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Cultural facilities and activities are significant factors in generating inspiration, self-confidence, debate or ideas exchange as well as the creation of a city’s image. They help attract skilled and talented personnel, as well as provide opportunities for residents.

Consuming high-profile arts and cultural activities has less strong transformative effects on individuals than direct participation, whose impact is greater in terms of human development and tapping creative potential.

Creative Spaces at Affordable Prices

Creative people and projects need to be based somewhere. A creative city requires land and buildings at affordable prices espe-cially for younger businesses or social entrepreneurs. These are likely to be available on the urban fringes and in areas where uses are changing, such as former port and industrial zones. Cheap spaces that can be innovatively adapted to reduce financial risk and encourage experiment, even at the most banal level of opening a new type of restaurant or a shop. Recycling older industrial build-ings is now a cliché of urban regeneration, but does not make it less worthwhile. Typically they can be re-used as incubator units for new business start-ups, as headquarters for cutting edge compa-nies, as artist studios, or as centres for design and new media.

Examples abound: the cable factory in Helsinki, formerly Nokia’s cable production centre houses over 600 people from micro-businesses to museums; perhaps the largest centre of its type in Europe. The Centre for Media Technology and the Arts housed in an old off-centre munitions factory in Karlsruhe has new forms of exhibitions spaces for electronic media, research facilities for sound and visual arts as well as space for renting out; also attached is the arts college thus fostering synergies. Perhaps the world’s largest arts space is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), a 13-acre spread of renovated 19th-century factory buildings. The Tramway in Glasgow is a huge cultural centre housed in an old bus and tram depot a few miles from the centre. Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre and Arnolfini Gallery housed in former warehouses on the river front just off the city centre have now become hubs of the city. These establishments generate new creative infrastructures and instigate other innova-tive, developmental chain reactions – most obviously relating to night life and property investment in surrounding buildings where higher values can be achieved.

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Artists as Regenerators

This creativity can establish interesting milieu, leading to spill-overs which encourage imaginative activities in other spheres. This dynamic, often created by artists, usually leads to the dispersal of those artists who set the regeneration process in motion in the first place. London is a good example. Artists are now dispersed throughout the capital with a tendency to agglomerate in cheap yet interesting areas as near as possible to the centre. Over the last 40 years there have been a number of waves. London’s Soho was once an area where artists lived and worked, yet that time has long since passed – with increased property values artists were pushed outwards to lower-value locations. Taking their place are the more successful new media companies. Camden Town is another area where a similar process has occurred. Now it is the East End where the UK’s largest collection of artists live and work – in Wapping, Tower Hamlets around Brick Lane or Hackney and Hoxton Square.

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ZKM is an institution that has no exact parallel in the world, the Ars Electronica Centre, Linz, Austria and the Intercommunication Center, Tokyo are somewhat related. Founded in 1989 and opened to the public in October, 1997, the ZKM has more than 48,000 square yards of usable space. It houses in addition to a Media Museum, an Institute for Visual Media, an Institute of Media and Acoustics, a media library, a media theatre, a Museum for Contemporary Art and, under different direction, the State Academy of Design and the Municipal Gallery of the City of Karlsruhe. ‘Touring the Media Museum is like roaming an elec-tronic theme park, a futuristic playground for grown-ups where miniature theatres, videos and oversize images morph, dance, respond to questions and urge visitors along on fictive journeys.

… Though many of the installations ask hard questions about serious issues, the museum simply brushes aside the barrier between art and entertainment. … Artists are invited to estab-lish long-term residence in the labs … experimenting in sound as well as the visual context. … the media arts have created the first global arts scene … just about everyone in the field knows every-one else’ (New York Times, 14 February 1999).

Classically artists agglomerate in interesting yet run-down areas, often subject to potential redevelopment pressures, but where the process has not yet started. The artist in effect is the explorer and the regenerator kick-starting a gentrification process, bringing life to run-down areas and generating the development of support structures such as cafes, restaurants and some shops. They then attract a more middle-class clientele who would not have risked being the first, either through fear, the dislike of run-down areas or pressure from peer groups. Only when the ‘grottiness’ has been tamed and made safe by the artist will this second group arrive.

From the planning point of view the key issue is how to main-tain low-value uses, that may have broader ‘public good’ benefits.

In the cultural quarter of Temple Bar in Dublin, the city authority has given artists long-term leases in city-owned property, which has been designated for artists’ use. The spin-offs that accrue to the wider area justify this.

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Networking has two aspects: networking within a city and networking internationally. Cities have always been centres of networking and communication, but the nature of networking is Foundations of the Creative City 125

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A 13-acre spread of renovated 19th-century factory buildings in a poor rural mill town has been recast as the US’s and perhaps the world’s largest centre for contemporary and visual arts.

Opened in May 1999, it spans the fields of sculpture, dance, theatre, film, digital media and music. ‘Museums are a reliquary,’

says the director. ‘This is not a reliquary. This is a place for seeing art and directly relating to it.’ Since visitors can see art works in the process of creation, it has been described by a reporter as

‘the equivalent of a Hollywood studio back lot.’ The museum will have no contemporary collection. It commissions on occas-ion pieces ‘that resonate with the building, for example the Berlin artist Christina Kubisch has placed carillon bells on the mill’s clock tower to ring compositions whose tones are dictated by the motion and brightness of the sun.’

changing as communities become more mobile and technically connected. A bird’s eye view of cities reveals a series of overlapping communities and networks criss-crossing the city and well beyond, creating a form of invisible glue that holds the city together, gener-ates multiple interactions, but also cregener-ates loyalty and connection far beyond the reach of the city. Each network sees the city in a different way – some are intensely local, others more global.

Networking and creativity are intrinsically symbiotic, as the greater the number of nodes in a system the greater its capacity for reflexive learning and innovation. To maximize benefits, network-ing needs to become even more intense and with new configurations.

Many traditional networks contribute nothing special to urban creativity. They are simply part of what makes community, which is based on needing to communicate and cooperate to solve common problems and to socialize. Social homogeneity and immobility were dominant as was a far smaller geographic reach – conditions that no longer apply in a world of mobility, ethnic or lifestyle diversity and which has seen the erosion of geographically based communities.

The rise of partnership models for urban development are inter-esting in this regard. Public, private and voluntary partnerships have brought together people, each perhaps a member of the great and the good in their sub-sector, but previously unknown to each other. The process has eroded the primacy and power of local politi-cians and brought in new actors. The long-term impact of new urban cyber-communities remain to be seen. The ‘virtual city’

movement including Virtual Helsinki, Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Manchester provide not only information and marketing services for their own city, but a much wider function too. Several thousand ex-Mancunians from as far afield as Canada and Australia regu-larly hook up to keep in touch with Manchester, creating discussion forums with locals – this is a community too.

Connecting urban communities both to themselves and other places is such a crucial issue that it is time for local authority departments concerned with ‘connectedness’ and networking to be brought into being. Their primary aim would be to bring people together physically or virtually, focusing on communicating in the city. This might include urban information services like libraries or a council’s own PR department encouraging internationally oriented networking – for officials, local businesses, schools or old-age pensioners – as competition and comparison with other cities provides stimulus and benchmarking. The brokering of new 126 The Dynamics of Urban Creativity

connections and new economic, scientific and cultural collabora-tions is key for future urban prosperity.

To maximize learning potential international networking between cities needs to change and move away from:

I networking based on ceremony to substance – less a focus on local authority ‘junkets’ which provide no practical outcome;

I friendship initiatives to projects which achieve tangible and monitorable results;

I amateurism to professionalism to ensure ideas and projects are carried through;

I community friendship links to the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders;

I general all-purpose initiatives to targeted activities involving real transfer of expertise, say dealing with degraded land or business start-ups;

I incidental to systematic technical collaboration to ensure that the benefits of working together can be maximized (see Gilbert et al, 1996).

Measures of connectedness could include: densities of communica-tion such as availability of mobiles or Internet access; number of project-specific partnerships within the city and externally; or range of meeting places from bars to restaurants.