Creative Clusters 2006 : Mainstreaming Creativity post 2
November 8, 2006
Posted by Dick in: Events | TrackbackFinal day of Creative Clusters. Main focus is bringing strands
together towards some action points. I choose the Creative Enterprise
summing up. The discussion starts by being dominated by public sector
agendas which provokes a healthy backlash and ultimately a clearer
sense that although the arts are part of the creative economy they art
not primarily about economic activity and have an impact which goes
much wider that the size and vitality of the creative economy. This
gets us into how can the creative sector make better economic progress
and does the public sector really help. A sense emerged that there is
too much competition between UK regions and not enough focus on
globally competitive specialisms. Again quite a bit led back to the CEP
agenda as a driver for govt policy and the need to engage. A sense that
clusters can generate the density and critical mass to register on the
govt radar. My contribution was that planning policy could be changed
so that all new developments must provide minimum 25MB symmetric
connectivity and that all new residential and mixed use development
must include a proportion of affordable workspace or live/workspace as
well as affordable housing. This got a lot of support.Points made by others which I think worthy of mention include:
Kristin Wolff of Corporation for a Skilled Workforce Chicago’s Mayor Daley
declared several years ago that he was going to make Chicago the
greenest US city, people laughed, and apparently he has made huge
strides, been featured on the cover of many design magazines for the
improvement in the live/work environment of Chicago and seen
significant economic growth.
Andy Breslau of City Futures http://www.nycfuture.org & http://www.citylimits.org - Creative enterprise is dependent on audiences and consumers not funding, surely that is where the primary focus should be.
A point I picked up from earlier in the conference was that value
added by a service is relative to the user input such that in case 1.
user driven = less; case 2. user inspired = more; case 3. user adapted
= lots more.
Then the chairs of the different strands came together for the
closing plenary. Peter Stark reported back that the international
strand felt that the UK was suffering from subsidy sickness – too much
energy used up on inward looking self referencing public sector
agendas. The closing speech was from Anthony Sargent of the Sage who
finished by saying that in 10 years we would be in the age of the
imagination.
Then I caught up with my email inbox to find an invitation to the
National Creative Industries Conference on 5th December in Bradford
with George Cox, Shaun Woodward and Chris Powell – this event had not
been referenced at all during the Creative Clusters conference.
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