Creative Cluster Development

Governance, Place-Making and Entrepreneurship

Marlen Komorowski, Ike Picone, Marlen Komorowski, Ike Picone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Comportamiento del consumidor

In recent decades, the importance of creative cluster development has gained increasing recognition from national and regional governments. Governments have been investing in initiatives and urban development plans that aim to create or support localized creative industries.

Our understanding of creative clusters is expanded with this insightful volume, which looks at issues of governance, place-making and entrepreneurship. In addition to its theoretical contributions, the book also presents a rich range of international case studies, including, among others, an analysis of coworking spaces in Toronto, business park development in MediaCityUK and mediapark.brussels and public–private partnerships in Warsaw.

Creative Cluster Development will be valuable reading for advanced students, researchers and policymakers in urban planning, regional studies, economic geography, innovation studies and the creative and cultural industries.

1Introducing the book

The concept of creative cluster development

Marlen Komorowski and Ike Picone

Creative cluster development in a new era

The formulation of creative-cluster policy as a tool has its origin in the efforts for local redevelopment. It was in the 1980s that local governments in the UK and the United States began to notice how creativity can have an effect on a city’s image as well as its economy by making it a site of vibrant creative and cultural production as well as consumption (O’Connor, 2010). The notion of the ‘creative city’, which began to epitomise these policies, did not emerge until the late 1990s. Creative clusters were increasingly seen as a tool for cities, regions and nations, to transform industrial capitals into new creative capitals. An important component of this has been the evolution of the creative cluster as a way to mitigate the adverse impacts of deindustrialisation (Martin, Upham & Budd, 2015).

Governments at all levels are still initiating new projects and initiatives today. Creative cluster development as a tool has been reinvented: it is today not only a tool for urban regeneration but also a widely adopted policy measure to create sustainable growth for today’s local economies. We see that an increasing amount of investment is being poured into this development. There is evidence showing that creative cluster development takes today place in almost all parts of the globe – while originally it was only pursued in the United States and Europe (Flew, 2013; UNDP, 2013).

These developments are gaining even more momentum today. Supported by the case studies presented in this book, we presume that creative clusters will keep increasing in relevancy for policymaking during the coming years and decades. Shifting economies, being impacted by the development of so-called ‘knowledge economies’ – or other concepts that represent similar ideas of a changing economy like ‘creative and cultural economies’ and ‘innovation economies’ or ‘information society’ – are calling for novel approaches to create sustainable growth and new ways of working. While this shift is not new, only today have we gathered enough evidence to explain how different environments have coped with changing economies and can determine the impact creative clusters had on economic and social development.

As will be illustrated in this book, creative clusters have been proven to be a fitting policy tool for governments to cope with new challenges related to globalisation, digitisation and other trends impacting our cities and regions. In this book, creative clusters will be defined and analysed as an overarching concept for the many different agglomeration formations and policy approaches that are implemented to incentivise creative and cultural industries (CCI) to congregate.

Researching creative clusters

The many different facets of creative cluster research so far

The creative cluster literature field is highly multidisciplinary. The disciplines that are involved in this research field include geography, urban studies, business, economics and management studies, sociology and areas related to media and communication studies (Komorowski, 2017b). It is important to understand where the research and policy concept comes from before we can pursue to create new insights, which we aim to do in this book. Generally, the creative cluster research field can be divided into four main approaches: (1) the clustering and agglomeration approach, (2) the creative governance and urban planning approach, (3) the creative city and creative class approach, and (4) the media city and global hub approach.

Research has often looked at creative clusters through the lens of what we call the (1) clustering and agglomeration approach. This research approach has its origins in Alfred Marshall’s book The Principles of Economics (1920), in which he describes the concept of the ‘industrial district’. This provided the first rationale for the shift from traditional units of analysis of economics, like firms, towards a more inclusive unit. Based on this concept, the idea of agglomeration economies was formed, which highlights positive externalities that derive from the geographic clustering of firms (Rosenthal & Strange, 2004). Based on this, economists and management theorists developed the concept of clustering in the 1990s. The most well-known contribution to the topic is Porter’s (2000, p. 16) definition of clusters: “a geographically proximate group of interconnected companies and associated institutions in a particular field, linked by commonalities and complementarities”. However, the cluster approach has also been criticised. Authors including Martin and Sunley (2003) argue for a “much more cautious and circumspect use” of the notion of clustering, especially within a policy context. It is important to note that research in this field stems mostly from analysis on industrial production. Today, literature revolves often around design-intensive and high-tech industries (Schamp, 1997). This approach became more recently also a research tool for the analysis of localized CCIs. Picard (2008), for instance, defines a media cluster as a “specialized form of agglomeration designed to produce mediated content”. There is, however, enough clarity in the field to indicate that CCIs theory differs from traditional theories of manufacturing due to the unique characteristics of the CCIs (Boix, Hervas-Oliver & Miguel-Molina, 2015). Creative activities and the CCIs in general are functioning based on premises different from those of manufacturing industries. This needs to be taken into consideration when looking at such literature.

Many studies in the creative cluster field focus on urban policies, which we call the (2) creative governance and urban planning approach. Research in this area has its origins in the industrial restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s (Hutton, 2009). The concept of the industrial city as articulated by the Chicago School’s practitioners was subverted during this time by far-reaching industrial restructuring processes creating an extended urban policy crisis (Hutton, 2009). The 1990s saw the emergence of new industries in cities subsumed under concepts like the ‘new economy’ and the ‘knowledge-based economy’ but also the ‘cultural economy’ of the city (Hutton, 2009). Scholars and policymakers started focusing on different sectors that are supposedly favourable for the development of urban economies after the decline of manufacturing industries. Hesmondhalgh and Pratt (2005) notice that in politics “this boom of the concept has been apparent at the international, national and local level, in a massive array of reports, initiatives and partnerships that use the term cultural industries”, and that in academia “this boom has been apparent in numerous journal articles and books on the cultural and creative industries”.

Subsequently, the (3) creative city and creative class approach had an immense impact on the research and policy discourse surrounding CCIs. This approach can be seen as a sub-field of the previously described research approach. It has the same origins but became its own leading research tradition through influential authors. Core to this tradition is the idea of the ‘creative and innovative milieu’ that originated in the 1980s. The term was coined by the Groupe de Recherche Européen sur les Milieux Innovateurs (Fromhold-Eisebith, 1995). The idea of the creative milieu which focuses on the creative economy as an upcoming policy tool (Gibson & Kong, 2005) was later applied specifically to the economy of a location: the city. This led to the emergence of the today often used concept of the ‘creative city’ (United Nations & Bureau de Liaison Bruxelles-Europe, 2010). The concept has been applied in research and by politicians to describe an urban system where cultural and creative activities are an integral part of the city itself, the city’s economy, the city’s employment and/or the city’s social structure.¹ The creative city was first described by Yencken (1988), who argued that cities need to foster creativity among their citizens to be successful. The creative city concept was later popularized by Landry (2008) through his book The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. He investigated the concept of the creative city and highlighted creative activities as essential, while people are considered the key resource for urban environments and creativity the key principle of urban dynamism. In the early 2000s, Florida shifted the focus to the human factor for cities with his famous book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). The creative class consists of individuals who are professional, scientific and artistic workers, employees working in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment. Within the creative city and creative class approach, a city’s driving force behind development is the ability to attract and retain these creative individuals (Florida, 2004).

Recently scholars have contributed to the field of creative clusters by applying what we call the (4) media city and global hub approach. Research on this approach is influenced by the globalization tendencies of creative industries. One view suggests local CCIs will be overwhelmed by global forces and that policy needs to support said local CCIs to make them competitive. Amin and Thrift (1995) argue that regional economic prosperity will depend upon the degree to which regions are able to mobilize flexible and adaptable institutional strategies as well as human capital. The foundation of the trends of localization in a globalized context is based on the concept of global cities and of the global city network. Most notable is the work of the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (Taylor, 2004). This logic was also applied to the media industry, notably by Krätke (2003), who developed the concept of the global media city. Krätke’s approach focuses on globalization tendencies which enable global media firms with their worldwide network of subsidiaries and offices to forge links between urban clusters towards a global network of media production (Krätke & Taylor, 2004). Consideration of the effects of globalization is not only applied to the media industry. Cunningham (2005), for instance, stresses that creative enterprises are being transformed by the combined effects of the ‘big three’: convergence, globalization and digitization. Most notably, the concept of hubs is especially relevant for this context. Currid (2006) describes, for instance, New York as a global creative hub and explores its dominant global position. Another understanding of the term ‘media city’ recently emerged: the ‘planned’ media city. This concept refers to a media city or media park as the ‘physical, meta-planned, purpose-built hub of media and creative industry knowledge in any given urban locale’ (Mould, 2014).² Another approach to creative clusters includes the analysis of cluster initiatives. This can include different kind of initiatives for the CCIs to build competitiveness and competences (Lundequist & Power, 2002).

While literature in the field of creative clusters is dispersed, we find commonalities in literature: researchers agree that CCIs do agglomerate in certain places (depending on the specific creative sector and the place) around the globe, and that clustered CCIs can create benefits for participating firms and the surrounding place. Policymakers, however, are often not aware of the divergent views and insights created by research. For a long time, the literature that influenced policy ambitions focused on concepts and primary models. For example, literature on Silicon Valley and Hollywood or the creative city stipulate governments to try to replicate such successful clusters. However, we argue that a new approach to creative cluster development is necessary to secure future successful development and that research needs to take the next step to advance the literature and understanding.

The objectives of this book

In thi...