Over the last fifteen years, the term âhubâ has captured the imagination of policy makers, urban planners and politicians. Tied to a broader hyperbole about creativity, creative hubs have come to be presented as unquestionably a âGood Thingâ, a panacea for all economic ills. No longer do urban areas simply want to rebrand themselves as âcreative citiesâ, now, in a seemingly unstoppable global trend, they want to becomeâor to hostâcreative hubsâdistricts, clusters or spaces that will concentrate the kismet of âcreativesâ, as well as offering attractive, buzzy locales.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the growth and proliferation of these types of largely urban industrial agglomeration have been exponential. From San Francisco to Moscow and from Durban to Hanoi, creative hubs have really taken off. Yet they have done so with very little scrutiny or research and with hardly any shared understanding of what hubs are, what they do and howâor indeed ifâthey work. Academic work on creative hubs is surprisingly scarce. Instead, there exists a kind of unquestioned faith in hubsâdespiteâor more tellingly perhaps becauseâtheir meaning is not always clear.
Hubs have variously been understood as co-working spaces, as studios, as incubators, as accelerators, as districts, quarters or zones and/or a mix of all of the above. The lack of clarityâlet alone consensusâis particularly troubling given that policy makers, research councils, consultants and governments have been so quick to promote and endorse the value of creative hubs as a catalyst for innovation and growth in local creative and cultural economies, as well as for producing urban regeneration.
In this book our aim is to look critically at creative hubs from interdisciplinary perspectives including Sociology, Geography, Economics, Media and Communications, Culture and Creative Industries and Critical Policy studies. We are interested in âpressing pauseâ on the celebratory discourses about creative hubs to ask how they are best conceptualised, who they include or exclude, whether they make for âgoodâ workplaces, and what diverse forms they take across different places and contexts.
From our perspective, one of the most important âhiddenâ aspects of hubs that find little expression in the writings about them are the voices of those that work there. This oversight is all the more critical given the transformation of all work, and in particular work in the creative and cultural economy, in recent years which has highlighted, first, the structural and, second, the organisation changes (evidenced by micro-enterprises and freelance work) and, third, the particular affective conditions of cultural labour. The first two factors in part explain a demand for hubs, but the latter concerns the ways that hubs operate, and the conditions within then: in both senses, these are particular to the cultural economy.
Cultural labour requires the engagement of aesthetics and values, and the unique interplay between the economy and art. Often, cultural workers choose to or are forced to do things in unique ways. This is in part because the risk of failure is great, but also because normal economic and bureaucratic systems assume a reality that is different from that of the cultural economy. These conditions, and the experiences of cultural workers, have generated a substantial debate in academic fields that has slowly found its way into the political sphere largely through concern with âprecarious workâ. However, our concern goes further, to address the experiences and aspirations that cultural workers bring to these question: how do they use, and share, knowledges, skills, practices and aspirations; what sort of situated âsolutionsâ do they achieve; and furthermore do creative hubs help or hinder these actions.
As our contributors argue, creative hubs are seldom amenable to binary divisions between competition and cooperation, the formal and informal, and the for-profit and its alternatives. To accept such binary thinking endangers the creative economy being imprisoned not only in the physical structures of the industrial revolution, but also the thinking of mass manufacture. Debates are not reducible to âflexible workspacesâ that are assumed to accommodate new, or rapidly changing, organisational forms that are associated with project work, collective and individual work. Rather, the concerns of cultural workers include balancing material and cognitive (or immaterial) labour, and the moral economy of work, materials and organisation; they also concern questions about how they can connect with their audiences and markets for both inspiration and social validation. We hope that this collection causes readers to question how, and why, hubs operate as they do, as well as attending to the communities that they are part of, and the workers and their aspirations and motivations.
Creative Hubs in Question: Space, Place and Work in the Creative Economy
Hubs in general and creative hubs in particular have become since the early 2000s a contemporary meme in the policy fields of culture/creativity; urban, regional and national development; industrial and innovation (Pratt and Jeffcutt 2009b). A Google Search on the term âcreative hubâ shows peaks in search occurrences in 2005 and 2017; the latest high point being dominated by searches in Asia.1 Even companies such as Facebook and Ikea are promoting versions of a hub as part of their business activities. Like many ideas before them, hubs have become a âgo toâ solution that rests on a common-sense understanding of concentration and intensity of activities (more must be better), and the implicit facility to connect firms and creatives, and to distribute those benefits locally. Whilst notions of the âdeath of distanceâ (Cairncross 1998) were one popular response to the growth of the Internet and digital culture, hubs represent the inverse: an appreciation of proximity and co-location (Pratt 2000).
The generic notion of the hub relies on a number of questionable assumptions. The popularity and general understanding of hubs has led to a political favour. The translation of this general idea into practice has usually taken the form of a designated building or space that is branded a hub. The promoters and supporters of hubs commonly assume that by facilitating co-location (by provision of space that was not previously available) that economies of aggregation and knowledge transfer will inevitably follow. Whilst the idea of hubs (or clusters, or districts) has been a popular topic for industrial strategy and economics, those empirical analyses that have been carried out are characterised in macro-scale studies using secondary data.2 Little empirical work has either focused on particular industrial sectors, or explored detailed analysis of product or information exchange: that is, what goes on inside or within hubs. The research deficit regarding hubs is most acute in the field of the creative economy.
The lack of detailed research and the understanding of creative hubs is surprising. The term creative hub appears in urban regeneration policies and in creative economy strategies; also it has occurred in a number of public research funding calls. The relatively small body of research that has been carried out on hubs can be broken down into three types: first, perhaps the most popular are pragmatic accounts of âhow to set up a hubâ; inevitably, these tend to stress the positive or aspirational agenda of the agency promoting the hub. Implicitly, they highlight that the process is not quite as easily achieved by a supply of âhubsâ based on a logic of âbuild it and they will comeâ; incorrectly assuming that the âdemandâ from a nascent creative economy would look after itself. Second, the main body of academic research on creative hubs is of a policy-descriptive variety: whilst much of it is critical, it offers little in the way of evaluation or understanding of either the actual practices, or the gap between the observed and expected outcomes (Evans 2001, 2009; Pratt 2004a; Bagwell 2008). Finally, a strand of work that attempts to offer a robust evaluation of hubs is closely bound by economic assumptions and use of secondary data to test their economic impact on wider regions (Chapain et al. 2010).
There are number of weaknesses in this economic field of research. First, the gap between what was expected or proposed in hubs and what actually occurred. Second, most of the insight is gained from secondary aggregate data such that it is unclear which firms or creatives are included in a spatial unit. Third, there is a lack of explicit statement on testing the objectives for hubs (often because there were not clear for policy makers); in the exceptional cases where they are stated by policy makers (rather than implied by researchers from assumptions based on economy theory), they tend to relate to property management. Fourth, where data is collected on firms and creatives, it focuses on the numbers of workers employed rather than their experiences. Overall, there exists a blind spot in relation to what actually goes on within hubs. This question relates to the management and organisation of the hub, how they are governed, and what the character of the relationships is between the various users of hubs are (internal and external): are they material, or immaterial; formal, or informal, relationships? Moreover, in the field of culture and creativity, the question of values is an important one; this may be apparent in the set of questions above, or expressed as a moral or ethical position. Aesthetic and political judgements may, for some participants, be more important than profit generation per se.
Arguably, one important forerunner of the idea of a creative hub was that which was developed at St Katherineâs Dock in London by SPACE in 1968 (see Harding 2018). The acronym SPACE stands for Space Provision Artistic Cultural and Educational and reflected an ambitious attempt to provide space for artists run by artists,3 and a new way of working across boundaries: professional, social, political, cultural and philosophically, between artist and audiences, and artist and materials going beyond sites of individualistic expression (Wilson 2018). This innovative initiative was clearly driven by a deep concern for the quality and nature of art that was produced and the practices whereby it was produced, not simply the economic bottom line, although this had to be satisfied too. We present this manifestation of SPACE as a counterpoint to the outlier cases of generic workspaces provision that occasionally carry the label âcreative hubâ.
The example of SPACE alerts us to the live questions of ethics and values that underpin all work, but particularly creative and cultural work. It highlights the fact that there is an alternative to the âisolated studioâ that commonly makes up much hub provision (echoing standard workspace provision). Of critical importance to the day-to-day experience of hubs is the social and organisational environment, their governance and representation, individual and collective spaces and services, as well as the opportunities to learn from, and interact with, others. Our collection of essays seeks to open up the scope of enquiry to embrace this position; in so doing, we have sought to create a platform for authors to start with what actually happens, rather than what should, or might, occur. We hope that this strategy will bring us to a more satisfactory point of departure from which we may develop a richer understanding of the phenomenon of creative hubs, including what goes on inside them whether it is in spite of, or because of, their organisational form.
In summary, creative hubs have become a cornerstone of economic and cultural policy with only the barest amount of critical discussion or scrutiny. It is as if we have all unwittingly become caught up in the hyperbole about creative hubs as an unquestioned good. Yet, do hubs fulfil the promises that are claimed for them? Our contributors explore a range of questions, including, but not limited to:
What makes a hub âa hubâ: is it a co-working space, district or cluster by a different name?
What kinds of different forms or models of hubs exist?
What is it like to work in a creative hub?
Do/can hubs address questions of austerity and inequality?
How are creative hubs materialised differently in various parts of the world and in contrasting environments, e.g. urban versus rural?
What does the notion of âcreative hubâ achieve performatively or ideologically for its sponsors, users and communities?
Do creative hubs contribute to a variety of social âgoodsââgood working environments, successful businesses, more equal and socially just communities?
Contributors to this book use the tools of qualitative research and take an interdisciplinary perspective to engage with the phenomenon of creative hubs including Sociology, Geography, Economics, Media and Communications, Culture and Creative Industries, Critical Policy studies and Urban S...
