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Università Iuav di Venezia
DADI Dipartimento delle Arti e
del Disegno Industriale
WP WORKING PAPERS
DADI/ WP_5/08
Le opinioni espresse in questa pubblicazione
sono responsabilità degli autori
Culture as an Engine of Local
Development Processes:
System-Wide Cultural Districts
Pier Luigi Sacco
Giorgio Tavano Blessi
Massimiliano Nuccio
aprile 2008
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Culture as an Engine of Local Development Processes:
System-Wide Cultural Districts*
Pier Luigi Sacco, PhD, Full Professor of Cultural Economics, DADI -
Department of Art and Industrial Design, IUAV University, Venice, Italy
sacco@iuav.it
Giorgio Tavano Blessi, PhD, DADI – Department of Art and Industrial
Design, IUAV University, Venice, Italy g.tavano@unive.it
Massimiliano Nuccio, PhD, Department of Economics and Marketing,
IULM University, Milan, Italy massimiliano.nuccio@iulm.it
Abstract
Starting at least from the seminal work of Alfred Marshall, the analysis
of economic processes has emphasized the spatial function of ‘clusters’
and ‘districts’ within economic development – in terms of external
economies on firms’ localization and agglomeration – and thus impacts
on the growth of productive sectors. Subsequently, these models have
also been geared to set out full-fledged local development processes.
After a few decades of analysis, agglomeration phenomena are still on
the theoretical agenda more than ever, but the recent debate has
introduced a significant novelty, underlining the importance of the
cultural dimension and the growing complementarity between culture
and local tangible and intangible assets in promoting the improvement of
the economic, social and environmental dimensions. Research has thus
focused on innovative paths of local development based on the spatial
clustering of cultural investments and activities.
* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 STP&A Conference in Wien
and at the 2007 STP&A Conference in New York. We thank seminar audiences for
useful comments, while retaining full responsibility for the paper.
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The paper aims to provide an analytical foundation for these processes,
and to develop tools for policy analysis and evaluation.
The article is divided into three sections: in the first one, the literature on
‘clusters’ and ‘districts’ will be reviewed, highlighting the concept of
cultural districts and related notions, and carrying out a comparative
analysis of key-cases found in post-industrial contexts. The case studies
allow highlighting the importance and role of cultural resources and
planning as a catalyst for major physical, economic and social renewal.
In the second section, a conceptual framework for culture-led
development processes will be developed, together with a strategic model
for the development of ‘system-wide cultural districts’, based on a
suitable asset-action matrix. The final section contains some critical
discussion and speculates on possible further theoretical development.
By ‘system-wide cultural districts’ we mean an idiosyncratic mix of top-
down planned elements and emergent, self-organized activities
coalescing into a model of local development in which cultural activity
displays significant strategic complementarities with other production
chains within typical post-industrial contexts. In this scenario, culture
drives the accumulation of intangible assets, such as human, social and
cultural/symbolic capital, thereby fostering economic and social growth
and environmental sustainability.
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1. Introduction
Many economically advanced countries have recently faced an intense
process of transition from a development model based on the industrial
economy (see Marshall, 1920) to a post-industrial one (see Porter, 2003).
From the 1970s, and following the upsurge of globalization-related
phenomena, such as labor-intensive production being delocalized from
industrialized to developing countries (see e.g. Ohmae, 1996), the
elements that have characterized the industrial era (see Porter, 1989) have
lost their propulsive role in comparison to new factors driving the
development of post-industrial societies (see Ritzer, 2007). This
transition is bringing about changes that go vastly beyond the dismissal
of old production modes. Consumption models, for instance, have
remarkably complexified (see e.g. Sassatelli, 2004), and, more generally,
post-industrial societies are undergoing a process of de-materialization of
affluence (see Inglehart, 1997) in which symbolic and identity features,
and thus cultural elements, play an unprecedented role (see Akerlof &
Kranton, 2000). Intangible factors such as knowledge, sociability, shared
meaning are becoming the true repositories of social and economic value.
At the economic level, there is by now a widespread although still
somewhat misstated recognition of the strategic role of culture in the
global competition game (see e.g. Gibson and Stevenson, 2004). On the
supply side, it is increasingly evident that products tend to become
culture-laden: their perceived value is more and more linked to aspects
and traits that cannot be objectively traced back to their physical features,
but are on the contrary strongly linked to the individual and social
narratives that they can credibly develop in the minds of consumers (see
e.g. Grafton Small, 2006). For this reason, culture migrates toward the
early stages of the product value chain, determining to a sensible degree
its market viability, in that it provides the ‘bricks’ of the narrative, that is
to say, the basic elements that are used to construct product-related
systems of meaning (see e.g. Charters, 2006). On the demand side, the
usual notions of given consumer tastes are basically challenged by new
phenomena such as ‘auratic’ consumption (buying objects that transmit
their characteristics to the buyer and define the social perception of
his/her personality; see e.g. Björkman, 2002) and more generally the
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dynamics and cultivation of taste as a complex chunk of personal,
socially adaptive inclinations (see McCain, 1979, 1981, 1995). And
again, building their own personal mythologies and narratives responding
to the stimuli that come from the market arena, consumers often
unintentionally build their own intangible, cultural capital of appropriated
symbols and meanings: a capital whose return can be measured in terms
of identity and social positioning (see Sacco and Viviani, 2003; Sacco
and Zarri, 2004).
At the social level, culture plays a manifold set of roles, from fostering
cohesion (in terms of bridging social capital) in socially diverse contexts
(see Everingham, 2003), to acting as an empowerment basis for socially
driven development of human potential (see Matarasso, 1997).
Amassment of cultural capital has thus become a facilitator for further
relevant goals such as the creation and/or regeneration of the social fabric
and the definition of a shared, compelling vision of local social and
economic development – pulling in an opposite direction with respect to
the familiar social dynamics of distinction that are typical of industrial
societies (see Bourdieu, 1984). This brings about immediate implications
at the planning level, where the cohesive, motivational power of culture
is eagerly sought to drive physical and social renovation of buildings and
areas, as well as an overall redefinition of the social logic of space use
(see Stevenson, 1998). For example, culture plays an important role in
the rehabilitation of landfill or brownfield areas. The creation of ‘cultural
boxes’ in areas with controversial land use destination is broadly
considered a smart move toward decreasing the individually and
collectively perceived area risk. In this perspective, culture is seen as a
sophisticated policy tool that provides a platform for collective awareness
and debate, helping to redefine them in more constructive ways once
rephrased within the ‘cultural box frame’ (see Scottish Executive, 2002;
DCMS, 2004; Dixon, 2006).
As a consequence of this, cultural policies are attaining an increasing
relevance in the policy-makers toolkit in the various dimensions – social,
economic, environmental. Not surprisingly, then, they have attracted
considerable attention both from theorists and policy makers (see among
others Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993; Stevenson, 1998; Throsby, 2001;
Moulaert et al., 2004; Roodhouse, 2006).
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In the literature, we find references to culture-led development processes
in terms of cultural clusters, or districts, or quarters. In most cases, all
these terms refer to the same phenomena of spatial concentration of
cultural, or culture-related, activities in specific areas of the city acting as
a sort of social and creative hub. Although vastly boasted as the ultimate
recipe for urban renewal and development, cultural hubs are neither
novel nor revolutionary. What is more interesting and worth attention is
the emergent role of culture as a system-wide leverage of coordination
and cooperation among local actors within a social learning process
focused on radical innovation practices. Here we therefore refer to a
broader meaning, speaking of cultural clusters/districts in terms of local
systems in which culture has taken or is taking a central place in the
definition of the strategic vision and in mediating interaction between
local stakeholders. The reason why we stick to an already existing
terminology rather than coining a new one is that we want to emphasize
the connection that this model presents with the so called industrial
district model that has been characteristic of Italian local development in
the past few decades and then largely studied and imitated abroad. The
cultural district/cluster model can be regarded as a post-industrial
adaptation of the old industrial district scheme, with several, important
qualifications.
The aim of this paper is to illustrate how this emergent systemic feature
of culture is characterizing many recent instances of culture-led local
development processes, and subsequently to set out an analytical
paradigm that allows to frame such processes into a simple theoretical
scheme, developing some preliminary policy implications. It is a largely
preliminary attempt that needs significant further development and
discussion but that may be useful to launch a critical debate on the issue.
2. Background and conceptual framework
The economic literature has investigated at length how and why firms
should decide to locate in a specific place. Basically, local agglomeration
of firms is due to some sort of increasing returns that give rise to a
positive feedback mechanism such that the more the firms that already
located in that place, the larger the incentive for more firms to do the
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same. In the absence of such increasing returns, there would be no
advantage in choosing one particular place rather than another.
The basic tenets of the economies of agglomeration are presented and
discussed in Marshall’s (1890) seminal contribution, making up the so
called Marshallian triad: demand and cost spatial effects, specific and
thick labor markets, and the ‘industrial atmosphere’. On the one side,
being close to a large final market (the demand side) and being close to
other firms lying upstream and downstream along the same value chain
entails clear competitive advantages in terms of travel costs, the
coordination of production, the optimal use of time, and so on. In
particular, being close to other complementary firms allows the
possibility of a far-reaching informal coordination that could work as the
decentralized equivalent of a large, vertically integrated firm (and this is
exactly what has happened in the most successful examples of industrial
districts in Italy). Moreover, the spatial concentration of firms operating
in the same productive sector and asking for a certain range of skills
facilitates the parallel concentration of skilled workers and the training of
new ones, thus ‘thickening’ the local labor market and making it more
efficient and reactive to changes in prices, the evolution of demand, and
so on. Finally, the ‘industrial atmosphere’, which at first sight could be
meant as the onset of systematic informational flows and spillovers
among local agents, but that fundamentally ends up being a truly local,
shared organizational culture working as the real entry barrier of the local
system, allows firms to share experiences, information, forecasts about
the future market dynamics, as well as extremely specific and critical bits
of knowledge about productive processes and products.
On the other hand, the literature has pointed out contrary forces
preventing agglomeration from going on indefinitely and making room
for the existence of alternative and possibly rival locations, from
congestion costs of all sorts (traffic, pollution, crime etc.) to constraints
posed by the location of immobile factors, to the dynamics of land and
real estate prices (see e.g. Krugman, 1998; Maignan et al., 2003).
But with the concentration of productive assets (especially physical
capital), a parallel concentration of intangible assets also taken place:
knowledge, social relationships, place identity gradually develop,
enriching the urban character of the agglomeration. As it has been widely
recognized, the process has unfolded through stages. In the first phase,
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the process has been mostly un-intentional and self-organized, following
the classical dynamics of social division of labor highlighted by Adam
Smith. As the competitive advantage of agglomeration was becoming
visible and evident, there has been an increasing tendency of policy
makers to overtake the whole process, with the aim to control it and
target its evolution to specific social and economic goals. Industrial
clusters have thus acquired a growing importance in the analysis of the
overall mechanics of local development processes, conditioning to a
large extent also decisions on urban planning and the management of city
functions (see Knox & Pinch, 2000). Agglomeration has taken a variety
of forms, from clustering around one or several large firms, to
constellations of complementary small-medium firms, with all the
intermediate possible variation. An important lesson that has been learnt
with time, however, is that the mere clustering of firms in a specific site
it is not per se sufficient to promote the development of a local area.
Spatial concentration has to be supported by a sustainable social system
where knowledge, social norms, conventions of mutual trust become the
pillars of an all-encompassing network of interaction and exchange.
Starting from the seminal work of Marshall, Michael Porter (1989) and
Giacomo Becattini (2000a,b) have in recent years studied, each one on
his own, industrial clustering phenomena in their more recent
developments. Porter has placed particular emphasis on the working of
economic factors and speaks of industrial clusters, whereas Becattini has
extensively analyzed the underlying social dimension, placing particular
emphasis on the ‘industrial atmosphere’ dimension, and speaking of
industrial districts. In Becattini’s view, the subtle developmental role of
intangible factors is carefully spelled out. Understandably he has the
Italian case in mind, and makes of it the almost exclusive object of
analysis, whereas Porter is focused on the North American cases and his
attention is especially driven by the different constellations that the
spatial concentration of firms may take. For these reasons, the
respectively preferred terms, cultural clusters vs. cultural district, have
ended up denoting slightly different analytical approaches if not
phenomena.
With the advent of the post-industrial era, the weight of traditional
industrial clusters/districts in local development scenarios has diminished
as new forms of productive specialization characterized by higher
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degrees of intangible value added have taken over. These new forms,
which are typically creativity - and innovation-based, assign a new role
to the cultural dimension, which in the traditional industrial city has
typically to do with leisure, entertainment and tourism (see e.g.
Mommaas, 2004). Consequently, the issue of the cultural geography of
the city has gained momentum, and so has the interest toward the
condensation of cultural activities into clusters and districts, and their
role in the local development process. Recent studies (see e.g. Cheng,
2006) are emphasizing the parallelism between industrial and cultural
‘atmosphere’ in these new instances of local development processes,
thereby establishing an ideal, although unintentional, continuity with the
industrial districts approach. But this continuity is already foreshadowed
in Becattini’s own analysis. In this new stream of literature on cultural
agglomerations in post-industrial cities, the social dimension is however
even more evident and compelling then in the traditional industrial
districts literature (see e.g. the thorough analysis of Lloyd, 2006).
The shift from industrial to cultural district here implies a major
substantial change: whereas the industrial district model is focused upon
(decentralized) vertical integration (an increasing level of coordination of
firms operating within a same value chain), the cultural district model is
sustained by horizontal integration (increasing levels of coordination and
complementarities among firms belonging to different value chains) that
leads to culture-driven forms of local economic and social development.
There are, indeed, lines of research that tend to conceive the cultural
district as a direct extension of the industrial district model, e.g. in terms
of vertical integration of the value chains of given local cultural and
tourism industries. Scott (2001) describes this mechanism in his book. He
provides an extensive overview of the value of the creative industries in
developing new economic opportunities for local areas, using a model in
which the notion of cultural district will be better referred to the idea of
‘creative industries’ district, thus an industrial district of a particular
kind. In his analysis, he clearly explains the effect of the spatial
agglomeration of firms and of the corresponding economies of scale. But
he narrowly approaches the consequences of this development process on
the local system’s social actors. Valentino (see Valentino, 2004)
discusses the phenomenon and the effect of cultural facilities/activities
within urban renewal strategies in Italy. He argues that cultural district
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models developed in Italy are oriented to building an imagery that may
be palatable to tourists, and a consequential positioning mostly focused
on providing new economic and cultural opportunities which will boost
the attractiveness of the city, while at the same time fostering vertical
integration of firms belonging to broadly meant cultural value chains.
Once again, the author avoids the investigation of the impacts and of the
effects of this strategy on the local tissue, in a vision of the cultural
district similar to the industrial one that does not adequately take into
account the differences between manufacturing-oriented activities such
as those characteristics of industrial districts and service-oriented ones as
are those deriving from cultural tourism and the like. Santagata (2004,
2006) makes an attempt at abridging the district vs. cluster-based
approaches by introducing a typology that encompasses various
possibilities, but that turns out to be focused on relatively specific cases
rather than spanning the full range of possibilities.
Differences between a cluster- vs. district-oriented approach are not
mainly definitional. The main dilemma remains that of evaluating value
creation of cultural activities in terms of their direct and indirect
economic impact, which is typical of a cluster-based kind of thinking, or
in terms of their overall impact on all sorts of dimensions, primarily the
social one. In the latter case, what becomes crucial is the impact that a
given local development model brings about upon intangible local assets
such as social and identity capital. To appreciate this point, consider the
case of Venice: certainly a place whose local economy is dominated by
cultural tourism, and a thriving local economy by purely economic
standards. But, as a matter of fact, when one looks into the specific
activities and practices that make up this apparently thriving economy,
one readily realizes that most of the value added produced by local firms
derives from a trivial exploitation of the most cursory stereotypes of the
city that is gradually destroying both the city’s social fabric and cultural
environment. Today’s Venice is much closer to an amusement park than
to an art city, and this is because its almost unconditional surrender to the
imperatives of mass tourism is causing the intangible multipliers of the
local economy to be dramatically negative, more than offsetting the
positive tangible multipliers connected to a tourist-tailored retail
economy. What makes perfect sense from a narrowly economic
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viewpoint, maker very poor sense from a wider perspective (see also
Sacco et al., 2007).
The cultural district model may be better focused upon the activation
effects of culture in creating a local knowledge-friendly ‘atmosphere’, an
economic and social environment in which easy and continued access to
cultural opportunities fosters a widespread social orientation toward
innovative thinking, far-reaching visions of human development and
social cooperation. But up to now, most of the literature which dealt with
cultural districts making direct reference to the Italian paradigm of the
industrial district has paradoxically taken an instrumental route much
akin to the one typical of the cluster approach, repeating the
contradictions already pointed out in the case of Venice: turning heritage
sites into profit-oriented amusement parks, without proper attention to
the long term impacts - i.e. social sustainability, impact on real estate
dynamics and the social use of space, etcetera (see Sacco and Tavano
Blessi, 2005a).
There are reasons to believe that a too mechanical extension of the
original Marshallian idea to the cultural field runs the risk of missing the
basic points and of foregoing the key opportunities provided by cultural
investments in the social and human local dimensions (see Sacco et al.,
2007a, for a critical discussion), thereby reproducing the cultural cluster
rather than the cultural district logic of development. The main weakness
of this position is in its insistence of thinking of the cultural district as a
vertically integrated value chain that replicates the same, successful
model of intra-sectoral competition that has been typical of industrial
districts. Culture per se may also be an expanding sector of activity in its
own right, as several, independent field studies are showing (see e.g.
KEA, 2006), but its real value added comes from its capacity to promote
system-wide (horizontal) integration of diverse activities, all accruing to,
and taking benefits from, the development of a full-fledged knowledge-
based economy. That is to say, even if culture would not be profitable per
se (as it is the case, by the way, in many, important cultural sectors), it
would be as well a crucial local development engine in the current
scenario: this is why, rather than merely speaking of cultural districts, we
prefer to speak of system-wide cultural districts.
The development of a system-wide type of district can happen starting
both from a bottom-up or a top-down process, depending on the specific
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context, although even in the bottom-up cases, sooner or later some
agency or coordinating actor gains some leadership in the process
without fully superseding the self-organized development. The former
case is typical of situations where the pioneering agents are private ones
(firms, non-profits, universities and learning centers, cultural institutions
etcetera), whereas public actors jump in at a later stage: this is somewhat
typical of North-European cases, although evidence is found in Europe as
well. The latter case, instead, fully represent situations where the initiator
is a public player that gradually involves private parties in a shared local
development vision, and is most typical, although not exclusive, of the
European context.
As a matter of fact, however, full-fledged, successful models rely upon a
close interplay between the self-organized and the planned dimensions,
so that the bottom-up vs. top-down opposition is not really meaningful; it
is only useful to discern different aspects of the same process. What is
always true, however, is that one cannot expect to spark a system-wide
cultural district dynamics effectively but in contexts where a broad
spectrum of knowledge-related activities is locally well represented even
if not necessarily initially involved: local government; civil society (the
so called third sector); universities and educational systems; businesses.
Cultural producers, which are also a crucial agent of the process, partially
overlap both with the civil society and with the corporate sector, but have
a crucial, distinctive role. For a more extensive discussion, we refer the
interested reader to Sacco et al. (2007a).
System-wide cultural districts (meant as a synthesis of planned and self-
organized components) may be usefully investigated from the viewpoint
of several lines of research in apparently diverse fields. In particular, we
want to emphasize three of them, which could also be regarded as
thematic characterizations of the three basic aspects of culture-driven
development:
- The creativity-based attraction model of Richard Florida (2002), that
emphasizes the role of quality of life and of technological
infrastructure in the creation of a critical, locally rooted mass for the
emergence of a knowledge-oriented economy;
- The competitiveness-based urban renovation model of Michael Porter
(1989), that focuses upon the transition from an investment-based
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industrial economy toward an endogenously growing, innovation-
based economy;
- The capability-based model of Amartya Sen (1992, 2000), which
builds the central role of the social fabric in fostering capability-
building activities and practices as a prerequisite for viable economic
development.
The system-wide cultural district model ideally encompasses all these
aspects in a common theoretical perspective where the crucial integrating
role is played by cultural innovation and production (in its interaction
with technological innovation), and by its gradual transmission to
different industries, fields of activity, and local players and communities.
The ‘system-wide’ aspect of the model comes from the fact that the
diffusion dynamics are gradually rationally anticipated to an increasing
degree by the actors of the local system and are therefore more and more
strategically pursued as a coherent, collective, cooperative endeavor of
cross fertilization between all local stakeholders.
Starting from a meta-review of the existing literature and case studies,
Sacco et al. (2007b) identify twelve strategic dimensions that can be
thought of as a substantial generalization of the specific frameworks of
the theoretical approaches of Florida, Porter and Sen, and that together
span the complex set of conditions allowing for a viable and sustainable
development of a system-wide cultural district dynamics; clearly the
combination of such conditions will be highly idiosyncratic to each
specific context:
1. Quality of Cultural Supply (QCS)
The existence of a cultural milieu of organizations and institutions that represent and
organize the local creativity base while at the same time providing challenging cultural
standards, making the local cultural supply palatable to wider though specific global
audiences;
2. Quality of Local Governance (QLG)
One or more local administrations credibly committing on the enhancement of coordination
and cooperation of local actors around a shared, socially equitable knowledge development-
based vision;
3. Quality of the Production of Knowledge (QPK)
The existence of a strong base of educational, research and knowledge trasnfer institutions
that present at least a few areas of excellence;
4. Development of Local Entrepreneurship (DLE)
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The availability of (merit based) opportunities and facilities to develop new entrepreneurial
projects by local people in knowledge-related sectors;
5. Development of Local Talent (DLT)
The existence of a stimulating and motivating social and cultural environment that
encourages and rewards the skilled and creatively talented young to emerge, that provides
opportunities to showcase their work and to expose it to qualified talent-scouts;
6. Attraction of External Firms and Investments (AEF)
Creating the legal, financial, logistic, environmental, socio-cultural conditions for non-local
knowledge-related firms to settle down and for outside capitals to be invested locally;
7. Attraction of External Talent (AET)
Creating the logistic, socio-cultural conditions for emerging and acclaimed talents to settle
down or at least to put a stake in the local milieu for the development of their professional
career and relationships;
8. Management of Social Criticalities (MSC)
Referring to culture and knowledge-related activities and practices as basic, widely
experimented tools for the mediation and the rehabilitation of socially critical situations;
9. Capability Building and Education of the Local Community
(CBE)
Devising and implementing community-wide initiatives aimed at fostering a systematic and
widespread accumulation of intangible assets, especially in terms of capability of access to
knowledge-intensive experiences;
10. Local community involvement (LCI)
Promoting an extensive and generalized participation and attendance of all local
communities to knowledge-related initiatives and practices;
11. Internal Networking (IN)
Providing a strong networking among all local players having complementary strategic
interests and fostering close, regular cooperation and coordination in their activities;
12. External Networking (EN)
Establishing a dense, stable web of relationships with a number of other local contexts
characterized by similar tensions toward the development of system-wide, knowledge
intensive cultural, social and economic orientations.
For a more detailed discussion of each single dimension, see also Sacco
and Tavano Blessi (2007). It is interesting to notice that the interplay of
the twelve conditions creates a much more subtle and complex range of
theoretical and policy issues than one could figure out sticking entirely to
one of the classical approaches referred to above. For instance, it allows
to take into account all of the complex implications for the sustainability
of the local communities that are somewhat underplayed, say, by a
classical Florida-inspired creative class gentrification dynamics (see e.g.
Peck, 2005, for a critical discussion). It is also important to point out
what is the meaning of ‘knowledge-related’ activities in our
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characterization of the twelve dimensions. Certainly, cultural and
creative activities as defined, for instance, by KEA (2006) on the basis of
the classical formulation of UK’s Department of Media, Culture and
Sport, are (a central) part of the picture; but more generally, any kind of
activity that is bound to present strategic complementarities with the
above is potentially a knowledge-related activity, no matter how
‘industrial’ or ‘old economy’ it may look like. Think for instance of the
top quality segment of the food and wine industry, which is currently one
of the most knowledge-laden competitive fields of the whole spectrum of
economic activity, and which traditionally pertains at the same time at
the most archaic sector of the economy, namely the agricultural one. In
other words, it is not possible to draw in principle firm boundaries
between the activities that should belong to the knowledge-related area
and the ones that should not. The distinction is highly context-specific
and should follow from an accurate evaluation of the characteristics and
practices of a specific local context.
In the following section, we will review a few case studies which
represent interesting illustrations of a system-wide cultural district kind
of dynamics, briefly discussing how the above twelve dimensions play a
part in that specific environment and how they synergetically combine to
produce a successful outcome.
3. Assessing drivers and impacts: some cases.
As we already emphasized in the previous section, system-wide cultural
districts may emerge starting from a bottom-up or a top-down logic,
although eventually the two need to mix up in an entirely idiosyncratic
combination tailored for that specific milieu. Also, it is the case that,
initially, one of the three drivers mentioned with reference to already
established approaches, the attraction-drive approach by Florida, the
competitive restructuring-driven approach by Porter, and the capability
building-driven approach by Sen, tends to play a major role in the
establishment phase, even if all aspects tend to become relevant in the
long run. All the above basically boils down to a specific combination of
the twelve dimensions previously introduced, and in particular to a
history-dependent path of activation that brings a few of them on the
stage and subsequently explore the hidden potential of others as the
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model unfolds toward maturity. This is why it may be useful to examine
some such cases with an eye to the incidence of the twelve dimensions to
understand the specific mechanics gearing up in one context with a view
to developing a more general analytical methodology.
1. Valencia (Spain)
The city of Valencia, once a rather ordinary and provincial Spanish city,
has recently undergone one of the most ambitious and far-reaching urban
renewal processes at the European, if not at the global, scale, which has
transformed the city, and to a degree the whole surrounding region, in a
thriving global cultural hub, with a remarkable growth of both tourists
and residents flows and of social and economic development, rivaling
with the nearby Barcelona.
The two major projects at the urban scale that gave the tune to the whole
process have been the ‘Plan de Rehabilitacion Integral de Valencia – Plan
RIVA – and the ‘City of Art and Science’ inside the new urban park. The
Plan Riva focuses on the renewal process of the historical city centre,
one of the most important European historical old towns in terms of
dimension (147 ha.) and cultural heritage, which at the present
constitutes the 3.67% of the whole extension of the urban area (as of
2000). At the beginning of XXth century, the area represented the
32,21% of the whole city (as of 1910), the most populous and dynamic
part of the urban area. From 1910, responding to the growth of the
population and of the level of economic activity, Valencia started to
expand the urban area, reaching the actual dimension of more than
14.000 Ha (as of 2000). The historical centre is characterized by a
complex fabric of spontaneous and planned elements, mixing quite
diverse cultural influences caused by different dominations, like the
Arabic walls of the XIth century or the Christian walls of the XIVth
century, which also became the border between the centre of the city and
the neighbors until the XIXth century.
In 1957, a disaster flooding of the Turia River into the city centre, created
structural damages to the urban infrastructures, with huge impacts in the
social and economic tissue of the whole old town. It’s important to
underline that, until the Sixties, the city centre hosted a lively and richly
diverse mix of small economic activities, but in the last quarter of the
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XXth century, as an aftermath of the Turia flooding, the population
decreased from 56.391 inhabitants (as of 1970) to 24.027 (as of 1996):
the city center then suffered from massive abandonment, closing down of
economic activities and upheaval of social conflicts among local
residents (within the Christian walls enclave) and the rest of the city. In
1992, a conjoint project of the Generalitat Valenciana (the Regional
administration) and of the Municipality of Valencia, within the more
general framework of the city’s strategic plan (see below) launched a
special agency – Oficina de Rehabilitazion Urbana – with the aim to
define a new strategy for the renewal of the city centre – the Plan RIVA.
The plan presents innovative characteristics, focusing attention not only
on the physical infrastructures (i.e. buildings restoration, creation of new
facilities, etcetera), but also studying innovative actions and approaches
for the economical, cultural, and social fields (e.g. paying attention to
social inclusion issues). The plan’s objectives include:
¾ Maintaining the resident population and attracting new residents
aiming at a socially and culturally diverse urban environment;
¾ Enhancing the area’s infrastructural endowment with the creation of
social, cultural and educational facilities and with the revitalization
of the local retail economy;
¾ Fostering direct participation to the renewal process, following a
participatory approach centered on close consultation with local
stakeholders;
¾ Promoting public-private partnerships for the sustainability of urban
renewal actions and infrastructural investments.
The project has focused attention on three ‘districts’ (Barrios) of the
historical centre, Velleuters, Carmen and Mercat: three areas presenting
substantial social criticalities (due to the settlement of low-income,
poorly educated immigrants and to extensive phenomena of urban
decay), with the imaginable economic and environmental fallouts. An
eloquent figure to understand the socio-economic condition of the area at
that moment is the yearly income of local families, which in 1992, in the
90% of the cases was close to 6.000 €/year: an impressively low value
for Western-European standards.
The plan has been funded by the Generalitat and City Hall
administrations, also benefiting from European URBAN 1 and FEDER
Funds. The main policy tenets were:
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1. Favoring indirect policy action, i.e. funding and supporting
private initiative whenever possible, rather than monopolizing
public interventions;
2. Creating the context for a new social logic of space use, through
infrastructural rehabilitation and renovation, and the opening of
new social and communitarian spaces, educational/cultural
facilities and leisure areas.
The results of the project over the 1992-2003 period are impressive:
- 1.825 new private projects/initiatives of rehabilitation;
- 7.300 apartments rehabilitated with public funds;
- 68 new spaces dedicated to private activities (commercial,
educational ecc.);
- 7 new cultural and educational facilities (new School of Music, new
Contemporary Art Museum, new University buildings, and so on);
- 125 ml. € of private investments leveraged by 50 ml € of institutional
financial aid;
- 30.000 citizens involved in the projects;
- 118.000 square meters of re-urbanized public space;
- 335 new public houses;
- a positive, although initially modest (but subsequently more
substantial, with an increasing number of foreigners), residents flow
balance (after 30 years of deep-red figures).
Today, the old city has been integrally rehabilitated and is one of the
most thriving and captivating parts of the metropolitan area.
A second major project that was a result of the Turia river flooding of
1957, was the municipality of Valencia’s decision to modify the river-
bed route, creating a new way for the river to the sea, avoiding to get
across the city centre as it originally was. The City of Art and Science is
thus an outcome of an urban transformation project whose roots trace
back to the Seventies. In 1986, the 120 hectares of the old, now dry 10
km-long river-bed were re-designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo
Bofill to become a remarkably innovative linear park, the Jardins del
Turia, a green belt servicing the whole city that hints at the concept of the
Moorish Gardens, thus making a direct reference to an important period
of the city’s history. The green belt is divided into twelve sections, the
former ones being mainly devoted to sporting an open-air activities,
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whereas the latter ones are spotted by important cultural facilities.
Starting from this early achievement, in 1988, the Generalitat and the
Valencia City Hall launched a far-reaching strategic plan, the General
Urban Organization Plan (GUOP), to redesign the whole layout of the
city, and announced an international competition for the construction of
the new city communication tower, to be located somewhere along the
new green belt. The competition was won in 1991 by the Valencia-born -
but internationally renowned - engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava,
who was also appointed for the design of a new, extremely ambitious
culture and leisure facilities complex situated just aside of the final
segment of the Jardins del Turia, in an area that had been decaying for
decades because of the presence of highly polluting industrial activities
and at the beginning of the project was basically an urban wilderness. An
impressive number of cultural facilities – ‘L’Emisfèric’ (a Planetarium
with an IMAX Cinema, a Laserium and a university conference hall
devoted to astrophysical courses); the ‘Principe Felipe’ Science Museum
(a 40.000 square meters facility designed according to XXI century
museum standards in terms of interactivity and audience involvement);
the ‘Umbracle’ (an impressive sculpture garden); the ‘Oceanografic’ (an
ocean park with an extremely large underground development over a
80.000 square meters area); the ‘Palau de les Arts’ (a multi-auditorium
complex of 43.000 square meters hosting both concerts and educational
activities) – were opened one after the other, one every few years starting
from 1998, for a total investment estimated to stay close to 3 bn. €. The
centre is directed by a special company created by the Generalitat, the
‘Ciutad de las artes y las ciencias’ S.A., managing both the complex and
its activities, and is visited by more than 4 millions people every year.
Parallel to the development of the complex, some 5.000 new residences
have been built in the surrounding area, transforming one of the most
critical and marginalized spots of the whole metropolitan area in one of
the preferred residential locations; moreover, the area is well connected
to the city center by the underground public transportation system.
The vision behind the GUOP was that of making of Valencia a green and
European city, developing toward the sea and pursuing a high level of
social integration and of cultural vitality, playing an ambitious leadership
role in the Western Mediterranean quadrant. The three main strategic
axes were cultural development, scientific-technological development,
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and environmental sustainability. It is, evidently, a strongly top-down
oriented model. Nevertheless, and here its strength lies, it is also a model
that heavily relies on the unleashing of private resources and energies and
on a vastly inclusive and participative conception of the role of the local
communities. The reaction of the local system has been overwhelming:
the actual city’s quality of life is very high, and Valencia is becoming
one of the preferred residential locations at the continental level, as well
as an emerging cultural and scientific capital, while at the same time
qualifying as a primary tourism venue hosting big events such as
America’s Cup Finals and, from 2008, the second urban circuit for
Formula 1 races after Montecarlo.
Evaluation of impact using the strategic dimensions
The role of culture as the ‘red thread’ in the re-invention of the urban
identity of Valencia is all the more evident, as it is evident the leading
role, in the initial stage of the process, of the ‘competitive restructuring’
driver. At the same time, the fact that the top-down action has found
correspondence in the behavioral response of the local communities,
which were actually called from the beginning to participate actively in
the process, makes room for good chances of long-run sustainability.
The GUOP main elements have been – other than, of course, QLG,
which is the pre-requisite for a sound top-down project, and IN (the close
institutional cooperation between the Generalitat and the City Hall has
been an indispensable part of the picture, subsequently replicated with
the massive involvement of local private partners in the rehabilitation
plan) – QCS, QPK, and LCI: betting on culture and science as the assets
that could build a new local competitiveness model, with a substantial
inclusive attitude. Massive popular participation is by the way highly
ritualized and firmly rooted in the city’s cultural memory thanks to Las
Fallas, in internationally famous ritual feast that is deeply felt by
Valencians and that attracts increasing amounts of tourists every year
without losing its original spirit. The spectacular project of the city of
Arts and Sciences has added substantially to the city’s identity capital,
and has contributed substantially to both AEF and AET, by signaling in
an eloquent manner the city’s commitment toward an ambitious path of
cultural development, and CBE, creating one of Europe’s largest cultural
facilities complexes and actively promoting local attendance and
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sociability around the new city agorà. CBE has been also substantially
pursued through the impressive increase in cultural and educational
facilities all around the city – the comparison of the actual cultural
infrastructure endowment with the pre-Nineties one is flattening. The
Plan RIVA has, on the other hand, basically designed around the MSC
dimension, making of culture-led renovation a radical challenge to the
old city’s seemingly unmanageable decay, and the same philosophy has
been replicated in the choice of location for the City of Arts and
Sciences, although in a radically different context from the point of view
of the pre-existing social structure. The Plan RIVA has also given a
substantial contribution on the DLE dimension, by promoting the re-
discovery of traditional arts and crafts productions throughout the old
city center and their creative combination with more trendy and cutting
edge activities in design, fashion design, music, and club entertainment.
More generally, Valencia has been developing in the past few years an
interesting and vibrant juvenile creative scene that demonstrates the
relevance of the DLT dimension. Finally, the EN dimension, once quite
poor and under-developed, has currently a big momentum, especially
through the development of the networks of the city’s main cultural
institutions like the IVAM – the contemporary art center – the Palau de
les Arts, the local Universities, and so on. The full spectrum of strategic
dimensions has thus found resonance in the city’s development path of a
system-wide cultural district. The dynamics started as a top-down
renovation one, to develop subsequently both the attraction and the
capability-building drivers in full and to unleash a considerably rich and
complex bottom-up, self organized response, thus fleshing out a
complex, specific, mature local development model whose potential is
probably not yet entirely expressed.
2. Austin (Texas - USA)
Austin is the capital city of Texas and the fourth largest State urban area
in terms of population. As is the case for most of the American southern
states, the economy of the whole area is historically based on oil-related
industries, agriculture and cattle, with a traditionalist social environment
and a relatively conservative business atmosphere. From the beginning of
the 1990s, something started to change in the economic and social
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sectors, with almost immediate practical consequences. For instance,
Forbes’ ranking – in collaboration with the Milken Institute – of the ‘Best
Places for Business and Career’, in the period at the turn of the decade
regularly placed Austin in the Top Ten of the American urban areas.
‘Keep Austin weird’ has been the ‘new’ Austin’s largely endorsed
cultural imperative.
Having to cope with Houston, Dallas-Ft Worth and San Antonio, Austin
has had a hard time competing with these large and quite vital neighbors,
but has managed to find a place on the map with a top-down policy based
on the attraction of businesses and investments in high-tech fields,
aiming to become the new American ‘Silicon Valley’. Austin has been a
textbook example of Richard Florida’s creative class paradigm: it is no
coincidence that it is reserved a specific paragraph in Florida’s (2002)
book, as one of the archetypal examples of what a creative city is. The
city’s business-friendly fiscal and administrative policies have managed
to attract many of the big players of the IT markets, including Motorola,
Texas Instruments, Samsung, IBM, Dell, AT&T, Qualcomm, Intel and T-
mobile, to name just a few. In a few years, to contrast the cyclical slumps
of the IT industry, the specialization profile of the local economy has
substantially broadened toward sectors such as automotives, biotech and
medical engineering, transportation and logistics, and even (hello again)
food. And the initial top-down stance has been quickly complemented - if
not even reversed - to bottom-up by an incredibly vital and
entrepreneurial local business community, which has taken the initiative
not only to launch new activities and projects, but first and foremost to
create an impressively cohesive local interaction network for the
exchange of ideas, prospects and outright cooperation.
The effects of this attraction policy in the pioneering decade 1990-2000
are easily traced: the average yearly personal income jumped from
18,092 US$ in 1990 to 32,039 US$ in 2000; 280,000 new jobs were
generated; real estate prices increased by 130%, arriving at an average
price for an apartment of 200,000 US$. A crucial role in this
transformation was played by educational and research sectors. The
University of Texas at Austin has a national reputation and several
departments, including Computer Science, are centers of excellence. A
number of important research consortia are active in the area, and the
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level of educational achievement is constantly within the nation’s Top
Twenty range for metro areas according to the Forbes-Milken ranking.
Initially the economic resource base for this transformation was drawn
from the surpluses generated by the old-economy activities, but Austin’s
new economic development model soon became self-sustaining and
endogenously growing. Still, one should not think of Austin as a
Southwest replica of Silicon Valley, and not only because it soon
diversified its productive assets in several directions. Building a strong
high-tech industrial core, the quality of life and the environment, good
public services, a multi-ethnic, well-integrated community, affordable
living have all been important factors, but the deep tone of Austin’s
urban identity is its cultural atmosphere – the idea that what makes the
city different is its devoted openness to the unexpected and the
unfamiliar.
In particular, the cultural sector shows an incredible variety of activities
for a city of approximately 500,000 inhabitants. The city hosts more than
100 performing arts venues and production centers of folk music, the
Austin Museum of Art containing modern and contemporary visual art,
the Zachary Scott Theatre Centre focused on musicals and opera, the
Austin Musical Theatre and Austin Lyric Opera promoting symphonic
music and opera again, and two national dance companies, the Tapestry
Dance Company and The Rude Mechanicals. Furthermore, every year in
September the whole city becomes the stage for two significant events:
the Austin City Limit Music Festival, a pop/rock festival with more than
200,000 visitors hosted by the tourist structures of the city, and the South
by Southwest Festival, a world famous event where the most recent and
innovative IT applications in the media and performing arts disciplines
are shown. The festival also presents a program of shows, concerts and
film screenings where new forms of creativity and innovative
technologies are employed. Open debates and conferences also allow the
public to approach the latest in new technologies development, following
and understanding their evolution in the fields of media and performing
arts.
Locally based and headquartered companies have recognized the
potential of this ample, diversified cultural platform for the further
development of the city’s attractiveness and more generally as a factor of
competitive advantage. For example, Samsung has decided to invest 1.3
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billion US$ in a new high-density chips production centre and in 2001
also donated 300,000 US$ to finance the new Performing Arts Centre,
inviting the other companies to move along the same lines.
As already noticed, the recent history of Austin certainly makes a case
for Richard Florida's emphasis toward the attraction of the creative class:
promotion of quality of life, a development process based on creativity
and innovation, and so on. But this is only part of the story, and reducing
the Austin model to an illustration of Florida’s recipe would amount to
badly missing its essence. The other important, strategic element to be
considered is the widely participatory approach of the city’s local
communities and of all the local stakeholders in the majority of the
projects. Big Austin, a society founded by the municipality whose
mission is supporting and providing financial aid for new companies and
entrepreneurs is an example; another one is the Entrepreneurs
Foundation of Central Texas, a highly innovative institution whose
mission is to take a step forward in corporate philanthropy asking
associates to donate not only time or competence, but even equities (from
more than 170 companies of any size) to support the local network of
nonprofits addressing any kinds of social criticalities and marginality
(education, housing, social inclusion, environment and so on). To date,
the foundation has distributed more than 1 million US$ to over 70 local
nonprofits during 8 years of operation, and an extra 1 million US$ is now
available for further grant-making. A special high-tech fund has been
created to raise money to support Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Central
Texas, whose seed money has been raised through contributions from
high-tech employees and acquaintances, raising an overall 480.000 US$
in six weeks. What is particularly interesting is the implicit redistribution
mechanism that is at work here: part of the wealth produced through the
area’s high tech development is handed over to the more fragile
components of the community, in order to preserve its social diversity
and avoid transforming the city in a ‘creative class ghetto’, that is to say,
a look-cool, affluent-only, cozy urban scenery. This is a vision that goes
far beyond common sense corporate philanthropy, linking it to the long-
run social sustainability of the local system, looking not merely at wealth
or jobs creation, but also to the accumulation of intangible, crucial assets
such as social and symbolic/cultural capital. And this calls for a win-win
kind of strategy where success must be measured by the extent to which
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the benefits of economic growth accrue to the largest possible share of
the community, thereby encouraging inclusive, rather than positional and
exclusive, human and social development.
Although such as attitude could be quickly dismissed by someone as
utopian and unfit to meet the increasingly challenging pressure of global
competition, the economic performance indicators speak for themselves.
To cite just a few:
• Patents registered: in 1975, 74; in 2001, 2,014, an increase of 2621%,
(in the same period the whole of the United States registered an
increase of 100%)
• 36.1% of employees work in the intangible post-industrial economy:
242,000 out of 670,000. The average annual salary of a creative
worker is 52,285 $; the 54.4% of the total salary fund is allocated to
the creative class (12.6 billion US$).
In other words, the city’s participatory, socially equitable approach does
not impede its post-industrial creativity-oriented transformation, but
actually favors it. Creativity-related jobs pay more than average and tend
to be very productive in terms of innovative performance, and this
attracts further talent from outside. But part of the private return from the
city’s creative excellence is given back as social return. Thus there may
be no trade-off between being competitive and creative and being
socially responsible; possibly, the opposite is true.
One should not think, however, that Austin’s development record has
been straightforward and flawless. The hard high-tech cutting edge taken
by the local economy has exposed it massively to the ups and downs that
characterize the turbulent evolution of these sectors. For instance, the
massive recession that struck the country at the beginning of the current
decade has a serious negative occupational impact on the city, and as a
consequence the already cited Milken Institute ranking plummeted
dramatically – from place 19 in 2002 to 59 in 2003. Coping with this
emergency partly explains the progressive widening of Austin’s portfolio
of productive specializations. Some of the most interesting initiatives
taken by the city government, such as the Opportunity Austin plan
launched in 2003 to give new impulse to the city’s attractiveness and
global competitiveness, may be also read as prompt responses to
potential or actual threats of structural crises. Indeed, the difference
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between unsuccessful or successful local development models is not the
occurrence vs. absence of crises, which are on the contrary inevitable, but
rather the way the local system reacts to them. And this is one of the
hallmarks of the Austin model: the ability to design and implement
timely and widely cooperative reactions. Once again, the Milken Institute
rankings provide a clear illustration of this: after having stayed down for
a couple of extra years while the re-organization phase went on (58 in
2004, and even 64 in 2005), the city bounced back to position 20 in the
2007 report, based on 2006 data (there has been no 2006 report). In other
words, Austin has developed what we could call a homeostatic adaptation
capacity which derives from its ability to constantly pursue richness and
depth of internal diversity while maintaining cohesion: the tension
toward keeping the city weird (i.e. the openness toward expressive rather
than instrumental rationality) makes of it one of the most terse
illustrations of how a system-wide cultural district works in practice.
Evaluation of impact using strategic dimensions
In the Austin case, we observe a wide spectrum of initiatives addressing
different targets but thoroughly characterized by a clear social
responsibility orientation. Thus the link is not simply going from
(development and attraction of) culture and talent to local economic
growth, but involves an inclusive, participatory re-weaving of the whole
area’s social texture, coping with the change commanded by the
knowledge-oriented, post-industrial transition. There is clearly a top-
down stream of action that can be traced back to the public
administration’s initiative, but also a bottom-up one, fed partly by some
of the front runners of Austin’s technological innovation scene, thus
closing the positive feedback loop.
The QLG dimension is certainly crucial and particularly evident in the
Austin case, as certified by the cited Milken Institute rankings, and in
particular by their dynamics, as discussed above. The public
administration’s development vision is likely to have been the real
initiator of Austin’s innovative local development model.
The Big Austin project is one clear illustration of this, and neatly
emphasizes the priority that the administration has given to the DLE
dimension, whose relevance comes up again in the manifold initiatives of
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active and creative dialogue and networking undertaken by the local
business community. The QCS and QPK dimensions are also very clearly
represented: in the impressive array of quality – and at the same time
vastly popular – initiatives, also of global resonance, that make up the
city’s cultural menu; and in the rich pool of outstanding educational and
research institutions. The DLT is also clearly one of the priorities – a
striking example comes for instance from the Arthouse Texas Prize
organized by Arthouse Texas, an innovative and outstanding institution
operating in the contemporary visual arts field, that makes on a yearly
basis an extensive screening of the area’s best young creative talent,
exposing it to a jury composed of some of the nation’s most influential
critics and curators, further supplemented by the New American Talent
yearly exhibition that extends, although of course on a less ambitious
base, the screening to the entire country. These initiatives are making a
crucial contribution to the establishment of Texas as one of the most vital
and propositional North America creative scenes. The AEF and AET
dimensions are so deeply rooted and essential to the functioning of the
model that hardly need further discussion. The three social-communal
dimensions, MSC, CBE and LCI, constitute one of the most
characteristic and remarkable traits of the model: the Entrepreneurs
Foundation of Central Texas hits the MSC and LCI dimensions in an
original and effective way, whereas an instance of how CBE is pursued is
Access to Learning, a community-oriented educational collaborative that
involves a vast network of city museum and educational institutions. And
finally, the IN dimension mirrors in the extent and level of cooperation of
local players carried out through a myriad of initiatives of all genres, part
of which briefly cited above, whereas the EN one is ensured by the
global scope of several of the city’s cultural, educational and scientific
initiatives.
In the Austin case, the top-down and bottom-up components are almost
inextricably entangled: the level of local cooperation is so high that the
impulse coming from one side seems to be almost immediately matched
by a complementary impulse coming from the other.
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3. Newcastle upon Tyne - Gateshead (England - UK)
Newcastle and Gateshead form a conurbation of about three quarters of a
million inhabitants on the river Tyne in North East England. The
abundance of natural resources was what initially stimulated the growth
of industry in the Tyneside region. Coal had been mined in the area since
the 14th century, and had directly stimulated the development of the
world's earliest railways in the North East during the 18th century. Also
significant for Tyneside was the local availability of iron, which in
conjunction with coal provided the lifeblood for the giant 19th and early
20th century industries of shipbuilding, locomotive engineering, civil
engineering and armament manufacture.
In the 1970s and 1980s the city and the region witnessed massive de-
industrialization, which brought dramatic rates of unemployment and
considerable emigration towards richer areas in the South of England.
Throughout its history, the town of Gateshead has lived in the shadow of
the commercially powerful and historically wealthier Newcastle, but
despite this strong competition Gateshead has managed to rigidly hold
onto its own identity and refuses to become a mere suburb of the Geordie
capital. The regeneration of Gateshead started in the 1990s and it is
symbolized in England and in Europe by a handful of major icons: the
Baltic Flour Mills, the Millennium Bridge, the Sage Opera House, and
the Angel of the North sculpture by Anthony Gormley. In particular, the
Baltic is a centre for contemporary art housed in a grain warehouse on
the Gateshead Quayside. Realized with the contribution of the National
Lottery Fund, it was opened to the public in 2002 and it now holds
temporary art exhibitions, but does not have any permanent collection. It
cost £33.4 million, with an additional £7.5 million as an endowment for
revenue support for exhibitions and education programs in the first five
years. The project leveraged additional grants: an ONE NE Regional
Development Agency one for £4.4 million; an European Regional
Development Fund one for £3.5 million; a Single Regeneration Budget
one for £750,000; a Northern Arts one £600,000, plus £500,000 from the
private sector and a Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council £3 million
in-kind grant in land and staff time to realize the project.
The Baltic is separated from the Newcastle Quayside by the Millennium
Bridge, the first tilting bridge in the world, opened in 2001 and accessible
only to pedestrians and cycles. With its changing colors and its unusual
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shape, it immediately became an icon of the whole region and made up
its first million visitors in just one year of activity. The Sage, realized
with the collaboration of the Sage Software Group, is a £70 million
Opera House and educational centre with a spectacular architecture,
located on the southern part of the river Tyne, facing the Baltic. It opened
at the end of 2004 and is home to the Northern Symphonia. Finally, the
Angel of the North is £ 1 million-cost monumental sculpture, mainly
financed by National Lottery funds, that is 20 meters high and with a 54
meters lateral development, which has now been adopted by the
community as a landmark not only for the local area but for the whole
North East of England, and has been elected as one of the country’s
outstanding icons in the ICONS project commissioned by the Culture
Online section of the national Department of Media, Culture and Sports
(DMCS).
Thanks to these projects, the Gateshead Quays have been converted into
a truly unique arts, culture, leisure, and housing space for residents and
tourists, thus making up one of the most extensive projects of culture-
based urban renovations in Europe. More than £250 million has been
injected into the regeneration of this part of the city. In the span of a
decade, Newcastle-Gateshead has turned its image upside-down: from a
blackened, gritty place of social and economic dismal to a fun-loving
urban area that consistently features in the lists of the top ten party cities
in the world. But one should not think of the Gateshead case as an
instance, all too common nowadays, of city ‘cool hunting’ leading to
exclusive gentrification: the new image of the city is a consequence of a
strongly community-based project aimed at redefining primarily the
attitudes and perceptions of actual inhabitants.
Gateshead has gambled its future on these huge and ambitious flagships
that have come to characterize the entire region. However, they represent
only the initial steps of a broader initiative directed to the social and
economic revitalization of the conurbation by means of a community-
oriented strategy of artistic and cultural development, that is being
developed by a complex array of mainly public bodies and agencies. The
key players are:
- the Gateshead Council, which decided to revitalize the city through
cultural and artistic projects. The Council has been able to convince
many partners to participate in the initiative and to collect the
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necessary funds, such as the Regional Arts Council, public and
private partners and investors, cultural organizations and universities,
all of which played a relevant role.
- One NorthEast, the Regional Development Agency set up in April
1999 to help the people of the North East to attain permanent
occupation, prosperity and a higher quality of life. The Agency, along
with all other Regional Development Agencies across England,
shares a common mission statement: ‘to transform England's regions
through sustainable economic development’. It is also committed to
invest in cultural initiatives and in particular in the Culture 10
program of festivals and events (see also below) going through 2009-
10, and has just published a strategic report commissioned to a
private consulting firm to begin designing its cultural strategy beyond
2010.
- Culture North East is one of eight regional cultural consortiums in
England, established by the DCMS to support regional cultural and
creative forces. It is meant to be a think-tank, as well as a networking
and advocacy organization that develops the region’s cultural
development strategy. It has prepared in January 2005 a Cultural
Manifesto that clearly spells out its focus of interest in terms of
promoting the region’s cultural distinctiveness, the participation of
the community to cultural mind-opening opportunities and to
strengthen the region’s links to the international cultural scenes with
a view to a two-way global exchange.
- NewcastleGateshead Initiative is the destination-marketing agency
for the area, created by the two city councils and funded with both
public and private money. It is a limited company whose board draws
from both public officers and leading business people in the region.
With the launch of this agency, Newcastle and Gateshead have
worked together for the first time to promote the area as a whole. The
agency’s aim is to construct a strong brand for the area by positioning
it as “a place at the forefront of innovative culture-led regeneration
and a world-class place to live, learn, work and visit”. Culture plays a
truly key role in this respect as it is seen and marketed as the major
source of identification and attractiveness of the region.
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Whereas Austin can be seen as an instance of a system-wide cultural
district that started from focusing on Florida’s attractiveness paradigm
and gradually evolved a more complex and articulated model, Newcastle-
Gateshead rather represents an antithetical approach, entirely founded on
the capability-building of the local community and regarding
attractiveness as a consequence of the achievement of a new culturally
oriented social attitude. When the Newcastle-Gateshead area applied for
the massive public (mainly Lottery) funds that were called for to finance
the huge regional re-development strategy, it had to cope with the
skepticism of several national opinion leaders: the social and economic
backwardness of the region seemed to many too entrenched to warrant a
reasonable expectation of success. For instance, the area lost the national
bid for the European Culture Capital 2008, that was won by Liverpool,
despite a clear early evidence of the viability and effectiveness of the by
then ongoing renovation effort. This failure, however, did not curb the
enthusiasm and energy around the project and drew national attention
toward the North East’s new cultural wave.
In a nutshell, the strategy initially focused on the cultural reconstruction
of the identity and pride of a community that had been humiliated by
years of downsizing and relocation of (traditional) productive activities.
In particular, the strategy has bet on the somewhat unintuitive possibility
that systematically enabling people with competences and capabilities to
participate in cultural events and project would have paved the way to a
new knowledge-oriented society that would have been able to take
advantage of the new opportunities put forth by the country’s post-
industrial transition. The community orientation of all of the area’s major
cultural institutions is strong and firmly declared and is particularly
evident in the case of the Sage Gateshead which has made of musical
education a quite powerful leverage for social cohesion and inclusive
participation. The bet has been largely won. But it has been a surprise at
the national level - in spite of the impressive results of a more than a
decade-long coherent and consistent endeavor in terms of cultural
participation and development of creative professions and markets - that
a research conducted in 2006 by a private consulting firm and
commissioned by the tv channel Artsworld revealed that, by making a
thorough evaluation of both availability and attendance of cultural
opportunities and facilities as well as levels of funding, Newcastle-
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Gateshead ranked first at the national level, with London and Liverpool
lagging far behind – ninth and tenth out of a pool of 14, respectively
(Taylor, 2006). Another recognition has already come as early as in 2002
by Newsweek International, that included Newcastle-Gateshead among
the world’s eight most creative cities (Piore, 2002); incidentally, also
Austin was part of the list. And, from the point of view of citizens, the
share that recognized to cultural activities of the area a significant
existence value was 81 per cent (Miles, 2005).
Evaluation of impact using strategic dimensions
The case of Newcastle-Gateshead represents one of the most impressive
currently available examples of a culture-led economic and social
renovation project, in which the public sector has played a key role in
designing and implementing a sophisticated strategy of systematic,
carefully targeted cultural investments. The above described system of
development agencies make an impressive case for the incidence of the
QLG dimension. The QCS dimension has been developed not by creating
iconic facilities mainly aimed at making the conurbation a tourist
destination (although certainly some of the facilities and projects have
become iconic anyway), but rather by addressing the weaknesses and
contradictions to the local community’s cultural identity, and thus in this
instance the QCS dimension conjugates naturally with the LCI, MSC and
CBE ones – the culture-society link pops up over and over as one reviews
all aspects of the area’s cultural strategy. And the link has been very
successful, as it has been able to foster a widespread, solid, motivated
participation to cultural opportunities in a context with very little
previous tradition and with a local identity mainly characterized by
popular sports (soccer above all) at the symbolic level. Of special interest
is the already cited Culture 10 program, whose aim is to affirm and
consolidate at the international level the area’s major cultural standing
through a series of highly coordinated initiatives that have a traceable
impact on virtually all of the twelve strategic dimensions, but certainly
add substantially to the QCS in the first place and to the ‘social’
dimensions as an immediate consequence. Of special interest is the fact
that every project in Culture 10 must have a clear and distinctive
implication for the cultural capability building of the local community
(CBE).
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On the QPK side, the Skills Action Plan promoted by One NorthEast is
fostering a more effective and thorough integration between the (fairly
good) local network of educational and research institutions and the
business environment. The DLE dimension is covered by the Regional
Economic Strategy Action Plan 2006-2011 “Leading the Way” that
places a major emphasis in the support of start-up companies and in the
parallel attraction of outside skills (AEF, AET). The DLT dimension is
equally well looked after: for instance, the Newcastle College has opened
in 2004 a £ 19 millions education facility entirely aimed at educating and
preparing cultural and creative professionals – the largest educational
facility of this kind in the whole country. Again, both the DLT and the
AET dimensions are central to the Culture 10 strategy, and the same can
be said for both the IN and EN dimensions. As to IN, the very fact that
the two cities are increasingly integrating their development policy into
one single strategy is very telling in this respect.
The NewcastleGateshead strategy has been started with a clear top-down
characterization, that has been predominant for a relatively long time, but
as long as the local community has regained confidence in its skills and
human resources, and with the increasing amount of outside credit and
recognition, the bottom-up dimension has emerged dramatically and now
it can be said that the model has a strong community push; the local
cultural and artistic scene is expanding and keeps a highly inclusive
character, so that all of the major cultural institutions are engaged in an
ongoing dialogue with the local cultural producers. Even Baltic, that
from the point of view of the exhibition program was initially not very
responsive to the local art scene and basically focused on internationally
recognized artists, is now becoming more attentive in this respect, also
thanks to the fact that as the culture-led development of the area proceeds
and international cultural exchanges are developed, the local scene is
rapidly losing parochial traits and is becoming very responsive to the
international standards of quality and achievement.
4. Linz (Austria)
Linz is the third largest city in the country – with about 180,000
inhabitants – on the river Danube, Upper Austria. Today Linz is still an
industrial city: the Voest Alpine, a large steel mill and the former
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‘Chemie Linz’, a chemical group now split up into several companies,
made Linz one of Austria's most important economic centers. Linz also
serves as an important transportation hub for the region of both Upper
Austria and, to a lesser degree, Southern Bohemia.
The city is now home to a vibrant music and arts scene that is well
funded by the city and the state of Upper Austria. Besides well-
established events and institutions, from the 1990s new experimental and
innovative culturally related activities have appeared, re-shaping the
image and development strategy of the city. At present, along with the
Lithuanian capital Vilnius, Linz will be the European Capital of Culture
in 2009.
The city approach to culture-led renovation finds its best example in Ars
Electronica, which is a museum, a laboratory, a prize and a festival at the
same time. The Museum of the Future on the north bank of the Danube,
across from the Hauptplatz, which leads to the historical part of the city
(Altstadt), is a six-storey space where visitors can learn about technology
by getting their hands on and playing with the world of digital
interaction. The Ars Electronica Center (AEC) is home to one of the few
public 3D caves in Europe - the very first 3D cave in the world to be
publicly accessible - and attracts a large gathering of technologically
oriented artists every year for the Ars Electronica Festival. For the 2009
Cultural Capital program, a new wing will be completed and the whole
floor space will be tripled with respect to the current status quo, whereas
the current multimedia collection will move in a new space downtown.
The FutureLab is a complex of studios and workshops where researchers
carry out innovative projects on digital surfaces, virtual environments
and interactive space; it will expand significantly in the AEC’s new
configuration in 2009. The ‘Prix Ars Electronica’ is a multidisciplinary
competition for cyber arts, which includes any possible kind of digital
media design project linked to technology, art, science and society.
The creative interaction between local cultural tradition and a resolute
option for cutting-edge technology in the media industry has enhanced
the cultural supply of the entire city, even in the traditional art forms.
Situated on the banks of the river Danube, the new Lentos modern art
gallery was completed in 2003 in order to host the internationally
acclaimed collection of the Linz Neue Galerie. The appearance of the
building, with its 8000 sqm of usable floor space, is remarkable for its
DADI/ WP_5/08
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transparent glass casing, attractively lit in blue, pink, red and purple at
night. Almost 3000 sqm of exhibition space containing masterpieces of
painting and graphics from the 19th century to the present day await the
visitor, along with selected special exhibitions. The ‘OK Centrum für
Gegenwartskunst’ (Centre for Contemporary Art), which is supported by
public funding, is an experimental laboratory for exploring experimental
research in visual arts. It is intended to be an exhibition and production
facility for contemporary art, accompanying the whole artistic process
from conception to exhibition. In this way, both a public platform and a
laboratory situation are provided simultaneously for artists, usually from
young generations, working in an international context. The
Brucknerhaus, the most important Linz concert hall, named after Anton
Bruckner, is situated just some 200 meters away from Lentos. It is home
to the Bruckner Orchester, and is frequently used for concerts, as well as
ballet and other events. Between Lentos and the Brucknerhaus, the
Donaulände, which is also referred to as the ‘culture mile’, hosts a park,
used mainly by young people to relax in, and in summertime for the Ars
Electronica Festival and the Linz Fest.
Along with cultural infrastructures, the ‘ephemeral’ dimension has been
strengthened by means of an international festivals circuit. Following the
opening of the Brucknerhaus in 1974, the next step was to found a
special music festival. The concept for this festival naturally followed
such models as the Wiener Festwochen and the Salzburger Festspiele.
Initially, the International Bruckner Festival was a pure music festival
based on the works of Anton Bruckner. Yet the traditional orientation of
this event was not really in the position to provide Linz with an image of
its own. In 1979 the city enhanced the Bruckner Festival with the Ars
Electronica and the ‘Cloud of Sound’. The former features exhibitions,
seminars and performances which every year involve an issue around the
relation between ITC and artistic expression. The latter is an attempt to
create a popular link between Bruckner’s music and Ars Electronica. In
1979 a multi-track tape from a record company was used to broadcast
into the Danube Park: 100,000 listeners were amazed by this initial
experiment of the Linz Cloud of Sound. The sound system today runs on
way over 200,000 watts. It was this conjunction between the future and
tradition that gave the Bruckner Festival and thus the city of Linz a
unique image, which is recognized in this form all over the world. The
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further development of the festival will be in the direction of ‘Linz.art’.
The Ars Electronica Festival and the Bruckner Festival, together with the
Linzer Landestheater, the Lentos museum and other cultural institutions
in Linz will thus now offer a month of creativity in festival form every
year. Moreover, every summer Linz welcomes the world of international
street art in all its colourful facets (Linzer Pflasterspektakel). Over 500
artists from around 40 different countries make music, juggle, dance,
present their unique performances and enchant roughly 200,000 visitors
over three days with their spontaneous and masterly abilities.
Evaluation of impact using strategic dimensions.
In order to underpin such an impressive network of activities, the Linz
City Council has adopted an explicit document of cultural planning since
2000. The plan is innovative in terms of contents and modes of financing,
and the strategy, which is aimed to address the metropolitan area’s key
future development options, assumes culture as the main driver for the
further development of the city. The high quality of the cultural supply is
not something new in a city with a long-lived and remarkable cultural
tradition, but what makes the QCS dimension particularly interesting in
the case of Linz is the increasingly focused groping towards a world-
class positioning in the field of new media, technology and cutting edge
experimentation. From the early experiments conducted in the late 70s
and promoted by a small group of private pioneers, there has been a
progressive legitimization from, and participation of, all of the major
local stakeholders in the new cultural venture. The city government has
had the merit to realize the potential of AEC as the hub of an
internationally focused local creative economy, and has made all the
needed investment to secure its development, arriving at centering the
2000 cultural plan, that makes an outstanding contribution to the QLG
dimension, on the AEC model as a paradigm for the emergence of a new
productive specialization for the whole urban area. This does not mean of
course that the Linz strategy prepares for a future where culture is the
only turf; the point is rather the understanding of how culture can
contribute to the creation of the environmental conditions for successful
innovation in the high-tech field. The cultural and scientific wings of the
local systems are all but separated and self-referential; in particular, the
FutureLab is fully integrated in the city’s R&D technological system and
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constitutes one of its key factors of competitive advantage. This original
scientific-cultural configuration of the innovation system looks very
promising both in terms of QPK, DLE and AEF. The Johannes Kepler
University is currently building a 24 millions euros mechatronics-focused
science park and a new campus that will become the other hub of the
system, entirely coherent with, and complementary to, the positioning of
the local system on the cultural side. Not incidentally, the University also
hosts a new Institute for media arts and media professions. The support
of this massive program of activities comes not only from public money,
but also from the attraction of venture capital, meant not only for the
technological sphere but also for the cultural one, with an eye to the
economic potential lying in the development of the local system of
cultural and creative industries.
The development and attraction of talent, DLT and AET, is another of
the priorities of the 2000 cultural plan. AEC has been a leader in this
field too, by creating an internationally renowned artist in residence
program. Residence programs in various field are now operating and are
again consolidating the exceptional international networking (EN)
developed by AEC from the very early years of activity. The IN
dimension is encouraged through the spatial concentration of several
cultural institutions in the culture mile along the Danube, and is also
explicitly dealt with in the cultural plan, that provides several incentives
to foster projects that are realized through the joint effort of different
cultural institutions. The ‘social’ block of dimensions – MSC, CBE and
LCI – finds a pioneering development again in the activities of AEC,
whose collection of multimedia installations is open not only to schools
coming from throughout Central Europe, but also to local social events
such as the birthday parties of the children of resident families. AEC is
also engaging in highly innovative educational programs open to various
kinds of public. Moreover, the AEC upper floor is open in the evening,
when the center is closed, with a program of cultural activities of various
nature that attract a significant and faithful public. Community
involvement and education has again been taken up by the 2000 cultural
plan, that places a remarkable emphasis on the need to commission and
produce socially engaged, community oriented art projects to stimulate
the public debate on controversial issues. The Linz tradition of huge,
open air cultural events has also contributed to a great extent in reshaping
DADI/ WP_5/08
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the city identity in a cultural sense, and to address an increasingly diverse
and motivated local audience.
The case of Linz can be considered a textbook example of culturally-
driven re-definition of the competitive model of a local system in the
transition from an industrial society to a post-industrial one. In this case,
the original impulse has been from the bottom-up, and found a crucial
leadership in an innovative world-class institution such as Art
Electronica, that progressively re-modeled the local attitude toward
culture through a process of constant involvement and participation of all
the local stakeholders at all levels. But it is interesting to stress that this
original impulse has been taken up in a timely way by the city
government, which has not only provided more resources and expanded
the local stable of cultural facilities and institutions, but has rationalized
the AEC model into a systematic vision of development in its 2000
cultural plan which represents an ideal compendium of the twelve
strategic dimensions that characterize system-wide cultural districts. It is
also interesting to stress how this innovative attitude of the public
administration is stimulating not only the cultural involvement of the
local entrepreneurship, but also, and most notably, the attraction of
venture capital in the cultural field: a new practice that could open new
opportunities also in other contexts of culture-led local development.
5. Denver (Colorado, USA)
Denver is the capital of the State of Colorado with a population of about
550,000 inhabitants, which rises to over 2 million if the whole
metropolitan area is considered. Denver has been historically known as
the ‘Queen City of the Plains’ because of its important role in the
agricultural industry in the plains regions along the foothills of the Front
Range. Denver's economy is to some degree based on its geographic
position and its connection to some of the major transportation systems
of the country. Since Denver is the largest city in 600 miles, it has
become a natural location for the storage and distribution of goods and
services to the Mountain States. Denver is also approximately halfway
between the large cities of the Midwest like Chicago and St. Louis and
the cities of the West Coast, another benefit for distribution.
DADI/ WP_5/08
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Denver is famous for such winter sports as skiing and other competitive
sports like basketball, baseball, football and hockey, which count for
several professional American sports franchises. Starting from the late
80s, the city has begun to develop a new strategy, which was originally
triggered by the difficulty of coping with the budget constraints of the
major local cultural institutions. The city's approach to culture-led local
development processes has been driven by a singular mix of bottom-up
and top-down elements and has turned out to be quite successful. Starting
from a situation of lack of available funds, now Denver has become able
to cater considerable resources on a yearly basis to finance cultural
initiatives in a variety of fields and establishing a close dialogue with the
local community, which has a strong say in determining the city’s
cultural policy. This is a consequence of the fact that the development of
the cultural capability of citizens has been the true, crucial cornerstone of
Denver’s culture-led local development model.
The results of such a policy are striking, once suitably scaled to Denver’s
context and history. In 2001, compared to an annual total of 7.5 million
skiers and 5.3 million spectators for sporting events, the number of
spectators for cultural events reached 9 million, and brought in profits for
$840,000 from outside Colorado, to become, respectively, 8.2 million,
4.5 million, and 14.1 million in 2005 . The sporting and cultural leisure
opportunities are not conflicting but rather complementary, as Colorado
residents and visitors seek a variety of activities. But the drive of culture,
once nothing more than a side dish of the overwhelming local menu of
opportunities for sporting and outdoor recreation, is surprising: almost
three times the state's population attended cultural activities in the
Denver area in 2005, and taking 2001 as a reference audiences grew at a
pace way above one extra million attendants per year.
Two institutions played a decisive role in activating the virtuous circle. In
1989, from the initiative of several local authorities, the SCFD (Scientific
and Cultural Facilities District) was established, a public funding agency
supporting cultural organizations and activities in 7 counties of Colorado
State. The SCFD is a unique collaboration between rural, suburban and
urban counties. The available budget for scientific and cultural
organizations in the area is now well over $30 million annually: it was
$14 million in 1989 and has become $38,3 million in 2005. The SCFD
raises money through a specific sales tax which delivers 1¢ from every
DADI/ WP_5/08
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$10 purchase in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver,
northern Douglas and Jefferson counties, thus providing supplemental
financial support to the metro Denver cultural organizations. Currently,
the SCFD recipients are organized into three tiers: Tier I (59% of funds)
is composed of the four major regional institutions: the Denver Art
Museum, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Museum of Nature
and Science, and Denver Zoo; Tier II (28%) organizations include 23
regional organizations offering the best in science and culture; Tier III
(13%) recipients include a range of small organizations with cultural and
scientific missions.
In addition to the SCFD, the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts
(CBCA) serves as a catalyst for business-arts partnerships, creating an
awareness of the arts community as a vehicle for creativity, economic
development, and business prosperity. The agency operates on three
levels. Primarily, the CBCA supports the arts by placing business leaders
on arts boards, sponsoring organizational and audience development and
training business people to be arts advocates and informing them of how
the arts foster community development. Secondly, the CBCA serves as a
resource for business by regularly monitoring the economic effect of
cultural and scientific organizations of the region. It also informs the
business community about arts issues that relate to business, enabling
business leaders to understand the complexities of the cultural
community, to stimulate employees' creativity and morale, to build new
business and to enhance corporate image. In addition, the CBCA
provides benefits to member companies, from honoring exceptional
support through an annual awards luncheon and corporate art exhibition,
to offering programs like employee art exhibits and behind the scenes
experiences at cultural events and facilities. The CBCA partners with the
Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce on the Chamber’s Cultural and
Scientific Committee. The Committee, comprised of business leaders and
select representatives from the cultural community, raises awareness of
the value of the cultural community to economic development and
quality of life throughout the seven-county metro Denver area.
Looking at 2005 data, cultural industry in the metropolitan area has had a
total economic impact of $1,426 billion ($1 billion in 2001); there have
been $785 million of expenditure in the cultural sector ($658 million in
2001) and $597 million in related businesses ($435 million in 2001),
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such as hotels, restaurants, etc. From the occupational viewpoint, cultural
organisations employed 10,800 people (a little less than 7,700 people in
2001), thus becoming the sixth major employer in the metropolitan area.
Cultural organisations incomes amounted to $387 million ($208 million
in 2001). Half of it derived from direct selling of goods and services
(entrance tickets included), and the other half from public and private
contributions from individuals, enterprises, public bodies, foundations
and agencies. In the same year cultural organisations invested $44
million in new buildings, and in their restoration and furnishing ($41
million in 2001). Cultural tourism turnover reached $139 million, and
cultural organisations paid $16 million in taxes ($14,5 million in 2001).
Denver has now become an important cultural destination, with its 4,5
million paying visits per year (4,3 in 2001), more than 8,7 million free
visits (3,9 in 2001) and 816,531 reduced price visits (816,000 in 2001).
There are about 860,000 visitors coming from outside the state. More
than 1 million people participated in cultural courses or educational
events, not all of which were free, and still one million, more or less,
decided to support the local cultural organizations’ fund raising
campaigns. Educational programmes involved 2,4 million primary and
secondary students, a number four times as big as the entire metropolitan
area students’ number. Community cultural programmes involved about
940.000 people, with a particular interest in poor children, ethnic
minorities, old people and disabled people. There were more than 39.000
volunteers working in total 1,7 million hours per year (28,000 volunteers
for 1 million hours in 2001).
Evaluation of impact using strategic dimensions.
The ‘social’ block of strategic dimensions, MSC, CBE and LCI, is the
cornerstone of Denver’s culture-led development strategy. The mere
inflow of resources raised from the dedicated sales tax would not have
made all this difference without a joint, comprehensive educational effort
that has substantially broadened and solidified the local cultural
audience, and increased its willingness to pay for access to cultural
opportunities. This educational action has been targeted to marginal,
minority and socially impaired groups (MSC) as well as to audience
development and involvement, through specific programs that have been
participated by all of the area’s main cultural institutions. The whole
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strategy, which by the way has been initially promoted among ample
controversy and strong disagreement of part of the local community,
only to unfold its effect through time, called for a remarkable amount of
strategic vision and is in itself an outstanding expression of QLG. The
SCFD-CBCA junction is the institutional counterpart of this local
excellence and constitutes a first important expression of IN, a dimension
that is further developed by the cohesive coordination of the local
cultural organizations in implementing the educational ‘shock therapy’
on the local audiences. The QCS and QPK dimensions are very well
represented – the metro Denver area hosts a number of outstanding
cultural institutions as well as university, colleges and research centers –
but paradoxically their role is probably more important now that the
cultural profile of metro Denver is gaining full momentum and acquiring
an international reputation, than it was in the starting phase where the
real concern was the construction of cultural audiences in a city with a
weak cultural identity.
Also the EN dimension has played a relatively minor part at the
beginning, to become increasingly important in the advanced phase. The
presence of cultural institutions with an international scope, such as the
Denver Art Museum that recently opened a new architecturally daring
wing designed by Daniel Libeskind, the Denver Center for Performing
Arts also hosting the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, or the Denver
Museum of Nature and Science, is constantly expanding the city’s
national and international cultural network. Also the DLT and AET
dimensions are well covered by the presence of excellent educational
institutions in the artistic and cultural fields such as the Arts and
Humanities branch of Denver University, the University of Colorado or
the Art Institute of Colorado, although this is probably the field where a
further leap forward may be called for. Finally, the DLE and AEF
dimensions provide other pioneering models: first and foremost, the
Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, a regional economic
development agency that groups and coordinates all the economic players
of the metro Denver as well as of the Northern Colorado areas pursuing
common, cross-sector strategies according to a logic that is very close to
that of the system-wide cultural district. It is the only example of a
regional development agency in the whole United States that can be
deemed representative of the whole compound of economic interests of
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its reference area. The Metro Denver EDC focuses especially on the
development of new entrepreneurial and professional skills to enhance
the global competitiveness of the region and is investing significant
amounts of resources to pursue innovative training programs ($3.8
million grants to 10 different workforce and education programs in the
context of WIRED (Workforce Innovation in Regional Development
Program), matched by a further $15 million grant from the US
Department of Labor.
As in other cases discusses above, the Denver example presents an initial
top-down impulse that has been readily matched from the bottom-up to
form a self-sustaining positive feedback loop that has constructed an
economically and socially significant cultural and creative economy.
4. Towards a policy framework
What makes an interesting case study of a system-wide cultural district is
neither the local presence of isolated, excellent cultural institutions nor
the spatial concentration of a large number of cultural institutions, as in
traditional cultural districts. Rather, it is the level of coordination among
the various local players to achieve strategically defined culture-led
development goals and the increasing complementarity among different
innovation-oriented value chains that may profit from a generalized,
pervasive cultural orientation of the local system as a mind opener, a
networking and social learning platform, a creativity lab, and so on.
There are many instances of culturally sophisticated cities that have so
far been unable or unwilling to develop this complex organizational
model. System-wide cultural districts are then based on the ability of the
local system to develop a self-organized regulation of their development
dynamics where the regulating parameters have a cultural nature. None
of the examples discussed above has intentionally pursued the creation of
a system-wide cultural district. In fact, in all cases one can say that there
was a local player, be it public or private, that gave the starting impulse
and the other ones gradually followed up, so that the new organizational
model emerged somewhat spontaneously from trial and error. But once
the key features of the model have been singled out, it becomes possible
DADI/ WP_5/08
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to incorporate them in a coherent policy framework, at least to some
extent.
As often noted during the discussion above, the twelve strategic
dimensions that characterize system-wide cultural districts may be
grouped into five macro-dimensions:
A. Quality
• Quality of Cultural Supply (QCS)
• Quality of Local Governance (QLG)
• Quality of the Production of Knowledge (QPK)
B. Development
• Development of Local Entrepreneurship (DLE)
• Development of Local Talent (DLT)
C. Attraction
• Attraction of External Firms (AEF)
• Attraction of External Talent (AET)
D. Sociality
• Management of Social Criticalities (MSC)
• Skills Building and Education of the Local Community (CBE)
• Local community involvement (LCI)
E. Networking
• Internal Networking (IN)
• External Networking (EN)
One can easily trace some of these strategic dimensions to the
aforementioned approaches of Sen (CBE, LCI, DLT, QLG, MSC),
Florida (QLG, AEF, AET) and Porter (QPK, QLG, DLE, AEF). With
respect to the two last dimensions, namely internal and external
networking, these cannot be referred to any specific approach, but have
to be conceived as a structural mechanism for the emergence of the
district, in that thanks to these elements it is possible to activate the
system dynamics, through the increasing levels of interaction,
communication and acquaintance among the social actors that are
conducive to system-wide self-organization. The system-wide cultural
district approach then can be regarded as a generalization of several
partial approaches that have been developed so far to analyze the
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specificities of local development models, with special reference to
industrial and post-industrial contexts. Whereas partial approaches may
be useful and satisfactory in the industrial phase that is characterized by
patterns of strong specialization in specific sectors and value chains, it
becomes increasingly wanting with the unfolding of the post-industrial
transition, that on the contrary calls for increasing integration and cross-
fertilization of productions, processes, and products.
Another important facet of the post-industrial context is the increasing
relevance of intangible factors, together with traditional tangible ones, in
determining a local system’s development asset matrix. The dynamics of
tangible vs. intangible assets is a primary concern for the design and
evaluation of local development strategies, and the proper analytical
toolbox to carry out this task is only partially available at the moment.
Lacking the proper tools, it is easy to commit to badly inefficient
strategies and courses of action, trading off the (visible, more easily
measurable) advantages of building tangible stocks against the (invisible,
less easily measurable) damage from destroying intangible ones. As
already noted above, this has been the strategy followed by some
prominent art cities, with outstanding Italian cases such as Venice or
Florence, that have basically given up their cultural identity to the
tourism mass market that is steadily transforming them in theme parks: in
these cases, there is certainly a benefit in terms of profitability of part of
the local economy, but the parallel annihilation of the city’s memory and
the thwarting of its cultural evolution are probably not worth it, or at least
the tradeoff is never explicitly spelled out and evaluated for what it is.
In the post-industrial transition, intangible assets acquire an increasing
capacity of value creation, as consumers’ demand becomes increasingly
laden with issues of sense-making and identity rather than of mere
availability of relatively abundant material resources. Therefore, paying
little or inappropriate attention to the implications of policy choices on
the dynamics of intangible assets is myopic at best. In the examples of
system-wide cultural districts discussed before, it is easy to isolate many
crucial aspects of these development histories where the role of one or
more kinds of intangible assets is explicit and crucial. To systematize this
intuition, we propose an analytical framework that can be considered as a
first step toward a full account of local development processes based on
the accumulation of intangible assets, and in particular of culture-driven
DADI/ WP_5/08
46
processes, by suitably extending the 12-dimensions scheme used so far
into a development matrix.
Each of the twelve dimensions discussed above, and so each of the
macro-dimensions just presented, interacts directly with tangible and
intangible assets, influencing in a positive or negative way their level and
dynamics (for a groundbreaking analysis of the composition of each of
these assets stock and flows in the context of urban processes see Sacco
et al., 2008).
Among tangible assets we distinguish:
- Natural capital, i.e., assets that are not produced by human activities
(natural resources, renewable or not);
- Physical capital, i.e. all those infrastructures and material goods
created by human activities.
Among intangible assets we have:
- Human and informational capital: individual knowledge,
competences and abilities as embodied in their owners/carriers
(human); the stock of transmissible knowledge stored on physical
supports or devices;
- Social capital: institutions, behavioral norms and networks of
relations allowing the individual and the community to profess
mutually compatible value orientations, to organize a well regulated
and cooperative social interaction, and the pursuit of shared
objectives of well-being and social quality;
- Symbolic and cultural capital: the stock of shared meanings,
conventions, and habits, that allow individuals and groups to identify
and express themselves and to find their place in a shared historical
and social narrative.
To gain a proper understanding of the properties and implications of a
specific local development process, it is necessary to track the actual
interactions that take place between actions conducted within a specific
strategic dimension and the impact that they produce, whether planned or
not, on each of the above asset categories. This evaluation may be
conducted by means of suitable quantitative or qualitative indicators, that
can be thought of as the entries of a 12x5 matrix, structured as follows:
DADI/ WP_5/08
47
Chart 1. Dimensions-Assets Evaluation Matrix
Quality of Cultural
Supply (QCS)
Quality of Local
Governance (QLG)
Quality
Quality Production of
Knowledge (QPK)
Development of
Local Entrepreneurship
(DLE)
Development
Development of
Local Talent (DLT)
Attraction of External
Firms (AEF)
Attraction
Attraction of External
Talent (AET)
Internal Networking
(IN)
Networking
External Networking
(EN)
Management of
Social Criticalities (MSC)
Skills Building and
Education of the Local
Community (CBE)
Sociality
Local community
involvement (LCI)
Natural
Capital
Physica
l Capital
Human
Capital
Social
Capital
Symbolic/Cultural
Capital
DADI/ WP_5/08
48
A direction for future research is that of developing the above matrix as
an analysis and evaluation framework for investigating and classifying
alternative local development processes in terms of their implications on
strategic dimensions and asset dynamics, and to construct specific,
targeted indicators. On the basis of this matrix, case studies as the above
discussed ones could be reformulated and data and information collected
so as to fit the matrix’s structure and organization, thereby allowing for
easier and sharper comparison. In principle, full-fledged system-wide
cultural district models will tend to saturate the twelve dimensions, i.e. to
produce significant entries for each of them, although the implications for
single types of capitals may be complex and highly diversified from case
to case. Local systems aiming at developing a system-wide cultural
district kind of organization could be able to perform significantly on
some dimensions but not on others, and the matrix would then become an
interesting support for the construction of a strategic road map for the
future evolution of the system, and to fine tune the corresponding
policies in terms of their asset dynamics implications, and so on. A
preliminary test for this methodology, for the moment limited to the
evaluation of the incidence of the strategic dimensions without a direct
evaluation of their impact on the asset dynamics, has been conducted by
comparing the policies undertaken by the 2004 European Culture
Capitals, namely Genoa and Lille (Sacco and Tavano Blessi 2007).
5. Conclusion
The increasing interest in culture as a catalyst and engine for local
development processes finds its antecedents in certain experiments in
urban and regional planning, such as the urban regeneration plans carried
out by the Greater London Council from the 1970s, based on a strategic
vision focused upon building cultural infrastructures and activities
(DCMS 2004). The issue of culture-led renovation processes for urban
areas and regions has subsequently developed both at the theoretical and
policy levels, fuelled by the evidence of the positive influence provided
by culture on the economic (see Landry, 2001; Rullani, 2004), social (see
Matarasso, 1997, Everingham, 2003) and built environment (see
Bianchini and Parkinson, 1993; Graham, 2002; Hutton, 2006). In this
perspective, the variety of observed cases of successful culture-driven
DADI/ WP_5/08
49
local development described in this article still defies the existing
analytical frameworks and calls for further theoretical and applied work
to get a proper understanding of the complexity of the interdependences
that make up a self-organizing, system-wide cultural district. In
particular, it is necessary to get a better understanding of the conditions
that allow their emergence, evolution, and sustainability, and to develop a
set of indicators that allow in-depth monitoring and analysis.
Recent literature has developed theoretical frameworks and
classifications for cultural clusters or districts (see Scott, 2000;
Valentino, 2003; Evans, 2001, 2004; Santagata, 2006) and there is an
extensive research on specific case studies, but this burgeoning interest
also makes room for confusion and ambiguity. In particular, Mommaas
(2004) underlines that the cultural district label has often been attached to
very different spatial ambits and scales: it sometimes refers to single
buildings, more often to urban quarters, but also to entire cities and
networks of small villages. In an effort of classification, the author points
out seven key dimensions, which range from two opposite boundaries:
the horizontal integration of activities; the vertical portfolio of
production/consumption functions; the dispersion of an organizational
framework; public/private involvement; the openness/closure of
programming; the vernacular/engineering approach to planning; spatial
hierarchy. The Mommaas framework is certainly useful and we plan to
analyze the possibility to integrate it with ours in our forthcoming
research.
According to Hospers & Beugelsdijk (2002), many policy-makers are
tempted to apply clustering strategies without considering local
differences and the cultural and structural idiosyncrasies. The best
practice in cultural development has shown a range of models that can
effectively work only under certain conditions. Models that only count on
one driver – like innovation – do not explain the complex territorial
dynamics. Evidence in some regions demonstrates that productive
agglomeration – even in the creative industries – does not necessarily
spread or enhance innovation (Simmie, 2004), further promoting the
improvement of social and environmental local dimensions.
The framework presented in this paper, and the corresponding
dimensions-assets matrix, is not meant as just another analytical tool, but
as an attempt to provide a systematic framework to organize the
DADI/ WP_5/08
50
discussion and analysis and ease the comparison of different models and
approaches. From a more strategic perspective, we think of it also as a
policy framework to organize and monitor the design and implementation
of cultural planning at a local level. The matrix encompasses both the
social and economic aspects and implications of cultural strategies and
actions, and therefore may serve as a guide for local stakeholders to
discuss and to play a part in the development process, thereby fostering
an integrated, socially cooperative approach based on a shared vision and
methodology. Also, it can be useful as a background for the design and
evaluation of public or private cultural investments, whether tangible or
not, at various possible scales.
The present paper is meant as a synthetic presentation of the system-wide
cultural district model, as a theoretically sound (in our view), but also a
pragmatic perspective on the role of cultural activities and resources in
current local development processes. Given the currently frantic activity
in promoting and developing culture-led strategies of development, place
marketing, tourist and investment attraction, and so on, we feel that it is
important now to prevent bubble-like phenomena of irrational
exuberance and to eschew easy plug-and-play recipes or true instances of
magical thought about how to make people and communities rich and
happy with culture all at a sudden. To avoid this, and to build on the
experience of others in a progressive and constructive way, we believe
that serious comparative analysis and methodological research is called
for, and we hope to have given a small, positive contribution in this
direction.
Of course, this implies raising plenty of issues that need proper
reflection, discussion, and analysis. Not only about the pros and cons of
state of the art cultural planning and culture-led local development
models per se, but also, for example, about the ‘culturalization’ of
productive processes, one of the hallmarks of the post-industrial
transition, which increasingly links together urban regeneration practices
with experimentation and incubation of new models of entrepreneurship
and creative production. Or issues of cultural participation and
democracy and of social and economic justice, in terms of opportunity of
access to cultural activities and practices, and arousal of awareness of the
long-term social and economic implications of culture-led regeneration
processes. And the list could be much longer. There is, therefore, much
DADI/ WP_5/08
51
food for thought and an enormous amount of work to be done. We look
forward to an exciting season of research and policy experimentation
aimed at opening new avenues for human, social and economic
development for local communities worldwide.
DADI/ WP_5/08
52
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