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The Quest for Creative Industries: A Multilevel National Study of the Impacts of Urban Form on the Geography of Creative Industries
Abstract
Creative industries have gained increasing attention in light of the cultural economy as viable magnets for local and regional economic development. Policy makers thus would benefit from attracting creative industries as potential economic boosters. However, it is hard to target such catalyst industries without better knowledge of the urban form conditions that may influence the location preference of these industries; do creative industries favor compact, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods with transit accessibility to employment? This paper, as one of the first national studies, answers this question using a multilevel modeling approach to control for the socioeconomic and built environment characteristics at both local and regional levels. Factor analysis is used to define a Creative Score, which captures the geography of creative industries using the number of creative firms, employment, the percentage of creative firms, and a creative employment location quotient. The compactness/sprawl index is used at both census tract and metropolitan levels as a proxy for urban form. Accounting for the socioeconomic factors, the findings suggest that, at the neighborhood level, the compactness index is significantly and positively associated with the Creative Score. Every 10% increase in compactness score results in a 0.3% increase in Creative Score at the census tract level. This is partly because compact neighborhoods provide creative industries with a stronger consumer base as a reliable source of development. Compact urban form also serves agglomeration economies by facilitating knowledge exchange, reducing travel time and costs, and giving greater accessibility to destinations by transit.
... Building on previous attempts at identifying the geography of creative firms (Comunian, Chapain, and Clifton 2010;Granpayehvaghei et al. 2019), this paper explores factors that lead a community to be welcoming to a creative cluster. Understanding the geography of creative clusters, the authors argue, can lead to evidence-based and empirically grounded economic policies aimed at fostering these clusters. ...
... Such experimentation generates the possibility for knowledge spillover across firms (Knudsen et al. 2008), where rumors, trade secrets, and impressions create what economic geographers celebrate as the Marshallian ambiance. Certain place characteristics are associated with cultural and creative clusters: Walkable neighborhoods (Mack, Talen, and Koschinsky 2017), denser areas with greater rental and mixed-income housing options (Spencer 2015;Granpayehvaghei et al. 2019), and highly tolerant, racially diverse communities (Florida 2014) seem to be appealing to creative firms and arts-based establishments. Walkability and transit accessibility, for example, could attract creative workers and promote face-to-face interactions; thus, they are treated as urban amenities necessary for creative-friendly communities (Zandiatashbar and Hamidi 2018;Kang 2010a). ...
Increasing investment in attracting creative clusters has become a quintessentially common practice at the municipal level, particularly in progressive cities, which have long been concerned with economic development. While rationales behind such investments are highly contingent on the potential economic outcomes of creative clusters, a thorough understanding of factors that help foster creative-friendly communities could facilitate municipal decision-making processes. This paper revisits factors relating to the location attributes of creative clusters that have hitherto remained insufficiently explored. Contributing to the development of creative-friendly communities, these factors complement the mainstream literature, which is overly preoccupied with the creative class theory, by addressing soft, cultural features as well as hard, material attributes, including the built environment, creative individuals, the local creative identity, networks and technology, leadership and the economic context, and the consumer market. This paper introduces a framework that incorporates those factors into three phases of creative activity, including idea-generation, production, and circulation/consumption, which operate on different tiers but nonetheless mutually interact. The paper reflects on the policy implications of the framework for local communities at large and concludes by proposing future avenues for research into how to promote creative-friendly communities.
... More specifically, do spatial patterns of ICT firms and jobs differ significantly among various types of urban structures? Do ICT firms cluster in compact, dense, amenity-rich and walkable neighbourhoods the way firms in creative industries do (see [54]), or are they rather dispersed and located in lower-cost suburban residential or commercial areas? To answer these questions, we distinguished among several basic types of urban structures (organic, urban blocks, estates and high rises, mixed building types and lowdensity residential and commercial structures) and discussed their potential relationships with the location of ICT firms and jobs (the typology is based on the approach of [55,56]). ...
... We found strong support for the thesis that ICT firms resemble creative industries in their location patterns [22,54]. A high rate of clustering in the urban core and inner city was found. ...
We aimed to explain the spatial distribution of information and communication technology (ICT) firms in the city of Ostrava as an example of a medium-sized, shrinking, polycentric industrial city. The primary research question was to what extent micro-geographic location factors affect the current spatial clustering of ICT firms in polycentric cities characteristic by relatively weak urbanization economies and mostly routine character of ICT activities. We analyse and test the effects of the urban form at the level of urban blocks and individual buildings (considering their height, technical condition, age and dominant function) on the clustering of ICT firms of various sizes and ownership statuses. The inquiry was based on a detailed field mapping (using ArcGIS Collector) of ICT firms and physical/functional characteristics of the buildings and their immediate surroundings. ICT firms are significantly spatially concentrated in the historic city centre and inner city. Spatial patterns of ICT firms focused on less knowledge-intensive, routine and/or lower value-added functions do not differ fundamentally from innovative firms developing new products. Preference of denser, walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods in urban cores/inner cities can be found in the group of firms focusing on routine functions: rather for larger than for smaller firms and domestic than foreign-owned firms.
... These place-based characteristics align well with sustainability strategies such as smart growth (Wlodarczak, 2012). However, these studies often do not address the specific needs of particular types of high-tech firms (Bakhshi et al., 2008;Granpayehvaghei et al., 2019;Hamidi et al., 2018;Hamidi and Zandiatashbar, 2018a, 2017b, 2017aZandiatashbar and Hamidi, 2018). ...
... runways, control tower, hangers) (Haug, 1991). (Granpayehvaghei et al., 2019;Hamidi and Zandiatashbar, 2018b, 2017a, 2017bZandiatashbar et al., 2019;Zandiatashbar and Hamidi, 2018 Despite the long-standing debates regarding urban form and sustainability as well as emerging policies suggesting knowledge-led economic development is compatible with sustainability agendas, these findings demonstrate that many hightech zones may be problematic in terms of their environmental impacts. As the result of these findings, policymakers may need to attend to the specializations present in their regional economy and balance growth strategies to not only succeed in growing their knowledge economy, but also ensure they are meeting sustainability goals. ...
Studies on the accessibility needs of high-tech firms often draw on agglomeration economies and creative class assumptions that emphasizes how transit and walkability encourage clustering, knowledge exchange and innovation. As a result, some argue that knowledge-led economic development aligns with sustainability planning, especially as high-tech industries become increasingly tied to smart city agendas. However, due to the new logistic revolution, global e-economy, rise of online workers and urban land values, it is likely that some tech industries prefer strong highway systems, potentially leading to higher GHG emissions. As such, the relationship between the knowledge economy and sustainability outcomes remains unclear. This study addresses these gaps by quantifying the geography of high-tech zones in North Texas and Northern California, measuring their specializations, and exploring their differences in terms of transportation infrastructures. Our results only partially support research suggesting high-tech industries prefer dense, walkable, transit-accessible places. For instance, we found large numbers of high-tech firms (e.g. IT and aerospace) are still attracted to peripheral, auto-centric spaces, which is at odds with sustainable transportation policies. Hence, policymakers may need to revisit their growth strategies to not only succeed in growing their knowledge economy, but also secure sustainability goals.
... The literature on creative economy, cities, and geography seeks to understand environments conducive to creativity, known as 'creative clustering' or 'creative clusters' (Comunian, Chapain&Clifton, 2010;Granpayehvaghei et al., 2019;Granpayehvaghei & Bonakdar, 2022). It posits that the locations of artists and their activities are determined by economic geographic principles rather than random chance (Mommaas, 2004;Rantisi, Leslie&Christopherson, 2006). ...
This paper presents a comprehensive digital mapping of artists’ residential locations and social networks in Republican Shanghai, aiming to enhance our understanding of the role of spatial proximity in the development and expansion of artists’ networks, and, based on this, to reconceptualize the ‘art world.’ Our findings suggest that spatial proximity does not influence the development or maintenance of artists’ networks, which instead form a city-wide network of pipelines. However, the clustering of key nodes in primary art clusters indicates that spatial proximity is a necessary but insufficient condition for artists to expand their networks and establish themselves as leading figures. The paper further explores the dynamics of these primary art clusters, revealing mechanisms such as spatial-network synergies, the formation of intimate master-pupil relationships through co-residence, and group imaging and place branding centered around prominent artists.
... This industry not only has far-reaching impacts on promoting employment, innovating technology, and enriching cultural life [6] but has also become an essential platform for the demonstration of the soft power and cultural exchanges of countries in an era of globalization. For over 20 years, CCIs have attracted increasing attention from academia and policymakers [6,7]. For example, governments in the United States, Europe, India, Russia, and other regions have provided adequate policy support for CCIs and have achieved remarkable results. ...
Existing studies need to pay more attention to the policy mechanisms of how to promote the development of cultural and creative industries through coordinating multi-stakeholder participation. Based on evolutionary game theory, this study constructs a three-party evolutionary game model to analyze the behavioral patterns of the government, cultural and creative enterprises, and consumers under different support policies. In addition, it takes the Chinese intangible cultural heritage of “Huaihe willow weaving” as a typical case for simulation. The results show that the probability of the system converging to the expected equilibrium point is low after implementing the certification policy, but the probability of the system converging to the expected equilibrium is significantly increased after implementing the incentive policy. Producer subsidies have significant advantages over consumer subsidies. At this stage, the government should consider jointly implementing the “certification + incentives” policy in phases to promote the development of cultural and creative industries.
... We found a limited number of the existing studies that use user generated data to inform the context of cultural planning (Currid and Williams 2010), or that apply advanced data analytics on art venues locations (Granpayehvaghei et al. 2019). However, there is no study that specifically aims to understand the deep connection between social media and art venues and to support it with data-based analyses. ...
Planning administrations are concerned with the diffusion of art. The concept of the Creative City has encouraged planners to develop cultural policies to support creative economies, city branding, urban identity and urban quality. With the introduction of social media, the production and consumption of art is changing significantly. It has resulted in the emergence of hybrid art spaces: social spaces existing both in physical space and on social media. This implies that the integration of social media data in cultural planning is not just beneficial, but necessary. However, existing cultural planning approaches hardly consider this shifting paradigm. Therefore, this paper introduces a methodology to analyze, map and evaluate art venues and the online communication they generate using social media data. We developed this methodology for Singapore. We gathered geo-located Twitter data and extracted posts relating to art (Social Media Art Classifier). We applied topic and sentiment analysis to art tweets, and introduced social media-based planning indicators. We also developed a machine learning model to determine the relationship between 11 art venue features and the level of their social media production. This methodology successfully demonstrates the use of social media data to support cultural planning in cities. While the work presented in this paper focuses on Singapore, and is limited to a two-year data period, our methodology could easily be adapted for other locales, and to include continuous assessment. As a next step, we will demonstrate and discuss our methodology with cultural planning professionals, in order to improve our methods and indicators, and explore some of the applications suggested in this paper.
... Illustrating a closely related dimension of the innovation policy-urban form relationship, there is new evidence about the association between the density of individuals and firms in a place and the resultant innovation. For example, both Zandiatashbar and Hamidi (2018) and Granpayehvaghei et al. (2019) find that as urban form compactness increases, so too does the density of creative firms within that market. However, consistent with traditional urban models, they also observe that innovation-oriented firms tend to exist at the periphery where land is less expensive-based on an assumption that firms in creative/innovation industries are small and not substantially capitalized. ...
Recent literature using the city and its shape as a lens through which to examine various socio-technical phenomena adds new and important perspective to conversations about real estate, efficient market outcomes, and market failures, as well as the role of public policy in ameliorating the latter. Accompanying and underpinning the newer literature are detailed micro-economic and spatial data that help to facilitate the revision of our collective understanding of the dualistic ontology of urban form as both a cause and consequence of public policy and economic conditions, given the monopolistic control of the land-use development process by local governments. In this context, the objectives of this paper are to summarize recent research on urban form and its attendant data, and to discuss the implications of these studies for real estate developers and investors.
The digital creative industry (DCI) has become increasingly integral to China’s digital economy and industrial restructuring landscape. This study scrutinized the spatial distribution patterns of four subindustries within DCI sector, leveraging county/district-level enterprise data from 2022. Our findings reveal a distinct geographical pattern characterized by a gradual decline in DCI concentration from the southeastern to the northwestern regions. Additionally, by analyzing the location quotient of each province, we identify specific provinces that demonstrate comparative advantages across each subindustry within the DCI sector.
Universities, medical centers, and headquarters are the driving forces behind cities’ innovation productivity and anchor-based urban revitalization efforts, such as innovation districts. As a result, there is increasing competition for corporate anchors, as well as emerging partnerships and conflicts. In each case, transit has a major role to play. Yet we know little about precisely how transit fits into the dynamics of anchor-based revitalization. To address this empirical gap, this study employed structural equation modeling to grasp both the direct and indirect impacts of transit on the knowledge-intensive firm location in 500 large U.S. cities. We conceptualized the indirect impact of transit as mediated by anchors with a composite value that we developed to quantitatively represent the presence and size of major innovation anchors in each city. According to our findings, the positive impact of transit on a city’s overall knowledge economy occurred through its role in supporting anchor institutions, a role that, in turn, significantly increased the likelihood of knowledge-based firms locating in the city. In short, transit quality was positively associated with larger and more established anchors, as well as the availability of more employees, which expands the city’s talent pool, a critical driver of knowledge-intensive employers’ location decisions. These findings call for greater attention to be paid to transit in cities’ anchor-based urban revitalization plans and to partnerships between cities, metropolitan organizations, and anchors in planning future transit systems.
The agglomeration paradigm for creative industries has fundamentally changed under the digital economy, giving rise to a new form of virtual agglomeration within these industries. This study explores the causes of this virtual agglomeration. We collected online Chinese news texts related to the virtual agglomeration of the creative industry, used text mining to identify nine factors affecting its formation, and refined the internal and external factors for an analytical framework based on the PEST (political, economic, social, technological) and value-chain models. We then combined the relevant literature and the creative industry’s development practices, analyzed the mechanism of each driving factor, and constructed a driving-force model for the creative industry’s virtual agglomeration. The external driving factors were government policy planning, the digital economic environment, emerging consumer demand, and the application of innovative technology; the internal factors were the digitalization of cultural resources, flexible manufacturing, digital marketing and promotion, online interactive services, and virtual platform facilities. Each factor was found to contribute to virtual agglomeration through different internal mechanisms. This study’s findings have theoretical and practical value for cultivating the modes of virtual agglomeration within creative industries.
Clustering and active transportation infrastructures have a significant impact on economic development strategies for attracting high-tech firms. High-tech firms cluster to create economies of scale. In theory, such clusters favor walkable and transit-accessible locations following the preferences of footloose workers of the creative class, an expectation that underpins pro-walkability and transit-accessible development strategies. Such approaches, however, fail to consider countervailing factors including changes in logistics, land values, the rise of the e-economy, and gig workers, which could result in a preference for auto-centric locations. This study addresses the knowledge gap by investigating differences in location behaviors of six high-tech sectoral categories with respect to transportation infrastructures. The analysis uses a firm-level micro dataset provided by Esri along with multiple logit regressions to explore the relationship between high-tech firm locations and transportation amenities in 627 high-tech clusters from the 52 largest U.S. regions. The results show that not all high-tech industries opt for walkable and transit-accessible locations. Compared with other high-tech specializations, professional services (i.e., data processing/computer or engineering and architectural services), which account for the largest share of high-tech employees, are drawn to walkable and transit rich areas near central business districts. On the other hand, auto-centric locations on the peripheries are home to aerospace and bio-pharmaceutical industries. In light of these findings, it is essential that economic development officials aiming to achieve balanced growth consider major local high-tech sector(s) and sectoral differences when making policy decisions.
The present article explores 98 years of creativity research [1922–2020] covering more than 38,000 academic articles on the topic. By applying computational methods rooted in network analysis and text mining, we uncover a history of creativity research spread through 12 major topics of inquiry, including, among others, the psychology of creativity, organisational creativity, creative industries, and idea generation. We also unpack recent trends within the growing body of literature, with a particular focus on business and management. These trends, 36 in total, cover a variety of topics, from the discussions of cultural psychology and distributed creativity to the role that virtual worlds play in the generation of creative outputs. Digitalisation, interdisciplinarity, and multiculturalism emerge as transversal topics across the recent developments. Finally, we discuss how computational methods can help develop comprehensive snapshots of large research fields such as that of creativity and draw subsequent policy implications.
This study investigates how a city’s innovation capacity could be influenced by its polycentric urban structure. Drawing upon a panel data set containing 267 Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above from 2006 to 2016, and using an instrumental variables approach, we reveal a significant and negative causal relationship between polycentricity and a city’s innovation capacity. We further discuss the mechanisms of agglomeration economies, socioeconomic diversity and firm location choice that drive the innovation impact of polycentricity. The paper highlights the need to rethink and re-evaluate the current movement of ‘planned polycentrism’ in the Chinese context.
Geography of innovation, creative clustering, urban buzz and innovation districts are place-based concepts that have emerged as a result of the US economy’s transformation to knowledge-intensive economies. The notable built environment characteristics of these concepts are spatial clustering, walkability and proximity to urban amenities, diversity, regional connectivity and agglomeration. While several of these characteristics have been associated with urban sprawl in previous studies, there is a lack of direct evidence on how urban sprawl affects innovation productivity. This national study seeks to examine the relationship between urban sprawl, place-based characteristics and innovation productivity. We used Multilevel Modelling to account for built environment characteristics at both neighbourhood and regional levels. We found that innovative firms tend to locate more in census tracts that are less compact but offer spatial proximity to firms in related business sectors. This is likely due to the higher land and property value in compact areas, which could make it unaffordable for small businesses. We also found that the regional compactness positively and significantly affects the number of innovative firms. This is likely due to the role of compact regions in supporting public transit investments, enhancing social capital and reducing poverty and racial segregation.
Research on the location of cultural and creative firms has traditionally focused on large cities, but small towns are also likely to hold them. This work investigates which factors determine cultural specialisation in a group of 46 extrametropolitan Spanish towns with 30-50,000 inhabitants. We consider factors related to markets and government policies -hard factors-and new factors related to amenities, tolerance, and the local climate -soft factors-.When we check them statistically, the greatest explanatory power is attributed to some hard-type factors such as economic activity and human capital, as well as the distance to urban markets. In contrast, the expectations raised by the soft factors are not confirmed.
Policymakers pursue a range of strategies aimed at diversifying neighborhoods despite research indicating the complicated and potentially damaging results of these efforts. One increasingly common approach is to incorporate the arts into planning efforts in the hope of enhancing diversity and catalyzing positive neighborhood change. Using data from the Cultural Data Project, the authors determine where newly established New York City arts organizations locate in terms of neighborhood racial, income, and industry diversity. They then analyze how diverse contexts interact with an arts presence to impact neighborhood economic health over time. They find that neighborhoods with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of income and industry diversity benefit most from an arts presence. However, the arts are attracted predominantly to neighborhoods with moderate levels of racial diversity and high levels of income and industry diversity. This complicates the use of the arts as a tool in urban revitalization policy.
The Mediterranean region has been increasingly receiving attention in recent years. This is due to the heterogeneity of the countries composing it, which raises several problems in business collaborations, but also unfolds several cross-national economic opportunities among Mediterranean countries. The analysis of cultural and creative industries can be useful to show that this area has many similarities, making intercultural exchange and cross-national economic development possible. This research starts from the comparison of three main Mediterranean countries situated both in Europe and outside, Italy, Spain and Turkey, and aims at highlighting the most striking similarities and differences of their features. The creativity specialization found in this region is alike, which allows us to begin to discuss the idea of a Mediterranean creativity.
Analysing census and industry data at the metro and neighbourhood levels, this paper seeks to identify the location characteristics associated with artistic clusters and determine how these characteristics vary across different places. We find that the arts cannot be taken overall as an urban panacea, but rather that their impact is place-specific and policy ought to reflect these nuances. However, our work also finds that, paradoxically, the arts’ role in developing metro economies is as highly underestimated as it is overgeneralised. While arts clusters exhibit unique industry, scale and place-specific attributes, we also find evidence that they cluster in ‘innovation districts’, suggesting they can play a larger role in economic development. To this end, our results raise important questions and point toward new approaches for arts-based urban development policy that look beyond a focus on the arts as amenities to consider the localised dynamics between the arts and other industries.
Public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher-density employment and enable urban growth, giving rise to agglomeration economies by improving labour market accessibility, increasing information exchange and facilitating industrial specialisation. Using data on US metropolitan areas, this paper traces the links from transit service to central city employment density, urbanised area employment density and population; and from these physical agglomeration measures to average wages and per capita GMP. Significant indirect productivity effects of transit service are found. For example, in the case of central city employment density, estimated wage increases range between 1.8 billion per metropolitan area yearly for a 10 per cent increase in transit seats or rail service miles per capita. Firms and households likely receive unanticipated agglomeration benefits from transit-induced densification and growth, and current benefit-cost evaluations may therefore underestimate the benefits of improving transit service, particularly in large cities with existing transit networks.
Creative industries and creative employment tend to concentrate around medium and large cities, forming creative local systems. We follow a multidisciplinary approach, based on cultural and creative economics, evolutionary geography and urban economics, in order to analyse the forces behind the clustering of employment in creative industries in a comparative analysis of Italy and Spain. The results show different patterns of clustering of creative employment in both countries. The historical and cultural endowments, the average size of creative industries, the size of the place, the productive diversity, and the concentration of human capital and creative class have been determined to be common factors leading to a concentration of creative firms and creative employment in both countries.
: This article represents a broad and occasionally polemical meditation on the nature and significance of creative cities. I seek to situate the concept of creative cities within the context of the so-called new economy and to trace out the connections of these phenomena to recent shifts in technologies, structures of production, labor markets, and the dynamics of locational agglomeration. I try to show, in particular, how the structures of the new economy unleash historically specific forms of economic and cultural innovation in modern cities. The argument is concerned passim with policy issues and, above all, with the general possibilities and limitations faced by policymakers in any attempt to build creative cities. The effects of globalization are discussed, with special reference to the prospective emergence of a worldwide network of creative cities bound together in relations of competition and cooperation. In the conclusion, I pinpoint some of the darker dimensions—both actual and potential—of creative cities.
This article reviews conceptual and operational issues in defining the creative sector and its arts and cultural core. Some accounts use establishment data to measure creative industry employment, some use firm-level data, and others use occupational data. The authors examine how cultural-sector employment is conceptualized in three pioneering cultural economy studies driven by distinctive policy agendas and constituencies. Choices about which industries, firms, and occupations to include affect the resulting size and content of the cultural economy. In comparing these three studies and others, the authors show that the Boston metro's creative economy varies in size from less than 1% to 49%, although most cultural definitions range from 1% to 4%. The authors explore how policy makers might use a combination of methods to produce a richer characterization of the regional cultural economy and reflect on the relevance of good numbers to cultural policy and creative region formation.
Public transport improvements may increase economic productivity if they enable the growth and densification of cities, downtowns, or industrial clusters and thereby increase external agglomeration economies. It has been argued that the potential agglomeration benefits are large; if so, understanding them better would be useful in making funding decisions about public transport improvements. We reviewed theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration as well as a small number of articles on transportation's role in agglomeration. The theoretical literature is useful in understanding possible avenues by which transportation improvements might affect agglomeration, although there is little discussion of public transport specifically. Relevant empirical studies tend to focus on metropolitan regions and use a generalized measure of transportation cost. But public transport impacts on agglomeration are likely to be different from road investment impacts. We identified several ways of conducting research building on this literature that would help evaluate the agglomeration impacts of public transport proposals: tracing the links between transport, agglomeration, and productivity; better motivating research using theories of agglomeration mechanisms; taking scale and redistribution into account; exploring the functional form of agglomeration economies; accounting for endogeneity in model structure; and considering development context.
Geographers and social scientists have probed the effects of agglomeration and spatial clustering on innovation and economic growth. Economists and others have identified the role of knowledge spillovers in driving the innovation process. Although innovation is thus assumed to be a function of proximity, there has been little systematic research on the role of density in innovation. This research investigates density, and more specifically the density of creative workers, as a key factor influencing regional innovation. It uses principal components analysis to create and implement a composite measure of density and presents a model of innovation as a function of creative density. Statistical analyses including multivariate regression find that density and creativity separately and jointly affect innovation in metropolitan areas. The regression analysis finds a positive relationship between the density of creative workers and metropolitan patenting activity, suggesting that density is a key component of knowledge spillovers and a key component of innovation.
Cultural districts have attracted increased attention as an urban economic development strategy. Yet for the most part, cities have focused on the agglomeration of cultural assets to increase tourism or lure wary suburbanites downtown. This article examines an alternative use of the arts for community development: cultivating neighborhood cultural clusters with modest concentrations of cultural providers (both nonprofit and commercial), resident artists, and cultural participants. The article presents innovative methods for integrating data on these indicators into a geographic information system to produce a Cultural Asset Index that can be used to identify census block groups with the highest density of these assets. The article then demonstrates the association between the concentration of cultural assets in Philadelphia in 1997 with improved housing market conditions between 2001 and 2006. The article concludes by exploring the implications of a neighborhood-based creative economy for urban policy, planning, and research.
creative city and growth exemplars. Limit-ations of the comparative nature of such cross-national policy analysis and method-ological challenges arising are then discussed in the context of this convergence in the nature and location types chosen for policy implementation—where the new economy meets city regeneration at a site-specifi c level. A discussion of the widening definitions Abstract The paper presents the results of an international study of creative industry policies and strategies, based on a survey of public-sector creative city initiatives and plans and their underlying rationales. As well as this survey and an accompanying literature review, interviews were carried out with senior policy-makers and intermediaries from Europe, North America, Africa and south-east Asia. The paper considers the scope and scale of so-called new-industrial clusters in local cultural and creative quarters and sub-regional creative hubs, which are the subject of policy interventions and public–private investment. The semantic and symbolic expansion of the cultural industries and their concentration in once-declining urban and former industrial districts, to the creative industries, and now to the knowledge and experience economy, is revealed in economic, sectoral and spatial terms. Whilst policy convergence and emulation are evident, manifested by the promotion of creative spaces and industry clusters and versions of the digital media and science city, this is driven by a meta-analysis of growth in the new economy, but one that is being achieved by old industrial economic interventions and policy rationales. These are being used to justify the redevelopment of former and residual industrial zones, with cities utilising the creative quarter/knowledge hub as a panacea to implement broader city expansion and regeneration plans.
Innovation has become a key driver of economic growth, benefitting from knowledge production and technological advancements. Existing literature on the geography of innovation examines agglomeration economies, density, and the diversity of knowledge intensive firms, yet often overlooks the role of urban form. Generally, compact urban form, as opposed to sprawling regions, offers rich amenities, accessibility to public transit and a higher quality of places. Since such features attract educated millennial, the driving force behind knowledge-based and innovation economy, compact regions could be conducive to the innovation capacity. This study builds on Metropolitan Compactness Index (MCI) and examines the relationship between regional compactness and Regional Innovation Capacity (RIC) in the US. Findings indicate that all three indicators of RIC – the average number of patents, firm innovations, and the number of innovative small firms – are positively associated with MCI, while their relationships were significant in two models. Policy implications suggest that sprawling regions could hinder the innovation capacity, while compact regions could remove the physical barriers to innovation generation through offering high quality places and accessibility to urban amenities. This could facilitate social interactions and enhance social capital, while minimizing poverty and segregation. Investment in compact urban forms, thus, deserves greater attention.
This article investigates the territorial conditions associated with the existence of creative activity clusters in extra-metropolitan areas. This issue is timely because the demographic, social and economic stagnation that continues to affect many of these areas requires recognition of the innovative dynamics that could alleviate it. We worked in a study zone composed of 2498 Spanish municipalities of between 1000 and 50,000 inhabitants distributed throughout the country. We began by identifying 514 municipalities with relative concentrations, or clusters, of creative activities. Next, we evaluated which factors explain the formation of the clusters identified: traditional factors related to markets and government policies—hard factors—or new factors related to, inter alia, amenities, tolerance, and the local climate—soft factors. To do this, we applied an econometric analysis that both manages employment and business data as exogenous variables and controls whether the demographic size and creative profile of the clusters influences the intensity of the clusterisation. The models obtained match the prediction only partially because they attribute the majority of the explanatory power to some hard-type factors but do not confirm the expectations raised by the soft factors. As a possible explanation we do not disregard the possibility that the literature has overvalued the benefit that extra-metropolitan or rural areas can extract from their specific advantages in the realm of “soft” factors. We believe that our study offers a valuable perspective on how creative activities are inserted into extra-metropolitan economies, and in this way, we contribute to a relevant social debate about rural development in both national and international spheres.
The goal of this study is to quantitatively examine the relationship between walkability and arts-related businesses in metropolitan areas across the United States. Model results indicate that the relationship between arts businesses and walkability is sensitive to the size or scale of the business considered, as well as to the definition of the arts used. Larger-scale businesses are somewhat more likely to locate in walkable neighborhoods than are small-scale arts-related businesses, which are less likely to locate in walkable neighborhoods. This difference is likely due to the higher cost of property in these neighborhoods. In this regard, community-level economic development and planning entities need to take proactive measures to ameliorate the cost externalities associated with modifications to urban environments to make them more walkable.
This article contributes to the creative city–community development arts policy debate by examining the association of arts organizations to various neighborhood contexts in New York City. Results from multivariate regression analyses show that arts organizations regardless of type are positioned to serve the creative class rather than play a community development role. Notably, only a small subset of locally focused organizations and organizations with smaller expenditures locate in disadvantaged and immigrant neighborhoods where they might play a direct role in community development. Instead, most arts organizations tend to locate in the most highly urbanized, amenities-rich areas with young working singles and creative industries. These findings raise important questions for incorporating the arts into neighborhood planning efforts.
In 1997, the Journal of the American Planning Association published a pair of point–counterpoint articles now listed by the American Planning Association as “classics” in the urban planning literature. In the first article, “Are Compact Cities Desirable?” Gordon and Richardson argued in favor of urban sprawl as a benign response to consumer preferences. In the counterpoint article, “Is Los Angeles-Style Sprawl Desirable?” Ewing argued for compact cities as an alternative to sprawl. It is time to reprise the debate. This article summarizes the literature on urban sprawl characteristics and measurements, causes, impacts, and remedies since the original debate.
In previous chapters special cases of the general linear model have been discussed and illustrated. This chapter builds on these prior chapters through the introduction of a set of advanced statistical modeling techniques also based on the general linear model called structural equation modeling (SEM). An important advantage of SEM over the basic general linear model is that dependent variables can also play the role of predictor variables within the same model. A second advantage of SEM relative to analyses based on the general linear model is the ability to estimate nonlinear models for categorical and censored data. In this chapter we will begin at a very basic level by defining SEM and illustrating some of the reasons why it may be a potentially useful tool for researchers. In this introduction we will place SEM on a continuum of the basic and advanced statistical approaches presented in this book. We ...
The Rise of the Creative Class, which was originally published in 2002, has generated widespread conversation and debate and has had a considerable impact on economic development policy and practice. This essay briefly recaps the key tenants of the creative class theory of economic development, discusses the key issues in the debate over it, and assesses its impacts on economic development policy.
This study pools household travel and built environment data from 15 diverse US regions to produce travel models with more external validity than any to date. It uses a large number of consistently defined built environmental variables to predict five household travel outcomes - car trips, walk trips, bike trips, transit trips and vehicle miles travelled (VMT). It employs multilevel modelling to account for the dependence of households in the same region on shared regional characteristics and estimates ‘hurdle’ models to account for the excess number of zero values in the distributions of dependent variables such as household transit trips. It tests built environment variables for three different buffer widths around household locations to see which scale best explains travel behaviour. The resulting models are appropriate for post-processing outputs of conventional travel demand models, and for sketch planning applications in traffic impact analysis, climate action planning and health impact assessment.
Across the nation, the debate over metropolitan sprawl and its impacts continues decade after decade. To elevate the debate, a decade ago, researchers developed compactness/sprawl indices for metropolitan areas and counties that have been widely used in health and other research. In this study, we develop refined compactness/sprawl indices based on definitions and procedures in earlier studies by Ewing and colleagues and validate them against transportation outcomes. The indices are being made available to researchers who wish to study the causes, costs and benefits, and solutions to sprawl and to practitioners who wish to check their community’s success in containing sprawl.
Initially published in 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class quickly achieved classic status for its identification of forces then only beginning to reshape our economy, geography, and workplace. Weaving story-telling with original research, Richard Florida identified a fundamental shift linking a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing importance of creativity in people’s work lives and the emergence of a class of people unified by their engagement in creative work. Millions of us were beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always had, Florida observed, and this Creative Class was determining how the workplace was organized, what companies would prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities would thrive.In The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited, Florida further refines his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, incorporates a decade of research, and adds five new chapters covering the global effects of the Creative Class and exploring the factors that shape “quality of place” in our changing cities and suburbs.
There has been significant research undertaken examining the “creative class” thesis within the context of the locational preferences of creative workers. However, relatively little attention has been given to the locational preferences of creative companies within the same context. This paper reports on research conducted to qualitatively analyse the location decision making of companies in two creative sectors: media and computer games. We address the role of the so-called “hard” and “soft” factors in company location decision making within the context of the creative class thesis, which suggests that company location is primarily determined by “soft” factors rather than “hard” factors. The study focuses upon “core” creative industries in the media and computer game sectors and utilises interview data with company managers and key elite actors in the sector to investigate the foregoing questions. The results show that “hard” factors are of primary importance for the location decision making in the sectors analysed, but that “soft” factors play quite an important role when “hard” factors are satisfactory in more than one competing city-region.
The aim of this paper is to provide basic stylized facts about the spatial patterns of location and co-location of clusters of creative industries in Europe. The research proposes a novel methodology for detailing the spatial delimitation of clusters, based on a geo-statistical algorithm and firm-based micro-data. The procedure is applied to a continuous space of 16 European countries and 15 creative industries in 2009. The investigation reveals that creative firms are highly clustered, and that clusters are concentrated in a ‘creative belt’ stretching from the South of England to the South-east of Germany. These clusters are predominantly metropolitan, heterogeneous, cross borders, and may co-locate to form assemblages.
This article analyses the cultural policy implications in the United Kingdom of a shift in terminology from cultural to creative industries. It argues that the use of the term “creative industries” can only be understood in the context of information society policy. It draws its political and ideological power from the prestige and economic importance attached to concepts of innovation, information, information workers and the impact of information and communication technologies drawn from information society theory. This sustains the unjustified claim of the cultural sector as a key economic growth sector within the global economy and creates a coalition of disparate interests around the extension of intellectual property rights. In the final analysis, it legitimates a return to an artist-centred, supply side defence of state cultural subsidies that is in contradiction to the other major aim of cultural policy – wider access.
Over the past two decades, urban and regional policy-makers have increasingly looked to the arts and culture as an economic panacea, especially for the older urban core. The arts' regional economic contribution is generally measured by totalling the revenue of larger arts organisations, associated expenditures by patrons and multiplier effects. This approach underestimates the contributions of creative artists to a regional economy, because of high rates of self-employment and direct export activity, because artists' work enhances the design, production and marketing of products and services in other sectors and because artists induce innovation on the part of suppliers. Artists create import-substituting entertainment options for regional consumers and spend large shares of their own incomes on local arts output. The paper takes a labour-centred view of the arts economy, hypothesising that many artists choose a locale in which to work, often without regard to particular employers but in response to a nurturing artistic and patron community, amenities and affordable cost of living. Because evidence on such economic impacts and location calculus is impossible to document directly, the distribution of artists across the largest US metropolitan areas is used as a proxy, using data from the PUMS for 1980, 1990 and 2000. It is found that artists sort themselves out among American cities in irregular fashion, not closely related to either size or growth rates. The paper further explores variations in the definition of artist, the relationship between artistic occupation and industry, and differentials in artists' self-employment rates and earnings across cities. It is concluded that artists comprise a relatively footloose group that can serve as a target of regional and local economic development policy; the components of such a policy are outlined.
Recent work has pointed towards the possibility that industries are not tied to their specific urban location as much as to their linkages with particular types of infrastructure and to their social and economic networks. Industries have similar clustering patterns even in very different cities. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, we conducted geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to compare cultural industries in Los Angeles and New York City, two cities with very different types of geography and urban environments. Two distinct findings emerged: (1) when cultural industries are disaggregated into distinct industrial subsectors (art, fashion, music, design), important differences among them emerge; and (2) cultural industries “behave” similarly in each city because their subsectors tend to colocate (e.g., art with design; music with film) in similar ways, and this colocation pattern remains consistent in both locations. Such notable clustering tendencies of cultural industries help inform future research and further enlighten our understanding of their location patterns.
Much emphasis has been placed on the importance of agglomeration economies as a backbone to urban and regional growth. Case study research points out that particular cities and regions have a competitive advantage in industrial activity over others, yet we have little by way of a satisfactory means of formally studying the geography of these industrial patterns to demonstrate how the specific case studies fit into a larger pattern of agglomeration that can be applied to more than one place. Is the agglomeration itself in fact exhibiting statistically robust and significant patterns? What do the patterns look like and how do they differ by region? Using geographic information systems to analyze spatial autocorrelation and “hot spots” of industries, we compare the ten most populous metropolitan statistical areas across several “advanced” service sectors (professional, management, media, finance, art and culture, engineering and high technology). We find that much of the qualitative evidence on industrial clustering is evocative of broader macro patterns that are both similar and dissimilar across industries and geographies. Our results indicate that there are three spatial typologies of growth in the advanced services within U.S. urban regions. These typologies allow us to intimate qualities of place in general and of places specifically that drive the agglomeration of advanced services. New York City's art and culture and media industries represent key examples of geographically unique cases within advanced services that are explained relative to existing literature regarding the importance of density and cross-fertilization across industrial fields.
Problem: In the last two decades, urban economic development has shifted its focus from industrial recruitment to talent and human capital, including art and culture. Many have argued that talented people are drawn to artistic and cultural amenities, but few have examined art and culture as a production system and drawn meaningful insights for urban planning and economic development based on understanding its inner workings. Purpose: This article looks closely at the mechanisms that structure and drive the cultural economy and suggests possible avenues for cultural economic development and policymaking based on these mechanisms. I focus on the ways cultural producers obtain jobs, advance their careers, gain value for their goods and services, and interact with each other. Methods: I conducted 80 interviews with cultural producers, cultural gatekeepers, and owners and managers of entertainment venues these groups frequent. Results and conclusions: I find that not only are artistic and cultural producers densely agglomerated, but that key social mechanisms structure and inform this clustered production system. These industries depend on unique kinds of social interaction, from nightlife to gallery openings, to thrive. This is more than just fun and games, and is critical to the operation of this economic sector. Takeaway for practice: Cultural producers rely heavily on their social lives to advance their careers, obtain jobs, and generate value for their goods, so that the local arts social milieu is critical to the cultural economy. Cultural producers also tend to cross-fertilize, collaborating to create goods and services, review each other's products, and establish new careers, meaning the ability to live and work in close proximity to one another is important. Finally, a large concentration of creative people and an active cultural milieu has made New York culture a known brand. While New York is unique, the cultural life of other cities and regions can also be economic development assets. Places can strategically cultivate the social milieus that are most conducive to the production of art and culture.
Bus rapid transit (BRT) has been a promising form of public transportation due to a higher burden of rail transit construction and operation. Many urban economists and planners argue that convenient public transit is one of the core urban strategies to attract and retain creative industries and increase employment density. Although many leaders of cities in the world pay attention to the new type of public transit, we have less understanding of the BRT impact on the location choice of creative industries and job density. Through multilevel modeling, this study tests whether BRT improvement in Seoul, Korea was appealing to the spatial patterns of creative industries and if it changed the spatial variation of employment density. This study confirms that the BRT system is the favorable component for the location of creative industries and service sectors within 500 meters of BRT-bus stops. In addition, the BRT operation increases the employment density within the same distance to the bus stops by 54%. The key findings suggest that enhancing the public transit system would be an effective strategy for higher competitiveness in the urban economy and compact urban structure.
Cities and regions have long captured the imagination of sociologists, economists, and urbanists. From Alfred Marshall to Robert Park and Jane Jacobs, cities have been seen as cauldrons of diversity and difference and as fonts for creativity and innovation. Yet until recently, social scientists concerned with regional growth and development have focused mainly on the role of firms in cities, and particularly on how these firms make location decisions and to what extent they concentrate together in agglomerations or clusters. This short article summarizes recent advances in our thinking about cities and communities, and does so particularly in light of themes advanced in my recently published book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which focuses on diversity and creativity as basic drivers of innovation and regional and national growth. This line of work further suggests the need for some conceptual refocusing and broadening to account for the location decisions of people as opposed to those of firms as sources of regional and national economic growth. In doing so, this article hopes to spur wider commentary and debate on the critical functions of cities and regions in 21st–century creative capitalism.
In the wake of the success of Richard Florida in particular, concepts such as the “creative class” and “quality of place” have become growing topics of debate in urban economics and urban geography. Originally developed to assess the competitiveness of U.S. cities, quality of place was applied to a group of European countries. However, analyses of quality of place at the national level can produce only an indicative picture. The objective of this article is therefore to gain a more detailed insight into the meaning and applicability of quality of place in a context different from the one in which Florida developed his ideas. First, it focuses on what quality of place actually entails, how far it can be measured in various contexts, and the main criticisms that can be leveled against Florida's ideas. Second, it draws a comparison between competitiveness and quality of place in the two largest cities in the Netherlands, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and discusses some of the main complications that arise from the analysis.