Presentation for the Creative Exchange, Coal Exchange, Cardiff, June 2011.

1. Developing sustainable urban creative clusters Building Creative Partnerships Oli Mould taCity.co.uk @olimould

3. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth? Cities breed collaboration… “Economic development is a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible… Cities provide not only new problems to be solved, but also the best environment to solve them” (J. Jacobs) Shanghai from the air

4. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth? The Creative Industries thrive when innovation, creativity and inspiration are allowed to flourish Cities facilitate: Collaboration Inspiration Exchange of tacit knowledge or ‘buzz’

5. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth? In 1998, the creative industries consisted of 13 sub-sectors In 2011, ‘siloization’ of creative industry activity is unsustainable Cross-pollination and inter-disciplinary practice is commonplace

6. Cities + Creative Industry activity (± political intervention) = clusters ‘Creative clusters’ can either be organic or planned Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth?

7. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth?

8. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth? Creative Industry growth is often serendipitous and evolves from unconventional (and illicit) collaborations

9. NESTA reportlast year looked at Cardiff’s TV and Digital Media cluster… TV firms protective over IP issues Informal networking low in TV, high in Digital Media Collaborative Digital Media industry facilitates flow of information Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth?

10. Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth? Academic reports (Clifton, 2007) suggest that Cardiff has a high LQ in the UK, thereby ideally placed to attract ‘The Creative Class’ However, important to stress unique and distinctive urbanity, avoid the ‘generica’ creative development

11. What can be done to encourage further growth? Institutional Inertia is crucial – difficult to start from scratch Encourage inter-disciplinary links with (free) events with broad remit Connections with Higher Education crucial to future creativity/development Allow for failure Cities Creative Industries Clusters Cardiff Future Growth?

12. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)