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Resilient creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe

Emma Feltona; Mark Nicholas Gibsonb; Terry Flewa; Phil Grahama; Anna Danielb
a
Creative Industries, QUT, Brisbane, Australia b National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia
Online publication date: 05 August 2010

To cite this Article Felton, Emma , Gibson, Mark Nicholas , Flew, Terry , Graham, Phil and Daniel, Anna(2010) 'Resilient

creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe', Continuum, 24: 4, 619 630
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.485675
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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 24, No. 4, August 2010, 619630

Resilient creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe

Emma Feltona*, Mark Nicholas Gibsonb, Terry Flewc, Phil Grahamd and Anna Daniele
Creative Industries, QUT, Brisbane, Australia; bNational Centre for Australian Studies, Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia; cCreative Industries, QUT, Brisbane, Australia; dCreative
Industries, QUT, Brisbane, Australia; eNational Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University,
Melbourne, Australia

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The relationship between culture and the economy is of growing interest to researchers,
writers and policy makers. Advanced economies have become increasingly
culturalised, pushing culture from the periphery to the centre of policy concerns
and action. The economic downturn commencing in late 2008 generated predictions
that ranged from the apocalyptic to the sanguine, across all sectors. This article offers
an insight into the relationship between the economy, the creative industries and their
geographic localities. It investigates creative industries situated away from the urban
core, and located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. We suggest that for
creative industries situated in outer suburbs, there are characteristics that may
contribute to their economic resilience.

Introduction
Economic vulnerability has always been somewhere on the horizon of research and
writing on creative industries. Those areas which are most commercially successful, such
as the Hollywood film industry, are also those which spend the least time thinking about
creative industries development. Creative industries as a discourse have more often been
concerned with nurturing fragile shoots those which need advocacy and research in
order to grow. It speaks to those for whom business failure, unemployment, and financial
risk are only too real as experiences or possibilities or indeed for whom business models
of any sort seem difficult to imagine and have assumed a structural dependence on state
subsidy or volunteer labour.
The creative industries may be better prepared than others, therefore, in responding to
the most recent crisis of capitalism following the global financial crisis of 2008 2009.
There is a certain counter-intuitive aspect to this. As Andy Pratt (2009) has suggested
recently, there is a well-established common-sense according to which any downturn is
particularly bad news for the sector: the burden of argument here turns on the fact that
the CCI [Creative and Cultural Industries] are based upon consumption, and hence will
always be subject to fluctuation in consumer spending (495). According to this
assumption, the star of the creative industries will always fade at times of recession, as
attention returns to the real economy. But as Pratt goes on to argue, there are good
reasons to reject such a simple view of culture as simply an added extra or candy floss.
Over the last few decades, the advanced economies have been profoundly
culturalized, such that economic transactions include, or depend upon, the cultural

*Corresponding author. Email: e.felton@qut.edu.au

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online
q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.485675
http://www.informaworld.com

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dimension of their activities to not only add value, but to encourage consumers to make
the buy/not buy decision (496). Culture underpins the main action and cannot be
removed. Yet there has been a common observation that the recent arts and cultural boom
in countries such as Britain co-evolved with what proved to be an unsustainable
hyperinflation of financial assets and bonus cultures in the City of London and rewarding a
contemporary visual art scene [that] has been the most slavishly money-serving, catering
as it has done exclusively to the rich (OKeefe 2009).
If this has been the case, then one would expect much of the arts and the creative
industries to sink into recessionary gloom alongside the financial sector that promoted
their unsustainable growth. But as Pratt observes, this is only one of four possibilities for
cultural sectors in a recession. Another possibility is that the public sector picks up much
of the slack arising from a private-sector downturn and that cultural activities flourish,
albeit with quite different and most likely more socially oriented priorities. A third
possibility is that we are in a phase of creative destruction, as Schumpeter (2008) refers
to business cycles under capitalism, and that there will be green shoots of new forms of
culture driven by new ideas and possibilities as others wither as they prove to be
unsustainable. The final possibility that Pratt raises is that just as many economists and
policy makers have failed to adequately register the rise and growth of the creative
industries, they have failed to understand their changing relationship to the economy and
society. The resilience of the cultural sectors, by this account, arises from a wider shift in
the relationship between symbolic and material production.
If understanding culture as the main action requires conceptual repositioning, then
equally we suggest that the geography of culture and the creative industries transcends
conventional understandings of their habitats. The notion, most vigorously promoted by
Florida (2002), that inner-city bohemian arts-focused enclaves are the natural domain of
creativity and culture is challenged by recent research which has investigated creative
economies in regional and outer suburban locations (see Gibson and Brennan-Horley
2006; James 2005). Gibsons work broadens the scope of investigation into creative
endeavour beyond the inner city into ex-urban, regional and remote areas and raises
questions around proximity and marginality, and the negotiations entailed (2010). The
cultural turn thus points to methodological and conceptual shifts that might provide a
richer view of the relationship between culture and the economy. Culture in the broader
meaning of the term is a place-based phenomenon and the extent to which attitudes,
values, and behaviours are related to the causal mechanisms of successful innovative
activity in some places and not others is not yet well understood (James 2006;
Gertler 2004).
In the following we consider the implications of the economic downturn for the
creative industries in a particular geographic zone: Australian suburbia, or more precisely
outer suburbia. Owing to both the characteristics of the creative industries, and the lower
costs associated with living and working in outer suburban localities, we suggest that those
creative industries workers living and working in the outer suburbs may be well equipped
to respond to the economic downturn. In pursuing a geographic focus, we follow a wellestablished path in research around the cultural geography of creativity but vary its spatial
emphasis. Much of the early literature on creative industries came out of attempts to revive
struggling post-industrial cities (see, for example, Crewe and Beaverstock 1998; Brown,
OConnor, and Cohen 2000) and, in this sense, has been concerned with the relation
between creative industries and recession. However, this literature has focused strongly on
the urban. It has sought, in Crewe and Beaverstocks (1998) phrase, to fashion the city,
converting dilapidated urban strips and crumbling warehouses into thriving zones of

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creativity and cultural consumption. But suburbia is seen to be somewhat different. In

Australia, this phase of urban development was kick-started in the early 1990s by the
federal (Labor) governments Building Better Cities program which spawned
collaboration between certain State governments and local councils.
Despite the relationship between cultural endeavour and urban regeneration of the last
decade, Australian scholars such as Gibson have recently identified the growth of creative
enterprise and activity located beyond the inner city(Gibson and Brennan-Horley 2006;
Gibson 2010). Gibson and Brennan-Horleys research indicates that in Sydney, ex-urban
areas such as the Blue Mountains experienced the highest rates of creative industries
employment growth in all of Sydney between 1991 and 2001 (Gibson and Brennan-Horley
2006, 467). Similarly, the ex-urban areas of Wyong, Camden, and Wollondilly achieved
higher rates of growth in creative work in the last 20 years than did inner-city areas such as
Sydney City and Marrickville (465).
Drawing upon an Australian Research Council project that examines the experience of
creative workers living and working in outer suburban localities in Brisbane and
Melbourne, this article explores the overlooked area of outer urban geography as an
economic site of creative industries.
The economic downturn and its impacts
While the predictions of the global financial crisis which emerged in September 2008
ranged from apocalyptic to the sanguine, the failures generated knock-on effects around
the world including heavy stock market falls, credit crises, and a slowing of economic
activity with resultant increases in unemployment (ABS 2009a). The consequences of the
crisis were experienced unevenly across the world, with Australia remaining one of
the most resilient economies. While growth slowed in Australia, the country avoided the
recession experienced by European countries and the United States. Despite the financial
crisis being top down, with its origins in the more arcane realms of the financial sector,
an index of job vulnerability indicated in early 2009 that the battler outer suburbs of
capital cities may be affected more heavily than inner urban areas (Martin 2009). These
areas are also experiencing the fastest population growth nationwide (ABS 2009c),
particularly in Melbourne and South East Queensland.
However, as the economic downturn played out throughout 2009, this geographic
prediction appears misplaced. Recent evidence has shown that job losses have tended to
hit high-end earners the hardest: those in finance and consulting sectors. This group
typically lives and works in the CBD and inner city where rents and housing costs are high
(Black 2009). Floridas well-known creative cities thesis pinpoints locality-based
characteristics of the creative class. One of his key findings is that those creative
industries workers who work in high-tech and knowledge-based sectors seem to prefer
living and working in inner-urban localities which combine technology, talent and
tolerance (2005, 37). Floridas investigation found that these places shared certain
physical and cultural-geographic commonalities, such as inclusivity and open social and
ethnic diversity, bohemian enclaves (117), and natural features and amenities (172).
Yet for those creative industries workers living in outer suburban regions, house prices
have remained relatively stable, while those in the inner city have borne the brunt of the
recession, with some dwellings in the luxury sector tumbling dramatically, forcing some
home owners with high mortgages to sell up and move out (Carter and Condon 2009). The
stability of outer suburban house prices is no doubt in large part due to the federal
governments tripling of the First Home Loan grant scheme because the outer suburbs are

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typically where many first home buyers go. But, for instance, in Melbourne, where 72% of
people work 5 kilometres beyond the CBD (Davies 2009), what of people who live and
work in the suburbs or outer suburbs? Is there a geography of economic impact? Are some
industries more resilient than others? Service and creative industries often rely on their
intellectual property for income generation. Because they are less resource intensive than
commodity industries, they may more easily respond to fluctuations in demand and are
therefore perhaps better equipped to weather financial downturns. In particular, those
businesses affected by the dotcom crash in 2001 have already been tested by financial
crisis and so creative industry survivors of that era may be better placed to emerge from
this recession.
The creative industries with links to the knowledge economy are often described as
innovative, entrepreneurial and problem-solving (Berwick and Wright 2009;
Kirkpatrick 2009). Creative industries that are small to medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs), might also be described as lean, sustainable, value added and flexible and, as a
number of observers have pointed out, it is precisely these qualities that could help fortify
many parts of the sector against the ravages of the global economic downtown
(Kirkpatrick 2009; Priestman 2009). Their elasticity makes them resilient. More
specifically, as a sector whose key assets include intellectual property and people who
create something from nothing, creative industries tend to rely on lighter infrastructure
and are therefore able to be more responsive to market conditions than many other
industries whose need for greater infrastructure makes them cumbersome and slow to
change (Kirkpatrick 2009). In Australia, the majority of creative industries are SMEs that
employ an average of 20 people or fewer (Higgs, Cunningham, and Pagan 2007, 13).
Depending upon their business, this makes them more organizationally agile with relative
elasticity. Downsizing for a graphic design or architectural company might mean a
reduction in employee hours rather than job losses of the scale occurring in the mining and
banking sectors, or in large companies such as Qantas. Output and production might also
be more easily tweaked to accommodate economic conditions.
In a generic sense, the resilience model that Robyn Archer employs for creative
workers could equally apply to many of the creative industries.1 Archers concept of
resilience is based on a scientific ecological model and consists of four phases, but in
general is defined as the capacity of a system to avoid disturbance and still retain its basic
function (2009, 9). It also relates to concepts of sustainability and the challenge of
servicing current system demands without eroding the potential to meet future needs.
Versatility and variety are components of a healthy ecological system, and many designbased SMEs such as advertising and multimedia agencies offer a wide range of services,
from concept design, media buying, and product development across several digital
platforms. Similarly, architectural firms may provide building design, interior design, and
urban planning services and partner with clients in building developments. As a CEO of a
small advertising agency in our study put it, to survive you need to be multi-taskers.
While there has been some drop in consumer spending in Australia since April 2008
(ABS 2009d), it has not been consistent, and certain products and services such as
clothing, soft goods, and hospitality services have remained in stable demand throughout
the market (ibid.). The view that some creative industries remain resilient in an economic
downturn is underscored by the fact that as we bunker down and spend less money on
going out and purchasing, our everyday lives in leisure, work, and education are none the
less heavily dependent on the products and services of the creative industries sectors (dos
Santos-Duisenberg 2009, 27). On a daily basis we consume relatively low-cost digital
services, read papers, use computers, listen to music and radio, wear clothes (fashion),

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watch television and go to the cinema all activities most likely to be maintained, if not
increased, during a recession. Media analyst Richard Greenfield endorses this view and
notes that, so far, the music industry has fared well in the current economic climate and
that CD sales in the United States have remained strong throughout the recession (Sisario
2008). In Australia, consumer electronics have done well, with retail sales up 13.2% in
March 2009 after two consecutive months of decline (Richards 2009).2 While sales may
point to the contribution made by the federal governments stimulus package, it is
interesting to note where people are spending their money. Similarly, Australias high
growth in consumer Internet use, with 8 million active broadband subscriptions (ABS
2009b), is often driven by demand for home entertainment and other creative activities.
Clearly, some creative industry sectors will be negatively affected, such as those
embedded in tourism. But dos Santos-Duisenberg suggests that other markets could
emerge. Indeed, some commentators have been sanguine about the impact of the global
recession, predicting the death of businesses that are not keenly responsive to the markets
in which they operate. In economic terms that might look like the death of outmoded
business structures and a flourishing of innovative businesses along the lines of the more
robust creative industries. As Taylor (2009) points out, in the current climate:
the creative industries are embroiled in a clear case of creative destruction, where longestablished businesses struggle with complacency, irrelevance and commoditisation, whilst
the innovative, entrepreneurial seeds of what will eventually replace them sprout
unpredictably in every direction. (20)

In a similar vein, Australian Reserve Bank Board member Roger Corbett described
recessions as a cleansing process (McIntyre 2009). Unwilling to be harbingers of a new
world order the full impact of the financial crisis is yet to be played out we suggest that
if the global financial crisis is in part geographic it originated in the United States and
tumbled like a pack of cards to greater and lesser extents across the world then the
geographic locality of the creative industries will make a difference to their elasticity in an
economic downturn. Indeed, our initial investigation into creative industries in the outer
suburbs of Brisbane and Melbourne has identified several factors which, we suggest,
contribute to the resilience of those industries in these localities. The second part of this
article draws upon the initial findings of this Australian Research Council (ARC) project.
The project covers four outer-suburban sites, and in this article we focus on two locations
Redcliffe in Brisbane and Frankston in Melbourne because these were the locations
with most creative industries activity of the four sites. While the research is location
specific, we argue that the studys findings are indicative of economic characteristics that
can be applied across creative industries located beyond inner-city regions.
Outer suburban creative industries
We use the Queensland State governments definition of Creative Industries which
includes music composition and production; film, television, and entertainment software;
writing, publishing, and print media; advertising, graphic design, and marketing;
architecture, visual arts, and design (Queensland State Government, Industry
Development 2008; see also Higgs, Cunningham, and Pagan 2007). The participants in
our research are scattered along a spectrum of those industries and were selected on the
basis of their ability to financially support themselves. Nonetheless, incomes of creative
industries workers vary significantly along the continuum of creative work and typically
for creative practitioners such as artists, writers, and musicians, the financial rewards are
highly skewed. A very small minority are high income earners while the median weekly

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E. Felton et al.

income for all persons working in cultural occupations was $741, compared with $718 for
all employed persons (ABS 2009d).3 Geographic insecurity and financial constraints of
lower income creative workers is exacerbated by the well-known phenomenon of
displacement from inner-city locations due to rising property values as urban development
occurs. As graffiti artists have written, artists are the storm troopers of gentrification; a
reference to the capitalization of artist-occupied property in the inner city that, in boom
times, turns a negative value into a positive one (Evans 2001, 172). Since urban
consolidation of the early 1990s, property values have risen exponentially in inner-urban
locations across most Australian capital cities. Indeed, several interview participants in the
Brisbane case study area of Redcliffe were economic refugees from the inner city where
they had been renting prior to their move to the outer suburb. Unable to afford to purchase
homes or offices in the inner city owing to spiralling real estate costs, they chose to move
to the affordable outer suburbs. The decision to relocate from the inner city to the outer
suburbs could also be motivated by the preference for single-dwelling housing over
apartment living. However, and in part as a result of inflated inner-city property values,
real estate data indicate that, apart from the luxury housing market, suburban (including
outer suburban) property values have remained stable or have increased in the 12 months
since the economic downturn (ABS 2009e).
Our research is focused principally on the experience of creative workers, and this
emphasis on the cultural conditions of creative industries employment beyond inner-urban
locations provides an insight into the web of connections and spatially based networks
which are central to the realization of markets (Berndt and Boeckler 2009; James 2005).
One hundred and seventeen in-depth interviews with creative industries workers were
conducted over a 12-month period. Interviews were of approximately 45 minutes duration
and canvassed open-ended questions focused predominantly on the relationship between
place and locality for creative industries workers. This included questions about the ways
in which local and wider networks functioned, and the sense of whether or not and why the
locations were conducive to creative industries work. All participants selected produced
incomes to sustain themselves, and for some this meant working in a combination of roles.
Participants were sourced from Brisbane and Melbourne Yellow Pages listings, web
searches and recommendations from colleagues; snowballing from one participant to
others; and occasionally receiving expressions of interest from potential participants.
Ethnographic research was undertaken in which researchers spent time in the localities
attending festivals and local cultural events, and some interviews were obtained this way.
Participants fell into one of two distinct categories which we have termed either artisans,
those people involved in generally solo creative endeavour such as art (painting, sculpture)
music or writing, and those who either worked in and/or ran an SME the commercial
creatives. The latter category tended to be design-based industries: graphic, web,
architecture, interior and fashion.
As the central focus of the research is the experience of creative industries workers
beyond the urban core, we only touch on aspects of the creative economy such as income
and associated business and professional costs including property and rent. Yet
affordability of location was a major theme among most participants, who viewed
affordability as a key benefit of living and working in an outer suburb. Most either owned
or were in the processing of buying their own homes, with a similar number owning or in
the process of buying their business premises, if they were not working from home.
Comparatively lower mortgages or rents meant that for many people the outer suburbs
offered a relief from the pressure of servicing high levels of debts more commonly
associated with creative workers living and working in inner-city locations, particularly as

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urban precincts continue to be gentrified. The appeal of affordability for those who had
relocated from the inner city to the outer suburb was frequently accompanied initially by
reservations about the shift in cultural milieu from inner to outer areas of the city.
However, a general level of acceptance of their move seemed to prevail, with several
participants commenting on the benefits of living and working in their outer suburb which
they had not anticipated. In outer suburban Melbourne, a Frankston creative worker who
moved from the inner city to what she termed boganville4 Frankston with her husband in
1980 was initially apprehensive about leaving her inner-urban friends, restaurants, and
lifestyle: Frankston was, oh no . . . theres murderers out here . . . I hated it when I came
here, hated it, it was horrible but once I knew what was in my own backyard it was wow,
you should come down here, its amazing. Similar stories of initial reticence and
acceptance are heard from participants in outer suburban Redcliffe, indicative of the
strength and impact of place-based perceptions and the potency of the city as the locus of
all things creative.
For many creative workers who work non-traditional hours, the lower cost of work
premises and housing in the outer suburb took the heat off earning a full-time income to
pay off mortgages and so contributed to other flexible work arrangements. Of the creative
workforce, 31.2% work part-time, a little higher than the national average of 29% (ABS
2009a). Managing paid work while at the same time working on individual projects that
might not be immediately income producing is a common work arrangement for many
creative workers who did not run or work in an SME. Suzanne, a visual artist, states that
the low cost of her mortgage means that she is able to work three days a week in paid work
and on the other days she is free to follow her own stuff. Similarly, Charlotte, a singersong writer, juggles two jobs working at an office in the city for two days a week, with the
rest of the week free to write and perform at local venues.
While housing affordability in general enabled creative workers a more flexible
lifestyle, being able to purchase work premises in an outer suburb at lower costs than if
located in the inner city meant for some participants the difference between renting and
buying. Several participants commented that lower overheads meant that they were able to
pass this benefit on to their clients. John, a graphic designer and multimedia developer who
runs his own business in the outer suburbs and employs eight staff, is able to keep costs
below inner-city competitors as his rent is half to third of what he would pay in the city.
This cost saving is passed on to his clients, a strategy also employed by several other
participants running advertising or graphic design SMEs. In a period of economic decline,
the ability to sustain lower charge-out rates as a result of low overheads assists in the
retention of a solid customer base.
The cost of space is lower in the outer suburbs and for those participants requiring
significant amounts of space either for production or for a series of offices, industrial sheds
provided space at greater economy than the inner city. Several graphic design and
advertising agencies in Redcliffe are housed in retrofitted industrial sheds that have been
transformed into office space. Although staff regularly commute to the city and regionally
for client meetings, a significant amount of their business is conducted online. Gary, an
advertising executive who recently relocated his business from his inner-city rented offices
of 20 years, states that while city-based advertising companies are forced to put up their
fees as a result of rising rents, he is able to maintain a competitive edge and keep his costs
stable. Garys decision was both a lifestyle and financial one: the company could not
afford to purchase the volume of space required in the inner city. Despite the majority of
Garys clients being city based, his clients remained with the company once it relocated
and he has picked up a major account in the new location.

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Similarly, a Frankston-based graphic designer who employs several locals in his

home-based business observes that the inner-urban overheads would be so [too] much.
Some years ago he established premises closer to the city because many of his innerurban-based clients expected him to be available within half an hour of calling. However,
he observes that location is now not such an issue because online technologies have
changed the way business is conducted.
The flexibility provided by online technologies and the relative ease of commuting by
car (not public transport) enables a flow between the city, the outer suburbs, and the
regions which, in the case of our participants, meets both their clients and their own
needs. Reliance on the car for access to markets and clients, particularly among the
Brisbane cohort, raises issues around the adequacy of public transport for people working
in outer suburban areas.
Despite this, while it is clear that place has a significant role to play in creative
industries development (Gertler 1995; Kong 2005; Scott 2001), technologys capacity to
bridge spatial boundaries has contributed to the flexibility and reach of certain work
practices and markets in which face-to-face and online transactions occur (Drake 2003,
512). Creative industries such as multimedia, graphic design, and advertising are heavily
reliant on technology for production, distribution, and communication; dealing with
clients online and meeting face to face occasionally is common among this group of
creative industries workers. The efficiencies that technology enables reducing
commuting and meeting time and potentially lowering labour costs through scalability of
production contribute to the cost benefits of creative businesses in locations beyond the
inner city.
A correlation between productivity and additional work space was identified by
several participants. For example, for a Redcliffe-based sculptor specializing in large
public works, purchasing a workshop in his outer suburb had the unpredictable effect of
tripling his work volume. He speculates about the reasons for the increase: I dont know if
its because Ive got a workshop and I have to pay it off, so Ive been working really hard.
Or I dont know what it is exactly . . . While his increased work may be more to do with
his growing reputation, it could also be that there is a connection between productivity and
space that accommodates all his requirements, something he could not afford in the inner
city. He also comments that his location in an industrial estate gives him ready access to
experts such as welders and joiners who provide advice and help, a support he did not have
when working in the inner city.
The prevalence of home-based studios or offices is another factor that contributes to
lower costs and elasticity of creative workers, and is a pattern associated with several
participants, particularly those employed in a creative practice such as artists. In
Queensland, the vernacular timber house, dominant in many older suburbs such as
Redcliffe, is built suspended above the ground on timber stumps and the convention of
expanding the house by building in underneath has a long history. Similarly in Victoria,
the backyard shed is often converted into or replaced by a purpose-built office, workshop,
or studio. We saw many examples of offices or studios located either underneath the house
in Queensland or businesses such as graphic design companies operating from purposebuilt offices adjoining homes in Victoria.
Proximity to light industrial areas in the outer suburbs where the bulk of art and office
supplies are produced was cited as an asset by several artists and sculptors because access
to supplies allows a greater ease of production. Materials can be purchased directly, easily
and just-in-time, enabling time efficiencies that some participants said they could not
find working in the inner city. One participant challenged us you can give me a long

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shopping list of art supplies and I can obtain them all cheaply locally within this afternoon
by comparison to the effort involved if the person were located in the inner city. A sculptor
who constructs large-scale public art stated that living in the outer suburb gave him ready
access to materials and tradespeople such as welders who were able to provide assistance
and advice. Ease of access to materials means less wasted time and more time given to
creative production.
Low overheads and easy access to materials do not make creative workers immune
from the effects of an economic downturn, however, and the demand for services will be
the ultimate determinant of resilience. Some creative workers such as visual artists are
more vulnerable than others in an economic downturn and demand for products and
services can taper off, as a visual artist in Frankston commented:
I went through the last recession as an artist and everybody just stopped buying paintings. It
was a luxury item so I know what it can do and for a few years I struggled after the last
recession.

Despite this, the artists versatility whether intrinsic or extrinsic motivated him to
diversify his creative activity in the last recession so that he was able to produce an
alternative income stream, a strategy more easily employed if working as a solo operator.
As clients and beneficiaries diminish, creative workers will need to address their costs and
seek alternative, perhaps innovative, revenue streams. In some cases creative workers may
be more open to seeing the potential in sites that others may overlook as the demands for
their products and services often means they have had to be entrepreneurial (Westbury
2009).

Conclusion
Culture generally is often accorded a Cinderella place in serious policy discussions of the
economic fabric of contemporary societies, a view which is greatly reinforced when we
are considering culture in the suburbs. Even after 30 years of discussion around postindustrialism and clear evidence of a significant suburbanization of employment, the
suburbs still generally figure only as spaces of consumption. The recent global financial
crisis has seen a recycling of these prejudices, with widespread predictions that as the
real economy contracts, both the suburbs and creative industries will be particularly
badly hit.
In this article, we have challenged this view with evidence that suburban creative
industries are, on the contrary, relatively resilient in times of economic downturn. The
article has offered an account of the geography of creative industries and their potential for
economic elasticity in places beyond the inner city. For participants in our research,
scalability, the lower cost of property and lower overheads in outer suburban locations
clearly plays a role for those working in industries located beyond the inner city and CBD.
If we were to push our argument for the sake of provocation, we might suggest that
culture in the suburbs provides a relatively secure base of economic activity; the real
economy in relation to which other things should be seen as secondary. This would, of
course, be only to invert the terms which usually function to minimize its importance and
is probably to take the argument too far. Nonetheless, there is a very strong argument for
taking suburban cultures much more seriously than they normally are not just as sites of
consumption but also as sites of production. To date, creative industries research has
focused primarily on the cultural economies of inner-city locations. It is time that this was
complemented by an attention to the geography and cultural conditions of creative

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economies in the suburbs. We hope here to have begun to give a picture of its complexity,
depth and implications.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Australian Research Council for its support of the project Creative
Suburbia: A Critical Evaluation of the Opportunities and Scope for Creative Cultural Development
in Australias Emergent Suburban Communities.

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Notes
1. We acknowledge that Archer disputes the utility of the term creative industries, arguing that its
focus on the economy of creative workers diminishes the intrinsic value of art and culture (2009).
2. http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Appliances/Industry/P4N8C9D2I.
3. Note that the ABS definition of cultural workers differs somewhat from the definition we use of
creative industries workers. ABS categories include those employed in museums and libraries,
and exclude other categories used by the Queensland definition.
4. Bogans is a derisive term to describe people who embody aspirational, i.e. material, suburban
values and have been the object of satire, e.g. the ABCs comedy programme Kath and Kim. See
Turnbull (2008).

Notes on contributors
Emma Felton is a Senior Researcher at Queensland University of Technologys Creative Industries
Faculty.
Mark Gibson teaches and researches in media and cultural studies at the National Centre for
Australian Studies at Monash University and is Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project.
Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communication at the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Creative Suburbia.
Phil Graham is Director of the Institute of Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland
University of Technology and is Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project Creative
Suburbia.
Anna Daniel is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University.

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