Creative Regions. Governance of Metropolitan Regions

Many European metropolises view an identity as a creative city as an opportunity to reposition themselves in the international competition among business locations. However, the shift from industry and services to a cognitive-cultural production and service activities varies greatly in different locations. A significant role is played here by the historic path dependencies, which result in very different initial positions for the various city regions and their efforts to attain a creative, knowledge-based economy. For instance, various city regions may already possess a broad variety of creative and knowledge-intensive companies from a purely quantitative viewpoint. And specific creative industries, such as the media industry (in particular film and television but also new media), are concentrated in Germany within a few metropolitan regions.

This poses the fundamental question of how the creative economy can be supported and which properties for specific sub-markets of the creative economy a location must possess in order for any attempt to promote such markets to meet with any success at all.

The next question is the scale at which individual forms of governance (should) act. While city measures directed most commonly toward micro-companies in cultural industries with the goal of improving specific quarters of a city act on the district level, cluster initiatives (such as media and games in Munich and Stuttgart) tend to act on the value creation chains within an entire metropolitan region.

In addition, the extremely heterogeneous structure of the creative companies and individual actors is also reflected in their differing demands and requirements for their physical environment. Large companies and global players in the music industry have different location requirements than DJs, small record labels or professional philharmonic musicians. On one hand, urban development must therefore address the creation of new locations for internationally active companies, for which attention and visibility, prominence and image are key location factors. On the other hand, particularly in the field of creative urban development, it is becoming increasingly important to create inexpensive spaces with experimental and niche character for start-ups as well as artistic and cultural endeavours without a commercial orientation as valuable resources for the establishment of creative milieus.

This poses very different challenges to cities possessing different contextual situations. While cities highly affected by structural change have more area available to satisfy the demand of creative industries, cities that already have a large base of creative and knowledge-intensive companies, such as Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt am Main, are confronted with the problem of scarce free space in their city centres and must deal with creative and cultural organisations leaving the city for a lack of opportunity and support as well as high leasing prices.

Particularly in inner-city districts, which are preferred by both established companies and creative organisations with lower financial means, it is a major challenge for economically prosperous cities to precisely differentiate the spatial requirements and needs of the companies and actors in order to implement regulatory instruments and incentives.

Key questions

The cultural and creative industry is a cross-disciplinary one and consists of heterogeneous sub-markets that exhibit very different production conditions and marketing structures. Nevertheless, a number of characteristic features can be identified that must be reflected within the development of specific forms of governance and that provide only little justification for the application of existing, traditional forms of control from other industries to the cultural and creative industries. With the exception of only a few sub-industries, the cultural economy primarily consists of micro-companies with only a few large companies in each area; middle size classes hardly exist. Project-based work structures with a large portion of freelancers dominate. Other features include a short half-life for the relevance of market knowledge, high pressure to innovate and rapidly changing project cultures the cultural economy is a high-risk area with extreme fluctuations in market success.

In defining a model of the cultural and creative sectors, it is possible to differentiate between a public, an intermediate and a private sector, whereby creative organisations can certainly receive orders from all three sectors. Although the borders between these three sectors are becoming increasingly blurred, it is possible to identify sub-areas that are heavily dependent on state funds, such as theatres, museums, orchestras or even film. Institutional subsidisation already has a long tradition in these areas, and organisations representing the individual interests have already been established. However, many sub-areas still lack their own organisational basis and industry associations that could serve as negotiation partners for consuming industries as well as for state institutions. As a result, widely differing forms of organisation can be found in the individual sub-markets, and the question arises which new forms of organisation could develop here to represent the interests within the individual sub-sectors.

Networks are most often discussed in connection with the forms of organisation of the creative economy. The terms organisations and networks encompass different aspects. The term organisation refers to forms of distributing work at a level above the individual. Companies are an organisational form of work distribution; they can also be understood as networks, but this overlooks some key aspects of organised distribution of work (contractual basis, company culture, etc.). It is often claimed in connection with the creative economy that new, flexible, temporary organisational forms are arising.

One important phenomenon in the cultural economy is found in the new agents, in other words intermediaries and brokers as culturepreneurs (Lange 2007) creativity brokers (Bilton/Leary 2002) or boundary spanners (Gander/Haberberg/Rieple 2007), who sometimes take on a certain control function within the flow of information. The agents are skilled at forming an interface; they are able and willing to take on a brokering function and can mediate between the two less compatible modes of thought and action found in agencies that distribute public funds and free, creative environments.

Another phenomenon we can observe in the creative economy is new approaches for professionalisation of both individuals and some entire sub-fields (e.g. games). This is significant for two reasons: First is the transition to paid work and a necessary economisation. Second is a social agglomeration: Groups arise with appraisal monopolies and specific expertise. Does this professionalisation also lead to new the formation of new professions as well as to the formation of new intermediary structures (e.g. professional associations)?

The increasing acceptance of the creative economy as a sphere of activity generates new questions regarding the ability to govern it. (Specialised) political agencies are on the search for solutions. The creative economy is not only an economic growth field but also an innovative reservoir of extremely diverse organisational and institutional answers to the fall of late capitalism with its large and inflexible units. As such, the creative economy deserves a prominent position in the search toward adequate instruments for an economy of smaller units and production niches that resists the centralism of political and economic control as well as the representatives of such an approach.

The concept of governance fundamentally takes on a guiding function in that the hierarchical, centralistic and managerial character of traditional forms of state control are being expanded and partially replaced by new, decentralised, network-like forms of contextualised control (Brand 2004). Several forms of governance can be differentiated: self-governance, co-governance and hierarchical governance (Kooimann 2004).

The term self-governance refers to communicative forms of self-organisation and self-guidance that can be identified particularly in what can be called the creative scenes. Potential for self-organisation and self-guidance is particularly relevant for the creative industries because it yields an ability to adapt to the market and has proven itself on the ground to a certain extent as well. From the perspective of market promotion, it is difficult to intervene in these informal networks in a way that provides stability and support.

Co-governance denotes to more institutionalized forms of cooperation in formalized networks.

Hierarchical governance refers to the traditional forms of top-down practices between state, public administration and private segments of creative industries.

If the intermediary level between the individual and society is assigned greater value, in other words if creative activities become more relevant within flexible, informal networks and professional scenes, this gives rise to questions of establishing leadership in structurally unstable situations. The possibility of leadership in times of increasing crisis and shrinking budgets arises only through acceptance of an essentially paradoxical basis: Since self-governance has developed from its initial swarm-like stage into professionalized platforms, the question of leadership if considered a modern concept must be asked anew.

More information and registration: http://www.creative-regions.de