Creative Industries

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

It's been a positive few days on either side of the Australia/Invasion Day holiday. On Wednesday we gained a major sponsor for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September, which should enable us to attract a further fairly high-profile keynote speaker; more on this as we go. Later that day we aso started work on the edgeX, or "Mapping the Missing Grassroots", ARC Linkage project between QUT and UQ Ipswich with Ipswich City Council - and I'm looking forward to seeing this one get going. More work on both today, with a few keynote speaker possibilities emerging...

Phew - another day spent editing the Uses of Blogs book with Jo Jacobs; we're now very close to sending off the manuscript to Peter Lang for editorial comments and proofreading. This has turned out to be a very strong collection of essays on blogs and blogging from a wide range of perspectives, and I think it will do very well. And nothing against our original cast of contributors, but we've added a few more authors in the last few months, and they've made quite an impact as well.

(Singapore) I've been travelling for around 24 hours straight now, and the end is in sight - currently I'm enjoying the free Internet connections at Singapore's Changi Airport, before the last flight leg into Brisbane in a couple of hours. Strictly speaking, when I arrive in Brisbane I'll have been underway for more than the 34 hours of plane travel over these last couple of days, though - my last day in the U.S. was taken up with another day trip, another guest lecture, this time at Temple University in Philadelphia. Of the four times I've now done the 'Understanding the Produser' lecture, this one was my favourite, I think - I had enough time to expand on some of the key ideas, there were great questions throughout, and some very nice comments afterwards (a close second was the first time, at SUNY Buffalo). Many thanks to Hana Iverson and her group for inviting me in (and shouting me dinner afterwards).

Well, it's the final session of this very exciting conference. Charles Landry and Pier Giorgio di Cicco will do the wrap-up. Charles reflects on the process of starting a revolution - from the individual idea to the broad movement. It is an extended transformative moment, but the question is whether it will linger long and lastingly, so that a legacy is created. He suggests that the resolution has already started, as the many projects mentioned along the way over the last couple of days show - and these are the generators for further action.

And finally we're in the last plenary session for the conference, on the power of new ideas. This is a panel deliberately of people aged 40 or under, to demonstrate that there is a strong future in this creative industries area. This is facilitated by the multitalented Canadian cultural entrepreneur Sharon Lewis, who now introduces the speakers.

Peter MacLeod: Towards Creative Security

Peter MacLeod makes a start; he is the principal of The Planning Desk in Vancouver. He has recently returned from a tour of Canada to investigate the civic infrastructure of the nation, and suggests that both risk and resolution are inherently political ideas. In addition to creative risk, there also is a need for creative security, in analogy to social security: states exist to mitigate risk (especially risk of violence), which is why the violence seen in New Orleans recently was so alarming, and states are indeed perhaps only relevant for the security they provide. However, government has fallen into a rut, always dealing with the same political problems, and the idea that government is a problem and necessarily inept has become all too prevalent.

After a brief break, the second part of this 'Creative City-Building' session has now begun. The first speaker is Rita Davies, the Director of Culture for the city of Toronto.

Rita Davies: Piloting the Creative Iceberg

Rita begins by noting that the key ingredient in any strategy is the creative talent pool. Toronto, she says, has it 'in spades', but how do you work with that talent pool in support of a city-building agenda? The problem is somewhat like piloting an iceberg, but you never known when you're going to run into the Titanic and go seriously off course. Also, what most see and focus on is the relatively small tip of the agenda, but the bulk and power of it lie deep down beneath the surface. The process is key, and stumbling around in the dark sometimes is inevitable; a dogged perseverance sometimes is required.

The next session at Creative Places + Spaces is called 'The Art of Creating Beautiful Places' - a panel involving five speakers mainly from Toronto itself. Lance Alexander from the City Manager's Office in Toronto makes a start. He begins by discussing the question of beauty itself - is there a common definition for what a beautiful city is, and therefore how policy and urban development could aim to build one? Architect Mark McClelland suggests that for buildings this is perhaps also a question of age - when they're built they might be in fashion or close to fashion, and fall out of fashion later on; if they survive long enough it may be possible for them to be seen as beautiful, iconic, and timeless - and even historic - again.

We're now starting the second day of the Creative Places + Spaces conference, with another conference plenary. This is facilitated by Mary Rowe, a community artist from Toronto, who begins by congratulating the Artscape organisers for the conference so far (yay!), and now introduces the first speaker, Glen Murray from the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto; he is also the former mayor of Winnipeg.

Glen Murray: Avoiding Irritable Bilbao Syndrome

Glen notes that there are a number of issues of concern at the moment. We are living in a very risk-adverse culture - in Canada, for example, people like their politicians to do what is predictable, not to be creative and original. Breaking with past practice escalates into an experience of higher rate risks of failure. The more original you are, the more people you will upset, and this raises the risk of failure. But why build political capital and popularity if you're not prepared to invest it in supporting and driving new projects and ideas? The media have a lot to answer here, too, as they reinforce sameness and the mainstream.