Creative City Limits: Urban Cultural Economy in a New Era of Austerity

The last two decades have marked the emergence and proliferation in the UK of research and policy agendas emphasising creativity as a powerful new 'motive force' for economic regeneration, planning and design. In particular, the 'creative city' has acted as an influential template and narrative for efforts at stimulating growth and rejuvenating urban communities. Policy-makers and planners have eagerly commissioned and adopted an array of creative city strategies to reap perceived employment and income-enhancing effects, ranging from attempts at nurturing art districts to efforts at 'incubating' clusters of creative industries. They have also sought to encourage a critical infrastructure of intellectual resources, social diversity and cultural intermediaries; not only as a way of improving cities' economic vitality and competitiveness, but increasingly as a means of addressing issues of social cohesion and transforming notions of civic identity. At the level of everyday life the creative industries of architecture, design and software have reshaped the way business is transacted and public services are consumed. The establishment in 1999 of a governmental urban design advisor, CABE, can be seen as the specific product of this growing public and private interest in culturally upgrading or culturally engaging with urban spaces.

The credit crunch and accompanying global economic crisis which came to the fore in September 2008 poses significant tests for this creative economic agenda. Arguably the creative city notion has flourished within the context of a long credit-fuelled boom in financial services and real estate. Policy-makers and cultural practitioners have often benefited from, relied on and targeted new forms of upmarket consumption, corporate sponsorship and property-led urban regeneration. The dramatic collapse in the UK's financial sector and property market slump over the last 18 months therefore presents significant challenges for the dominant creative agenda of the last 20 years.

This new research network will offer an important forum to reassess the place of creativity in urban economic growth. It will draw on critical academic perspectives largely sidelined by policy-makers during the long boom of the last two decades. At the same time it will identify gaps of emphasis within existing research and practice, often stemming from a failure to connect across distinct yet related disciplinary conversations.

The network sets out to address the following four key questions:

i) Why is the relationship between culture, knowledge and cities central to understanding the transforming economic structure of the UK?
ii) What role have artists, architects and other creative practitioners, institutions and networks played in augmenting and contesting economic policy and speculative agendas in recent decades?
iii) How has the urban renaissance and the changing design of the UK's buildings and cities manifested new divisions of labour, class structures and patterns of uneven growth?
iv) What future democratic role can culture, technology and cities play in issues of sustainability and social justice?

The network will be co-ordinated by UCL Urban Laboratory and CABE, and will be organised around four workshops to be held in London, Salford and Plymouth between November 2010 and May 2011. These will bring together UK and overseas academics, artists, planners, architects and other key stakeholders, and will be further discussed through an online forum and a public event to be held at Tate Britain in 2011. The material and findings produced by the network will be assembled to create a policy report and an edited collection of academic essays. These will provide not only a geographical and historically nuanced critique of the existing creative city model, but act as an important means of reshaping the policy and conceptual frameworks necessary to stimulate new creative urban futures.

There are three broad, interconnected areas of impact for this proposed network:

i) To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the national and regional knowledge base on the urban dimensions to the cultural and creative economy.
ii) To influence and improve the quality of urban policy making on creativity, culture and economic regeneration.
iii) To propose new urban and cultural investment routes to enhance welfare and well being for young people and communities.

The network will firstly meet an urgent need to review and debate the existing academic knowledge base on the state of urban cultural economies with key figures from the private sector, public policy, cultural institutions and cultural practitioners. This is a unique opportunity to define the national and regional state of creative cities through a new website and a set of metropolitan 'think tanks'. These will comprise academia, private sector actors such as urban developers (eg. Urban Splash), central/local government policy makers (eg. Department of Culture, Media and Sport - DCMS), public bodies (eg. CABE); museums (eg. Tate Britain) and architects and artists (eg. Bauman Lyons Associates and Nils Norman). And by basing the workshops in a range of universities across England we will highlight the diverse cultural experiences of global and medium-sized cities like London, Manchester and Plymouth and also the contribution of cultural departments of higher education institutions to national competitiveness.

Secondly, since all cities have been affected by the recession and have different prospects for growth, government departments such as HM Treasury, BIS (Business, Innovation and Skills) and CLG (Communities and Local Government) are keen to generate knowledge which can help define the economic strengths of particular places. This network will increase the effectiveness of national and local policy by developing an urban diagnostic framework to understand local economic and cultural infrastructure. By collecting and distilling information on this important subject in a policy report, the network will not only improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer between academia and policy-makers, but will also offer an important opportunity to test and challenge institutional assumptions about the impact of cultural investment policies and the issue of improving transparency and local community engagement with arts and urban policy making. As the network will emerge in the early period of a new government it will prove a timely source of information to influence and improve the direction and practical implementation of new cultural policies.

Thirdly, beyond the academic, institutional and practitioner beneficiaries, the network will focus on ways of improving cultural and civic engagement for the benefit of future generations of urban dwellers. The network will seek to identify what types of cultural skills and urban infrastructure investment and intervention work should be supported for future generations. Young people are bearing the brunt of the recession in cities, it is therefore important to focus on the dimension of education and skills investment in shaping the recovery prospects for cities. The Creative City Limits network will play a valuable role in identifying more sophisticated approaches to measurement, evaluation and development of education and skills training which can enhance quality of life, well being and the creative output of communities. The impact of the network will therefore be of real interest to DCSF (Department for Children, Schools and Families), BIS and DCMS. We will therefore seek to develop the findings of the network with opinion formers and think-tanks such as NESTA, the Young Foundation, DEMOS and the Work Foundation - and share findings with leading journalists from national newspapers and specialist educational pub