GaWC workshop and Annual lecture February 5, 2010
Posted by Oli Mould in Creative Class, Creative Industries, Urban Geography.Tags: GaWC
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Another call for papers…
The Globalization and World City Research Centre (GaWC), based in the Geography Department at Loughborough University is hosting a workshop for young researchers and postgraduates on the creative economy and the city on the 28th April 2010 at Loughborough University. We will be looking for presentations that explore the role of the creative economy in the production of cities through globalization, and the outcomes that this has on those who occupy the urban environment. Please email me (o.mould@lboro.ac.uk) to submit an abstract for presentation (no more than 250 words) and the deadline is the 5th March 2010.
On the day of the workshop, GaWC will also host their annual lecture, which this year will be delivered by Andy C Pratt, Professor of Culture, Media and the Economy from the Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI) at King’s College London. Professor Pratt is a leading academic and international policy advisor on cities and the creative economy and his talk will complement the themes of the workshop.
The flyer can be found here. Please feel free to distribute it through your own networks.
Creative Recessions: Are the Creative Industries the way out? March 9, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Architecture Industry, Creative Class, Creative Industries, Projects, Richard Florida, Slumdog Millionaire.Tags: Creative Industries
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The last few weeks has seen myself and other creative industry commentators share information (through Twitter, Google Reader feeds etc) about how various institutions, companies, governments and individuals are championing the cultural and creative industries (some saying ‘the arts’) as a way out of the current financial turmoil.
There is no doubt that while the financial sector has been imploding, the creative industry sectors have been steadily increasing their wealth, income generation and presence (in the UK economy at any rate) – or so the rhetoric would have you believe. NESTA’s recent report on how the creative industries will be the engine of growth in the UK suggests “between 2009 and 2013 the UK creative industries – which is responsible for films, music, fashion, TV and video games production – will grow on average at 4% – more than double the rate of the rest of the economy. By 2013, the sector is expected to employ 1.3 million people, likely to be more than the financial sector” (quote taken from here). These are bold statements, given the recent problems that have been reported in the so-called creative sectors. Forster & Partners, the global architectural firm shed 350 workers, Geary has halved its workforce, ITV is facing huge job cuts through a fall in advertising revenue, the music industry continues to battle against online innovations which limit their profits, and a particular issue of mine, the UK computer game industry is still facing a massive brain drain to Canada (also here) due to the fact that the government is still sitting on it’s hands regarding tax incentives for the industry.
However, recently, the creative evangelist himself Richard Florida has been trumpeting how the creative economy is where the US should be focusing it’s efforts, and not bailing out the stagnant and ‘old world’ industries of the banks and the automobiles. There is a sense that we should be enforcing a ‘revolution’, not ‘reseting’ the old and unworkable Fordist economy regime, by encouraging creativity and not supporting industries which got us into this mess in the first place – a message that has been echoed for the UK.
So where does this leave us? The mixed messages coming from the UK government are unhelpful, but they do point toward the fact that their is a consensus that creative and innovate workers need to be encouraged to ‘let rip’ and rebuild a different economic base to that from before. But more than this, it is the ‘atomisation’ (i.e. networked individualisation, or connected fragmentation) of the creative economy that will be crucial in the future. Architecture as an industry is so heavily linked to construction that an economic downturn, which effects the construction of major projects more acutely (one only has to remember the stationary, rusting cranes of the Asian financial crisis of 1997), will always see these firms suffer in one way or another. That is why those innovations that can make things more efficient or more environmentally friendly will win out in the end, not only politically, but economically.
Also, I believe that the problems facing ITV (and to some extent Channel 5 and 4) are indicative of a wider social media movement. Spoon-fed media is not what the majority of people are looking for in this hyper-connected, user-generated-content environment; and producing films, televisiual products, music recordings or newspapers for mass consumption is a process that will soon be redundant. Having the ability to produce and manipulate content to your own desires is the future of cultural production and the industrial policies that Mandelson is keen to operationalise will have to take note of this. How? That’s for the politicians to argue over, but encouraging risk-taking and collaborative innovation are essential facets of a creative escape from recession. 
For example, the success of Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars is always going to be heralded as a British cultural achievement, but will the filmmakers actually make that much hard cash? Film4 (the funders) will see little of the huge profits generated by the film. The creative talent on show in this product is immense, but this does not always translate into financial reward, which if rectified, could be ploughed back into the industry. This is not just the case in the UK, with Australia and other ‘inde’ producing countries and cities seeing similar problems.
With the advent of the democratisation of the production of cultural products through social media techniques (on which I blogged some thoughts on recently), investing the right people, firms and products will be crucial and will need to be an important part of future policy developments.
Video lectures worth taking the time to watch…. January 13, 2009
Posted by Oli Mould in Bruno Latour, Creative Class, Language, Richard Florida, Urban Geography, Video Lectures, Words.Tags: Video Lectures
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Trawling the internet for videos worth watching is definitely a time-consuming exercise, yet I’ve found that over the course a year or so, I’ve manged to accumulate a host of bookmarked pages of videos that I felt I would want to watch again (for differing reasons I hasten to add). So if you have some spare time (which of course in these modern, complex and chaotic days we all have loads of), then take some of it to watch these.
Bruno Latour at the Tate Modern. ‘Nature, Space, Society‘. Recorded on the 19th April, 2005. Length: 2h33m.
Steven Pinker at the RSA. ‘The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature‘. Recorded June, 2008. Length: 1h10m – (inspired my previous blog post about ‘The futility of Words’)
Richard Florida at University of Califronia. ‘The Rise of the Creative Class‘. Recorded 2003 (sometime). Length 59m
David Harvey at Lund University. ‘The Rights to the City’ Part 1. Part 2. Recorded May 28th 2008. Length 1h01m
Hans Rosling. ‘Debunking Third World Myths‘. Recorded February 2006. Length 20m. (This one is worth watching for the statistical usage)
And finally…
Clay Shirky at the RSA ‘Here Comes Everybody: the power of organising without organistions‘. Recorded Feburary 2008. Length (22m – although you’ve probably all seen this one already).
If you have any that you want to share then please do, although no more from Florida please, he tends to repeat himself alot….
Who’s going to do the changing? Obama’s Victory and the Creative Class November 5, 2008
Posted by Oli Mould in Creative Class, Creative Industries, Richard Florida.Tags: Creative Class, Obama
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First of all, congratulations to Barack, he certainly talks the talks, now lets see if he really can ‘change’ America – I think we all know what that would entail. I wanted to make a quick observation though. Watching the news this morning and seeing the cheering Obama supporters, one particularly line struck me (from the BBC) – “his supporters are mainly young, educated and urban” – which made me instantly think of Florida and his creative class.
Obama’s policies and the Democratic view in general seems to moving away from heavy manufacturing, the big pharmaceuticals, the war economy and a dependency on a post-Fordist/Milton Friedman ideology to a more high-tech, creative and innovation-led (non-linear) infrastructure. Florida, who popularised the ‘creative class’, a sentiment highly criticised (why, this blog commented on it) writes that these new types of people are footloose and are attracted to ‘cool’ cities based on the three T’s: tolerance, talent and technology.
With Obama’s victory will we see America’s cities progress down this route? Canadian cities are already highly regarded as being very desirable places for the creative class to live, so will we see the ‘Canadianisation‘ of US cities? Obama’s supporters (if they are indeed young, educated and urban) will more often than not be working in the creative industries, the service-based economy, technology-based companies, doctors, university professionals; the kind of jobs that are highly mobile and flexible. So what will this mean for the American future? Will we see the economy change so that these types of people and companies will be politically involved? We know that the likes of Google, Microsoft, News Corporation, the big Hollywood studios, they already have huge power in terms of economic might and they already have some political clout (some more than others). But the oridnary workers and the more ephemeral industy that surrounds them – we will see them grow and procude the tecnological, social and cultural innovations needed to help cure the problems currently facing the world?
The creative class, the definition of which is debated, does include those people that are beginning to have an impact on our world and way it is run and the way that it works, and if these people are encouraged, given more political support and allowed to flourish, then surely they are the people who really are able to effect ‘change’?
Florida and his ‘Sunshine State of Mind’ July 17, 2008
Posted by Oli Mould in Creative Class, Creative Industries, Richard Florida.add a comment
As an academic, when you have your books sold in airport bookshops you know you’ve made a big impact. Richard Florida’s work on the creative class (2002, 2004, 2005) has been one of the talked about public policy theses in many decades (I wanted to a picture up of him and found this wonderful one of him with a mullet – brilliant). Cities all over the world (although primarily and initially in the USA) have clambered over themselves to book Florida as a speaker, implemented his recommendations and made every attempt possible to raise technology, talent and tolerance – or as Florida coins them, the ‘3 T’s’ (what are we here –Kindergarten?). Just as quickly as he rose to fame, so too did his critics (see Peck, 2005) – in fact it is almost as ‘cool’ for an academic to discredit his work as it is for a city in order to attract the creative class in the first place. His work has been labelled as skin-deep, superficial (Gibson and Klocker, 2004) and overtly neo-liberal (Peck, 2005) – the sun is always shining in Florida’s mind.
Some of the critics are very direct. For example, “[The] politically ambivalent arguments contained in The Rise of the Creative Class… mix cosmopolitan elitism and pop universalism, hedonism and responsibility, cultural radicalism and economic conservatism, casual and causal inference, and social libertarianism and business realism. The irreverent, informal, sometimes preachy, but business-friendly style is in many ways a familiar one, echoing as it does the lifestyle guides, entrepreneurial manuals, and pop sociologies of the new-economy era” (Peck, 2005: 741). Such criticisms are widespread among many academics (Douglas and Morrow, 2003; Bradford, 2004; Nathan, 2005; Pratt, 2008) with another major deficiency in his work being the lack of empirical evidence – with some justification. There is also a distinct emphasis on the consumption of the ‘bohemian’, which focuses on superficial physical improvements (such as cycle paths) rather than long-term infrastructural amenities such as hospitals or schools. Attracting the ‘creative class’, Florida argues is all about making somewhere ‘cool’ – which can direct political focus and money from good schooling and universities, which themselves may produce talented individuals (thereby negating the need to attract them in the first place). Also, probably the most socially-charged ‘T’ is tolerance, and Florida readily infuses this with cultural consumption. An interest in a good curry from Brick Lane or the world music section of itunes cannot be used as an indicator of true racial or religious tolerance. Without making rash generalisations and typecasts; unless you are a young, middle class, white, rollerblading, tank-top wearing meterosexual, then you not a member of the creative class.
Overly harsh it may be, but the phrase ‘all style, no substance’, or the more low-brow version ‘all talk, no trousers’, could not apply any more aptly to Florida’s work. He has taken a small, US-centric view of creativity and run with it. For example he notes that the “the world of high-tech creativity doesn’t include many African Americans” (2002: 80). This maybe so (if you can decipher the rather folderol neologism), but what about the music industry? The film industry? The most influential rap and hip-hop artists are African-American, and some of Hollywood’s most decorated actors are too. One only has to survey the weird and wonderful dress sense of some of UK’s youths to see the almost ubiquitous influence of rap and hip-hop culture – even their violent traits. To be fair to Florida, he does argue that rapping is (sort of) creative when he suggests that “conceptually, it’s in the right ballpark”, since unearthing talent is a “pretty good starting point for a serious debate on how to keep our economy healthy” (Florida, 2003: 29). But to infer that a blanket investment strategy on all forms of creativity will somehow improve the quality of life for all devalues the true creative (read wealth-generating creativity) practices. Despite the universal and global appeal of rap and hip-hop, the vast majority of African Americans are part of America’s underclass, with extreme poverty and social inequality. Can the preached benefits of the creative class be applied to these under-privileged people? Does the mantra of creativity and the perceived economic and social benefits of developing a policy hell-bent of fuelling creativity help this section of society? The answer is swinging toward ‘no’.
Creativity and it’s political outlet, the creative industries, cannot be bought and sold by increasing the number of bistro’s in your city or by having more live music venues. This is simply cultural plumbing. What we need is cultural planning. It may sound old fashioned, but taking a reflexive case-by-case, locality-by-locality mentality, should be developed (Gibson and Klocker, 2004); not a one-size-fits-all, US-centric public policy script. This is of course unless you want your book on the best-seller’s rack in Borders…
References
Bradford N. (2004) ‘Creative cities structured policy dialogue backgrounder’. Background paper F46, Family Network. Canadian Policy Research Networks, Ottawa.
Douglas B and Morrow D. (2003) ‘Competing for Talent: Implications for Social and Cultural Policy in Canadian City Regions’. SRA. Department of Canadian Heritage, Ottawa.
Florida R. (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, New York.
Florida R. (2003) ‘The new American dream’. Washington Monthly March, 26–33.
Florida R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. Routledge, New York.
Florida R. (2005). The Flight of the Creative Class. The New Global Competition for Talent. HarperCollins, New York.
Gibson C & Klocker N. (2004) ‘Academic Publishing as ‘Creative’ Industry, and Recent Discourses of ‘Creative Economies’: Some Critical Reflections’. Area. 36(4):423-434.
Gibson C & Kong L. (2005) ‘Cultural economy: a critical review’. Progress in Human Geography. 29(5):541-561.
Nathan M. (2005) ‘The Wrong Stuff: Creative Class Theory, Diversity and City Performance’. IPPR Centre for Cities. Discussion Paper No.1, www.ippr.org/centreforcities.
Peck J. (2005) ‘Struggling with the Creative Class’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research: 29(4): 740-770.
Pratt A. (2008) ‘Creative Cities: the cultural industries and the creative class’. Geografiska B, 90(2):107-117.
