible that erases the difference between old and new… because “old” and “new” are simply different ways of creating Shanghai as a City of Culture in the ne w global space. (Abbas 2002: 49–51)

In this conte xt the use of the Shanghai Moderne as cultural resource stages an encounter between contemporary Chinese cultural modernisation and a new global cultural space which can be seen as collusion. Shanghai is willing to mobilise the past that will most ef fectively play to a western imaginary and thus enhance its global symbolic capital. There can be no doubt that this resource is being mobilised with great ef fectiveness; its cultural cachet feeding not only the continuing real estate boom but also the positioning of Shanghai as an emerging media city to rival Beijing. We might ask how a new Shanghai modernity can come out of such amnesia; or we might see this as an example of how a contemporary Chinese government is fully capable of mobilising culture as a ne w kind of soft knowledge resource. The mobilisation of cultural critique (or unruly histories) as a resource for the further expansion of symbolic (and indeed ‘real’) capital, goes be yond the image, heritage and real estate economies of global cities. In the last 40 or so years there has been a mobilisation of a certain kind of anti-capitalist critique to both produce a ne w kind of post-Enlightenment (or ‘post-Materialist’) subject and a ne w kind of capitalism closely link ed with it. There are a number of v ersions of this account, from the systematic to the anecdotal (see also Sennett 1998, 2006, 2008; Honneth 2004; Illouz 2007); but the connections made between what Boltanski and Chiappelo (2005) call the ‘artistic critique of capitalism’, or what others might call ‘counter-culture’ or ‘bohemia’, and the cutting edge of contemporary capitalism is now increasingly commonplace (e.g. Brooks 2000; Frank 1997). The ‘romantic’ cultural or ‘artistic’ critique of capitalism, a rejection of the alienated and inauthentic life-w orld of industrial and urban modernity , al ways had a complicated relationship to the ‘social critique’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) of capitalism, concerned with questions of exploitation and social equality. In these accounts 1968 stands as symbol for the direct confrontation of this artistic critique with the modern bureaucratic or ‘Fordist’ state. It extended the realm of democratic contestation (and hence the public sphere) beyond the formal spheres of political representation into the ‘pri vate’ realms of gender , ethnicity, se xuality and of ‘identity politics’ more generally. At the same time it might be seen to have uncoupled itself from the ‘social critique’ and elaborated a ne w set of social and political demands centred less on the equitable distribution of material rewards than on meaning, purpose and the authenticity of the self. Based on these premises, tw o clear critical characterisations of contemporary capitalism emer ge. First, this contestation of capitalism resulted in a ne w set of post-bureaucratic or post-Fordist arrangements whereby the search for authenticity

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and meaning have been promoted as key values within the world of work. For many this has mo ved the responsibility for indi vidual ‘success’ and ‘f ailure’ away from formal organisational roles and structures to the personal capacities of indi viduals themselves. They are expected to be self-motivated, creative, mobile, multi-skilled and highly netw orked. In short, the y are to become a ne w kind of subject whose ideal outlines were pref igured in the bohemian and counter -cultural worlds of the artistic critique. Second, the search for authenticity and self-fulf ilment, as Hutton recognises, might in volve a ne w spirituality, but they also feed into ne w kinds of consumption associated less with functionality and more with meaning and identity. The implication of pre viously counter -cultural or bohemian v alues with the cutting edge of contemporary consumer capitalism, as well as the wider implication of the cultural economy in the restructuring of western capitalism since the crisis of the 1970s has been e xtensively noted (see Hesmondhalgh 2007). Hutton’ s putting together of Inglehart and Weizel’s (2005) ‘post-materialist’ values and a new kind of sophisticated consumer culture is a version of this shift from ‘Fordism’ to ‘postFordism’ which is central to the narrative of the knowledge economy as well as the new round of globalisation that began in the 1970s. It is this narrative within which the cultural industries mo ve from remnant of the old to the cutting edge template for the ne w economy – and within which the y are renamed ‘creati ve industries’ (O’Connor 2007).

Chinese Creative Industries: More of the Same? How does this leave the prospects for the creative industries discourse in China? From Hutton’s point of view, China is not going to be catching up with the West in the near future. China has only partially modernised – leaving the creation of the requisite Enlightenment institutions and subjects to one side in its communist-led modernisation. It is in the kno wledge economy that this lag is felt at its sharpest; China might ha ve ‘hard kno wledge’ but the creati ve, emotional and interpersonal skills required for the high-value end of a post-Fordist knowledge economy cannot be achieved outside of western democratic political and ci vil society institutions. If the enormous challenge of such a political transformation of the Chinese state is obvious to even the most critical observers – it is not going to happen ‘overnight’ – then what of the challenge to create post-materialist or post-modern subjects out of those who have only a one-sided e xperience of modernity. Having caught up in manufacture, mark ets, f inancial instruments and high-tech research another ‘not yet’ appears on the road to full modernity . To this might be added the specif ic bind of the ‘global culture industry’ for developing countries; ho w to kick start a creati ve industries sector in the presence of an already well established, po werful netw ork of global companies that frequently inhibits the gro wth of indigenous industries and certainly their e xpansion onto a global stage. China’ s economic strength, its huge internal mark et, and the state’ s strong re gulatory po wer ha ve gone a long w ay to o vercoming these

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obstacles; but it might be that the lack of ne w post-modern Chinese subjects holds back the development of the softer forms of ‘media capital’ identif ied by Curtin, for example – that is, concentrations of creati ve talent alongside finance and regulatory muscle. Keane (2007) certainly identifies how censorship, weak intellectual property enforcement, lack of space for loosely networked small enterprises, heavy top-down management styles and so on, are hampering Chinese creative industries, locking them into imitation rather than innovation. But it is not at all clear that China cannot deal with these issues without a transition to democracy, or that the creation of such post-modern creative subjects entails a full Enlightenment agenda. We saw above the ways in which Shanghai has mobilised an ambiguous, unruly past as a source of symbolic capital. China has long e xperience of adapting ideas from the W est and of trying to mak e them w ork in specif ic and dif ferent local circumstances. As discussed e xtensively in this v olume, the notion of cluster , for example, has been widely adopted in Shanghai and other cities. There is a lot of hit and miss, as Keane (2007) shows. But there seems little reason to doubt that the different cities will find ways of adjusting and amending their management to produce better results, and in the process may draw on collective policy traditions very different from those in the West (Keane 2007). These may not be entirely amenable to Western notions of creativity. On the other hand, we might also see the adoption of a creati ve industries policy by cities such as Shanghai not just as a ne w accommodation between culture and economics (jobs, regeneration, innovation, etc.) but as a way separating out politically safe forms of cultural production, mo ving them from polic y groups around content re gulation to those more directly concerned with mark etled economic de velopment. In so doing it is quite concei vable that we will f ind new post-modern subjects suitable for a more quiescent political culture. This is how we put it elsewhere: Wang (2004) also makes the point that the creative entrepreneurs who are charged with this modernisation process are in fact very different from the socially responsible bohemians of the western imaginary; ‘the rising “creati ve class” in Beijing and Guangzhou ha ve deep pockets, netw orking capital with the state, and a lifestyle characteristic of the nouv eau riche’ (2004: 17). Our e xperience also suggests that the 4×4 dri ving denizens of Beijing’s Chaoyang district or Shanghai’ s Suzhou Creek ha ve little concern with an y wider social responsibilities. From this perspective the ‘cultural modernisation’ implied by the ‘creative industries’ may in volve as much an abandonment of the residual social responsibilities represented by ‘communism’ as it does the T rojan Horse of liberalization. (O’Connor and Xin 2006: 277)

If this is the case then at the v ery least, it is clear that that there are ‘post- modern’ human resources being mobilised within China which may not be reliant on Western political pluralism. In addition, this may not just be a ‘distorted’ or ‘underdeveloped’ form of creativity, but might make us question the emancipatory potential of these values, this soft knowledge in the West. The freighting of the creati ve industries with a discourse of democratic post-materialist Enlightenment might be increasingly compromised in the W est by its e ver closer association with an expanded round of consumerism and a new kind of capitalism. Exporting the creative industries discourse is in part to export a new kind of ‘connexionist’ (Boltanski

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and Chiapello 2005) or post-b ureaucratic (Sennett 2006) capitalism. Ho w these might translate into the very different circumstances of China is a moot question. If post-materialist values can be adapted to a much more state controlled or collectivist society, then they might also result in much sharper implementation in terms of new kinds of w ork and the subjects required for this. Ho w are the Chinese animation workers organised and managed; how far are they different (or indeed similar) to the creati ve clusters of the W est? The subtle niceties of ne w media w orkplace discipline identif ied by Ross (2003) in Ne w York might look v ery dif ferent in Shanghai (as his later work Ross (2006) tentatively suggests). Post-Fordist creative work here might tak e on a v ery dif ferent set of discourses than post-materialist self-fulfilment. But of course in man y respects the comple x mix of modern and postmodern values which so characterises the rapid development of China was identified in the 1990s by Jing W ang (1996) and is no w visibly present in popular and ‘elite’ cultures. It might be that these discourses, these ne w values become transformative in ways different than the West has come to expect. They might hide unruly potentials in ways we cannot as yet discern. What is clear is that the demand that Chinese need to become ‘post-modern subjects’ on a parliamentary democratic capitalist model before they can become fully creative can easily turn into the kind of imperialist discourse that cuts them off from the resources of their o wn past and culture. The key difference is that China represents the f irst non-Western challenger to the global system currently run by the USA. Hutton w ants to welcome China to the system without an y substantive change; if only the USA w ould remember its Enlightenment heritage. It is a strangely naïv e argument which gro ws out of that failure to see an y link between capitalism, Enlightenment and violence which we have pointed to abo ve. Without Enlightenment, China’ s rise can only be a threat. The kno wledge economy and the creati ve industries are one last point of le verage: if China w ants to mo ve be yond manuf acture then no more modernisation without Enlightenment. The idea that the arrival of China might challenge Western Enlightenment in ways that might be productive is not countenanced. Current debates within China concern ho w the market does or does not, should or should not, relate to the state’ s ‘residual’ commitment to socialism. ‘Left’ and ‘right’, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ liners, modernisers and traditionalists; one question not yet shut do wn is of some possibility other than that of western modernity as exemplified in the USA-led modern world system. Simply the possibility of such a question must allow us to think about the creati ve industries agenda in a dif ferent way. Not only a w ariness of the do wnside to the postmodern w orld of w ork and the consumerist bohemianism of self-fulf ilment, creati vity and material re ward. But also perhaps a new accommodation between the social and the artistic critique; that the latter might be possible without the former is clearly an option on of fer to many in the West as it is in China. What might a creati ve industries discourse look like that refused such a separation and took social equity as seriously as innovation and creativity? One that did not lapse into the anti-mark et discourse of ‘art’ but, in welcoming the market, refused the fundamental logic of endless, unlimited capital accumulation before all else?

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References Abbas, A. (2002) Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preserv ation in the Global Era. In Gandelsonas, M. (Ed.), Shanghai Reflections. Ar chitecture, Urbanism, and the Sear ch for an Alternative Modernity, pp. 33–55, Princeton Architectural Press. Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (1979) Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Arrighi, G. (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Benjamin, W . (1969) Theses on the Philosophy of History , Illuminations. London: F ontana/ Collins p. 259. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Braudel, R. (1985) Civilisation and Capitalism, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce. London: Fontana. Brooks, D. (2000) BOBOs in P aradise. The Ne w Upper Class and How The y Got Ther e. New York: Touchstone. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif ference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cook, H. (2007) Matters of Exc hange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutc h Golden Age. Yale: Yale University Press. Cunningham, S. (2001) From Cultural to Creati ve Industries: Theory , Industry , and Polic y Implications, Culturelink, Special issue pp. 19–32. Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool. Business Cultur e, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007) The Cultural Industries. Second edition. London: Sage. Honneth, A. (2004) Or ganized self-realization: Some paradox es of indi vidualization, European Journal of Social Theory, 7(4): 463–478. Hutton, W. (2007) The Writing on the Wall. Why We Must Embrace China as a Partner or Face It as an Enemy. London: Little, Brown. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism . Cambridge: Polity. Inglehart, R. and W eizel, C. (2005) Modernization, Cultur al Chang e, and Democr acy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keane, M. A. (2007) Created in China: the Great New Leap Forward. London: Routledge. Kong, L., Gibson, C., Khoo, L. M., and Semple, A. L. (2006) Kno wledges of the Creati ve Economy: Towards a Relational Geography of Diffusion and Adaptation in Asia, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 47: 173–194. O’Connor, J. (2004) Cities, Culture and “Transitional Economies”: Developing Cultural Industries in St. Petersburg. In Power, D. and Scott, A. (Eds.), Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture, pp. 37–53. London: Routledge. O’Connor, J. (2007) Creative Industries: A Critical Biblio graphy. London: Arts Council of England. O’Connor, J. and Gu, X. (2006) A New Modernity?: The Arrival of “Creative Industries” in China, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(3): 271–283. Peyrefitte, A. (1992) The Immobile Empire. New York: Alfred Knopf. Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our T ime. Boston, MA: Beacon. Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pratt, A. (2005) Cultural Industries and Public Polic y, International Journal of Cultur al Policy, 11(1): 31–44. Ross, A. (2003) No-Collar. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ross, A. (2006)Fast Boat to China. Lessons from Shanghai. Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade. New York: Pantheon. Sennett, R. (1998) The Corrosion of Character. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Sennett, R. (2006) The Culture of the New Capitalism. Yale: Yale University Press. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane. Wang, J. (1996) High Culture Fever. Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wang, J. (2004) The Global Reach of a Ne w Discourse: Ho w F ar Can ‘Creati ve Industries’ Travel? International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1): 9–19. Work F oundation (2007) Staying Ahead. The Economic P erformance of the UK’ s Cr eative Industries. London: DCMS. Yudice, G. (2003) The Expediency of Cultur e. Uses of Cultur e in the Global Er a. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yue, M. (2006) Shanghai and the Edg es of Empires. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 13

Urbanity as a Political Project: Towards Post-national European Cities Eric Corijn

The w orld is in a transition period with f ar-reaching social changes. The umbrella metaphor for these changes is the “process of globalisation. ” Both the term and the scale of globalisation are a matter for discussion. At least one important dimension of the process is the precarious nature of the balance between the mark et driven world system on the one hand and the political system of nation-states on the other hand. The global order is under reform. W ithin that tension, the increased urbanisation adds a specific dynamic. For the first time in history, the majority of mankind lives in an urban context. In the most industrialised continents that amounts to more than three quarters. The quantitative process does not in itself imply a qualitative shift. In the framework on the global restructuring of go vernance though, the urban systems tend to b urst out of the national frames they have been caught in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is in that context that we agree with those like Davis (2006: 1), who are radicalising the importance of the transition: “it will constitute a w atershed in human history , comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial re volutions.” The discussion on creati ve cities finds its full importance at the centre of this paradigm shift, where creati ve industries and actors are not merely a new kind of economic entrepreneur beneficial for post-industrial economies, but where creati ve cities are thought of as society b uilders of a ne w kind (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Featherstone 1990; Harv ey 1989; Lash 1994).

Cities Enter Different Time-Spaces The global-local ne xus, glocalisation and the ef fects of globalisation on places have been discussed basically as the outcome of the rescaling of mark ets, production and distrib ution sites, and re gulation mechanisms. The “original sin” at the core of the constitution of the modern state system (W allerstein 1984, 1991a, 1991b, 1996; Arrighi, 1994) is the separation between the eco-

E. Corijn ( ) Social and Cultural Geography and Centre for Urban Research, COSMOPOLIS, City, Culture & Society, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_13, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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nomic realm and the social and political re gulation mechanisms, introducing differentiated time-spaces. Political philosophy and the social sciences ha ve developed models of so vereignty and go vernance within a multiple society paradigm, that is, the identif ication of societies with countries. Democratic regulation and social inte gration were matters of people, their nations and their state institutions. Economic practices were accepted to ha ve their o wn logic, based on pri vate interest and re gulated e xchange, and not really subjected to the scales and formats of social and political frames. As long as the b ulk of economic interactions could be contained within the national re gimes, the original divide between the w orld system and the system of nation-states w as veiled. Since post-w ar developments are increasingly intertwined with b usiness c ycles and long w aves, further de velopment of the capitalist mode of production disrupted the frail equilibriums within national modes of regulation. They ultimately put into question the e xisting modes of social reproduction and made “culture into the ideological battleground of the modern world system” (Wallerstein 1990: 31). The cultural realm w as put into mo vement and under the umbrella of postmodernism, the restructuring of cultural production and social cohesion could be understood in terms of a shift between state and mark et, between production and consumption, between the collecti ve and the indi vidual (Lash and Urry 1987, 1994). Whatever critical accounts of the importance of these shifts and the respective positioning of nation states in the w orld system (Brenner 1977; Garst 1985; Holton 1998; Skocpol 1977), it is now generally accepted that the world is going through a profound rescaling process in which the nation state formations are under huge pressure. The rene wed importance of cities has at f irst been emphasised as the locus of a number of these processes. Globalisation tak es place and restructures spaces of flo ws and spaces of places, thus repositioning cities and regions on a wider scale than just their national environment (Castells 1983, 1989). In the European conte xt, this is not alien to the European unif ication process that is both part of and a reaction to globalisation. The development of a single European mark et and of continental modes of re gulation is specifically confronted with the timeless de velopment of the national structures and cultures. These ha ve gradually formatted nearly all modes of e xistence of the social, including the urban system. The resur gence of the urban in the late medie val and renaissance period ran parallel with the long logistical w ave installing the European world system (Braudel 1996; W allerstein 1984; Taylor and Flint 2000). The urban netw ork, partially built on remains of the old Roman network and partially on new concentration of surplus value from agricultural hinterlands, formed a space of commercial flo ws. It sought its o wn forms of re gulation at odds with the feudal structures of domination. Here is the origin of the specif ic realm of citizenship, indi vidual rights and freedom, self-government and the “living with strangers” that have brought the distinctive ingredients of “urbanity.” The cities took their specif ic European form with town halls, towers, and belfries with ci vic clocks and bour geois freedoms separated from feudal and religious rule. That all-European netw ork has been o vertaken by the system of nation states, installing national urban systems in which inter -urban connections were caught in the inter-national framework.

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Europe of Nations or of Regions? Globalisation sets of f an all-encompassing rescaling process. Not only is there the construction of the European Union with no w 27 member states, re gulating at least half of our daily li ves, within the national states, important decentralisation processes are also occurring, transferring socio-economic re gulation in acompetitive environment to smaller entities with more or less proper rule. The European Committee of the Re gions has 344 representati ves of re gional and local go vernments. The y play an important role in attracting European mone y to re gional development. There is a shift of emphasis to re gions and metropolitan zones. This process of rescaling is also part of the demise of the K eynesian welf are state to be replaced by an entrepreneurial (Schumpeterian) w orkfare state. Competiti ve regions and cities undermine national solidarities and f avour glocal growth strategies with a state at the service of global competition. Looking at cities and the global–local nexus in a European context thus introduces immediately the question of urbanity as a pre-and a post-national re gister, and thus as a para-national domain. Cities are not just part of the country (Brenner 1998). Two aspects ha ve caught our special attention. First, in as much as globalisation causes a disruption of the national inclusion models, the city becomes a junction for politi cal and social reconstruction of another kind. The combination of gro wth and post- welfare social equity are at the centre of the urban. That opens the specif ic agenda of new models of urban go vernance and urban democrac y. Second, as these national inclusion models are built on a specific position of (dominant) national culture, one has to differentiate an urban perspective of culture and its position in social bonding. Urban culture is not especially built on common history and tradition but is a constructed culture, and it is here that the “creati ve city” takes all its signif icance. In other w ords, urban cultural dynamics are not only important economic v ectors, or specific institutional or sector acti vities, but mainly different ways in the making of social bonds or in socialising. If cities ha ve to be centres of inno vation, cultural creativity stands not only at the forefront in designing ne w commodities, but also in producing new forms of societal metaphors. The rise of urbanity introduces in Europe an important shift in mental orientations. The European unif ication process has been conducted as a dialectics between an integration of mark ets and economic policies and the socio-cultural reproduction of national states. However, the economic space of flows of the single market coincides with the transnational urban netw ork related with high speed mobility and transportation, thus creating a ne w geography transcending the “flat” map of juxtaposed countries into a transnational archipelago of connected cities. The traditional view of a vertically integrated world with continents, countries and cities of a dif ferent kind has to be changed into a decentred triangular relationship in which the world system, the system of national states and the networked cities relate in different ways to each other, sometimes excluding the third element. The global-local nexus tends to decentre the importance of the nation-state or at least add important players to the game. The city as a centre of innovation is not inward-turned. Innovation is the product of a creati ve confrontation of dif ferences, of an e xperience of paradox es with an

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unknown outcome. That is ultimately the most characteristic part of cities: li ving with dif ference, with strangers (Lofland 1973). The dense mix of functions, the proximity of dif ference and the spaces of flo ws all determine the dominance of distinction. In that sense, the city is an e xception to the “normal” ways of building human societies. These ha ve been founded on senses of commonality , and ha ve been based on what people shared. Social bond has been deri ved from common characteristics. Cities were states of e xception. The y had “pri vileges” and introduced proper la ws of e xchange and hospitality . We are no w going to a passage where that kind of li ving together with strangers shifts from the e xception to the norm. Specif ically in Europe, that process is caught between the tw o mo vers of the unif ication: the single mark et and the national states. The former deals with increased mobility of capital, goods, services and persons re gulated through common law and common currency. The latter is still in charge of cultural reproduction and of social redistrib ution. The map of a Europe of national states co vers up the real density of the core regions, setting the pace for their economic integration. The European integration process is not the b uilding of a ne w nation. It is not based upon a project of imagining “Europeaness.” The mental map of Europe remains one of national countries, and represses the centre-periphery dynamics that really orient the economic integration. Both density of population and intensity of economic activities show the “Blue Banana” 1 as the real core determining the pace and the scope of de velopments. Labour or ganisation and labour producti vity in that area sets the standards in consumer culture in a dialectical relationship with the peripheries in spatial and social terms.

Towards the Urban Republic? The shift in the relationship between the world market/the European single market, the national state and the local urban go vernment opens a ne w agenda for urban governance. The local government is not (only) the lower level of hierarchical state power. It has to position its project between its relation with the state and its position in a global/continental market. Urban growth dynamics are caught in an urban regime combining in a specif ic way (parts of) the population with (parts of) ci vil society and (fractions of) local politics. The binding of these forces necessitates a

1 ‘The Blue Banana (also kno wn as the Hot Banana , European Me galopolis or European Backbone) is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation in W estern Europe. It stretches approximately from North West England in the north to Milan in the south. The curvature of this corridor (hence the “banana” in the name) takes in cities such as Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leeds, London, Basel, Turin, Milan and Zurich, and covers one of the world’s highest concentrations of people, money and industry. The concept was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet (RECLUS [1989].Les villes europeénnes: Rapport pour la DATAR. RECLUS, Montpellier.) Around 90 million people live within the Blue Banana.’ (Wikipedia entry)

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new “imaginary constitution of society” (Castoriadis 1975), a vision, a project, a mission that can be co-produced by these dif ferent social institutions. As ar gued earlier (Boudry et al. 2003–2005), urban governance involves some radical changes in administration and project management. Vertical, mostly bureaucratic, thematic administrations have to be combined horizontally in project teams. These teams do not necessarily take the lead in project realisation, but function rather as facilitators, as intermediaries, as stage directors, optimising the output of stak eholders. The participation of civil society is important both for the quality of the project and for democratic legitimacy (Corijn 2006). Urban go vernance asks for the de velopment of forms of participatory democrac y, completing representati ve democrac y with joint decision making of partners in action. Managing urban society goes be yond master planning and technocratic rule. It is lik e a construction site without total overview, with b uilt elements and useless remnants, b uilding blocks and partial plans, and a multitude of projects and actors. These social practices cannot be k ept together in the framework of national political regimes. These societies are building on the basis of a common past, a discourse of national history . Such a reduction of complexity can be presented as a collecti ve identity to be reproduced and such an identity can be represented through culture, the arts or parliaments. Urban culture is of a different kind. The city cannot be kept together on the basis of common roots. On the contrary , fragmentation, se gmentation and di versity can only be bound together in a common destin y and can only be joined in a programme or an image of the future. It is doubtful that such a projected platform of common becoming can be clearly identif ied from the start. It is a process, and a hybrid product of crossbreeding. It thus depends more on the intensity and quality of participation than of representation. Taking urbanity as scope for cultural inno vation and creation means a focus on the recovery of the polis, of the city as a political body based on citizenship. Ho w does urban cultural dynamics f it into building an urban regulation model? What is the relation of cultural practices with public forum and public space? In general, the urban cultural re gime is an intersection of the local cultural policies. It is deri ved from the position of the city in the national urban system and the role it plays in representing the nation and on the other hand, and globalisation processes that f ix spaces of flo ws and contrib ute to a more cosmopolitan city , on the other . Taking urbanity as culture is integrating these forces into the urban project. Cultural policies then become central in urban strate gies. However, urban culture is decentred in relation to the dominant national culture. In general, the cultural field in Europe has been part of the epochal shift opened by the economic crisis of the mid-1970s and the subsequent neoliberal turn in the 1980s. In the frame work of the welf are state, culture and the arts were important elements of social reproduction in national polic y making. As opposed to North America (Martel 2006), culture was closely regulated and financed by the state. Cultural policy was part of Fordist mass production, and oriented to dif fusion and access policies with refer ence to a national canon. “High culture” was based on the repertoire of the selective tradition (Williams 1981) at the base of national identities. Europe is the continent of strong national identities. In dif ferent places, a strong cultural resistance to the

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first effects of commodification and the opening up of the mark ets was expressed under the umbrella of the “cultural e xception” in the international trade agreements and supported by UNESCO (Poirrier 2006; Re gourd 2004). Nation states were resisting (multi-) cultural intoxication. At the same time, ho wever, cities had to manage the transition from industrial to post-industrial society and therefore needed to embrace consumer culture and di versity. Revitalisation of city centres, festivals and events, and urban attractors had to be developed with the private sector and according to market laws. Where supply and demand did not fully f it, production schemes were set in motion whereby the public was bound to the creation of so called socio-artistic projects. Whereas education remained the main tool for social integration in the nation, the arts were central in urban interv entions. The cultural policies of European cities were often a place-specific combination of national and urban policies. Cities exist within the national urban structure. They host national institutions lik e opera houses, museums and cultural centres. Besides the national communities, the y sometimes contrib ute to the documentation of lifestyles and traditions of immigrant communities. The y occasionally host cultural industries of national importance like television. All these aim at offering reference systems for integration in the “community” and form an inte grated public opinion. Urbanity is produced alongside the official cultural sector. It is the effect of intercultural bridging, creative encounter between differences, innovative adaptation to change and relations to a wider world. These forms of cultural production have their own sites at the margin, in subcultures, temporary coalitions and freezones. Local government sometimes supports these de velopments by or ganising these spaces like the “breeding grounds” in Amsterdam (see Chapter 14, Lehtovuori and Havik, this volume). These practices mostly occur in the interstitial spaces, in transition zones and around unsolved matters. It is a form of reclaiming urbanity (Groth and Corijn 2005).

The Brussels Case A good e xample of that permanent in-between-ness is Brussels, the capital city of the European Union. Brussels is the capital city of Belgium, an unsuccessful national project, which is under constant reform. The historical attempt to b uild a Frenchspeaking nation-state was confronted with the national aspirations of Flanders and the Dutch-speaking majority of the population. The Brussels city-re gion is no w part of the Belgian Federal State structure. It is one of the three regional territories, squeezed between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking W allonia. As such, it represents 1 million inhabitants of the 1.7 million in the metropolis. F or matters such as culture, welfare and care, education, sports, and so forth, Brussels is a bi-communitarian city where Flemish and French-speaking institutions operate independently and from a culturalist perspective. From the viewpoint of these state institutions, the city is but a territory on which to operate (there are 41 such political mandates for cultural matters in total!). Brussels has Belgian institutions to manage opera houses, museums

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and festival centres. It has Flemish and French-speaking theatre houses, museums, cultural centres, schools and arts centres. Each local go vernment has its o wn cultural policy. All these institutions delimit territories and sectors, and thus contrib ute to segmenting and fragmenting the city into more or less identif iable groups. The y represent the population in terms of linguistic “communities” imagined as culturally homogeneous groups. That kind of cultural policy serves to legitimate representation and representative delegation of power. It creates a political order. The socio-economic reality is quite the opposite. Brussels is the second richest region in Europe, b ut has an a verage income per inhabitant that is 15% belo w the Belgian average and the poorest neighbourhoods. F orty per cent of the population lives in derelict neighbourhoods. Sixteen per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. Unemplo yment is high. Thirty per cent of the youth li ves in households without income from labour . These inequalities also e xpress themselves in socio-geographical terms, creating a dual city. Institutionally, the city is thought to host 85% of French-speak ers and 15% of Dutch-speakers. Cultural policies attempt to form “communities” on this basis. However, 56% of the population is of foreign origin and one third still has no Belgian passport. Brussels is a very multinational city. Its main characteristic however is cultural hybridity . 41% of the households are linguistically mix ed. Man y people are multilingual. English is the second most commonly spok en language. The institutional representation does not fit the multicultural sociology of the city. Despite everything, Brussels’ cultural f ield produces the greatest cultural wealth in the whole of Belgium. Small centres for visual and audio visual arts lik e Roomade, CCNOA, Etablissements d’en F ace, Ar gus, Brussels Biennal, Music sector and some film festivals have become a f ixture. Classical music has some strong players (BOZAR, Flage y, Klarafestival, Ars Musica) and for popular music as well, there are renowned festivals (Couleur Café, Jazz Marathon) and concert halls (Ancienne Belgique, Botanique). The majority of the cultural of ferings are in the performing arts. Brussels has many large and small theatres. A recent count came to 112 theatres and 334 or ganisations. There is a strong presence of contemporary theatre mak ers, choreographers and performance artists in some reno wned arts centres (Las Halles, Kaaitheater, KVS, Théatre National). The artistic creati vity b ubbling from belo w feeds big arts centres such as La Monnaie and BOZAR. A good man y artists gro w in a number of smaller places which act as artistic laboratories and arts w orkplaces for the avant-garde (Nadine, Theatre de L’L, Bains::Connective). The strongest international visibility is achie ved through the contemporary dance sector with P ARTS dance school as an international training centre. Ov er the past decades, choreographers such as Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Michèle Noiret and Meg Stuart have crowned Brussels as the world’s dance capital. Brussels is therefore undeniably a magnet for artists. The multicultural reality of the city seems to be a good breeding ground for the arts. Ho wever, as mentioned, the politics remains cut off from its artistic midf ield. The political cast stays caught in its communitarian straitjacket and does not seem able to nestle itself fully in the reality of the multi-hued city. Nevertheless, it is precisely the intercultural experiments and celebrated ambivalence, which are the breath of life for the artists who w ork there.

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Some cultural projects specif ically feature this hybridity . In 1994, an international K unstenFestivaldesArts w as founded. Since 2000, when Brussels w as the European cultural capital, a Zinnek eparade takes place e very second year , where a rand procession of thousands of city dwellers sho w and celebrate the di versity of the city. In 2005, the professional arts f ield started up a bi-annual BXLBRAVO festival with more than 150 or ganisations. The arts sector in Brussels does ha ve a pronounced urban dimension. Initiatives such as City Mine(d) and Rec yclart interweave urban action and artistic production. Still, the cultural institutions are not a reflection of the broad multicultural di versity of Brussels and here as well, the governmental straitjacket is not helping.

A City Is Not a Country This paradoxical o verview sho ws the useful analytical distinction between the city as a place in the country and the city as urbanity . In the f irst instance, cultural polic y will be confronted by the centrality of the state and its functions. The cultural sector will be confronted by its role as a reference system in identity formation. Yet, urbanity focuses on intercultural production, bridging and networking, and creativity as a result of differences in proximity. Freezones and indeterminate spaces (Groth and Corijn 2005; Haydn et al. 2006; Osw alt et al. 2004) are of great importance in permitting informal actors to weigh on the urban agenda setting. Only in the presence of the full creative potential of urbanity can a metropolitan vision take up the comple xity of the situation and search for de velopment opportunities. Cultural creati vity in a city is al ways more plural and di verse than an y representation can render. Urban de velopment is represented in a vision. City imaging has to be distinguished from the field of city marketing. Marketing presents the city as a commodity to an outside mark et and tries to attract purchasing po wer. Imaging serv es the inner social bonding and offers an image as a meeting place of differences. Imagebuilding can be part of the public debate as it orients strate gic choices. Creati ve cities contrib ute to inno vative city imaging. It is not a form of master planning, but rather an ongoing debate about the making of the city . It is dri ven by a desire to solve problems and works best when adapted to the right scales. Urban projects are part of the vision. The y produce a part of the city , make a strategic difference, and mobilise people and ideas in an urban coalition. It is in the projects that urbanity can be made visible and debatable. Projects and o verall vision offer a platform for cultural debate. In that forum, the crisis of classic political representation (the end of great narratives) comes to the fore. There again, the need for creati vity and innovation in agenda setting and problem solving are mobilising cultural and arts actors as co-producers of urbanity , especially when looking for the adv antage of diversity (Wood and Landry 2008).

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Urban cultural policies in Europe are caught in a radical process of rescaling. The continental unif ication process, as a part of and reaction to globalisation, is confronted by the rooted European nation-states and their nationalist cultural per spectives. The more cities are positioning themselv es in a broad space of flo ws, in relation with other (foreign) cities or re gions and in competition with closer (domestic) cities or re gions, the more their culture will be confronted with the national system. Studies in cultural policies are a ware of that contradiction (Matarasso 2001; Bennet 2001; Bloomf ield and Bianchini 2001). Urbanity , as a condition of globalisation, opens up a post-national space and becomes a political project. Urban society needs culture to mobilise the population and mak e it li ve together on the basis of dif ferences and di versity. National cultural policies are meant to organise common identification. It took the century of enlightenment to think of religious freedom and the possibility of living together without sharing religion. It is a part of Europe’ s heritage. State religion w as abolished b ut the nation-state introduced state culture. It will take perhaps another century of enlightenment to experiment with the possibility of living together without sharing culture. As in the eighteenth century , we will ha ve to think of the separation of state and culture, and invent a multicultural polis. That is exactly what urbanity offers and what makes the twenty-first century the century of the city.

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Castells, M. 1998. End of millennium, the information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. III. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. 1975. L’institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Corijn, E. 2006. Deelnemen is belangrijker dan winnen. In Inzet/Opzet/.Voorzet. stadsprojecten in vlaanderen, eds. L. Boudry et al., 64–173. Garant: Antwerpen-Apeldoorn. Davis, M. 2006. Planet of slums. London: Verso. Featherstone, M. (Ed.). 1990. Global culture: Nationalism, globalisation and modernity. London: Sage. Garst, D. 1985. Wallerstein and his critics. Theory and Society 14: 469–495. Groth, J. and E. Corijn. 2005. Reclaiming urbanity: Indeterminate spaces, informal actors and urban agenda setting. A case study in Helsinki, Brussels and Berlin. Urban Studies 42(3): 511–534. Harvey, D. 1989. From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska annaler 71: 3–17. Haydn, F. and R. T emel. 2006. Temporary urban spaces. Concepts for the use of city spaces . Boston, MA: Birkhauser. Holton, R. 1998. Globalization and the nation-state. London: Macmillan. Lash, S. 1994. Refle xivity and its doubles: Structures, aesthetics, community . In Reflexive modernisation, eds. U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, 110–174. Cambridge, MA: Polity . Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1987. The end of organized capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Lash, S. and J. Urry. 1994. Economies of signs & space . London: Sage. Lofland, L. 1973. A world of strangers. Order and action in urban public space. New York: Basic Books. Martel, F. 2006. De la culture en Amérique. Paris: Gallimard. Matarasso, F. (ed.). 2001. Recognising culture: A series of briefing papers on culture and development. Canada: Department of Canadian Heritage. Oswalt, P., K. Overmeyer, and P. Misselwitz (eds.). 2004. Urban catalyst. Strategies for temporary use. Berlin: Studio Urban Catalyst. Poirrier, P. 2006. L’Etat et la culture en France au XXième Siècle. Paris: Livre de Poche. Regourd, S. 2004. L’exception culturelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Skocpol, T. 1977. Wallerstein’s world capitalist system: A theoretical and historical critique. The American Journal of Sociology 82(5): 1075–1090. Taylor, P. and C. Flint. 2000. Political geography. Harlow: Prentice Hall. Wallerstein, I. 1984. Historisch kapitalisme. Weesp: Heureka. Wallerstein, I. 1990. Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system. Theory, Culture & Society 7: 31–55. Wallerstein, I. 1991a. Unthinking social science . The limits of nineteenth-century par adigms. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Wallerstein, I. 1991b . Geopolitics and g eoculture. Essays on the c hanging world-system . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, I. 1996. Open the social sciences, r eport of the Gulbenkian Commission on the restructuring of the social sciences . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams, R. 1981. The analysis of culture. In Culture, ideolo gy and social pr ocess, eds. T. Bennett, G. Martin, C. Mercer , and J. Woollacott, 43–52. London: Batsford Academic and Educational Press/Open University Press. Wood, P. and C. Landry. 2008. The intercultural city: Planning for diver sity advantage. London: Earthscan.

Chapter 14

Alternative Politics in Urban Innovation Panu Lehtovuori and Klaske Havik

Alternative Approaches to Planning Creative Spaces: Amsterdam and Helsinki This chapter discusses the planning of “creati ve spaces” in terms of an alternative politics and presents case studies of Amsterdam and Helsinki. Specif ically, the approach to urban planning and urban politics in these cases is characterised by a strong presence of local actors embedded in local sub-cultural groups, willing to actively participate in the de velopment of a ne w, site-specif ic cultural scene. Also, experiences from the squat culture have in these cases found their way to the planning authorities. The cases e xemplify alternati ve approaches to urban planning policies such as temporary use, breeding places polic y and urban curation. These are among the concepts that pro vide a cultural and social correcti ve to existing instrumental and more mainstream approaches. Site-specificity is a recurring theme in such alternati ve approaches. We discuss this interest in place as a starting point for the planning of creative spaces, and argue that the emergence of new, place-based approaches is linked to a shifting locational logic of urban planning in contemporary society. This argument will be elaborated within the theoretical context of urban space, creativity and innovation.

Urban Space, Creativity and Innovation Broadly, contemporary urban planning is influenced by tw o interpretations of the role of urban space in fostering creati vity and innovation.1 The notion of “inno vative milieu” addresses re gional economic systems and well-def ined inno vation The many-sidedness of the notion of inno vation is reflected by the 33 entries in volving the term in the OECD statistical glossary http://stats.oecd.or g/glossary/. A baseline is that “an inno vation is the

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P. Lehtovuori () Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Helsinki University of Technology PO Box 9300 FIN-02015 TKK, Finland e-mail: [email protected] L. Kong and J. O’Connor (eds.), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, GeoJournal Library 98, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_14, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

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networks, while “creative city” can be seen to pro vide a basis for inventions in the “fuzzy” realm of human encounters and in the mix es of cultural flo ws that urban centrality (Lefebvre 1991) facilitates. A third, place-based and embedded approach is emerging.

Innovation in Cities – Centrality and Diversity Even though creati ve city theories are embraced by both politicians and planners as a “ne w” approach to urban de velopment, these theories are strongly rooted in 1960s critical comments on mainstream, rationalised urban planning. Jane Jacobs, in The Economy of Cities (1969) claimed that historically, cities have been the origin and engine of inno vation and economic gro wth. This still po werful argument explains ho w ne w ideas and ne w f ields of economy are in vented in cities, dri ving economic di versification and thereby gro wth. The e vidence is strong: indeed, from prehistoric trade settlements through mediaeval urban networks to nineteenth century urban industrial capitalism, cities’ dense agglomeration of people and resources has been necessary for innovation. Jacobs holds that innovation is clearly linked to the spatial and social condition of the city – to the chaos, di versity and inefficiency of city life. It is in the dynamics of the city that small companies ha ve the possibility of breaking out of the mainstream, and inno vating by means of trial and error. Jacobs (1969: 97) predicted that “cities will be more intricate, comprehensive, diversified and lar ger than today’s, and will ha ve even more complicated jumbles of old and ne w things. … The b ureaucratized, simplified cities so dear to our present-day city planners and urban designers… run counter to the processes of city growth and economic development.” This statement rings true in contemporary globalised cities and urban regions. Peter Hall reiterated Jacobs’ ar gument in Cities in Civilisation (1998; also Hall 1999). He def ined three types of inno vation, all needing the city as a breeding ground: cultural/intellectual, technological/producti ve, and technological/ organisational or “urban inno vation” (Hall 1999: 36). Cultural no velties often emerge in cities with excess wealth and conflictual social conditions, so that “creative cities are not lik ely to be stable or comfortable places (Hall 1999: 39)” while technological innovation seems to flourish on the edges of urban systems, in upstart places like late eighteenth century Manchester or early twentieth century Detroit. Hall’s notion of urban inno vation has become important for the current “creati ve city” agenda in many places.

implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a ne w organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations (OECD). Because of the multiple and broad definitions of ‘innovation’, we have rather chosen to focus on ‘innovation activity’ and ‘creative space’, referring to the spatial, functional and or ganisational ‘environments’ of creative work which urban planning can support” (Ruoppila et al. 2007: 11).

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Innovation as Regional Process – Innovative Milieu In the contemporary informational economy (Castells 1989), inno vation acti vity has a dif ferent locational logic. Lar ge companies’ production processes ha ve been globally distributed a long while, b ut also the “core” processes of management and R&D are not self-evidently bound to place (city) an ymore. Flows of data and ideas underpin the distrib uted “netw ork society” (Castells 1996). On the other hand, researchers have noted that in competitive environments, outsourcing and horizontal organisation of production create new regional agglomerations, which can be based for example in sectoral synergy, common value-chain or clustering around a shared science-base (e.g. Storper 1995; Porter 1991). A dual process of decentralisation and qualitatively new recentralisation can be observed (Gottdiener 1994/1985). “Innovative milieu,” as def ined by the GREMI group in the 1980s, pro vides a socio-spatial notion of the re gional condition of inno vation acti vity (Groupe de Recherche Européen sur les Milieux Inno vateurs). It is based on Philippe Aydalot’s insight, emphasising the interdependenc y of companies and their local milieu. The notion v alorises cultural norms and social relationships into the type of infrastructure that could nurture innovation and creativity. A milieu is conceived as a coherent whole in which a territorial production system, a technical culture, and firms and institutions are link ed (Maillat and Lecoq 1992; Maillat 1991). An effective inno vative milieu is characterised by high le vels of trust and norms of reciprocity among actors, and the development of a set of institutions that link these actors. In this w ay, the milieu pro vides positive externalities to actors within it by reducing uncertainty (Camagni 1991; Goldstein 2005). Silicon Valley in California is the paradigmatic e xample of an inno vative milieu, combining uni versity-based networks, hardw orking culture, Asian immigrants, local v enture capital, re gional job market and “garage” as the iconic/practical locus of start-ups. Another standard example is the fashion and design networks of Emilia Romagna around Milan. Innovative milieus need both “hard” and “soft” elements, that is, good infrastructures and institutions, combined with f avorable local culture. In urban planning, the idea has led to promoting technopoles and thematic economic corridors. To take an example, Helsinki region’s innovation strategy (Yhdessä huipulle 2005; Helsingin yleiskaava 2002) is based on science parks and hard infrastructures. The plan suggests a “campus netw ork” and “kno w-how routes” as tools to foster innovation activity in re gional scale. W ithin such lar ge networks, however, “soft” elements like the presence of cultural or educational uses and site-specific qualities are important. In the case of Arabianranta, a new neighbourhood in Helsinki around the former Arabia factories, the regeneration process has been initiated by cultural and educational use. The Uni versity of Art and Design used the former factory premises as inspiring laboratories for art and design. The ne w housing area for 7,000 inhabitants and an equal number of jobs, is now designated as “living laboratory,” or e veryday test-bed of ne w products and services. Apparently , the creati ve atmosphere that has come about in the former industrial b uildings, in combination with the spacious waterside location, proves attractive.

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Spatial and Temporal Niches of Creative Work – Emerging Urban Places Mark Gottdiener (1994/1985) has theorised further the contemporary , informational production of space, sho wing that the multi-centered metropolitan re gion is the appropriate frame for analysing spatial processes, for e xample, real-estate investment. However, central cities and especially old industrial areas ne xt to historic cores are not insignif icant for the discussion about links between urban space and inno vation activity – on the contrary . Sassen’s global city thesis (1991) points to possible e xtreme centralisation of certain “command and control” functions of global networks in the informational economy . While the empirical e vidence is somewhat contested, Manhattan in New York City, as well as certain parts of London, Paris and Tokyo, can be interesting e xamples of a wider re-v aluation of city centres and an intensif ied culture and consumption-led gentrif ication of derelict industrial zones. Zukin (1992), for e xample, points to “f ashion, f inance and food” as the drivers of Manhattan’s change; Roppongi Hills in central T okyo boasts an art museum on top of sk yscrapers and an e xtensive programme of street furniture- cumart. Such environments do play a role in the inter -urban competition for b usiness locations, tourists and upper-middle class residents, attracting members of the subcultural “creative class” (cf. Florida 2002; Florida and T inagli 2004). For our discussion, spaces of cultural production are more important than those of consumption. In terms of the politics of the creative city, the contextual creation of creative places raises tw o complementary issues. First, cultural users are often pioneers of economic revalorisation of urban areas. Writers, performers and artists are often the f irst to re veal the strong potential of urban places – which is often the start of alternati ve bottom-up processes of urban re generation. The process of change in SoHo in the 1970s (Zukin 1982) is a well-kno wn example. Artists who used old lofts as cheap studios led a f ight against complete reconstruction of the area. They were able to transform the aesthetics of v ernacular industrial buildings to a wanted cultural commodity. While succeeding in the initial battle, the y lost in the end because they could not afford the rents of the newly popular space (see also O’Connor 1999). This is one of the often discussed counterparts of gentrif ication (Glass 1964; Hamnett 1961). Whereas gentrif ication was originally a bottom-up, organically structured process, it is no w deliberately used as political de vice in urban regeneration. In current gentrification processes, “creativity” is often used in a top-down manner. Municipalities offer cheap facilities for artists in order to gi ve new life to rundown urban areas. The vibrant urban life caused by the presence of creative groups, is then used to attract other audiences. The question is, ho wever, whether creativity could be used as a mere tool (A vidar et al. 2007). Second, while the contextual creation of creative places may foster project identities, valorise new cultural actors and enrich city’s cultural offer (Lehtovuori et al. 2003), the organic processes do not al ways fit to official agenda. This may lead to conflicts. The case of Makasiinit (the former rail way w arehouses) in Helsinki is illustrative in this respect.

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Versatile use of Makasiinit: snowboarding event in the courtyard. Photo: Kirmo Ki velä

“Intencities” project in Makasiinit in summer 2000. Photo: Laura Mänki

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During the 1990s, the buildings hosted a versatile array of events and some semipermanent uses, such as a big flea market. The varied programme and lowbrow character of the historic buildings made Makasiinit well known and frequented by many kinds of visitors. Even though the place changed from marginal to popular, the rough atmosphere and unique location at the doorstep of the Finnish Parliament underlined their role as an alternative and free space. However, the official city planning did not take the organically created cultural space in account. This led to Helsinki’ s biggest planning conflict in decades. Different actors gathered together as the Pro Makasiinit movement, with a proacti ve agenda and project identity . In autumn 2000, about 8,000 people surrounded Makasiinit forming a ‘Human Wall’ to protect them. At that time, the conflict opened a momentary political space, allowing for wider discussion about Helsinki’s urban agenda and good city life (Lehto vuori 2005a: 217–220). The important observ ation is that without just that material place , the whole process of appropriation and conflict w ould ha ve been dif ferent, or might not have happened at all. Makasiinit were demolished in the end, b ut the conflict left a mark in the city’ s cultural polic y. The city realised the strate gic importance of events, and started to brand Helsinki as the “city of festi vals”. The type of space and programme Makasiinit represented w ould have suited well in the ne w policy, characterised by a dual concern about the direct economic impact of events and the ‘vibrancy’ they can produce (Mäenpää 2007). Helsinki’s example reflects European trends. Currently, place-based groups and new, organically evolved creative spaces are seen as important elements of municipal cultural polic y in many European cities. In the ne xt section, we study alternati ve strategies to foster such spaces, laying the ground for the detailed cases in Amsterdam and Helsinki.

Place-Based Alternative Strategies The Discovery of Marginal Places Across Europe, former harbour areas, industrial zones and abandoned f actories have become breeding grounds of cultural and creati ve economies. Hafen City in Hamburg, the waterfront of River Spree in Berlin, Northern Quarter in Manchester , Andrejsala in Riga, Luma f actory in Stockholm, Cable F actory in Helsinki and NDSM wharf and W estergasfabriek in Amsterdam are just some e xamples of the European scene of postindustrial sites of urban cultural production. The specif ic spatial and atmospheric qualities of these places play a significant role in their development, partly def ining which actors become interested and what kind of creati ve place they achieve. The appreciation of the undesigned and indeterminate coincides with the wish to de velop something ne w and inno vative – just there. Place, or the concrete situatedness, is the k ey. Adaptive reuse, ne w social forms and ne w business models lead to real inno vations in such circumstances (Lehto vuori et al. 2003: 36–61; Pruijt 2004). This cultural/atmospheric/alternati ve interest is in itself not new, but the growing European trend to manage very large redevelopments in a fresh “cultural” manner might represent urban inno vation in Peter Hall’s (1999) sense.

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In these projects – from small and alternati ve to big and commercial – the mean ing of place shifts from mere “pragmatic” location, with a focus on a vailability of material, labour and infrastructure, to a focus on the e xperience and appropriation of place. In many of the above-mentioned examples, it is creative people in search of affordable workspace, inspiration or freedom, who disco ver and in a w ay also produce such “creati ve spaces. ” The y f ind potential in underused, often dilapidated former industrial areas. The rough aesthetics of such places, as well as the alternative uses by squatters or other groups, of fer possibilities that are lacking in the mainstream urban places. Such “found” socio-spatial realities can play a major role in urban development. “Every crevice in the city had a hidden story or undiscovered potential that could be re-used for a positi ve urban purpose, ” as Charles Landry (2000: 7) states. In recent years, we have seen cities deliberately “constructing” such circumstances, and developing techniques of branding to attract creati ve groups. Mainstream politicians and real-estate developers have also discovered the potential of “hidden” or mar ginal places and in vested in their de velopment into centres of urban creati vity. Case by case, this calls for ne w kinds of connection and cooperation of cultural actors, businesses and planning authorities. Each stakeholder has to be ready to question old presuppositions and experiment – challenges that are not always easily met as the Makasiinit e xample showed.

Temporary Use A number of alternati ve approaches ha ve been de veloped which search for a balance between top-down and bottom-up planning of creative places. The notion of temporary use opens one w ay to challenge the rigidities of architectural and planning thought. The hypothesis of the Urban Catalysts project – a research initiated by the T echnische Uni versität Berlin and funded by the European Union focusing on the temporary uses of residual urban areas in f ive European cities, Naples, V ienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and Helsinki (Bengs et al. 2002; Lehtovuori et al. 2003) – was that temporary uses are a neglected resource of urban planning and development. Instead of the focus on the permanent and visible, the Urban Catalysts project fore grounded the ephemeral. It became clear that e ven though overlooked by the of ficial stakeholders, temporary uses and users do ha ve positive economic and social ef fects. In sustaining and rene wing urban cultures, temporary uses have a key role. Temporary uses facilitate a multiple coding of a site. They may also provide an opportunity to preserve the existing values and interesting features of the site better than other de velopment options. They are a research tool, which helps the planner in testing dif ferent uses and spatial patterns (Lehto vuori et al. 2003: 57–60). One e xample, also part of the Urban Catalyst research project, was the abo ve discussed temporary use of Makasiinit and the adjacent temporary Flower Gardens in Helsinki. There the temporary appropriation did sho w an interesting spatial pattern and programme, confirming its attractiveness, but the planning and real-estate processes could not take advantage of the “findings”. In other cases a wide variety of temporal types has been found: temporary uses can be pioneers, they

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can displace or subvert other uses, they can co-exist or consolidate, or they can give momentary impulses towards something new (Lehtovuori et al. 2003: 31–33).

Urban Curation “Urban Curation”, de veloped by the Chora group of architects (Bunschoten et al. 2001), represents one of the most thorough recent attempts to create a ne w methodology of urban planning. If applied to planning of creative spaces, urban curation seems to offer interesting possibilities. Chora views the city as a field of opportunities waiting to be realised. The budding opportunity for a public space or other urban phenomenon is called a “proto-urban condition.” The planner’ s (curator’s) task is not to introduce from some where outside a new order, to engender an artif icial project or tak e command of the city with visual tools, but to support and refine the urban proto-phenomena and opportunities. “Architects are designers of spaces for emer gent phenomena, for social, political, economic and cultural change” (Bunschoten et al. 2001: 27). In addition to the proto-urban condition, the notion of urban curation in volves other concepts that help to see place-based processes in ne w light. To take some examples, “caretakers” support arising phenomena, “urban icon” is a social collector and point of assembly and “liminal body” is a self-or ganising new actor or participant in the process of change (Bunschoten et al. 2001; Lehtovuori 2005a). These concepts help to be sensiti ve and inventive in the sometimes surprising processes. Applying Chora’ s ideas, a creati ve space in formation could be seen as a “metaspace”. The task of the planner/curator is to maintain the metaspaces, overseeing, organising and supporting their contents.

Breeding Places Policy In several cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, The Hague and Nijmegen, city authorities ha ve been acti vely in vesting in so-called “breeding grounds” or “incubators,” whereby the city pro vides affordable housing or w ork space for creative groups. Through the breeding places policy, city authorities try to form alliances with the local sub-cultural scene in order to create an attracti ve climate for creative groups. In a number of Dutch cities, “breeding places committees” were called to life, in which local politicians together with artists and other cultural entrepreneurs discussed possibilities for breeding places in former f actories, w arehouses and schools. Amsterdam founded the f irst breeding places committee in 1999, when politicians became sensiti ve to the positi ve ef fects of sub-cultural acti vities by squatters and other marginal groups. This concept may sound lik e an ideal political instrument. A k ey question is, ho wever, whether this alliance between sub-culture and institutions is a fruitful one. Didn’ t creati ve places e xist despite, rather than thanks to the established politics? The main concern is that breeding places need self-regulation to some e xtent, and should be pre vented from f alling into the traps

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of the b ureaucratic system. Therefore, a good understanding and clear agreements between city politics and creative groups are crucial. The development of the former NDSM ship wharf in Amsterdam North into a breeding place for a di versity of subcultural activities has been a test case for new alliances between sub-cultures and the authorities (Havik 2004, 2007). The project can be seen as an attempt to a void the negative effects of gentrification. Here, the regeneration of the old industrial harbour site started by forming an alliance between ‘top-do wn’ and ‘bottom-up’ politics. A group of artists and other creati ve people with a background in the squat scene w as given the chance to develop the NDSM wharf as a cultural breeding place.

Alternative Policies in Practice The above mentioned alternative approaches to the planning of creative spaces are by no means exclusive. Indeed, in many cases the development of creative spaces simultaneously takes place along different lines. For example, in Amsterdam’s NDSM, the breeding places policy was initially paired with ideas about temporary use. However, the process of concrete realisation of the cultural wharf took so man y years that the temporariness (of 5 years, initially) has by no w been e xtended to at least 20 years. Also the Cable Factory in Helsinki has proven to stand the test of time. In the be ginning of the 1990s, this f actory was converted into a ‘culture f actory’, giving space to architectural w orkshops, a photo museum, dance studios and e xhibition rooms. While the Cable f actory initially w as a sole entity in the industrial harbour area of Ruoholahti, it is now embedded in a new urban area, with residential and commercial uses. We choose to present the Helsinki Cable F actory and the Amsterdam NDSM wharf as case-studies for this chapter , precisely because the current stage of these initiatives allows us to study the social and economic forces that lie behind the urban and architectural results. Strate gies or f ailures to be learned from these cases can be applied in future planning of creati ve spaces. The case studies will be discussed below by f irst giving an o verview of the atmosphere at these sites. Second, we will introduce the programmatic impulses proposed to attract a cultural scene. Third, the institutional and cultural consequences of such strate gies are discussed.

Case Study: Amsterdam NDSM Cultural Wharf Atmosphere of the IJ Banks On the northern side of the IJ waters, at the back of the central railway station, lies the other side of Amsterdam. The scale is dif ferent from the inner city . After the rhythm of canal houses, with three steps up to the entrance, of bricks, of trees, of wooden doors, here, everything is gigantic. The blue doors of the shipwharf can be seen from a kilometre’s distance. A crane towers above the outdoor concrete ramp. Wind and emptiness are omnipresent. The ramp slopes do wn to an enclosed pond,

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Former shipwarf NDSM in Amsterdam. View from the ramp towards main building, 2008. Photo: Klaske Havik

Skatepark NDSM, architecture studio de Ruimte. Photo: James Linders

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protected from the IJ by a rusted steel dam. The doors no longer open to let just constructed ships sail out. No w, the pond is a reflecting stage, and the ramp is a platform for the audience, surrounded by concrete blocks full of colourful graf fiti. Low sun strengthens the colours of water, of paint, of the sky, lines disappear in the water, sounds of the surrounding site v aguely resonate. There is nobody here, and Amsterdam lies open before us. Amsterdam North has long remained out of sight, the rail way station forming a protection wall between roughness of the open w ater and the historical city centre with its system of canals along which public life took place. Only in the past decades, the huge amount of space that Amsterdam North has to of fer, so close to the city centre, has been recognised as an opportunity for urban de velopment. The discovery of these former industrial sites in Amsterdam has long been the initiative of dwellers, artists and non-prof it organisations. In the period between the depar ture of the harbour activities and the new urban development, the IJ banks with its empty warehouses and silos were tak en over by squatters as af fordable spaces to live and work. They then attracted the attention of the municipality and real estate developers to re generate the sites. By the 1990s, the Eastern Docklands, made up of se veral dif ferent peninsulas, had become laboratories for ne w housing architecture. The outcome w as that it attracted a socially rather homogenous group of well-paid young f amilies. The artistic li veliness and challenging mar ginality that characterised the area in the earlier years is hard to be found no w.

Approach: “City as a Hull” and Breeding Places Policy Following the large-scale top-down planning of the Eastern Harbour District, a subsequent shift to wards a more footloose, more di verse urban de velopment became observable. In the course of the 1990s, in Amsterdam’ s political circles, there w as more interest in the stimulating impulses that sub-cultural groups had pro vided to the areas around the IJ, and more room emer ged for these groups to operate politically as well. In 1993, the y joined forces in the “IJ Industrial Buildings Guild. ” As a reaction to the pre vailing uniform de velopment geared to luxury residential districts, this guild called for the preserv ation and re-use of historically and architecturally signif icant b uildings, in which non-commercial rental prices might be feasible. The premise w as the e xisting potential of sites and users. In De Stad als Casco (“The City as a Hull”) the guild outlines a method of urban design that lea ves room for local bottom-up initiati ves and in which users tak e an acti ve part in the development and maintenance of sites. At the same time, the guild ackno wledged mutability as a f actor in planning: a b uilding, an area is ne ver “f inished.” This perspective offers possibilities for a more dynamic urban de velopment, in which instead of homogeneous user groups supplanting one another , a blending tak es place among old and new users (Havik 2005, 2007). The NDSM cultural wharf was one of the first mayor projects using the breeding places policy. In October 1999, the borough of Amsterdam North held acompetition

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to develop the wharf into a fertile cultural site for temporary use. The w ork group Kinetisch Noord, which had its roots in the squat culture and the Industrial b uildings guild, w on the competition with a plan thoroughly elaborated both in spatial and or ganisational terms. The main goals were to (1) obtain the former NDSM wharf for lo w-profit art, culture and crafts production, (2) initiate a community that de velops NDSM wharf to wards an e xperimental, multi-disciplinary cultural environment and (3) create a cultural hotspot of (inter)national importance and organize public activities. Kinetisch Noord recei ved f inancial support from the Amsterdam broedplaatsfonds (“incubator fund”), among others, as well as an IPSV (inno vative projects in urban rene wal) grant from the Dutch Ministry of Public Housing, Spatial Planning and the En vironment. The architectural team for the master plan consisted of Kapriool Architecten, Architecture studio de Ruimte and Marc Labadie. Characteristic elements of the rough, industrial hangar , lik e its impressi ve steel construction and skylights, formed the guiding principle of the design, which w as based on the “city as a hull” philosophy. The building was partitioned into four sections: an events zone in the northern and tallest part of the hangar, a series of theatre workshops in the east wing, a youth centre in the west wing, and in the centre the Kunststad (“art city”), a grid within which of fices and studios are to be b uilt. In a later stage, the design task was divided in ten different projects in the wharf and on the terrain. This division into smaller projects allowed parallel processing in terms of budget, planning and design.

Cultural and Institutional Consequences The NDSM site is a unique e xample, given that the sub-culture w as deliberately employed from the start to provide an impulse to the area. The project has reached an advanced stage of completion: the shell of the K unststad was completed in late 2006 and its ne w users are b uilding their w orkshops and studios within the structure. The NDSM site can be considered an e xample of the application of the “city as a hull” philosophy at se veral scales. By opening up the entire site for cultural, public use, the site pro vides an open place in the midst of more re gulated urban developments. Because a certain level of freedom has been guaranteed architecturally as well, various groups of users can make the site their own; this will facilitate changes in use over time. The open set-up of the NDSM wharf, with its diversity of users and low threshold, succeeds in creating mixing between artists from the Amsterdam city centre and young people from Amsterdam-Noord, which promises to be the opposite of unilateral gentrification. This might actually mak e it possible for the urban di versity Jacobs called for and the “creati ve city” philosophy of Florida and Landry to bear fruit. For the moment, it seems the “creatives” are able to maintain their position on the NDSM site and not f all prey entirely to commercialisation: the NDSM site and its occupants seem, for no w, sufficiently resilient. Instead of seeing the

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Artist village K unststad NDSM. The structure has been designed by Dynamo architects. Artists themselves build their studio spaces within this structure. Photo: Klask e Havik

Outdoor restaurant at NDSM. Photo: Klask e Havik

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use of so-called “creative” groups merely as a gateway to gentrification, this might actually generate a more sustainable dynamic, which will lend the newly developed areas a certain diversity – a diversity indispensable to the city. The success story of the project however cannot yet be written. Difficulties with local authorities caused endless delays of b uilding and users permits. Right after the opening in February 2005, the skate park closed again, to be opened a fe w months later. Dutch building regulations seem not to be directly applicable for new programming of such lar ge industrial b uildings. Whereas teams of architects, f ire safety experts, engineers and advisors of all kinds ha ve been acti vely involved in developing the detailed plans, the la w seems to lack enough space to allo w such projects to come to life. Man y of the users and de velopers of the NDSM culture wharf have become nostalgic for the squatting period, when things seemed to ha ve been realised so much easier and f aster. The enthusiasm of the initial users f ades away due to political brawl. This lays bare the paradox of the breeding places polic y. The dilemma with such initiatives is that cooperation with establishment implies a loss of freedom. Breeding places policies can only become successful when they offer enough flexibility and free interpretation. Only then may they truly offer possibilities of making cities livelier, more creative and more interesting. If the NDSM project o vercomes the last barriers of le gislation, it can become a symbol of the creati ve capacity of Amsterdam, a site which breathes artistic as well as spatial freedom- and which will eventually generate the economic development of Amsterdam North.

Case Study: Cable Factory in Helsinki Atmosphere of the Western Harbour – Landscape of Work Helsinki’s Western harbour is an industrial and logistics landscape, which consists of three land-filled peninsulas. In its roughly 2 km2, one finds a functioning dockyard for luxury cruise ships, big po werplants, a heliport and both a passenger and a goods harbour . The latter is situated in the central peninsula, with its colourful cranes and the “instant city” of containers. The area is close to the city centre, and it has al ways been to some e xtent accessible. The landf ill is still going on, and new industrial b uildings are erected, simultaneously with a piece-meal process of re-using some areas for housing estates and public parks since late 1980s. W estern harbour is more a landscape in the making than an abandoned, rusty industrial belt. A big change will be caused by the relocation of the goods harbour in 2009. This opens the central peninsula, called Jätkäsaari, for a large scale residential and office project which will redefine the character of the whole area. Cable Factory is situated at the edge of Ruoholahti, the f irst phase of residential re-use of the harbour . In 1989, its o wner Nokia Ltd. be gan to lease premises no longer required by the cable production. Artists, cultural b usinesses and sports organisations quickly filled about 20,000 m2. What attracted those first users?

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The courtyard of the Cable F actory in 2009. Photo: Panu Lehtovuori

New of fices, Cable F actory and other reused industrial b uildings vie wed from the quay-side. Photo: Panu Lehtovuori

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First, the complete emptiness of the b uilding and the surrounding w astelands and quays created a solemn atmosphere, radically differing from the well-organised and nice museums, galleries, theatres, neighbourhood centres and other welf are society’s places of culture. Second, the b uilding w as full of scars of time and signs of w ork, making it easy to imagine future changes. Third, the size of Cable Factory is exceptional: its total floor area is 55,000 m2, making it one of the biggest industrial buildings in Finland. Many spaces are truly monumental, culminating in the cathedral-like Marine Cable Hall. F ourth, the Cable F actory carries a certain symbolism as one of the k ey sites of the country’ s post-war industrialisation and modernisation. Taken together, these atmospheric – or “auratic” – aspects and the robust spatial frame signified for the f irst users freedom, both actual and conceptual, combined with a feeling of being able to do something significant. The appropriating group of actors was formed in the process, but it shared an imaginative horizon of near endless future possibilities, enthusiasm and empo werment. They felt they had found a hidden gem, a future living monument for culture by the sea.

Approach: Cultural Planning Versus Town Planning The Ruoholahti to wn plan, a result of 1987–1988 architectural competition, did not understand the Cable Factory’s potential, but suggested demolishing most parts of the b uilding. Therefore, the cultural users of the f actory f aced a direct threat from City’s side. They soon formed the Pro Kaapeli association, which drafted an alternative plan. After support from leading cultural f igures and media, the City Planning Committee in 1990 approved keeping Cable Factory as a complete entity in the future town plan. The formative phase of the Cable F actory community, programme and “brand” can be seen as a f ight between cultural and technical readings of the potential of urban space. Unlik e in Makasiinit, the cultural approach w on. The reasons are many, but economy certainly played a role. The f irst Ruoholahti master plan w as made during a real-estate boom with an e xpected rapid realisation, b ut during the 1990s the economic recession w as already looming in the air . Because of this, a solution that seemed feasible and quite af fordable for the city won a majority. After this decision, an institutionalisation process started. In 1991, the City of Helsinki and Nokia Ltd. signed a contract on di viding the f actory. The part no w owned by the City w as formed into a compan y, which signed ne w lease contracts with the users lar gely on former conditions. A ne w committee w as set up: Pro Kaapeli architects Pia Ilonen and Jan V erwijnen compiled a ne w use plan. Their expertise allowed for quick decisions by the committee. At the same time, construction of the Ruoholahti residential district be gan. The years 1991–1993 witnessed several ground-breaking events that showed the enormous potential of the Marine Cable Hall and other unique spaces of the f actory. Important cultural institutions, such as A vanti chamber music orchestra, mo ved to Cable F actory. Educational

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actors, including Helsinki University of Technology’s Department of Architecture, also leased space for specific purposes (Lehtovuori 1999). A third phase in the programmatic evolution started in 1993, when the Museum of Photography and tw o other state museums mo ved in. Cable F actory started to be an established, big cultural centre, with its balance gradually shifting from production to consumption. A new chic restaurant in the High Voltage Hall and the Drive or Die megashow (1994), or the establishment of the Centre for Ne w Dance (1997) are some milestones of that phase. During the process, the empty “hull” had become a labyrinthine and partly sanitised cultural space. Ho wever, the main halls occupying the whole street le vel ha ve been k ept open as “lugns” of the f actory. They allow big programmes but also preserve some of the original feeling.

Cultural and Institutional Consequences Despite some problems in sustaining a balanced, non-commercial mix of tenants, programming the big halls acti vely enough, and managing the technical reparations, Cable Factory has become a successful e xample nationally and to an e xtent internationally. The artist’s studios are in full use, and e vents and museums gather some 200,000 visitors annually . The f actory is f inancially self-sustained, with a turn-over of 3.5 million euros (2005). 2 The size of the b uilding is again of impor tance: there simply are so man y rented studios that the y can subsidise the noncommercial programmes, while the rent-le vel is k ept acceptable. The same f actor explains the factory’s lively creative community. Due to its success, Cable F actory became an e xample to other projects. F or example, the model of sharing responsibilities between City and pri vate parties was used with modif ications in the Lasipalatsi media centre, a Helsinki European City of Culture 2000 project. Cable Factory became a member of the Trans-Europe Halles (TEH) network and, in 2003, the TEH Communication and Administration Office was established there. Locally, Cable Factory’s cluster of cultural actors and programmes (cf. Mommaas 2004) started to influence the cultural prof ile of its neighbourhood. Increasingly after 2004, cultural b usinesses and design and furniture shops started to mo ve to the neighbouring industrial b uildings. The area seemed to become an “address” for creati ve industries, e ven though the change is still modest and tentati ve. Nevertheless, the emerging cluster has become a clear asset for the whole W estern harbour development. Possibly the most important influence is taking off at the time of writing, in 2008. The company managing Cable Factory, Kiinteistö Oy Kaapelitalo, is entitled by the City of Helsinki to manage the re-use of Suvilahti, an industrial estate in the city’ s Eastern harbour. The former gas f actory, Suvilahti is seen as a k ey element of the 2

http://www.kaapelitehdas.fi/index.html?menuid = 18 (accessed 8 September 2008).

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Sea Cable Hall of the Cable F actory in Helsinki. Photo: Heli Rekula

A cultural event in Cable Factory. Photo: Petri Eskelinen

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very big scale (1 million square metres) Eastern harbour de velopment. The change of attitudes since late the 1980s is remarkable. No w, Suvilahti is seen to be the “Cable Factory 2”, and the already ongoing grassroots, participatory de velopment towards a v ersatile cultural cluster is an accepted part of planning (cf. Bianchini 1996: 21). Suvilahti will have studios and space for cultural production, but there is more emphasis on events than in Cable Factory. This difference can be explained by the opportunities of the place, with lar ge outdoor areas, b ut also by the city’ s new cultural policy, focusing on festivals and events.

Discussion Despite their dif ferences, the NDSM wharf and the Cable F actory share impor tant elements, gi ving insight to the alternati ve politics in urban inno vation. Very important is the appropriation process with all its place-based intricacies. The spatial configuration and atmosphere were main starting points for programming the creative space. In both cases, e xperiences from the squatting scene ha ve been part of the development process. The alternative politics thus seem to ha ve a fruitful connection to the squatting scene tactics – but in an institutionalised form. This notion foregrounds the dif ficulty and certain fragility of the alternati ve processes: despite the positive addition of creativity as a device in urban planning policy, there is only a thin borderline between the positive opportunities for urban innovation in a diverse and creati ve environment, and the loss of e xactly the creati vity that w as aimed at in the be ginning through too f ixed economic and political aims. Both the NDSM wharf and the Cable F actory have so far been able to successfully balance between experiment and safe solutions, freedom and institutionalisation, thus becoming benchmark projects and influencing their neighbourhoods and wider municipal policies. This success confirms that place-based alternative practices can indeed be valuable assets in policies for urban innovation, providing a cultural and social corrective to mainstream approaches. If e xamined from inside the emer ging creati ve space, three qualities come to the fore. At the core of a successful creative place is the site of cultural production, some kind of incubator. The atmosphere and spatial and programmatical openness of such sites and premises are important, and often they are managed by a new type of liminal actor , exemplified by Kinetisch Noord and Pro Kaapeli. Once such an incubator is working well, it creates a culturally attractive scene, a grey zone where outsiders and insiders, urban public and the creati ves can mingle. Again, articulating the threshold needs delicate spatial and or ganisational balancing. Finally , a more formal stage is needed, which in turn can mean either public urban space or a form of traditional cultural forum such as museum or theatre (Lehtovuori 2005b). In the NDSM wharf, the outside ramps and dock-sides are the main stage, while in the Cable Factory the monumental sequence of street-le vel halls has that function. In managing the stage, the organising capacity of the users, and their ability to communicate between sub-culture and politics, is crucial.

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In this chapter, we hope to ha ve shown that marginal sites can become creati ve spaces that gather people, radiate ideas and intensify urban e xperiences. These new urban cores can become important cultural resources for lar ge-scale developments too. A set of alternati ve practices can be utilised in the processes, in which all actors, including planning authorities and b usinesses, need to change their presuppositions and practices.

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Index

A Abbas, A., 187 Adorno, T., 11 Adorno, T.W., 178 Amsterdam NDSM Cultural Wharf breeding places policy, 217–218 cultural and institutional consequences, 218–220 IJ banks atmosphere, 215–217 Andersen, K.V., 114, 116 Anderson, E.A., 79 Andersson, A.E., 79 Arrighi, G., 182 Asheim, B., 99, 116 Asia, 28 animation outsourcing, 29–30 characterising industries’ creativity, 31–33 creativity index, 140 development lifecycle, 29 employment, 142, 147–148 free market economy, 142 GDP growth, 144 Hong Kong and Macau case study, 140–144 ILO occupational classification and creative occupations, 145–148 international tourism, 143 Japanese animation and video game industry, 29 low-end service economy, 143 OECD high-tech innovation, 141 online gaming, new entrants, 30–31 B B Barnes, K., 129, 130 Bassett, K., 155 Becker, H.S., 14 Beijing Centre for Creativity (BCC), 88

Beijing, creative clusters capital complex, 77 capital culture, 82–85 Capital Recreation District (CRD), 87 Chaoyang, 89–91 creative city, 78 creative excellence, 85 cultural creative industries, 78–79 cultural creative parks, 85 cultural infrastructure, 79 Dongcheng, 87–88 first 5 Year Development Plan (1954), 81 knowledge transfer processes, 80 urban transformation, 82 Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneer Base, 86 Zhongguancun Software Park, 86 Bell, D., 12 Bhidè, A., 138, 139 Bianchini, F., 48, 155 Boyle, M., 126 Braudel, R., 180, 181 C Chaoyang Gaobeidian, 90 media cluster, 90 multiple factories, 89 Songzhuang Creative Arts and Cartoon Cluster, 90–91 Cheng, Edmund, 69 Chen Guanzhong, 83 China animation outsourcing, 30 business strategy in creativity, 38 imitative trends, 32–33 national culture in creativity, 37 online games industry, 30–31 229

230 Content innovations, 35 Creative capital theory Asian economies creativity index, 140 employment, 142, 147–148 free market economy, 142 GDP growth, 144 Hong Kong and Macau case study, 140–144 ILO occupational classification and creative occupations, 145–148 international tourism, 143 low-end service economy, 143 OECD high-tech innovation, 141 high-tech industries and technology, 138 information technology diffusion, 139 International Labour Organization (ILO) database, 136–137 super creative core and creative professionals, 136 3T’s economic growth, 137 urban economy, 136 Creative clusters, 2–3 in Beijing capital complex, 77 capital culture, 82–85 Capital Recreation District (CRD), 87 Chaoyang, 89–91 creative city, 78 creative excellence, 85 cultural creative industries, 78–79 cultural creative parks, 85 cultural infrastructure, 79 Dongcheng, 87–88 knowledge transfer processes, 80 urban transformation, 82 5 Year Development Plan (1954), 81 Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneer Base, 86 Zhongguancun Software Park, 86 nature, 61 rethinking the theory, 73–74 in Singapore “Creative Community Singapore” programme, 67 creative industries, 65–66 Creative Services Development Plan, 63 Creative Towns, 64 Design Singapore, 64 Economic Development Board (EDB), 63 Media 21, 64 National Arts Council (NAC), 67–68 Renaissance City 2.0, 63–64 reputation, repose and rentals, 70–71

Index rivalry in relationships, 71–73 Telok Kurau Studios, 68–69 tacit knowledge, 62 Creative industries, 25 in Asia, 28 animation outsourcing, 29–30 characterising industries’ creativity, 31–33 development lifecycle, 29 Japanese animation and video game industry, 29 online gaming, new entrants, 30–31 creativity influencing factors business strategy in managing creativity, 38–39 content innovations, 35 convergence of constituents, 36 individual creativity, 34 national culture, 36–38 State’s role, 39–40 technological innovations, 34–35 culture, 26 flash technology, 28 governance and economic development cultural districts, 155 culture’s utilities, multiplication of, 156 European Structural Funds, 155 flexibility, 163 globalisation, 160 institutional relationships, networks and embedded knowledge, 157–159 post-fordist flexible specialisation, 162 potential growth sectors identification, 160 re-territorialisation, 157 untraded inter-dependencies, 153, 158 urban politics, 161–162 Internet, 27 long tail phenomenon, 28 massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), 28 mode of production, 26–27 product’s innovativeness, 27 user-created content, 28 Creativity as selling point, 12–13 business strategy in managing creativity, 38–39 content innovations, 35 convergence of constituents, 36 creative class, drivers, 13 individual creativity, 34 national culture, 36–38 in socially innovative projects, 13

Index in social problem solving, 13–14 State’s role in, 39–40 technological innovations, 34–35 Cultural and creative industries (CCI) European experience cultural industries and clusters policies, 18 cultural quarters and cultural planning, 18 fragmented practice, 16 genealogy of CCI, 17 expectations, 2 policies, 2 policy making, 9–10 and policy transfer creativity, 12–14 cultural industries, 10–11 normative debates, 14–15 xerox policy making, 15 Cultural–creative clusters artistic districts to cultural industry quarters, 46 Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS), 49 cultural clustering strategies, 50–51 cultural–economic approach to cultural spaces, 48–49 cultural industries in economic regeneration, 49 cultural to creative clusters, 51–53 formulation of term, 46 innovations, 62 nature, 61 notions, 45 Sheffield public strategy, 49 three dimensional space levels of proximity, 54–56 political–economic landscape, 56–57 role of culture, 53–54 urban regeneration projects, 48 Currid, E., 54, 56

231 annual average employment growth rate, 109 annual average population growth rate, 108 creative class (Florida’s) approach high degree of heterogeneity, 102 larger city-regions, 103–104 regional development, 101–104 social and cultural amenities, 103 Super Creative Core and Creative Professionals, 101 technological and knowledge industries, 103 Tech-Pole Index, 103 theory and development of hypotheses, 100–101 dataset and methods Bohemian Variable, 106 coordinated market economies, 104–105 Creative Class Variable, 105–106 Cultural Opportunity Variable (COI), 107 Human Capital Variable, 106 Integration Index, 106 Openness Variable, 106–107 Public Provision Variable (PPI), 107 Variables, quantitative analyses, 105 New High-Tech Firm Formation Variable, 108 proxies variables, 108–109 statistical findings business climate, 113–115 people climate, 110–112 size correlation, 115 social and cultural amenities, 112 technology and knowledge-intensive industries, 113–114 tolerance variables, 110–111 Tech-pole Variable, 107–108 time–space compression, 99 total population variable and density variable, 108 unemployment rate, 109 EXPO 2010 Shanghai, 173

D De Muynck, B., 89 DeVol, R., 103, 107, 108 Dongcheng, 87–88 Duncan, S., 15

F Florida, R., 1, 13, 51, 102, 103, 105, 114–116, 123–126, 130, 135–138, 140, 141, 143, 145

E Esping-Andersen, G., 15, 18 European creative class and regional development

G Garnham, N., 11 Gehua Cultural Development Group, 88 Gertler, M., 105

232 Girard, A., 11 Glaeser, E., 99, 115, 138 Goodwin, M., 15 Gottdiener, Mark, 209 Grabher, G., 102 Granovetter, M., 102 H Hall, Peter, 208 Hannigan, J., 47 Hansen, H.K., 99, 106, 107, 114, 116 Harvey, D., 101 Havik, K., 207, 216, 219 Helsinki cable factory cultural and institutional consequences, 223–225 cultural planning vs. town planning, 222–223 Western harbour atmosphere, 220–222 Horkheimer, M., 11, 178 Hua Jian, 167 Hudson, J., 131 Hui, D., 79, 130 Hutton, W., 180–185, 187, 189, 191 I Imitation, 31–33 Inglehart, R., 178, 189 International Creative Industries Alliance (ICIA), 88 J Jacobs, J., 103, 208, 218 Japan animation and video game industry, 29 individual creativity, 34 Jin, Y., 81 K Keane, Michael, 3, 77 King, D., 124 Kong, L., 1, 61 Korea animation outsourcing, 30 imitation, 33 online games industry, 31 L Landry, C., 14, 48, 79, 213, 218 Lash, S., 156, 163

Index Lauridsen, J.V., 99 Lehtovuori, P., 207, 221 Lewis, J., 156 Li Wu Wei, 167 Lloyd, R., 123 M Mao, Q., 81 Markusen, A., 54, 56, 121, 123, 124, 130 Matsuura, M., 36 McGuigan, J., 156 Meeus, M.T.H., 55 Miège, B., 11 Mobile creative class city regeneration company, 129 labour mobility, 125 migration data analysis, 126–127 potential social consequences, 130 revitalisation strategy, 130–131 Sheffield case Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ), 127–128 knowledge economy model, 128 talent, technology and tolerance, 124 urban policy, 122 Mommaas, H., 2, 45 Montgomery, J., 121, 125 N Nathan, M., 126, 128 North Rhein Westphalia (NRW), 17 O Oakley, K., 121 O’Connor, J., 1, 62, 175 Oerlemans, L.A.G, 55 Online gaming, 30–31 P Parkinson, M., 155 Peck, J., 10 Peterson, R.A., 14 Planning creative spaces alternative policies, 215 Amsterdam NDSM Cultural Wharf breeding places policy, 217–218 cultural and institutional consequences, 218–220 IJ banks atmosphere, 215–217

Index Helsinki cable factory cultural and institutional consequences, 223–225 cultural planning vs. town planning, 222–223 Western harbour atmosphere, 220–222 innovation in cities, 208 regional economic systems and well-defined networks, 207 as regional process, 208–209 urban places Amsterdam and Helsinki, 210–212 array of events, 210–212 breeding grounds, 214–215 gentrification processes, 210 marginal places, discovery of, 212–213 temporary uses, 213 Urban Curation, 214 Polanyi, K., 179–181 Pomeranz, K., 180 Porter, M., 80 Pratt, A.C., 2, 9 Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, 171 Putnam, R., 102 S Schapiro, D., 162, 163 Schuster, J.M.D., 15 Scott, A.J., 131 Shanghai century of humiliation, 184 economic strength, 189–190 enlightenment values and violence circulation of knowledge, 176 cultural and economic dynamism, 179 hard knowledge, 178 high-level equilibrium trap, 180 public company, capitalism, 182 social authority, 181 global creative economy challenges and opportunities, 173 Chinese GDP and production value, 168 conductive environmental factors, 167–168 creative industries, 169–171 institutional infrastructure, 171 intellectual property, roles of, 172 5-year plan, 168–169 modernity and cultural critique capitalism, 187–189 Fordist state, 188–189

233 non-market institutions, 177 self-strengthening movement, 185 Shanghai Economic Commission, 171 Shearmur, R., 125, 126 Singapore, creative clusters “Creative Community Singapore” programme, 67 creative industries, 65–66 Creative Services Development Plan, 63 Creative Towns, 64 Design Singapore, 64 Economic Development Board (EDB), 63 Govt’s role in creativity, 40 Media 21, 64 National Arts Council (NAC), 67–68 Renaissance City 2.0, 63–64 reputation, repose and rentals, 70–71 rivalry in relationships, 71–73 Telok Kurau Studios, 68–69 Songzhuang, 90–91 Soskice, D., 104 T Taylor, C., 4, 153, 155 Technological innovations, 34–35 Telok Kurau Studios, visual arts cluster rentals, 71 repose, 70–71 reputation, 70 rivalry in relationships, 71–73 Toepler, S., 15, 18 Tschang, T., 2, 25 U Urban Curation, 214 Urbanity, as European political project Brussels case bi-communitarian city, 202 multicultural reality, 203–204 multinational city, 203 socio-economic reality, 203 city cultural policies, 204–205 in different time-spaces, 197–198 imaging, 204 Europe of Nations, 198–200 towards urban republic, 200–202 Urry, J., 163 W Wang, J., 82–83, 190, 191 Wang Shuo, 84

234 Weizel, C., 178 Williams, C.C., 156 Wright, Will, 35, 36 Wu, W.P., 62 X ‘Xerox’ policy making, 15

Index Y Yeoh, B., 125 Yudice, G., 187 Z Zhongguangcun Haidian Park, 86 Zimmer, A., 15, 18 Zukin, S., 210