Rethinking Creative Cities Policy

Invisible Agents and Hidden Protagonists

Allan Watson, Calvin Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138890084
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317495406
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

In recent years, there has been high level of interest amongst policy-makers in the 'creative city' concept, due to the anticipation of economic and social benefits from a growing cultural and creative economy. However, a lack of understanding of local social and economic contexts, as well as the complexities and challenges of cultural production, has resulted in formulaic, ineffective misguided policies.

This book is concerned, in various ways, with developing an understanding of the complex dimensions of cultural production, and with tackling the often weak and implied links between research, policy and urban planning. In particular, contributors are concerned with agents, protagonists and practices that appear to be somehow invisible to, hidden from, or indeed ignored in much contemporary creative cities policy. Drawing on case studies from the UK and the Netherlands, chapters consider creative industries and policy across a range of scales, from provincial cities and regional economies, to the global cities of London and Amsterdam. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

Invisible Agents and hidden Protagonists: Rethinking Creative Cities Policy

ALLAN WATSON* & CALVIN TAYLOR**

*Department of Geography, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK, **School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

ABSTRACT This article acts as an introduction to the special issue on creative cities policy. We begin the article with a discussion of recent critical accounts of cultural/creative industries and creative cities policy, arguing that the failure of policies to fully understand the often hidden complexities of cultural production has fostered simplistic and often self-defeating policy design and intervention. We then move on to present a series of papers that are concerned in various ways with both developing an understanding of the complex dimensions of cultural production and with tackling the often weak and implicit links between research, policy and urban planning.

Introduction

There has been an increased interest amongst policy-makers in recent years in the “creative city” concept. The label “creative city” refers to an approach to policy and planning that “recognises the urbanistic context and infrastructure within which creative industry innovation and growth take place” (O’Connor & Kong, 2009, p. 1), and which anticipates economic and social benefits from a growing cultural and creative economy. Such policies have been significantly influenced by Charles Landry’s The Creative City (2000) and Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), which considered creativity as a source of competitive advantage and positioned the creative economy firmly at the cutting edge of the post-industrial knowledge economy. Culture now appears at the heart of new ways of thinking and practicing economic development (Clammer, 2005; Taylor, 2009). However, as Pratt (2010) argues, there is a fractured and loose web of justifying rationales for the creative city, and moreover complex and shifting matrices of justification and reality. Thus, he argues that “today the notion of a creative city stands as much for political and social mantra as an urban, social or economic policy, or even an aspiration” (2010, p. 14) and that “it is problematic to assume a direct correspondence between aims and objectives, policies and impacts” (2010, p. 14). The performative nature of the creative city imaginary in urban policy may offer some degree of comfort for the beleaguered urban planner but it represents a major challenge for the researcher.

One of the major academic criticisms of cultural/creative industries and creative city policy in this respect is the narrow vision of creativity often invoked in policy agendas concerned with urban and regional economic growth. For Taylor (2006) the prevalent habit of eliding cultural policy with economic development or economic objectives has inappropriately over-economized the arts and culture to the detriment of intelligent policy-making (see also Taylor, 2009). Neoliberal governmental strategies have in particular encouraged a form of urban entrepreneurialism that not only encourages places to compete for investment and certain ideal types of culturally endowed economic migrants, but also draws on a particular—and very restricted—notion of productive “creative” subjects (Luckman et al., 2009). As Banks and O’Connor note, the specific contexts and dynamics within which cultural, symbolic or expressive values are produced cannot be reduced to the overarching goals of growth and profit on the traditional economic model. This, they go on to explain:

… produces many conflicts and confusions, especially at local level, where enthused policy makers confront a sector often sceptical or simply unable to act in the expected manner of a dynamic, emergent “growth sector”. (2009, p. 368)

Understanding of local contexts, complexities and challenges of cultural production must be central to creative cities policy, given that “the same policies produce different effects and impacts under various institutional and social, cultural and economic contextual situations” (Pratt, 2010, p. 14). The lack of such an understanding at the centre of policy has resulted in “Xerox” policies that are simply copied from one place to another with no acknowledgement of different local social and economic contexts (Pratt, 2009). Thus creative city policies and agendas have become increasingly formulaic, and are often imposed on places in a damaging or unrealistic manner (Kong, 2000). The increasingly prescriptive tone of governmental strategies is reinforced when distributed by popular thinkers through networks of policy influence (Luckman et al., 2009; Taylor, 2013).

The inability, unwillingness, and failure within cultural policy-making circles to understand the complex dimensions of cultural production has been a major reason for ineffective creative city policy and misguided policy instruments. Indeed for Pratt (2009), it is debatable whether a deep understanding of the creative/cultural industries has been achieved (see also Jeffcut & Pratt, 2002; Pratt, 2005; Oakley, 2006) and there remain a number of problematic relationships that are not yet fully understood, including public–private, formal–informal, and production–consumption, each of which is reaching new levels of complexity as, for example, new technologies pervade the relationships of the urban environment. As Pratt asserts, “the organisational ecology of the sector and policies necessary to support, sustain and promote it are complex, risky and unusual, much like the cultural and creative economy as a whole” (2010, p. 18). However, as Pratt suggests, developing an understanding of the complexities and challenges of cultural production carries a heavy burden of information, and insight, into the cultural and creative sector that “despite the upsurge of analyses that have occurred in the last quarter of a century, is still broadly inadequate for the burden placed upon it by an ever more enthusiastic policy and political communities” (2010, p. 18). Thus academic research has an important role to play in this respect, in providing the required information and insight to policy-makers, whilst engaging critically with new and anticipated future developments. This themed issue presents a number of papers that are each concerned, in various ways, with not only developing an understanding of the complex dimensions of cultural production, but also with tackling the often weak and implicit links between research, policy and urban planning.

Invisible Agents and Hidden Protagonists

One crucial element of the complexity of production in the cultural and creative industries is the issue of “hiddeness”, that is to say the invisibility to policy, or lack of acknowledgement in policy, of particular actors and particular local creative practices that play an essential role in sustaining a healthy cultural milieu in urban centres (see Luckman et al., 2009). The first three papers in this special issue are concerned in various ways with agents, protagonists and practices that appear to be somehow invisible to, hidden from, or indeed ignored in much contemporary creative cities policy. In each paper, the identification of agents that have remained hidden from policy clearly highlights the need for more nuanced understandings of the complexities of the creative economy. In the first article Oli Mould, Tim Vorley and Kai Liu consider how the working practices of the freelance labour force in London’s creative industries remain largely enigmatic to public policy. Freelancers, they argue, make up a large proportion of labour within the creative industries, sustaining creative firms, and playing a central role in a project-based work environment. Indeed the creative industries are characterized perhaps more than any other industrial sector by project-based work (Christopherson, 2004), and in some sectors, such as film and television, fragmentation and deregulation have resulted in almost universal freelance working (Saundry & Nolan, 1998; Ursell, 2000; Davenport, 2006). Despite this, the authors argue that freelancers remain a hidden driver of the creative economy, largely invisible and overlooked by public policy, a situation that is compounded by inconsistencies within both academic and public policy literature as to what constitutes a freelancer. Drawing on their case study of London, the authors argue that it is not only crucial that freelancers receive appropriate recognition in policy, but also that public policy should provide legislative support for freelance workers.

In the second paper in the issue, Roberta Comunian, Calvin Taylor, and David N. Smith argue that while regional and urban planning literature has examined the growth-promoting potential of universities very closely, their possible role in relation to regional and urban creative economic development has received less attention. Universities, the authors suggest, are “hidden protagonists” with often long and hidden associations with regional and urban creative activities. Drawing on a Triple Helix theoretical framework enables the authors to highlight the role played by public policy in the creative economy and the specific nature of the creative industries themselves, in order to understand the long-established but often informal connections with higher education. They highlight how there are important institutional and professional challenges in the possibility of Universities developing an explicit and sustainable role as new actors in regional and urban creative economies. Whilst universities have moved fairly quickly to embrace the imperatives of entrepreneurship and innovation, the art-world (Becker, 1984) relationships that span creative practice and the academy, by turns evidence institutionally opaque alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation, on the one hand, and, resistant strategies of subversion on the other.

In the third paper of the issue, Rachel Granger considers creative cities in terms of socio-institutional perspectives on urban innovation. The hidden agents identified here are social actors, with the authors arguing that analyses of urban innovation are “under socialised” and therefore that disconnections exists between research on urban innovation and its realities. The authors draw on a spatial-relational mapping of the arts sector in the city of Coventry, UK, to reveal important developments in urban creative economies that are of immediate concern for planners, including developments in sector and spatial convergence of creative workers, and the separation between “upperground” and “underground” activities. Their work emphasizes why recognition of the importance of social institutions, networks and relations should be central to urban planning. Thus the paper usefully extends to the literature emerging in particular from economic geography on the importance of geographical proximity for social aspects of cultural production (Pratt, 2000, 2002; Bathelt, 2002, 2005; Power & Hallencreutz, 2002; Power & Jansson, 2004; Watson, 2008).

Creative Cities Research, Policy and Planning

The discussion of hiddeness presented in the first three papers of this issue also speaks to another area of complexity with regard to creative cities policy; namely the relationship between academic research and policy and planning. In the fourth paper of the issue, Jan Jacob Trip and Arie Romein argue that while the importance of creativity and innovation for urban competitiveness has been analysed at the conceptual level in academic literature, and numerous cities have developed and implemented creative city policies in practice, the connection between policy and practice continues to be weak and implicit. Their article is concerned with narrowing the gap between theory and practice, by addressing the question of how conceptual insights into the creative city can be converted into an elaborated operational approach for local policy practice. Drawing on the example of the city of Delft in the Netherlands, they consider a three-step approach that allows theoretical insights to be applied in practice.

In the final paper of the issue, Robert Kloosterman critically examines the limited nature of current urban cultural planning, and is in particular critical of its indirect and strategic nature. Echoing our earlier call for an understanding of local contexts, complexities and challenges of cultural production to be at the centre of creative cities policy, the author argues that for cultural planning to be successful, a thorough understanding of the type of culture, the type of place and the role of local players is needed. The author is, for example, critical of the ways in which current cultural policies aimed at attracting knowledge workers and the “creative class” (Florida, 2002) tend to privilege larger cities and strengthen their agglomeration economies, at the expense of smaller cities that can offer only more stand-alone cultural amenities. Scale and location are then key in relation to policy and planning; as Kloosterman argues successful cultural planning is feasible, but only in relation to the characteristics and particularities of places.

It is notable in this context that the papers in this issue have considered creative industries and creative cities policy across a range of different scales, from the regional economies of the UK (Comunian et al., 2013), to the glob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Invisible Agents and Hidden Protagonists: Rethinking Creative Cities Policy
• 2. Invisible Creativity? Highlighting the Hidden Impact of Freelancing in London’s Creative Industries
• 3. The Role of Universities in the Regional Creative Economies of the UK: Hidden Protagonists and the Challenge of Knowledge Transfer
• 4. Spatial–Relational Mapping in Socio-Institutional Perspectives of Innovation
• 5. Creative City Policy and the Gap with Theory
• 6. Cultural Amenities: Large and Small, Mainstream and Niche—A Conceptual Framework for Cultural Planning in an Age of Austerity
• Index