Building the Creative City, Wherever It Might Be

This is a conference on the move - from the posh (and very old-fashioned) surroundings of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel Concert Hall we have now been bussed to Toronto's historic distillery district - a rejuvenated area east of the city centre where grand old distillery and factory buildings have been converted into cafes, restaurants, boutiques, and events spaces. Clearly the sort of creative space everyone at this conference has been talking about. I'm now in the Fermenting Cellar, waiting for the start of the 'Creative City-Building' session; this involves two parts with Arian Hassani, and speakers from Toronto, London, Munich, and beyond.

Arian Hassani: UNESCO Support for Creative Cities

Arian Hassani starts us off. She reflects on the new realisation of the importance of creativity, in the economy, in city-building, and in many other areas. She is now working with UNESCO in Paris as the director of Arts and Cultural Enterprise, aiming to bring together cultural entrepreneurs from all over the world in order to build capacity and try to form international clusters of creativity. Many of these entrepreneurs work in cities, and there are five key cities involved in the programme at the moment, which have gone through a rigorous application process.

Edinborough was the pilot city in this process, which has developed a very strong creative programme especially around literature. Santa Fe has become a UNESCO city of folk art, and has used folk art in civil society processes in order to determine not only where citizens have come from, but also where they want to be going. Popayan in Colombia is the UNESCO city of gastronomy, while Buenos Aires is the UNESCO city of design and has again made strong progress in involving citizens in design processes. Finally, Aswan in Egypt is the UNESCO city of folk art.

A key issue for each of these cities is the economy, of course. Also, how is it possible to mobilise local leaders in the service of the city's vision, and communicate that vision effectively? One of the answers is clustering, which enables the development of innovative ideas and supports micro-economic collaboration. Clusters also facilitate a trickle-down effect from successful lead projects to the entire environment, and the development of projects from the ground up.

But how can such exciting and successful experiences be translated to and implemented in other cities? UNESCO offers some help with this. The application process for involvement in the programme helps cities to take stock of their existing strengths and to involve leaders in all relevant fields, as well as enables a labelling of some of the strength which may exist but be relatively under-recognised as yet. This also generates enough trust in local communities to enable some risk-taking which allows for daring projects (which could also end in mistakes).

As individuals, too, we need to decide what is the incentive structure within which we work: if the press, for example, is an hindrance in its shooting down of any risky projects, then this may also be a reflection of prevalent societal attitudes, and it is incumbent on all of us to change these attitudes. With a change in our personal attitudes we might be able to create an incentive for the press (and many other societal institutions) to change their attitudes towards risky, innovative ideas.

Ian Bromley: Cooking Up a Creative City Strategy for Toronto

Next up is Ian Bromley from the Government of Ontario, who works on a research project between Ontario, Toronto, and London (the one in England, not in Ontario). This project is about the strategies for creative city building in either city - how best to maximise the return on investment in creativity in such cities? The Toronto side has put together a multi-disciplinary team of 20 creative leaders from the creative industries, academics, and the media, and will release a creative strategy (or 'creative cookbook') for Toronto in about six months.

Ian believes that there is a unique opportunity for Toronto in this context - the project is a  very innovative project, he says, and it is very untraditional for governments to sponsor but not control such processes (as well as for local and regional governments to collaborate on such projects, and to develop an interaction between different countries).

Ian suggests that there is a need for a new language, and Toronto may be moving from one set of understandings of what creativity means to an entirely different one. Creativity is no longer necessarily about supporting local cultural expression, or developing cultural tourism; he suggests that the Richard Florida viewpoint of creative cities as attracting talented workforces is more useful here, and that even more so the regeneration of the local economy through artistic facility is an important motivation for creative strategies. Further, creativity and design can revitalise traditional industries - more and more money is being spent on aesthetics and experience, and this also means that local creative industries can also be an important factor in the export economy. And finally, then, creativity is now an alternate and increasingly viable career path in itself; this also means that creative ability must be better recognised at a school level (in the same way in which athletic ability is being recognised).

Graeme Evans: Scanning Creative City Policies around the World

The next speaker is Graeme Evans, who is working with the London component of the project. His team began by conducting a global scan of creative city programmes around the world in order to identify and compare what was being done, in particular with a focus on the role of creativity in economic development; a full report is now available for download as well. At present, he says, there remains a kind of inverted pyramid with plenty of creative policies advocacy, and relatively fewer studies presenting hard evidence of success. Many programmes were driven (in order of significance) by economic development, rejuvenation, local infrastructure, and education and training; they were also often focussed on selected areas (often a combination of one media and one arts discipline; film and television was highly important here in many places).

There was often a focus on clusters (or more accurately micro- or proto-clusters), digital media industries, and emerging fields, and the idea of the creative industries has taken hold in many places around the world, even in many developing countries (Graeme mentions Lebanon, for example). This is a growth area, but growth cannot be infinite, as cities like post-unification Berlin or areas like post-Dreamweaver Web design are experiencing now. Further, there is also a trend towards collaboration across creative industries disciplines and between CI and other sectors, but there still remain strong differences in professional culture which delay such developments.

Creative industries do not necessarily fit the standard business models, especially in their dependence on project-based, volatile work which also depends often on face-to-face contact; this then requires strong strategies to foster such contact (and not all creative workers can necessarily be found in the creative industries). Often cities respond by building creative districts (many in redeveloped areas of town), which can also be risky as such environments don't just succeed automatically.

The scanning project is now on its way around the world, visiting some key creative cities and analysing their programmes (Berlin, Barcelona, etc.). Some issues which have already arisen is that the creative industries are really a proxy for the knowledge economy, and the role of culture isn't fully clear. Many policies are also being developed in ignorance of similar projects elsewhere, so there may be some duplication which ultimately undermines later comers; issues around sustainability and gentrification are also ubiquitous (perhaps, Graeme suggests, Florida's creative class 'are the stormtroopers of gentrification').

Meric Gertler: Statistics as a Prelude to a Strategy

Next is Meric Gertler, who brings us back to the Toronto environment. Given the preparatory work, what is the plan for Toronto - what are its strengths, where are the best opportunities for formulating strategy here, and what are the principal challenges for the city? There are over 100,000 jobs in the creative industries in Toronto at this point, and clearly there are great opportunities for the city. Meric now runs through the results of a creative industries mapping exercise in Toronto, evaluating the size of various CI sectors in the city and their role in a North American and global environment - I won't reproduce them all here as there's too much to go through, but the results are likely to be available online as well. Some of this work is also linked to the indices with which Richard Florida operates - and for example, Toronto rates fairly well on the important bohemian index, and the similarly crucial diversity index.

Such statistics are clearly useful, but it is now also important to indicate what the objectives for a creative city strategy should be - is it only about the creative industries themselves, or also about using these industries to develop the economy beyond, and what other impacts can be facilitated by such a strategy (Graeme already touched on this)? Some of the thinking here is that there are some areas of industry where Toronto is unlikely to compete head-on; there are also many people here still who work in more traditional fields, and in the face of growing competition from China and elsewhere these also need to be reinvigorated through creative involvement. At the same time, there are also some key strengths in local culture and industry which can be leveraged through a creative strategy, as well as great opportunities for redeveloping specific areas of town.

At the same time there are also some challenges - including a relatively conservative city culture, and a reluctance to take risks, cuts to education funding and arts expenditure, limitations in the embrace of multiculturalism, and the renewal of mature industries through creativity. Traditionally there also has been some reliance on a cheap Canadian dollar and cheap resource inputs, which cannot be taken for granted any longer in the current economic environment.

Michelle Reeves: Developing London's Creative Hubs

The final speaker in this group is Michelle Reeves from the London Development Agency. She talks about the question of implementation of strategy, based on the London experience. London has developed a creative city and creative cluster approach, and its work with Toronto aims to capture best practices and investigate what works. The London Development Agency is part of the Greater London Authority, and focusses on economic development in conjunction with public and private sector partners. It develops strategies which are accountable and signed off by the mayor.

In 2002 it initiated an inquiry process into creative industries development strategies, in order to refocus on what works in interventions in this sector. The result was the Creative London programme, launched in 2004. London's CI are worth 21 billion GBP per annum, and there are some 600,000 jobs in the area (20% of all new jobs in London are in the CI). The sector also has a higher productivity rate than others. Creative London, then, is the strategic agency for this developing sector, with the aim of also using the creative industries to promote London as a brand. Its role is as a broker, leveraging the resources of other people and building industry and capacity in a strategic and sustainable way.

There are a number of areas it addresses: talent building; enterprise development; and showcasing of key sectors in the international arena. A strategy in this is the development of ten Creative Hubs across London, to facilitate business-to-business interaction and maximise the advantage of co-location and collaboration, and to provide an access point for creative business and entrepreneurs. They embeds creativity at the roots of London and ensure that all communities have access to the opportunities, potential and rewards of the creative industries. At the same time, they also allow response to specific local needs and opportunities and work with local organisations in these creative communities, using a bottom-up approach.

While this sounds very straightforward, this also comes with some challenges. To begin with, defining a hub isn't necessarily easy: what was necessary first was to develop a local knowledge base about what was and wasn't already available in specific areas and develop localised approaches to addressing these areas. This meant working with the knowledge of locals as well as doing independent research into the local economic and social make-up. In the second phase, some criteria were established to identify the organisations and needs existing in specific areas. This is now about developing sustainable infrastructure in collaboration with local partners.

Despite the identification of local partners in these communities, these partners also needed to know that they alone were not necessarily the eventual hub partners - partners needed to trust the process, then, and needed to take a leap of faith to get involved in the process. Indeed, the very process had to be flexible; structured, but not prescriptive, and could look chaotic from the outside. Further, the process was also a change process, and just getting people around the table was a success in itself. Implementing a bottom-up strategy isn't easy for a top-down agency, and local partners were not always expecting the agency to be able to work in this way and were therefore reluctant to become involved or to trust the agency.

Some of the lessons from this process, then, are that there is a need for a local knowledge base of needs in order to develop a sustainable cluster and develop policy responses. The hub is a conceptual tool which reflects the fact that a commitment to organic development is made by the agency, and through the process it was learnt that the agency was involved in an evolving rather than prescriptive strategy; this is a form of situated learning. Key individuals in the local communities were also crucial.