London Strategy&Workspace 18 03 10

Creative industries and responses to place and culture - Creative industries strategy and workspaces, Aberystwyth and Three Mills Island, Bromley By Bow, London,

David Clarke

Creative industries and responses to place and culture.David Clarke

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www.dca-consultants.comwww.creativeworkspace.info


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Creative industries and responses to place and culture.

DCA is a private consulting company specialising in the creative industries, but also in cultural and heritage projects

Founded in 1995, myself and colleagues previously:

Operated cultural buildingsDeveloped and operated a significant production centre

Operated a national specialist business support agency for the sector

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Stripped of its cultural context, isolated from the patterns of human occupation, enjoyment and social discourse, intervention in the creative

industries loses its unique power.

By developing, together, strategies for industrial development, heritage interpretation, cultural activity and the development of sense of place, we

best create live-able as well as creative, productive districts….

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We have been lucky enough to work on a wide portfolio of projects

BuildingsStrategies for sectoral development

Organisational engineeringProject rescue

Research and evaluation

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A creative industries strategy for University of Wales Aberystwyth

A project in which we set out a medium term plan to build a creative industries ‘layer’ on an existing cultural infrastructure


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University of Wales Aberystwyth is a campus university with a very substantial cultural centre serving much of mid-Wales

The University has historically been a supplier of creative people for the Welsh economy but retains little of this talent locally

How to mobilise the very substantial infrastructure for culture to deliver creative industries development and talent retention?


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A phased strategy of intervention to:

Make better links between teaching, research and CI business

Develop new workspaces as incubators, accelerators and for CI hub businesses

Provision for new residency programmes to stimulate local talent

Retro-fitting the University main hall as a digital studio

Making new production spaces

Refreshing the creativity brand of the site


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Strengths

Layers support for the creative industries in existing cultural infrastructure

Investment costs are limited and marginal

Costs are offset by income generated from the broader cultural economy of the site

Provides access to facilities for the whole production chain:

Creates an ecology where people and products permeate through the boundaries of the production economy


Laboratory Testbed Manufactory

Showcase Distributor

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Weaknesses

The Creative Industries facilities are necessarily limited

This is not a powerhouse of production

The objective is not to drive large quantified outputs

Maybe it is more suitable to smaller places, town and urban satellites than to the metropolitan core?


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Developing Bromley by Bow on the theme of a cultural ecology

A project in which we are setting out to make a sustainable creative place at the heart of a city regeneration zone


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Bromley by Bow – a classic post industrial city fringe in East London

Less than half a mile from the 2012 Olympic stadium but essentially undeveloped

Lots of interest in the creative industries

But with a history of failure and transience of conventional CI interventions


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The context

We are commissioned for the heritage project to renew and interpret the House Mill

But the Mill exists at the pivot of several major regeneration and development schemes:

A major urban park

Huge residential and retail schemes

New public spaces

New transport infrastructures


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We are seeking to develop a broad cultural layer to the development of the area

Historic interpretation of Mill, place and landscapes

Extending this storytelling through the public realm, developments and streetscape

Developing community resources to give local people control of some part of the place

Doing simple things – cafes, toilets, markets

And looking for integrated, local, appropriate CI interventions


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Strengths

By identifying heritage stories with enduring resonance, we make stronger sense of place and more integrated community, for those who live, work and

visit here

We open opportunities for non-specialist local people to edge into the CI sector

A stronger sense of place/identity enriches practice and the products of the sector

By building a locally anchored and ‘owned’ ecology of cultural content, opportunity and creativity, the CI interventions that follow might best take

root

And might best resist the common pattern of gentrification and displacement


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Weaknesses

We struggle with the scale of the task in joined up working – e.g. making a workshop of 17 distinct design and consultant teams all working at once

We have to generate and influence resources across many schemes and many agencies

Perhaps this approach dilutes the creative industries cluster?

And we have to understand that the more organic the ecology, the less we can determine and direct it strategically


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So – in conclusion - When we think of creative economies, maybe we should be thinking of creative ecologies:

The ecology that grows from layering the creative industries interventions in other cultural infrastructures

The ecology that clusters together not many similar things and businesses, but a diversity of differing and complementary things

The ecology that weaves our Creative industries interventions into a fabric of heritage, identity, community and sense and meaning of place


London Strategy&Workspace 18 03 10

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