About
In July 2018, the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England convened the first Creativity, Knowledge, Cities (CKC) Conference to critically explore the tensions between the cultural sector, cities and universities. CKC 2019: Rethinking, Resisting, and Reimagining the Creative City builds on these productive debates.
The ‘Creative Economy’ continues to be predominantly imagined and evaluated in terms of a narrow set of economic metrics and neoliberal assumptions regarding the value of ‘culture’, ‘creativity’, ‘digital’ and ‘innovation’. Despite the sector’s economic ‘success’, such policies often elide the persistent consequences associated with the creative economy including labour precarity, economic exclusion, gentrification, uneven regional development and negative health and well-being impacts.
Further, the University is becoming increasingly implicated in these dynamics. Regional and national economic policies position universities as urban placemakers, real estate developers, talent pipelines, and drivers of innovation. Through research practices, value metrics, and indicators of impact, scholars may also play a role in reproducing dominant constructions of the creative economy and subsequently, urban exclusions. The UK’s Creative Clusters Programme, which links universities, the creative sector and national industrial strategies, is illustrative of these policies, and we especially welcome critical attention to these projects this year.
Against this backdrop of neoliberalism coupled with continued austerity measures, Brexit, Trumpism, and increasing nationalism, creative practitioners, cultural organisations and their collaborators participate in various strategies of resilience and resistance. Hybrid academic-creative spaces of open innovation, radical organisational forms, plural economic practices and values, creative citizenship, and cultural activism, point to how global cultural networks are engaged with economies of care, urban repair, playful politics and experiments in performing just urban futures. However, these activities are often at risk for appropriation and displacement by urban growth regimes, and all the challenges associated with them.
Exploring these contradictory and complex dynamics in tandem, we invite scholars, practitioners and policymakers to explore how we might reimagine the relationships between places, the creative sector and the university in order to collectively work towards more resilient and just urban futures. How do concepts such as ‘inclusive growth’, ‘sustainable development’, ‘smart cities’, ‘urban commons’ and ‘just city’ relate to these concerns? How can we mitigate the many and varied social, economic and cultural costs of creative urban policy?
CKC 2019: Rethinking, Resisting, and Reimagining the Creative City is hosted by the Creative Economies Research Unit at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol.
Homepage and conference programme photo by Picturepest | CC BY 2.0