Cultural-creative industries park (CCIP ) is a recently emerging important issue with the rise of cultural-creative industries. Since itâs an integrated issue, connected with many different topics such as industry, policy, city, space, geography, creativity, economy, community and so on, literature discussing on this issue seems extremely diversified. Different disciplines contributed lots of academic literature from different perspectives, with different methodologies. Added with the development of practices in different countries during the past 20 years, there came out many different theoretic concepts and specific experiences.
The discursive usage of a series of correlated concepts made the research difficult, and sometimes even impossible. Papers published in the international academic journals have discussed the concepts and cases of culture district, artistic district, cultural street, cultural cluster, creative cluster, creative industry cluster, creative industries park, cultural-creative industries park and so on at the same time. These correlated and different concepts demonstrated the chaos in academic literature at the early stage of creative cluster development.
In China, this kind of chaos seemed more obvious. In the first decade when this new phenomenon emerged, from the titles of several main citiesâ policy papers, we can clearly find the âanxiety of influenceâ from the Westââclusterâ as a keyword and the diversified or random usage of concepts. For example, the Beijing municipal government published âAdministrative Measures for Registration of Cultural and Creative Industries Cluster of Beijingâ (2006), Shanghai municipal government published âAdministrative Measures for Registration of Creative Industries Cluster of Shanghaiâ (2008) and Hangzhou municipal government published âAdministrative Measures for Registration of Cultural and Creative Industries Base of Hangzhouâ (2007). Almost at the same stage, the three cities respectively used three different notionsââcultural and creative industries clusterâ, âcreative industries clusterâ and âcultural and creative industries baseââin their policy papers to name the similar new phenomenon. However, with the development of practices and studies, not only the academics but also the policy-makers found it more and more necessary to give a clear definition and comparatively unified academic or official name to describe the main trend of Chinese-styled creative cluster.
Both in the international academic papers and in the Chinese municipal policy papers, there are jumbled concepts to identify some kind of similar phenomenon, which is more and more beyond the automatic clustering of creators in space and is more and more becoming a policy tool of the local government to push the development of regional economy and city ( Mommaas, 2004; Westrick & Rehfeld, 2003). Confronted with this challenge, Mommaas (2009) once pointed out that the concept of cultural cluster is too narrow, for not taking into account other cultural forms of creativity besides culture, such as the communication technology, science and engineering, research and development, marketing and communication, while the notion of creative cluster is too broad, for not sufficiently differentiating different forms of creativity. Hence, Mommaas made a proposal of using the phrase âcultural-creativeâ to deal with the dilemma.
The proposal of an eclectic notion of âcultural-creativeâ reflected that the understanding and research of creative clustering are experiencing a process of deepening. In this newly coined phrase, âcultureâ hinted that the features of cultural-creative clusters should be definitely different from those of the traditional industry clusters.
Although industrial agglomeration theory had been used as the theoretic resource to explain the creative cluster from the perspective of economy since the very beginning, the recent development of cultural cluster or creative cluster has brought this issue to diversified cross-disciplinary perspectives. Some research identified cultural-creative cluster as a dynamic network of social interaction (Zarlenga, Ulldemolins, & Morato, 2016); some took it as the policy tool to regenerate the downtown city (Stern & Seifert, 2010); and some concluded it as an innovation-encouraging approach (DâAlise, Giustiniano, & Peruffo, 2014), a long-term developing strategy of a city (Florea, 2015) or an urban planning strategy of sustainable district development (Sacco, Blessi, & Nuccio, 2009). All of these researches made great efforts in transcending single economic or industrial perspective. They tried diversified and integrated approaches and made advantage of multiple theoretic resources. In these academic papers, culture, economy, society and urban development have all been connected with each other. As a result, these discourses extended the meaning and function of âcultureâ. Based on these cross-disciplinary researches, the practice of cultural-creative industries park (CCIP ) has also been constantly experiencing a version-changing process.
However, itâs the historically developing and self-transcending process of cultural-creative industries park that made the notion or concept of cultural-creative industrial cluster/park a confusing thing. In mainland China, it has been a long time that many cities identify a special district, several neighborhood streets, newly built architectures and the regenerated old factories with the same notionâcultural industrial park or cultural-creative industries cluster. The adverse impact of this notion chaos leads to the constant lack of specific development strategies of an individual cultural-creative industries park. How to design, operate and manage a cultural-creative industries park is a new topic waiting to be proposed.
In this research, my basic opinion is that cultural-creative industries park (CCIP ) is a brand-new and special issue integrating culture, industries and urban space, which makes it a totally different case from the ordinary or traditional industrial parks. The traditional industrial parks are normally located at the outskirts of the city and related to a specific industry, with clear cooperation or co-creation along the industrial chain. In economics history, there are a series of theories to account this phenomenon, such as industrial agglomeration theory, external economies, scale economies, urbanization economies, the new industrial districts theory, industrial clusters and diamond model theory. But as a lot of scholars emphasized, cultural-creative industries park has their particularities. First of all, there are a lot of actually different industries under the umbrella of âcultural-creative industriesâ, and in different countries there are different classifications and definitions. Secondly, since most of CCIPs are regenerated from abandoned or old factories of industrial era, the location of CCIPs is usually in the downtown districts of the cities which have entered into post-industrial stage. Thirdly, as to the business model, the pure rent model has a paradox at two levels: in the first level, it either leads the CCIP finally to a sheer commercial place, which deviates from its original policy goals, or unavoidably goes to an upper limit of income, which falls short of its economic target; in the second level, for the small and medium enterprises, especially in creative industries, the rental cost they can bear has a ceiling, but the golden zones of the post-industrial city where CCIPs usually located will logically ask for higher economic value creation. This paradox which is ubiquitous in creative industries was given a metaphor by scholars as the paradox of âdiamond and waterâ, which means the use value of culture is just like the air and water that human beingâs living or existence is accounting for, but the exchange value of it is as rare as diamond that is precious and irreproducible.
In that sense, itâs impossible to use the traditional economic theory to account for cultural economy and to use the traditional industrial agglomeration theory to explain the cultural-creative industrial cluster. What makes the issue more complex is that the phenomena of cultural-creative industrial cluster have been in a change process, for example, it developed from the accidentally original bottom-up model to the prevalent top-down model, and it had many different notions and concepts in different countries based on different political and economic context.
In present mainland China, the national and local government consciously took advantage of CCIPs to accelerate the urban regeneration or push the village development. Hence there emerge a series of new notions, new trends and new practices, which urgently call for corresponding new theories or studies to generalize or support them.
Because the development of CCIP is involved with the land policy, industrial policy and cultural policy, it has distinct differentiations among regions. This study wouldnât discuss the status of its development across the world, but will take it into the specific political and economic context of mainland China and examine the sustainable developing strategy of a single CCIP from the perspective of operation and management. Its goal is to find out if there is any sustainable business model or business model design framework which could give inspirations or references to CCIP managers and meanwhile help the government to make more moderate policies to really support CCIPs, then realize its policy target.
Considering that most of the existing researches focused on the policy, or the urban space transformation, or the development condition of cultural-creative industries, this study will fill the theoretic gap on this issue with its concern mainly on the business model of a specific CCIP and will provide a guiding framework of designing a proper business model of CCIP for its manager or investor on the practical level in specific conditions or contexts. Below are the bookâs main ideas and the structure of the research.
In order to give a theoretic definition of CCIP of mainland China based on the comparison and contrast with other notions of different countries or different developing stages, Chap. 2 contributes an elaborate...