Localising the Creative City
Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities of Local Industrial Strategy: Initial findings of Place-based Creative Industries Research at the AHRC Creative Industries: Policy and Evidence Centre| A. Gilmore & Z. Bulaitis
This paper will discuss Local Industrial Strategies (including the initial pilot activities) and their implication for the creative industries across the UK. It will provide a context for and explore the relevance of this policy within a discussion of “rethinking” a creative city in the twenty-first century. The paper suggests that, whilst “resisting” certain qualities and demands of the national industrial strategy, engaging with regional strategy development might offer potential for “reimagining” the local places where we generate creative ideas and do cultural work in line with the aspiration for ‘inclusive growth’ in the creative economy (Hawking, 2019). This paper presents research undertaken across the AHRC Creative Industries: Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC), which includes researchers from across the four nations of the UK, and in particular draws upon current research in the arts and humanities at the University of Manchester. Using the case study of Greater Manchester, the first devolved city-regional combined authority and one of three pilot schemes in England, the paper will review Local Industrial Strategy pilot activities and reports, consider the perspectives of stakeholders in the local creative economy, and establish the possibilities for interdisciplinary research and evidence from those working in critical university studies, sociology, museology, and higher education policy to inform place-based strategies for sustainable creative cities. In summary, this paper explores the potential of new Local Industrial Strategies within the context of the national industrial strategy, applying the lenses of national research, policy and evidence centre and local stakes within the creative economy of Greater Manchester, and to consider their consequences for the creative industries and Creative Cities, identifying potential challenges and areas for flourishing.
Re-imagining Creative Cities in Asia: A review of Creative Cities Policies in China | X. Gu
This paper focuses on cultural development, one of the most distinctive models of Chinese modernization. Deriving from the western cultural development narrative – cultural place making for the regeneration of post-industrial cities, central to the Chinese model is the development of creative clusters. The transformation of cities like Shanghai is metaphoric of the advanced socialist market economy where culture converges with market and politics. Whilst cultural values, freedom speech and equality are no more fringe issues in cultural policy making in the West, these issues have barely been touched in China or the rest of Asia. This supports a reassessment of the relationships between the state, economy and everyday life through cultural policy including those framed under ‘creative cities’. These borrowed cultural development models create new conditions for inequality in the new global knowledge economy competition (Europe vs Asia). They are also responsible for a diminishing space for addressing cultural values in countries that aren’t part of the globalized circulation of cultural capital.
Here, there, or everywhere? Placing Bristol’s ‘creative ecosystem’ | S. Moreton