Published in Y.R. Isar & H.K. Anheier (Eds.), Cultural Expression, Creativity, and Innovation.

The Cultures and

Globalization Series, Volume 3. London: Sage Publications, 2009.

CREATIVE SPACES
Nancy Duxbury and Catherine Murray

Both as a context and a set of dynamics for the emancipation and production of cultural
expression, globalization erodes certainty. Traditional relationships among what the
editors of this volume call the worldly, productive sites of crossing: complex, unfinished
paths between local and global attachment (James Clifford) are turning on their head. If we
can accept that creative expression involves individual acts, in creative sites which allow
for new types of collaboration, then it is important to understand the forces structuring
these sites. Places for expression are driven by a need for agglomeration in much new
creative economy thinking (see the Second Volume of the Cultures and Globalization
Series), so that design of place, contextualization and aesthetics of space become
productive factors in understanding creativity and innovation. The scale of creative spaces
can range from the global hierarchy of cities, their emergent rivals and the satellite
communities or cracks at the margins and boundaries of systems, to the sub-city-scale hubs
and particular places of connection in which global and local flows of creativity and
innovation intermix and are facilitated. Cultural geography, urban planning and new
thinking about the global flows of the creative economy present fundamental opportunities
for many cities and smaller communities who are actually enacting processes of
repluralisation(Anheier and Isar, this volume). As such communities re-stake their place
on the map, by repositioning and reinventing their economic base, many are also thinking
about how to construct and foster vibrant creative spaces as a resource for, incubator of or
place for production, rehearsal , performance or exhibition of new genres, new artistic
works or new practices. This chapter outlines the conceptual underpinnings of creative
spaces as physical, embedded places where creative production, exhibition and
consumption occur. It examines a knowledge production process consisting of ideas
(embedded intelligences, and imagination), planning (patterns of involvement and
intervention), and policy (integration). The authors argue for a cultural ecology approach
to built or natural creative spaces within communities of any scale that is constructivist,
holistic, and based on both physical and social infrastructure. Creative space-making as a
policy sub-field must more adequately incorporate issues of locality, sociality, cultural
diversity, and equity while bridging disparate professional vocabularies or grammars of
space.

Introduction
The processes of globalization are creating a new geography of centres and margins, intensifying
interest in the processes of spatialization (Sassen, 2006). Contrary to the expectations of the 1990s,
centralization of cultural power in global cities has been uneven, resulting in a distributed,
polycentric networked economy of cultural production and exchange (Davoudi, 2003). If the
doctrine of creativity is now an animating force for the digital age (Schlesinger, 2007: 387), it is
increasingly acceptedi that place is an important driver of creativity (CEP, 2006; Drake, 2003).
Creative cities, creative clusters and, increasingly, creative hubs in cultural policies and culturalpolicy-led urban regeneration strategies are embedded with assumptions about how creative space is
produced. What are creative spaces? How are they conceived? Who are they for? And, what is their

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relationship to fostering and harnessing the force of creative expression for cultural, social, and
economic advancement?
Creative spaces are often considered a synonym for cultural facilities, cultural/creative milieus,
enclaves, corridors, quarters, districts, clusters, or creative hubs. They are defined as places where
creative production and performance occur by chance or design. They are place-based and place
contingent. While creative space may be virtual, the focus here is on the physical, material
representation of space or how it is conceived. In this way, we are building upon Henri Lefebrves
(1991) notion of space as a product of the processes and work of creativity performed and
experienced by humans.ii Creative spaces in this lexicon are what may be called creative hardware
(Richards and Wilson, 2007). They are more than just land, buildings, parks, precincts or districts
they are socially constructed products of physical facility/place, people, and
programming/operational resources. They carry significant iconic or symbolic value. Creative
spaces operate between current reality and possibility.
The focus of this chapter is on the creative coming together of different groups, land uses,
residential forms, and architectural styles to make creative spaces in an urban environment. Creative
space-making is a practice rooted in three dynamic, interrelated domains: ideas, planning and
policy, and on-the-ground entrepreneurialism. As new configurations and practices of creative
space development emerge, various degrees of misalignment, friction, and disconnectedness
among these three domains become evident.
Conceptual Background
Thinking about creative space is strongly influenced by the disciplines of cultural geography,
architecture, industrial design, and urban/community planning.iii Creative space-making is an
emergent policy sub-field, increasingly differentiated from, but indebted to, thinking about creative
cities, creative industries, economy and society. The goal of creative space-making is to identify
and optimize strategies for building, adapting, or renovating the necessary infrastructure and
environment in which human creativity can flourish. A number of cultural policy paradigms guide
creative space-making. The neo-liberal paradigm of the creative economy iv led to urban
entrepreneurialism as the competitive response of cities and a new hierarchy of global cities
(Sassen, 2006). Creative spaces are treated as sites for spectacle and consumption (Hannigan,
2007). Cities and nation states designed flagship spatial amenities to provide magnets for foreign
capital, attract the creative migrant class, and expand cultural tourism during the fiscal crisis
triggered by footloose manufacturing plants and loss of jobs offshore. But such instrumentalizing of
creative space as an amenity in tourism-led growth strategies failed to explore the relationship of
creative spaces to endogenous creative processes. Hence, influenced by high-tech districts and their
economic spin-offs, cultural centres or clusters began to be conceived of as cultural-economic hubs
and generators of growth, with locality conceived of as a resource or visual stimuli, an energizing
buzz and brand based on tradition and reputation (Drake, 2003).
The Blair New Labour turn to the creative city strategy of urban regeneration broadened the
traditional aesthetic focus on cultural policy to other creative sectors such as design and fashion
and examining creativity as an input into other areas of the networked economy (Throsby, 2001;
Flew, 2002; Hartley, 2007). Location and place remain central to this largely UK-led creative
city/economy policy paradigm, but the target for such facilities switched from the tourist to the
attraction of highly skilled new residents or local creative workers. Built-out spaces featured arts
and entertainment districts, anchors in streetscape renewal projects, the promotion of nighttime
economies, pedestrian plazas, and new collaboration between private developers/investors and not-

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for-profit creative groups (Gibson and Holman, 2004). Evans (2007) calls this a shift from a
singular cultural branding approach to city spaces that depend on creative diversity and tension
rather than predictability, or riskless risk. In this view, cosmopolitan or creative cities offer a more
sustainable spatial distribution and diversity of cultural and visitor activity.
From a survey of literature from over 38 countries with some evidence of creative economy/cluster
or city approaches (Gollmitzer and Murray, 2008), we can accept that strategic creative space
planning is increasingly part of urban planning, with a spatial dimension that is city-wide, and
works to establish cultural facility priorities. In parallel with these developments, a focus on the
changing sociology of the global city led by Sharon Zukin, Peter Hall, Saskia Sassen and others,
began to ripple through urban studies, building on the earlier community development paradigms of
the early 1960s, which focused on urban poverty, social welfare maximization and urban
regeneration projects. This progressive tradition in urban planning persists today, and now
struggles to articulate culture with sustainability and distributive equity as a planning goal.v The
challenge is to frame cultural strategies for creative spaces in urban revitalization that address social
and environmental goals without ignoring economic realities.
A Creative Ecology Approach
There are typically three biases to policy ideas about creative space-making. First, the creative
clusters or hubs are primarily portrayed through an economic or political economic lens, with only
limited acknowledgement of ties to the broader socio-cultural communities in which they reside.
Second, creative clusters are often described as a bundle of dynamics and activities without a sense
of how space(s) may be supporting, enabling, or enhancing the various stages of creative processes.
In a sense, creativity is valorized but still plays out in a black box which hides how the various
creative stages may be appropriately housed. Third, the bulk of the literature generally focuses on
global cities exclusively, although this thinking is increasingly taken up in theories about
polycentricity (Davoudi, 2003), ordinary cities (Robinson, 2006), and small cities and
communities (e.g., Garrett-Petts, 2005) as well.
As a corrective to these biases, a more holistic model of developing creative spaces for cultural
development, experimentation, and evolution is emerging. The social and cultural-creative
processes of use that inhabit and give life to these spaces are of first concern, acknowledging the
simultaneous co-existence of social interrelationships at all geographical scales (Massey, 1994),
from the intimacy of the home, local pub, or community cultural centre, to the wide spaces of transglobal connections.
From a planning perspective, Charles Landrys Cycle of Urban Creativity was one of the first
models to outline a systematic holistic approach to creativity within an urban context (Landry,
2000).vi More recently, wide-spread community sustainability initiatives have also encouraged a
holistic, systems-based planning approach, frequently including cultural, economic, environmental,
and social dimensions of sustainable development (e.g., Hawkes, 2001; City of Port Phillip, 2002;
New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2006; Regional Vancouver Urban Observatory,
2006; Infrastructure Canada, 2008). Creative space-making includes more voluntary basis for
actions (compared to a heavily legislated, top-down approach) and is rooted in local decisionmaking, participatory planning and priority-setting, integrated planning, and (ideally) horizontal
coordination across municipalities and other local agencies within regions (e.g., districts, counties,
etc.) (Duxbury et al., 2008). While useful, Landrys model does not open the black box of the
cognitive repertoire for creative space-making. To do this, we must turn to a framework for
knowledge production, borrowed here from Yoshiteru Nakamori, which examines the dynamics of

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intelligence, imagination, involvement, intervention and integration in creative space making in

cities (Wierzbicki and Nakamori, 2005).
Towards a More Holistic Model of Creative Processes in Creative Spaces
Peter Hall, among others, has lamented the division of professional intelligences about the place of
culture in urban space in geography, sociology, economics, architecture, cultural studies, or urban
studies (Hall and Pain, 2006). Too few have taken up the call for a new urban literacy that would
more broadly disperse and interconnect this knowledge base and the skills to read a citys look
and feel of its creative spaces (Centre for Public Space Research, 2004). Creative attributes of
space, place, and form (or semiotics of structures and other built objects) need to be more debated
and diffused among the respective design and urban planning communities (Hutton, 2006).
Intelligence
Spatial vocabularies of power have long been embedded in conceptions of urban-rural, centreperiphery, and downtown slums-affluent residential areas (Lee, 2007). At issue is how spaces for
cultural/creative rehearsal, production, performance and archiving are included. The traditional
ensembles of urban space and form like the piazza, village square, or public commons have been
anchored by a cultural performance space (typically a theatre or museum). Intelligence about
creative space, usually organized by the predominant aesthetic or professional/artistic disciplines,
has traditionally involved large-scale, purpose-built spaces. As more participatory cultural policy
approaches developed, spaces became multifunctional, scaled down, or more flexible in use and
(depending on urban regime) clustered around public transit nodes or other green space to
encourage daily presence. Indeed, variable scale to creative space becomes crucially important in
adapting to change over time.
Of particular interest in cultural studies are the cognitive repertoires of visual cityscapes in
modernist and post modernist sensibilities.vii Building design in the old industrial economy for
cultural institutions was largely about maintaining control, whereas the social order and design
values of the new economy stress freedom in the selective areas of labour and identity. In spatial
politics, the two most critical dimensions are: (1) to balance the need to be central or to position at
the margins of the city, consciously maintaining an alternative, bohemian atmosphere (see, e.g.,
Mercer, 2006); and (2) to establish an identifiable standing place with strongly shared
representations and/or an open and flexible space constantly adapting to changes in the wider
cultural and urban field (Mommaas, 2004). Diversity is widely accepted as a dominant design ethic:
in addition to function mixingold, new, closed, open and so onthere is attention to day/night
economies, and chances for accidental encounters to frame intercultural curiosity or a cosmopolitan
imagination (Hospers, 2003). However, the growing anxiety about public security after 9/11 shows
increasing preoccupation with the spatial policing of heterogeneity (Cochrane, 2007), surveillance,
and social control. Yet creativity thrives in the tension between orderly and disorderly space, so
managing the interplay of these zones is crucial.
New taxonomies of creative spaces are emerging. They can be assembled on the basis of their role
in the cultural-creative value chain (experimentation, creation, rehearsal, performance, exhibition,
archiving); their role in creative knowledge production (from visible knowledge to invisible or tacit
knowledge); cognitive-experiential modes of cultural participation; or fixity or flow in the
knowledge economy (Markus, 1993; Bennett et al., 1999; Castells, 1996). In response to Richard
Floridas (2002) creative class thesis, more attention is being placed on attributes of emotional
affect. Spatial cognition looks at the means by which people construct an image of the city in which

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they live, and translate this into awareness and identification (Hospers, 2003). With the focus on the
role of cultural amenities on attracting creative workersviii new studies identify the appealing
aesthetic attributes which provoke aesthetic curiosity (the unexpected use of the alley, the
compatibility with night life), place (the attachment of boundedness, coziness, and authenticity),
sociality (opportunities for informal co-location or clustering of different creative disciplines), and
diversity (historic building and other amenity typesix) (Helbrecht, 2003; Hutton, 2006).
Imagination
The aspirational aspect of the creative space imaginary is a remarkable resourcelooking outward,
globally and competitively, and inward, locally and co-operatively. Critiques of disembedded
visions of starchitects in the period of spectacle and consumption are now so well known they
have generated vernacular shorthand: the Bilbao effect.x Opposing this view, in the organic ecology
paradigm (influenced by urban theorist Jane Jacobs) is the postulate that the roots of creative spaces
always lie in the existing, historically developed urban environment (Hospers, 2003). The best
strategy is always to assess the actual situation and needs for creative space-making, renovating or
adapting in particular contexts.xi In these ways, imagination connects space to place. Places are
spaces with meaning and local knowledge attached. Spatial imaginaries are most productive when
local and grounded.
From our meta-analysis of extensive literatures on cultural infrastructure and creative space, the
leading trends in re-conceptualizing creative space goals include recovering rurality as lived
creative space (Cloke, 2007) or the slow urban movement, identifying how to construct
empathetic destinations to avoid the exploitative tourist frame on cultural development (Richards
and Wilson, 2007), and how to define authenticity (i.e., unique, local differentiation) in creative
city visions.
Current trends in physical creative space developments reflect changing artistic practices, a new
design ethic of intermixture and involvement, and flexibilization of space.xii The models presented
here as incubators, creative habitats, multi-sector convergence projects are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed, combinations of operating models are emerging that blur the lines between for-profit and
not-for-profit creative enterprises, influencing how cultural-creative activity is organized, how
spaces are used and governed, and challenging the funding systems and planning contexts.
Incubators
Cultural or creative incubators form an umbrella type of creative spaces that offer various
platforms of support for creators and enable connection, production, and networking among creators
and their publics. Artist co-operatives, media arts centres, and new media artist-run centres, as
examples, benefit from coming together to share specialized equipment and production spaces.
While some incubators are multidisciplinary in nature, many others are defined by their specialties
(e.g., fashion, visual arts, film), usually serving a hub role for particular communities, operating as
extensions of them, and evolving over time. They may be municipality-owned-and-operated, notfor-profit co-operatives and societies, or a combination of commercial and not-for-profit
organizations.

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Mduse Cooprative, Quebec City, Canada

Mduse comprises 10 independent studios (woodworking, stone, metal, engraving, and
multipurpose), and range of services including a photography lab, exhibition rooms, and rehearsal,
photography, sound, film, video, and radio studios. It contains space for archiving and equipment
storage, offices, a central computer server, caf-bistro, and an artist studio-apartment (for
international residencies). Approximately 60 per cent of the space is dedicated to development and
40 per cent to exhibition.
http://www.meduse.org/
Arts House, Melbourne, Australia
Arts House, operating from a collection of historic public buildings, is an arts centre operated by the
City of Melbourne. It integrates subsidized office/work space for arts organizations and individual
artists, performance spaces, rehearsal and development spaces, meeting rooms, galleries, a digital
media and sound studio (with recording capability), visual arts studios, a writers lab, and a
producers hub. Arts House provides support for artists from exploration/creation through to
presentation/exhibition, promotion, and touring, and has built a reputation for working
interculturally (Beal, 2008).
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=186&pg=2163
Creative habitats
Evolving from incubators as singular buildings, discourse is expanding to a broader perspective of
creative habitats asking, from the perspective of a creative production ecology, what do artists need
to thrive? Jones (2008) identified key components of a creative production milieu as: space and
place (mixed living/working spaces), networks and a sense of community, entrepreneurial support,
and neighbourhoods with distinctive and authentic features. Other desirable features include
alternative, experimental spaces allowing for fluid streams of activity; use of non-traditional
public domain spaces by artists for temporary projects; locally grounded creative spaces enabling
networks; and artists treated as creative resources for a broader community.xiii
Multi-sector convergence projects
Crucial to a creative economy, convergence centres are vibrant physical places designed to
maximize socialization, networking, and random collisions within them. Cross-sectoral
convergence centres are leading to new sustainable operating models of shared sites and spaces.
Notably, these projects are often situated within re-purposed heritage buildingsanother recurring
theme is the restoration or rehabilitation of spaces for repurposed uses. Some projects are designed
as public realm while others are more inwardly focused.

The Artscape Wychwood Barns, Toronto, Canada

Toronto Artscape, the City of Toronto, and the Stop Community Food Centre are transforming
historic streetcar repair barns into a multifaceted art centre, community centre, and environment
centre. It will include artist live-work and studio tenancies and features such as a commercial
kitchen, community wood-burning bake oven, communal gardens, and camps for children. The
diversity of the components is facilitating interesting cross-linkages.
http://www.torontoartscape.on.ca/barns/

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Waag Society, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Waag Society was founded to make new media available to those with minimal access to
computers and Internet. The medialab developed into an avant-gardistic thinktank, building
technology around social and cultural issues, and is active in the fields of networked art, healthcare,
education, and Internet-related issues. It operates from its own heritage Waag Building and Pakhuis
de Zwijger, a renovated warehouse that also houses the Media Guild. Partners come from all sectors
of society.
http://www.waag.org/
Involvement
In an era when historical recollection of built form and its social context is thin, how do artists,
planners, and citizens seek to balance the aims of economic efficiency, social welfare, and
environmental sustainability with beauty and liveability? As Uzzell et al. (2002) note, the value
framework interrelating the environment and cultural/social/urban development must take into
account both the objective environment (physical environment, natural resources) and the
psychological and phenomenological environment (perception and evaluation of cultural resources,
group reference, expectancies, lifestyles). Design can be an active force in the sustainability of
culture by reflecting and representing the respective people and places in which it is working
(Blankenship, 2005: 24).xiv
Participatory planning exercises bring collective visioning to communities, developing new
techniques to bridge specialized discourses to everyday vocabularies and, increasingly, using
expressive tools and social networking sites for citizens to map their local cultural iconic spaces.
These exercises may also include consultations with artistic groups to identify unmet space needs.
Channelling this information through local planning regimes with separate recreational,
engineering, social, cultural, and land use bureaucracies imposes complex challenges in reconciling
professional languages and worldviews to influence local politicians.
At the same time, a new entrepreneurialism is taking root,xv and online resource hubs in numerous
cities (e.g., CAR in Chicago) are helping to build independent entrepreneurial capacity to envision
and plan, conduct feasibility analyses, and fundraise for their spatial ventures. Yet sustaining longterm community involvement of volunteers in public initiatives is challenging (Cochrane, 2007). A
multi-generational strategy is needed to maintain the involvement of a largely volunteer or
precarious base of creative labour in governance of creative space-making.
Intervention
Cities are implicated in complex systems of governance, with sharply different constitutional
powers and fiscal levers. Not only is there a trend to multilevel governance, increasingly, armslength creative development agencies (such as Creative Scotland) interact with multiple tiers of city,
regional, state, national, and private-sector interests, and there is an increased corporatization of
form (e.g., arrangements including private sector developers, not-for-profit entrepreneurs, etc.).
In cities where the rise to develop creative spaces has been taken up most keenly, the desire for
enabling structures, organizational cultures, and milieu to encourage creative activity have often
initially spawned top-down policymanagement structures (Schlesinger, 2007). Both in practice and
in the literature, a collective call for replacing this meta-structure mentality with more organic,
grassroots-directed, flexible and enabling conditions/support is emerging (e.g., Sandercock, 2003;
Crossick, 2006; Goldbard, 2006; Schlesinger, 2007; Stern and Seifert, 2007, among others).

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The most important variables in the construction of creative spaces are city land ownership and
control over use of land, property, and premises. In 2002, London and Toronto identified a range of
levers for municipal intervention in creative spaces including: creative cluster strategies, designing
creative quarters, liberalizing zoning regulations, promoting positive images of diversity, and direct
and indirect support for creative enterprises (Evans et al., 2006). Direct ownership and operation of
facilities is the most assertive way to build creative space, as is building public artist housing (or
work-live space). Use of public-private partnerships and business improvement districts is also
increasing.
Individual cities, regional and national programs, and supra-national programs (such as the EU
Cultural Capitals program) have provided money to enable development of cultural facilities across
many cities and communities of different scales. In the spread of creativity as a mode of policy
address around the world, China (Keane, 2007), Singapore, South Korea and the United Arab
Emirates have made dramatic infusions of public investment in flagship cultural facilities. However,
while knowledge and cultural perspectives on creative space-making circulate in global policy
networks, there are few systematic comparisons of cultural infrastructural investments and it is
difficult to compile public accounts of cultural assets (Waltman Daschko, 2008).
Private or civil society-sector investment in creative spaces is a growing part of the picture. Finance
models for creative spaces are typically dependent upon a variety of mechanisms and sources, many
enabled by legislation specific to a country or sub-national region. Challenges are emerging with
traditional sector-specific funding frameworks that cannot embrace blended for-profit and non-forprofit interconnections, and a reformed private-public financial framework is needed. In the
discourse around creative space development and operation, three overarching financial models are
emerging: non-profit real estate development, non-profit and community investment funds, and
social enterprise development (Duxbury et al., 2008).
Integration
Issues of sustainability overarch all development initiatives today. Sustainability is fundamentally
about adapting to a new ethic of living on the planet and creating a more equitable and just society
through the fair distribution of social goods and resources in the world (Darlow, 1996). The most
common definition of sustainable development comes from the World Commission on Environment
and Development 1987 report, Our Common Future: Sustainable development is development that
meets the needs of the present without compromising future generations to meet their own needs
(p. 43). Traditionally, sustainability has been focused on an environmentalism framework, and
environmental concerns continue to be the cornerstone of sustainable development. As the concept
has matured, however, increasing emphasis has been placed on its interconnection to social and
economic dimensions of development, and space has opened up for debate and further reflection
(Kadekodi, 1992; Nurse, 2006a). Culture is gradually becoming a part of this vision and discourse.
Culture as a key dimension of sustainability is a thinly distributed but pervasive idea in the
community development and sustainability literature (Duxbury and Gillette, 2007), traditionally
discussed in terms of cultural capital and defined as traditions and values, heritage and place, the
arts, diversity and social history (Roseland et al., 2005: 12). The emerging framework incorporates
more dynamic and expansive perspectives in which culture is more broadly conceived as a whole
way of life informing underlying belief systems, worldviews, epistemologies and cosmologies
(Nurse, 2006a: 36).xvi Current literature on culture and sustainability incorporates cross-cutting
concerns about cultural vitality, cultural continuityxvii, social embeddedness, social equity, and deep

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environmental knowledge (see, e.g., Chandler and Lalonde, 1998; Uzzell et al., 2002; Doubleday et
al., 2004; Blankenship, 2005; Nurse, 2006a, 2006b; Rhoades, 2006; Thorpe, 2007).
The conceptual idea behind this fourfold model is deceptively simple: creative expression and
participation, which is at the heart of the dynamism of human settlements, requires unlocking the
energies of the social economy of artists, citizens, volunteers and not-for-profit groups to work and
play in around and through the formal creative economy. This social economy in turn adds value
which produces economic growth and prosperity horizontally across many economic sectors within
the carrying capacity of the natural environment. This ecological value chain in turn is embedded in
a supportive culture which celebrates a sustainable ethos, and produces the symbolic capital to
sustain it. Specific planning and policy initiatives (e.g., requiring a cultural assessment in reviewing
development initiatives and plans, enforcing LEED standards on cultural facilities, commissioning
public art for important social and heritage sites, integrating cultural spaces with affordable housing
or social programs for at risk groups, valuing the role of volunteer contributions in calculations of
economic contributions, or taxing tourism businesses for carbon offsets or reinvestment in arts
activities) are all ways to ensure the four pillars are considered equally and integrated with each
other and within an ecological and holistic approach.

In policy and planning initiatives, culture as the fourth pillar of sustainability in urban systems (and
for smaller communities) is gradually gaining currency in places such as Australia, Canada, the
Caribbean, Europe, and New Zealand. Jon Hawkes The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Cultures
Essential Role in Public Planning, and New Zealands model of four community well-beings
(social, economic, environmental, and cultural) have proved influential. In recognition of this need
to consider a four-fold, integrated planning approach, the federal government in Canada has tied gas
tax sharing agreements for its cities to the development of local Integrated Community
Sustainability Plans, integrated policy/planning frameworks that provide direction for community
sustainability planning objectives for the environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions
of its identity (Infrastructure Canada, 2008). To be sure, there is still resistance in many planning
communities more familiar with economic or traditional land use worldviews in community
development which treat cultural facilities or creative spaces as an afterthought.
Nonetheless we argue that carefully designed socio-cultural community spaces can contribute to
integrating artists and arts with everyday culture and to addressing wider social issues, economic
development dimensions, and other challenges of community life. Cultural centres, as a cornerstone
component of broader revitalization initiatives, can balance an array of considerations for
community benefit and bring together different economic, social, and cultural dimensions in
thoughtful, inclusive, and locally grounded manners.
TOHU, Montreal, Canada
TOHU is an encounter between a burgeoning arts community looking for a home, an
environmentally damaged site in the process of being restored, and a low-income neighbourhood
unsure of what to do with its rich potential (Brunelle, 2008). TOHUs three-pronged mission
circus (art), earth (environment), and people (community) is bound together through an
overarching concern for human development. It has a job readiness program for neighbourhood
youth and a policy that all staff working with the public at TOHU live in the neighbourhood.
http://www.tohu.ca

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Haida Heritage Centre at Kaay Llnagaay, Haida Gwaii, Canada

The Haida Heritage Centre, celebrating the rich culture, art, and history of the Haida Nation,
consists of five contemporary timber longhouses housing an expanded Haida Gwaii Museum,
exhibition space, meeting rooms/classrooms, the Performing House, Canoe House, Bill Reid
Teaching Centre, Carving Shed, gift shop, and a restaurant/caf. The Haida Heritage Centre
contributes to the preservation of Haida culture and to the diversification of the local economy of
this small rural community.
http://www.haidaheritagecentre.com
The sustainability of an urban system can be understood as the compatibility and productive
intermixture between social, economic, and cultural dynamics and environmental resources in the
present and the future (Uzzell et al., 2002). We argue that models of creative space-making must
include a duty of care (a fiduciary, long-term public trust approach) which specifically protects
intergenerational and class equity as well as ethno-cultural diversity.
Duty of care traditionally interprets intergenerational equity to refer to historical buildings and
creative spaces which archive and preserve cultural expression.xviii Indeed, an extensive scaffolding
of international covenants adopted by UNESCOxix (which intervenes to protect certain cultural
places, notably under its World Heritage mechanisms) and at various regional and national levels
have established a fairly robust set of responsibilities to protect historical spaces for future
generations.xx We propose that holistic creative space policy incorporate notions of stewardship,
and enable a framework to address issues of gentrification, multicultural flows, and in place
intercultural diversity.
Gentrification
The impact of artist-led regeneration on sustaining creative spaces is of particular interest. Upscaling can take many forms: the path from unslumming (Jane Jacobs) to neighbourhood
improvement to gentrification is a continuum. Gentrification is most often linked to the movement
of artists into previously poor, unsafe, or unfashionable districts, who then in turn may be displaced
by red-hot real estate markets. Intentional gentrification may also involve the deployment of
purpose-built cultural spaces to anchor revitalization in certain zones. Numerous projects have
shown that the advent of a theatre can drive local restaurants and other amenities and increase
property value for residents locally (e.g., Sharpe et al., 2004).
Philadelphias Social Impact of the Arts Project shows a strong correlation between the presence of
cultural providers, dense social networks, and the decline of poverty in low- income areas and
makes the case for natural cultural district development on an evolutionary, small scale model
(Stern and Seifert, 2007). The hollowing out of artistic presence through the processes of
gentrification, both from the perspective of having a voice in the community and the ability to keep
spaces as artistic or creative ones, is a central risk to sustainability. Connecting artists and
community through creating small organizations and partnerships can help embed a creative
community into the wider socio-economic milieu. Individual artist ownership of physical spaces
and artist co-operatives have proven to be effective models in maintaining artistic spaces and
presence in a community over time, often enabled by municipal intervention during development or
created by non-profit real estate developers.
Progressive social strategies seeking to mitigate the effects of displacement attendant with
gentrification have imposed linkage fees and exactions on developers but have had only limited

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success in ensuring social goals for creative spaces. Indeed, surveys of local planners find they are
rarely top-of-mind in rationales for cultural space development fewer than 10 per cent of cities
surveyed in the US, for example, look at publicly subsidized housing for creators and artists
(Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2008).
Most analyses suggest the principal barrier against excessive gentrification is a more spatially
integrated urban policy, one focused on incenting and encouraging mixed-use developments,
committed to maintaining and renewing social housing stock over time and preventing speculative
flipping of publicly subsidized artist live-work studios or spaces. Social inclusion strategies in the
construction of creative spaces include: strong public housing with artist access, empowerment zone
financing, long-term rent controls, public investment funds for cultural-creative space development,
and micro-financing for cultural entrepreneurs.
Diversity
In most ecological thinking, diversity is the ultimate outcome of dynamic systems. The same is true
of culture, where diversity is increasingly recognized as a means of achieving resilience for the
cultural ecology as a whole (Bradshaw and Bekoff, 2001). The duty of care to the multicultural
flows of immigrants and sojourners links the dynamics of globalization with the development of
creative spaces and inclusive place-making. The social dimensions of creative spaces deserve closer
consideration, with particular attention to the inherent desirability of fostering cultural-creative
diversity within these spaces (Mommaas, 2004, Sacco et al., 2007) as well as the broader culturalcreative diversity of communities (Duxbury et al., 2006; Dang and Duxbury, 2007). Related to this
is the importance of inter-disciplinarity and hybridity in aesthetic modes of creation and innovation.
The challenge is to make existing creative spaces inclusive of different cultural groups (see, e.g.,
Duxbury et al., 2006; Mercer, 2006), and redistribute resources to them.
Where there is a dearth of intelligence is in cross-cultural form, and different religious or cultural
interpretations of private or public space. Blending architectural knowledges (of the use of
facades, for example, inspired by Oriental or Islamic traditions), and new experiments of ethnoscapes or their renewal have the potential to promote intercultural understanding, local
neighbourhood identification, and creativity.
Conclusion
The integrated creative space-planning approach which we have outlined as a proactive move
forward from site-specific ad hoc development ones faces three main challenges. The first is to
develop a robust, multifaceted approach to creative space development that is sensitive to the
changing needs of the creative activity that animates the physical spaces and to emerging multisectoral and blended operational models. The second is to provide a comprehensive planning
framework that can facilitate and enable collaborative/decentralized development spurred by
grassroots cultural vitality and capacity. The third challenge is to balance the rigidity of must have
prescriptive approaches with more flexible ones that embed stable, long-term cultural-creative
facility investments within broader planning processes. These challenges reflect the tensions
between the planned and the organic, top-down or bottom-up, creator-led or creative coalition-led
project designs.
Conceptual approaches and practices to creative space are evolving and the emerging models are
challenging existing planning, financial, and policy systems. The cases we have cited are modest in
scale, grounded, flexible, and consistent with an urban duty of care to protect intergenerational,
class, and intercultural equity while fostering creative vitality and enabling it to flourish. A thick

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understanding of local cultural-creative spaces and their human resources forms the policy
intelligence foundation on which to integrate culture with economic, education, environmental,
social, and health policies. Local cultural strategies need to balance entrepreneurship with a needsbased analysis, to seek authentic local differentiation, and recover a dimension of playfulness in
cities, not as an experience of consumption and staged commercial production but a genuine
expression of creativity and a process of intercultural education and re-discovery (Bianchini,
2004).We join forces with many who argue that the design of the built creative environment is an
important element of the productive forces of society, not just a reflection of them (Hutton, 2006).
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the editors and authors for this opportunity to
participate in rethinking the physical structures in which creativity can be unleashed. Mirjam
Gollmitzer, Keith McPhail, Erin Schultz, Eileen Gillette, and Kelsey Johnson of SFUs Center for
Policy Studies on Culture and Communities have been invaluable for their research assistance.
Some of the research in this article was based on a series of cross-Canada regional and national
policy and issues dialogues on The State of Cultural Infrastructure and papers presented at the
international symposium Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity, Ottawa, April 28May 1, 2008. These events were made possible principally through support from Infrastructure
Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

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|NOTES
i

However, Africa, Middle East, and Latin America are underrepresented in the creative/economy/policy
literature.

ii

Henri Lefebvre (1991) locates the conceptual representation of space in the signs, discourses, and objectified
images of spatial order traded by designers, planners, geographers, and other scientists. Paul Cloke (2007)
reminds us that the other equally important dimensions are representational space (how it is lived or
experienced) and spatial practices (how it is perceived) (see Richards and Wilson, 2007).
iii

This context may help to explain why visual approaches such as cultural mapping are frequently used to
identify and codify cultural resources and assets. Early prototypes of such maps worked to visibilize unseen
locations of cultural spaces, highlighting proximity, tracing direction, and occasionally indicating changes
over time. Frequently two-dimensional, they use simple inputs of locational coordinates and asset type. Now
there are more sophisticated (GIS) uses of the mapping techniques explore dimensions of density and access,
either in terms of audience access, or foot traffic or of affordability, lease rates and so on. Some are indexical
and much more interpretive in nature.

iv

David Harveys simple characterization of early neo-liberalism is premised on the notion that human wellbeing can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional
framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free
trade. (Harvey, 2007: 22). Harvey was one of the first political economists to identify the urban
entrepreneurial thesis in 1989.

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Evans (2005) helpfully distinguishes between culture-led regeneration, cultural regeneration and culture
disconnected from regeneration.
vi

The model identifies are five stages in the cycle: (1) Enhancing the ideas-generating capacity of the town,
(2) Turning ideas into reality, (3) Networking and circulating ideas, (4) Providing platforms for delivery, and
(5) Building audiences and markets. Renewable urban energies feedback into stage 1.
vii

Modernist visions are characterized by mega-structural bigness, straight space (city centre canyons or
suburban vistas) rational order, hardness and opacity, and discontinuous serial vision. On the other hand,
postmodern townscapes include quaintspace, textured facades, stylishness, reconnection with the local
(often involving deliberate historical/geographical construction) and a reemphasis on walking corridors (see
E. Relph, quoted in Hutton, 2006: 1822).
viii

The Lloyd Quarter in the old harbour of Rotterdam presents itself as a total formula for the creative class,
supplying it not only with exclusive office and living space a variation of shiny hypermodern objects,
maritime-like buildings and reconverted warehouses but also bars, restaurants, sporting and fitness facilities,
and so on. The Lloyd Quarter has been conceived of as a hedonistic special zone for the creative class, an
exclusive playground fully catered to the needs and desires of its extravagant target group (Boie and Pawels,
2007).
ix

Creative workers look for spaces to work in characterized by: ample space (i.e., not less than 800 square
feet in live/work studio guidelines), good natural lighting, ventilation, design tending to upper-levels of
historic buildings, with retail activity on the lower floor, and many personalized features of interior design
(Hutton, 2006: 1835).
x

Gehrys design for the Guggenheim Bilbao exhibit is dropped in on the landscape, and the development is
regarded as bold as it is controversial, with mixed economic and social impacts, since it did not grow a local
arts market, for example.
xi

Andy Pratt (2002) argues the evidence for positive impact on policy interventions in creative clusters is
weak, and indeed, creative industries must emerge out of some pre-existing activity or strength to flourish.
xii

They may be a result of pragmatism, that is, adjustment to diminishing budgets, or changing
artistic/experiential needs.
xiii

The situation of artists is often left out of creative city discussions. These features were articulated in
presentations and discussions at the Creative Construct: Building for Culture and Creativity international
symposium, held April 28 to May 1, 2008 in Ottawa, Canada (www.symposium2008.ca).
xiv

Blankenship (2005) outlines five frameworks for design as key: (1) awareness of the local/personal culture;
(2) valuing visual traditions and folklore along with an understanding of their impact/influence on
contemporary design; (3) exhibiting confidence that leads to less dependence upon an imitation of large,
dominate cultures, and which allows the emergence and integration of local aesthetics; (4) an increase in
publications that promote local design and recognize individuals who serve as role models for young
designers; and (5) a vision for the future.
xv

For example, Urban Splash, working out of Manchester and Liverpool, champions organic development to
unique creative markets and mixed-use development. The Capitol Hill Arts Center in Seattle integrated
commercial businesses (bars, a restaurant, and a pilates studio) with cultural components (studio theatre and
other presentation spaces), and evolved into seven roles: rental venue, promotional partner, investment
licenser, presenter, sponsor, producer, and community development fund (Kwatinetz, 2008).

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xvi

This approach resonates with UNESCOs 1995 definition of the cultural dimension of development as the
whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society
or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the
human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs (p. 22).
xvii

Chandler and Lalonde (1998) links markers of cultural continuity in First Nations communities with rates
of teenage suicide in these communities. The authors conclude: Communities that have taken active steps to
preserve and rehabilitate their own cultures are shown to be those in which youth suicide rates are
dramatically lower (191).
xviii

A survey of larger US cities recently conducted found 70 per cent worked to preserve a historically
significant public space, building or monument (Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2008).
xix

These include, the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity of Cultural
Expressions (2005), the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003).
Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and National Heritage (1972) and the Convention for the
Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) among others.

xx

See, for example, Paget (2008): The Community Preservation Act of Massachussetts allows communities to
generate revenue to acquire and preserve open space, affordable housing, and preserve historic buildings and
landscapes.

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