The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) is a global leader in research on the role of the creative industries in creating a more dynamic and inclusive innovation system and society. It is a broad-based, multidisciplinary and internationally focused centre embracing basic theoretical and applied research in media, cultural and communication studies, law, education, economics & business, and information technology. It addresses key problems and opportunities for Australia, the Asian region and beyond, arising from innovation in and through the creative economy. The CCI is primarily funded through competitive grants from the Australian Research Council. It is one of the few ARC Centres of Excellence based in the Humanities & Creative Arts, or the Social Sciences.
Table 1: Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results ............................... 18
Table 2: Broad Classification of City Indexes ......................................... 34
Table 3: 16 General Themes of City Index Dimensions.............................. 35
Table 4: Checklist of City Index Dimensions and Indicators: Stocks .............. 36
Table 5: Checklist of City Index Dimensions and Indicators: Flows ............... 37
Table 6: Dimensions and Indicators of Florida’s Creative Cities Index ........... 39
Table 7: Categories and Indicator Groups of the Global Power Cities Index .... 47
Table 8: Global City Indicators Facility ‘Themes’.................................... 50
Table 9: The Value Chain of Meaning and Global Cities ............................ 66
Table 10: Differentiating the Creative City ........................................... 67
Table 11: Differentiating the Creative Arts ........................................... 68
Table 12: Differentiating the Media of Communication............................. 68
Table 13: 16 General Themes of City Index Dimensions ............................ 71
Table 14: CI-1 Creative Clusters ........................................................ 72
Table 15: CI-2 Creative Services ........................................................ 73
Table 16: CI-3 Creative Citizens ........................................................ 73
Table 17: CI-4 Creative Cities ........................................................... 74
Table 18: Interaction and Intermediation of the CCI Models....................... 75
Table 19: Infrastructure & Institutions ................................................ 76
Table 20: Interaction of Agents ......................................................... 76
Table 21: Clustering & Networking..................................................... 77
Table 22: Creative Milieu ................................................................ 77
Table 23: ‘Virtual’ Clustering & Networks ............................................ 78
Table 24: Population Characteristics .................................................. 78
Table 25: Education, Social Learning & Experimentation .......................... 79
Table 26: Cultural Clash ................................................................. 79
Table 27: Urban Planning & Attractions ............................................... 80
Table 28: Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results.............................. 83
Table 29: Rank Order of CCI Creative City Index Results ........................... 84
Table 30: Sensitivity Analysis of CCI Creative City Index Results.................. 85
Table 31: Sensitivity Analysis of Rank Order of CCI Creative City Index ......... 86
Table 32: The Activities Included Within CCI’s Creative Segments Definition... 87
Table 33: Creative Industries Scale, Scope & Employment ......................... 91
Table 34: Microproductivity ............................................................. 98
Table 35: Attractions & Economy of Attention ......................................103
Table 36: Participation & Expenditure................................................107
Table 37: Public Support ................................................................109
Table 38: Human Capital & Research .................................................111
Table 39: Global Integration............................................................116
Table 40: Openness, Tolerance & Diversity ..........................................120
Figure 1: Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results (3D Column) .............. 19
Figure 2: Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results (Marked Radar)........... 19
Figure 3: The CCI-BJSS agreement is signed in Beijing, September 2010 ........ 20
Figure 4: World Population of Young People to 2050 (UNDESA 2009) ............. 69
Global cities used to be empire capitals (power, politics); then trading centres (commerce, market efficiency); now they are attractors (creativity, economics of ideas).
Cities rise and fall; rapidly urbanizing world; cities compete for globally mobile human capital.
Cities compete on many dimensions: The CCI Creative City Index aims to capture these dimensions.
Many extant indices (23 reviewed). Two classes: ‘stock’ indexes focusing on cultural and creative assets (e.g. Florida Creative Cities Index); and ‘flows’ indexes focusing on broader city services, innovation, ICT and global integration (e.g. Global Power City Index).
16 city index dimensions: cultural tourism; creative industries; cultural capital; venues; liveability; transportation; globalization; openness; human capital; social capital; government; business & economy; entrepreneurship; innovation & research; technology & ICT; environment.
Global city index construction is a new, emergent industry. Not all of the current indexes are expected to survive. But no long-running dominant indexes.
Global cities evolve out of creative cities. Creative cities organically develop. We caution against the ‘real-estate’ model of city development.
We develop a theory of the ‘value chain of meaning’ from pre-modern, to modern and to global cities.
We explain the shift from ‘creative clusters’ (CI-1) to ‘creative services’ (CI-2), to ‘creative citizens’ (CI-3), to ‘creative cities’ (CI-4).
We distinguish between a world city and creative city. Creative cities focus on the dynamic sources of change, and with a centre of gravity that substantially incorporates the youth cohort and popular culture shaped by the digitally literate and entrepreneurial consumer. Creative cities are characterised by ‘complexity, friction and buzz’.
We propose the CCI-CCI Index, comprising 8 main dimensions, with 72 components and over 250 individual data points.
A pilot is estimated on six cities; one metropolitan and one provincial in each of three countries: London & Cardiff (UK), Melbourne & Brisbane (AUS), and Berlin & Bremen (GER).
The eight dimensions:
Creative industries scale & scope;
Microproductivity;
Attractions & economy of attention;
Participation & expenditure;
Public support;
Human capital;
Global integration;
Openness, tolerance & diversity.
We outline the methods and data used to estimate each index dimension.
Three of our indicator suites – CI scope, microproductivity, & economy of attention – are entirely novel inclusions in creative city index construction.
The CCI-CCI index is efficient and robust.
Some issues likely with equivalent measures (particularly of social media) in China; and potentially in other jurisdictions.
The index accords mostly with intuition, with London dominating on most dimensions. Berlin and Melbourne are comparable.
The Index will improve in efficiency with the benefit of (a) longitudinal trends among the cities analysed; (b) a wider comparative array and diversity of cities indexed.
The CCI Creative City Index (CCI-CCI) is a new approach to the measurement and ranking of
Global creative cities can often seem alike, in respect of per-capita measures of factors such as public spending on cultural amenities, or the number of hotels and restaurants. This is to be expected when people and capital are relatively free to move, and where economic and political institutions are broadly comparable. However, we find that different cities can register far larger differences at the level of consumer-co-creation and especially digital
We set out the case for our new model of a
We then present the findings from a
A key insight that all city indexes point to, as ours most certainly does, is that creative global cities are increasingly engaged in
Globalization is a centuries-long process that results in the increased interdependence of peoples’ economic, cultural, social and political lives. Globalization progresses as ‘factor mobility’ increases, and accelerates when
From 2008 a majority of the world’s population – over 3 billion people – now lives in cities, making humanity an urban species for the first time (UNFPA 2007). In completely new ways and at unprecedented scale,
The process of globalization has also drawn attention to the productive potential of cities and to the human cost. Yet the enormous scale and impact of future urbanization have not penetrated the public’s mind (UNFPA 2007: Introduction).
It also means that cities compete globally. Nation-states are no longer the key units of global competition; instead, cities compete with one another for valuable scarce factors of production. The most important factor, by far, is ‘human capital’ –
That globalization is a selection mechanism on cities is the key insight that underpins contemporary attention to the measure of a city’s creative output and potential. The demand for and development of such indexes has burgeoned in the past decade (see chapter 2 of this report). Yet a central challenge remains: what is the effective measure of a creative city? This has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. It is not simply a matter of adding up a city’s capital infrastructure and knowledge exports, or adducing a measure from population size, although these factors are important. Degrees of openness and diversity also need to be included in any measure of a global creative city. These have been key additions contributed by the most influential players, the Florida, MORI Foundation and GaWC indexes. The current state of the art is that manufacturing-based indexes have been updated to account for the openness, global integration, attractiveness and liveability of a city to produce much improved measures of global city indexes and rankings.
Yet there remain significant gaps in this enterprise, most notably in accounting for consumer imagination, user co-creation and amateur production, and the social learning dynamics of the creative citizen, who is connected both to ‘small world’ networks (see e.g. Ormerod & Wiltshire 2008) and to global complex systems via digital social networking, including digital platforms like Facebook (Potts et al 2008a). These factors remain unaccounted in current indexes for at least two reasons: (1) they are difficult and seemingly subjective measures to make; and (2) in traditional industrial economics there was little reason to suppose that these factors mattered.
Our work at the CCI, particularly through the intellectual framework developed in John Hartley’s Federation Fellowship program (e.g. Hartley 2009; 2012), has highlighted the increasing importance of what we call here ‘microproductivity’ in the cultural, social and economic impact of the creative industries. The work of Jason Potts on the drivers of economic evolution has reinforced this observation, which further recognises the ‘situatedness’ of productive creativity (Potts et al 2008b; Potts 2011).
Between them, these approaches indicate that ‘consumer’ activities, the non-professional creative productivity of ordinary citizens in digitally linked social networks, should be regarded as part of the
Cities are crucibles of everyday human inventiveness through the rapid experimentation, market feedback and social copying processes that drive creative endeavour. Some cities do this better than others, and those that do can become great creative cities.
But how do we recognise this ‘on the fly’, as the processes unfold, and as novelties emerge? How can we identify when and how a city is doing well, even as it is doing so? That is the purpose of a creative city index. This report will present an analysis of why we need a better index model, and a working prototype of such an index.
The challenge lies in selecting a set of indicators to feed critical information to a dashboard index, including one that can measure a city’s absolute performance (how creative?) and its relative performance (compared with which other cities?). The report details our endeavour to construct such an index from first principles, along with the rationale for why we have included the indicators that we have.
Most important, we present a worked example of the index applied to six cities – two each from Australia (Brisbane & Melbourne), Germany (Bremen & Berlin) and the UK (Cardiff & London). We chose London because it regularly features in the top three of any index of global cities (along with New York and Tokyo); but by the same token it is far from typical. Thus, we paired it with Cardiff, a more compact city that is also a capital and has its own claims to creativity. We wanted to compare different countries, not least because each has its own peculiarities in the collection of data and compilation of statistics, not always in English. So we have chosen a pair of cities – one metropolitan and one provincial – in each of three countries, not all of them Anglophone: Australia; Germany; the UK.
Our index is calculated and presented as unweighted, in that the summation weights given to each of the 8 index components are equal. That is because we have no priors relating to the relative importance of each component to add to this. Yet even without such calibration, we propose that its raw form offers a superior measure of the creativity of a city compared with other indexes, by assembling not only its industrial output and its cultural attractiveness – these are the two factors that dominate extant indexes – but also the contribution of its creative citizens. We believe this third impulse to be the main motive and driving causal factor in creative city development.
Our index is built on an approach that can be dubbed ‘cultural science’. See
We show how we have measured these additional arguments and indicate the effect they have on creative and global city indexes. We then overview the findings from a pilot study of six cities (two Australian, two German and two from the UK) to indicate how the new index is applied. Our results indicate much greater variance arising from the new arguments between cities.
Our findings are summarized in the following table and figures.
Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results
CCI CREATIVE CITY INDEX | Brisbane (AUS) | Melbourne (AUS) | Berlin (GER) | Bremen (GER) | Cardiff (UK) | London (UK) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE & EMPLOYMENT | 49.8 | 54.4 | 53.4 | 49.2 | 51.7 | 96.6 |
2. MICROPRODUCTIVITY | 37.0 | 41.8 | 56.3 | 39.2 | 49.2 | 83.6 |
3. ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION | 15.7 | 30.8 | 54.9 | 12.6 | 10.7 | 97.8 |
4. PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE | 37.0 | 41.5 | 69.5 | 54.6 | 37.8 | 79.8 |
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | 100.0 | 80.1 | 77.3 | 79.3 | 68.5 | 94.4 |
6. HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH | 41.8 | 48.9 | 75.2 | 54.8 | 50.2 | 75.6 |
7. GLOBAL INTEGRATION | 40.5 | 52.2 | 46.0 | 28.3 | 25.4 | 76.7 |
8. OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY | 67.5 | 76.0 | 74.0 | 70.5 | 63.6 | 76.5 |
In September 2010 the Beijing Research Centre for Science of Science (BJSS), CCI:
The work has been carried out by Prof. Hartley, Dr Jason Potts (CCI Centre Fellow) and Trent MacDonald (CCI Research Associate), with the assistance of BJSS researcher and CCI postgraduate Angela Lin Huang. Research assistance for the population of the indicator suites was provided by Chris Erkunt and Carl Kufleitner of the University of Queensland.
The report surveys the modern development of city rank indexes and outlines the method and theory for the construction of an improved city index that identifies
We have sought to produce a ‘Creative City Index toolkit’ for the municipal government of Beijing to use in domestic and international creative city benchmarking and comparison, thereby to promote policy settings that will cultivate a creative and cultural environment of world-class standing, with the strategic aim of transforming Beijing into a leading global creative city. The CCI Creative City Index (CCI-CCI) is designed to measure and track a city’s creativity over time, to make comparisons with peer and exemplary cities worldwide, and to provide a mechanism whereby cities can be internationally ranked.
The index will be used as follows:
to provide a more comprehensive rank of a subset of global cities;
to improve policymaking and implementation;
to foster the expansion of creativity and innovation in Beijing;
to assess the effectiveness of support for the creative sectors;
to provide a tool for those whose goal is to transform Beijing into a renowned global creative city.
Beyond this immediate purpose, the CCI-CCI indexing tool can be adapted on demand to provide a creativity score and ranking for any city. Its further development outside China will be the responsibility of the CCI.
The work underlying the development of a
According to the brief given to the CCI by the BJSS, the scope of this project is as follows:
to review the burgeoning suite of international city indexes and indicators to assess their consequence and applicability to the creative cities index;
to integrate the most contemporary conceptions of the creative city into the index and indicators;
to compile a suite of indicators to compose the creative cities index;
to report on data sources for such indicators and possible contingencies;
to formulate the methodology to be used, and demonstrate the index construction in a preliminary analysis of at 2 major cities in 3 countries outside China (Australia, UK and Germany);
The BJSS will perform data collection work and compile the CCI Creative City index for Beijing and other cities inside China, for comparison, if so desired. For cities outside China, the CCI-CCI will be developed by the CCI.
John Hartley (2009), p. 208
What makes a great city? This is the question that the construction of world city or global city indexes has sought to answer. Interestingly, this concern has been a very recent development, mostly of the past decade, broadly coinciding with the rise of globalisation, the emergence of rapidly growing and changing emerging economy cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, etc., that are increasingly in direct competition with ‘old’ global cities like New York, London, Paris, etc., and coupled with vast improvements in information collection and classification standardisation.
It was not so long ago that the answer to what makes a great city was a simple arithmetic of:
New York, London and Paris were And see:
City historians Peter Hall (1998) and Joel Kotkin (2005) provide scholarly overviews of the historical approach to city research. For more detailed statistical treatment, the work of Michael Batty (2006) on city scaling laws uses data on global city populations over the past 3000 years to trace these changes. There is no shortage of thoroughly researched long-run accounts of the rise and fall of great cities. For the most part they emphasise a simple political-economic arithmetic of a locus of power combined with fertile plains and effective institutions. Great cities were capital cities; places where power resided.
By the Middle Ages, cities became places where commerce resided too, as power began to shift to the secular world. Much of this story is associated with the rise of the West (Ferguson 2011), the invention of science, technology, democracy, media and, most important, the institutions of trade and commerce. Here global cities began to emerge about trading ports and network hubs (e.g. the northern European Hanseatic League), not about castles and palaces. Thus the world began to urbanise as people came to cities for reasons of enterprise, not for alms (or arms) or rents. To this day, cities may still be plausibly divided by this distinction (patronage vs. entrepreneurship), a distinction that as yet has not been measured. The great fairs in Medieval Europe, of which St. Bartholomew's in London (1133-1855) is one of the best-known, were crucibles of commerce. They were used by servants to find new masters for the ensuing year, and were also used for the sale of slaves, i.e. service and labour were echanged as well as good. See e.g. Walford (1883), pp. 10, 179. 7 For Paul Romer, see also:
A somewhat different line has also developed through the work of urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs (1969) and more recently by Richard Florida (2002; 2005) and Elizabeth Currid (2007). This approach focuses on the adaptive functionality and emergent liveability of cities, emphasising in essence that great cities are grown, not planned. By drawing on the economics of self-organisation, Jacobs shows how – contrary to their purpose – planning laws and great plans often stymie the development of cities, by suffocating the development of local neighbourhoods. Florida and Currid show how the development of a city depends upon who moves there and why, emphasising the mobility dynamics of cities.
This dynamic institutional line has also been explored recently by economists Paul Romer (1990) and Ed Glaeser (2010), For Paul Romer, see also:
In this view, cities are complexes of people, and the more entrepreneurial and capable those people are, the greater the city will be. Furthermore, because of feedback effects that accrue to the concentration and proximity of such idea-carriers and generators (Romer 1990, Krugman 1994), city greatness exhibits
Crucially, this introduces the importance of great cities as
This shift in focus from a romantic and mostly static view of great cities as a
But as empires have crumbled since World War I, and nation-states have weakened as economic entities since globalisation, cities have re-emerged (as they were prior to the 1700s) as the
This is evidenced by the fact that the leading growth and development economists at the most elite universities have focused on the
New scholars of cities, following the line of evolutionary and institutional economics, have re-emphasised the role of
Recent scholarly endeavour to answer the question has sought to follow these new theoretical lines and has turned to the construction of multi-component statistical indexes, each based around a suite of specific indicators over multiple dimensions. Such indicators seek to decompose and identity the factors that attract interesting migrants and citizens.
This has seen something of a growth industry in city analytics during the past 10 years or so. Richard Florida, for example, has famously emphasised
But now we need to try and disentangle this complex, to understand what specific aspects contribute to this contemporary and ongoing attractiveness. And that is the point of the various global city indexes that have recently emerged. Once we are beyond the notion that great cities are the children of great empires, we enter a world where great cities are the ‘adults’ of great institutions. But what are those institutions? That is what we seek to discover. The purpose of the extant and new city index constructions is to unpack this complex.
The value of these indexes is thereby two-fold. On the one hand they
Cities now compete. And like the competition between corporations in highly contestable markets, these dimensions and magnitudes of differences in cities are issues of significant competitive advantage. We are now in a world where rank indexes of cites matter not as politically charged issues of mostly romantic issues of imperial pride, but as practical issues of city strategy. These indexes are less celebratory laurels of past glory, and more dashboard measures of current performance. These new indexes matter;
There is a substantial body of literature on the rise of global cities. This divides between the work of Scottish sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, for example, arguably developed this field in Geddes (1911).
First,
Second,
Third,
This insight has provoked two types of response among scholars. One side, represented mostly by historians and economists, sees competition as a natural and evolutionary process and emphasises its gains and benefits. It implicitly values the
Our report finds greater congruence with the historians’ and economists’ perspective than with that of the sociologists and geographers. We seek to accept all three propositions: that cities matter to human and economic development; that cities rise and fall; and that this dynamic is a consequence of the process of global competition for scarce, valuable and mobile resources, the most important of which are enterprising and creative people.
We recognise that this dynamic evolutionary process will create disruptions and transition problems; including ‘creative destruction’ of city infrastructure, legacy cultural forms and their attendant occupations, and that there will be scope for management and even planning in this process. But we do not conclude from this that the
When framed in this way,
What In Charles Leadbeater's terms, a sustainable competitive advantage in the knowledge economy requires creativity that is 'hard to imitate,' producing IP that is 'easy to replicate': see Leadbeater & Oakley (2001), p. 19.
But we must face the problem that ‘attractive factors’ and ‘creative potential for competitive advantage’ are difficult to identity and define. This is why it is necessary to construct a suite of indicators to capture activities that may seem insignificant; spaces for youth culture, for example, which on the face of it are less impressive than great airports or industrial headquarters. Appropriate policies are difficult to implement, because simply committing large amounts of public resources may not be sufficient. It may not even be necessary. Grand plans often fail. As in all competition, adaptation, experimentation and learning are the key process ingredients. Rather than recommending a shopping-list of capital infrastructure investments, the approach we develop is focused on identifying such indicators of
Creative cities of the past did not arise from pre-constructed plans, but
Stan Metcalfe (2000)
The many existing city indexes can be grouped into two classes (see Table 2 below):
The first class of index, exemplified by the work of Richard Florida and his colleagues, is based on the premise that a ‘creative class’ of migrants is drawn to cities by cultural attractors and by societies that value diversity, openness and tolerance. These indexes also strive to measure the vibrancy of the creative sectors in terms of output, employment, participation and talent. This is a
Broad Classification of City Indexes
Creativity and Culture Stocks | Global Cities, Networks and Tech/ ICT Flows | Other Approaches |
---|---|---|
Florida’s Creative Cities Index | The Global Power Cities Index | Oslo Manual |
The Euro- Creativity Index | The Global Cities Index | Creativity Grid |
Czech Creativity Index | Global City Indicators Facility | Landry’s Index |
Sharpie’s Creativity Index | Fundamental Index and Flow | |
Creative Communities Index | The Globalization and World Cities Index | |
The Creative Vitality Index | The Shift Index | |
European Creativity Index | World Knowledge Competitive Index | |
Hong Kong Creativity Index | Information Society Index | |
Cultural Life Index | ||
Composite Index of the Creative Economy | ||
Design, Creativity and Innovation Scoreboard |
Indexes in the second class, exemplified by the Global Power Cities Index, tend to include comparable (though less detailed) ‘creative’ indicators as a subset, while expanding to cover a wider pool of city attractors, including business activity, liveability, the environment, transportation and accessibility, and technology. This wider scope tends to shift the focal point from culture and creativity towards city infrastructure and basic services, innovation and technology performance, and international exchange and network formation. This is a
In the following review we have divided the extant city indexes into these two classes: creative stocks and global flows. We also include a further section discussing other prominent approaches from the literature on world creative cities. Tables 3 and 4 (below) presents a checklist of the dimensions and indicators covered by the various city indexes included in our review. The checklist consists of 16 general themes from which the index dimensions are drawn:
16 General Themes of City Index Dimensions
1. Culture, Recreation & Tourism |
2. Creative Output & Employment |
3. Cultural Capital & Participation |
4. Venues, Resources & Facilities |
5. Liveability & Amenities |
6. Transportation & Accessibility |
7. Globalisation, Networks & Exchange |
8. Openness, Tolerance & Diversity |
9. Human Capital, Talent & Education |
10. Social Capital, Engagement & Support |
11. Government & Regulations |
12. Business Activity & Economy |
13. Entrepreneurship |
14. Innovation & R&D |
15. Technology & ICT |
16. Environment & Ecology |
Checklist of City Index Dimensions and Indicators: Stocks
CITY INDEX CHECKLIST | Culture, Recreation, Tourism | Creative Output, Employment | Cultural Capital, Participation | Venues, Resources, Facilities | Liveability, Amenities | Transport, Accessibility | Globalization, Networks, Exchange | Openness, Tolerance, Diversity | Human Capital, Talent, Education | Social Capital, Engagement, Support | Government, Regulation | Business Activity, Economy | Entrepreneurship | Innovation, R&D | Technology, ICT | Environment, Ecology |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Florida's Creative Cities Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||
The Euro Creativity Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||
Czech Creativity Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||
Sharpie's Creativity Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||||||||||
Creative Communities Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||||||||
The Creative Vitality Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||
European Creativity Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||||||||
Hong Kong Creativity Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||||||||
Cultural Life Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||
Composite Index of the Creative Economy | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||
Design, Creativity and Innovation Scoreboard | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ |
Checklist of City Index Dimensions and Indicators: Flows
CITY INDEX CHECKLIST | Culture, Recreation, Tourism | Creative Output, Employment | Cultural Capital, Participation | Venues, Resources, Facilities | Liveability, Amenities | Transport, Accessibility | Globalization, Networks, Exchange | Openness, Tolerance, Diversity | Human Capital, Talent, Education | Social Capital, Engagement, Support | Government, Regulation | Business Activity, Economy | Entrepreneurship | Innovation, R&D | Technology, ICT | Environment, Ecology |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The Global Power Cities Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||||||
The Global Cities Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||||||
Global City Indicators Facility | □ | □ | □ | |||||||||||||
Fundamental and Flow Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||||||
The Globalization and World Cities Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||
The Shift Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||||
World Knowledge Competitive Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |||||
Information Society Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | |
Oslo Manual | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||
Creativity Grid | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | ||||||||
Landry's Index | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ | □ |
Based on our assessment of these 16 dimensions, which we take as key analytic points of decomposition:
Chapter 2.2 discusses the eleven leading culture and creativity indexes;
Chapter 2.3 discusses the eight leading global cities and networks indexes;
Chapter 2.4 discusses three additional indexes that are more general in respect of these two classes of global city index.
We seek to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the respective indexes, and present this discussion in order to outline the parts of the extant indexes that we will seek to incorporate into our CCI Creative City Index, as well as highlighting gaps in the extant measures that we will seek to fill.
For Richard Florida, cities must focus on capturing the imagination of talented individuals rather than concentrating solely on building infrastructure or industrial locations. Florida's private consulting firm, The Creative Class Group: Florida has recently used this framework to assess the creative economy in China; see Martin Prosperity Institute (2011).
Florida’s framework consists of the 3 Ts –
Given the implied focus on social outsiders, this was a radical suggestion when first proposed. But Florida’s index has been one of the most successful and widely discussed measures of creative cities, precisely because it combined a basic truth (that creativity does indeed often come from outsiders) and also a relatively cost-effective solution (Florida’s consultancy fees aside): namely loose zoning laws, better universities or technology parks, and relatively low-cost urban leisure amenities. All of these factors were within the reach of city councillors, partly explaining the positive reception and significant uptake Florida’s ideas have received.
The definition of creativity used in Florida’s index is relatively broad, extending well beyond the so-called creative industries (e.g. arts, culture and entertainment). A large number of indicators selected for his index assess science-based innovation (e.g. patents, R&D expenditure, number of scientists). For this reason it may understate the role of culture and creativity as usually understood, although this of course depends on the scope that we use in defining our image of a global creative city. Nonetheless, indicators from Florida’s 3T model will certainly come under consideration in our index. As he says: ‘Creativity … is now the
Dimensions and Indicators of Florida’s Creative Cities Index
Human capital (e.g. number of university graduates, ranking of local universities, concentration of people with Bachelor’s degrees) |
Creative class (e.g. percentage of workforce defined as the ‘creative class’, 'creative occupations' ISCO-88) |
Researchers (number of people working in R&D-intensive jobs; creative core) |
Innovation (e.g. number of registered patents, patents per capita) |
High-tech innovation (e.g. number of registered high-tech patents, high-tech patents per capita) |
High-tech industry (e.g. Milken Institute’s Tech Pole Index, number of technology-heavy companies, share of workforce employed in high-tech industry) |
Foreign-borns (e.g. percentage of foreign-born population, size of foreign student population, number of international schools) |
Diversity Index (e.g. fragmentation index based on ethnic background of foreign born population 1 – ! pop. share2) |
Gay Index (e.g. fraction of gay people living in a region divided by the fraction of the total (US) population living in the area, tolerance surveys) |
Bohemian Index (e.g. concentration of workforce engaged in artistic or avant-garde – experimental – activities) |
The Florida 3T model has been applied many times, and it has been tailored in other studies to suit the specificities of different regions (e.g. Europe rather than North America) (Florida & Tinagli 2004). Extensions have also been made to the 3 Ts to include a fourth ‘T’ –
Celebrity pen manufacturer
The index uses the following quantitative and qualitative criteria:
Sexual, racial and cultural
The existence of thriving
Sharpie’s Creativity Index is more narrowly focused on cultural rather than scientific or innovative creativity. It includes many useful candidate indicators for our study.
The
The indicators are grouped into four categories: See Appendix 1 for full list of index components.
The index is constructed mainly through personal interviews with residents in order to gain an understanding of what they think about arts and culture in the region, and as a result many of the indicators will not be easily transferable to our study, nevertheless, they do provide useful guidelines.
Participation is a major component in the Creative Vitality Index as well. This one measures the health of a creative economy relative to a national benchmark according to
The creative economy as defined in this index includes both for-profit and non-profit arts-related enterprises. One component measures seven indicators of community participation in the arts (i.e., per capita museum and art gallery revenue from ticket and product sales) while the other measures arts-related employment in more than 30 professional categories (e.g., actors, graphic designers, television producers, art teachers). It is reasoned that the balance of the cause-and-effect relationship between participation levels and jobs lies with participation, and as a result the components are weighted 60% towards participation and 40% towards employment.
These citizen participatory indicators are of clear importance to any creative city index, and will therefore inform consideration for our model.
The European Creativity Index was created by the creative industries consultancy group KEA European Affairs (2009) as part of a study on the contribution of culture to creativity, conducted for the European Commission in 2008/09. Focusing on the cultural dimensions of creativity, this index considers a number of factors, including:
Education in
Cultural
Cultural
Cultural
Economic contribution of cultural industries
These indicators are grouped in five pillars of creativity, namely:
The
The
Openness and
As such this index represents a further broadening of the base of creativity indexes. According to the index framework, the five pillars of creativity combine to influence creative outcomes. In total the paper suggests 32 indicators (including data sources) related to the five pillars as well as the outcomes of creativity.
The Hong Kong Creativity Index was produced by the Centre for Cultural Policy Research, University of Hong Kong, having been commissioned by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (Home Affairs Bureau HKSARG, 2004).
The Index comprises five elements:
This model stems from Florida’s 3 Ts – technology, talent and tolerance – but broadens out from economic and technological outputs of creativity to incorporate ideas from the Silicon Valley Creativity Community Index, such as cultural infrastructure, social connectedness, cultural participation and cultural policies. It also covers other creativity and competitiveness elements taken from the World Values Survey of Inglehart and the Global competitiveness report of Michael Porter (Inglehart & Baker 2000).
The index framework builds on ‘5 Cs’:
Essentially, the four forms of capital (structural/institutional, human, social and cultural) are seen as the determinants of growth of creativity, the accumulated effects of which are manifest in creative outcomes or outputs. Again, while this index may be somewhat prone to undermining the impact that cultural factors have on creativity, it provides useful candidate indicators for our study.
The Report on Cultural Life by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is a compilation of indicators of cultural life (62 indicators) (Picard, Gronlund & Toivonen 2003). It is broken down into three sub-indexes:
Cultural
Cultural
Cultural
These can then be combined to compute the Cultural Life Index. It is assumed that a rich cultural environment benefits creativity and that social life triggered by cultural activities supports the creative economy. The index is not actually calculated, nor does it go into any detail of how it is to be calculated. It is a simply a suggestion of possible indicators that would go into such an index. In fact, it proposes a useful, rich and detailed source of potential cultural-based indicators that our indicator suite draws upon.
The Composite Index of the Creative Economy takes a wider definition of the creative economy, and can be seen as a bridge of sorts between ‘Florida-style’ creativity indexes and broader global city indexes (Bower, Moesen & Sleuwaegen 2008). This study attempts to benchmark creative capacity via achievement in three dimensions –
This index is also noteworthy for the methodological approach it takes – to determine the weight each sub-dimension should contribute to the total value of the index, the authors employ endogenous weighting. This is inspired by data envelopment analysis (DEA). Data values are normalised to lie between zero and unity sso that each score indictates the 'distance' that a given region is from the 'best practice' maximum value of unity. Similarly, the difference in the score value between any two regions indicates that distance that one region is from another region.
This ‘scoreboard approach’ uses a set of indicators to capture different dimensions of creativity and design, based on the European Innovation Scoreboard (Hollanders & van Cruysen 2009). Produced by UNU-MERIT (Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology, Maastricht University), the Scoreboard provides an annual assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States.
The 35 indicators are classified in 7 different dimensions. Of these, 3 capture the creative climate and 4 capture creativity and design. This assessment is based on a wide range of indicators covering structural conditions, knowledge creation, and innovative efforts by firms, and outputs in terms of new products, services and intellectual property. Like the Composite Index, the Design, Creativity and Innovation Scoreboard incorporates ‘Floridian’ measures of technology, tolerance and talent, but is novel in that it is skewed towards design activities. This focus on design is a further aspect we seek to develop in our indicator suite.
The following sets of index indicator proposals are less focused on creativity, as above, but more on the information economy, enterprise and trade, and technology aspects of global cities. In many cases these align with the above index measures, but the main difference is that where the above indexes ostensibly focus on the cultural life and creative potential of a city, these indexes unabashedly focus on its economic, entrepreneurial, technology and business environment, with a culture as an aspect of residency, not so much a factor of production. Our design on a good solution for a creative cities index is to take the best of the above suites, with some further inclusions and adaptations, and then to incorporate them into an edited version of the best of the more general suites below. Of these, we suggest that the Global Power Cities Index provides the best platform for development.
Perhaps the most comprehensive and arguably the pre-eminent index of global cities has been created by The Institute for Urban Strategies at
Economy;
Research and Development;
Cultural Interaction;
Liveability;
Ecology and Natural Environment;
Accessibility.
Each category is separated into a number of indicator groups and then the indicators themselves. The authors list the indicator groups but do not disclose all of the indicators (although some examples have been gleaned from various reports, see Appendix A12). This is an excellent index that, while proprietary, provides important guidance to the development of a comprehensive creative cities index.
Categories and Indicator Groups of the Global Power Cities Index
Market attractiveness |
Economic vitality |
Business environment |
Regulations and risks |
Research background |
Readiness for accepting and supporting researchers |
Research achievement |
Trendsetting potential |
Accommodation environment |
Resources for attracting visitors |
Shopping and dining |
Volume of interaction |
Working environment |
Cost of living |
Security and safety |
Life support functions |
Ecology |
Pollution degree |
Natural environment |
Infrastructure of international transportation |
Infrastructure of inner-city transportation |
This index also ranks the top ten world cities in subjective categories, from the point of view of various actors such as ‘manager’, ‘researcher’, ‘artist’, ‘visitor’ and ‘resident’. A profile of each actor is described and their demands on the city for performing their role are defined. Each actor selects a suitable bundle of indicators, which are aggregated to reflect the actor-specific rankings.
We strongly recommend that this method be adopted as part of the CCI Creative City Index, although it imposes some further costs and complexities in index construction. The benefit is that it allows disaggregation of the ‘attractiveness’ of a creative city by cohort. Targeted marketing endeavours at different demographic cohorts will benefit from such disaggregated analysis, suggesting both improvements in efficiency and effectiveness in city promotion.
Additionally, the dependency relations among the 35 cities are analysed and visualised as a ‘Global Circuit’ on ‘Airline Flows’ and ‘Global Corporation Networks’ for financial and non-financial corporations. This provides further information about a city’s integration into global networks.
This index does not focus on creativity, which is its main weakness, although many of the index dimensions and indicators may be applicable to our study. Indeed, we seek to investigate the
The Global Cities Index It is the product of collaboration between the global politics and economics magazine Published annually on the Foreign Policy website:
Business activity;
Human capital;
Information exchange;
Cultural experience;
Political engagement.
Again, this is a broad-based index, although one of the five index dimensions captures ‘cultural experience’. It includes metrics ranging from the volume of goods passing through a city (business activity) and the percentage of residents with university degrees (human capital), to the number of international news bureaux (information exchange) and the number of foreign embassies (political engagement.
But its concept of ‘cultural experience’, in essence, refers to cultural
Overall, the information exchange and political engagement indicators are interesting insofar as they capture the extent of
The Global City Indicators Program established a set of city indicators with a globally standardised methodology that allows for international comparison of city performance and knowledge sharing. The Global City Indicators Facility website provides a database of such indicators to all member-cities for measuring and reporting their performance.
Global City Indicators Facility ‘Themes’
Education | Civic Engagement |
Energy | Culture |
Recreation | Economy |
Fire Emergency | Environment |
Response | Shelter |
Governance | Social Equity |
Health | Subjective |
Social Services | Well-Being |
Solid Waste | Technology And Innovation |
Transportation | |
Urban Planning | |
Waste Water | |
Water |
A suite of several indicators measures city performance. The Global City Indicators Facility does not aggregate these metrics into a city index; it simply provides a useful database of indicators for the task of constructing such an index. However, the measures that are counted in the Global Indicators Facility mostly relate to local government claims based on spending commitments, not outcomes, and thus must be treated appropriately. This approach is useful, however, to assist with the
This study, conducted by the Fukuoka Benchmarking Consortium, compares 6 major Japanese cities with its own indicators of ‘fundamental’ and ‘flow’ factors for a creative city index. Conference presentation outlining the index available online:
The index consists of five ‘fundamental’ factors:
Industrial infrastructure and human resources;
Research and tertiary education;
Convenience, culture and entertainment;
Living environment;
Exchange activities.
It adds five ‘flow’ factors:
Flows of people;
Flows of materials;
Flows money;
Information flows;
Flows across national boundaries.
The most interesting aspect of this index is the explicit focus on
While this index is limited to one nation, and only covers six cities, and hence is a weak basis for generalisation, its method of differentiating between
Based in the Geography Department at Loughborough University, the Globalisation and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network is perhaps the foremost academic think tank on cities in globalisation.
The GaWC is a highly regarded index, in significant part because of the strength of academic input into it. In comparison, many and indeed most of the indexes discussed in this report are private sector or consultancy-derived indexes. The scholarly underpinning comes from experts in urban geography and sociology, giving it a claim to some rigour and robustness.
GaWC’s explicit focus on
It assesses cities in terms of their (share of some aggregate level of) advanced producer services using an
A particularly germane paper from GaWC considers an alternative dimension of world city network formation, driven by See also the work of Michael Curtin an his colleagues on world media capital at the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara: www.
The data consists of 525 cities and 25 firms, giving a 525 cities x 25 firms matrix of 13,125 media values. The matrix holds data on which firms have offices in which cities and how important each individual office is in the office network of the firm. The level of importance is coded between 0 (no office in the city) to 5 (headquarters), and the total value for a city is based on all firms’ present media value. The list of firms included in the analysis presented in this paper includes the 25 largest media companies, by total sales, for which locational data were available. The various Globalisation and World Cities Indexes provide a unique way of quantifying the
The Shift Index is largely an economic and technological index of cities and regions (Hagel, Brown & Davison 2009). It also incorporates indicators relating to network flows (more precisely knowledge and virtual flows), but its main endeavour is to augment familiar short-term metrics with indicators of
The
The
The
The
The
There is a tension between virtual- and location-based sources in this approach, which may over-emphasise virtual flows in the
Lastly, the
The Shift index is thus a model for the CCI index in its underlying design to capture the
The World Knowledge Competitiveness Index was introduced by the Centre for International Competitiveness in 2002, and is published biennially. The 2008 edition is available for download online:
The model employed in this index consists of four key components:
Capital inputs (knowledge capital, human capital, financial capital and physical capital);
Knowledge economy production;
Regional economy outputs (including knowledge economy outputs);
The sustainability link.
The cycle is sustained by
The extent to which this index is helpful to our study will depend on how closely our definition of the
The Report on Cultural Life by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture is a compilation of indicators of cultural life and the information society; this is a sub-index of the ‘Measuring Cultural Life and Involvement’ study for that purpose (Picard, R, Gro nlund, M & T Toivonen 2003: 17). The indicators of the information society subindex focus on the potential to be part of the information society as well as the use of basic information and communications technologies. They relate to critical infrastructure and basic services necessary for
The index is not actually calculated, nor does it go into any detail of how it is to be calculated. It is a simply a suggestion of possible indicators that would go into such an index. It suggests a useful and detailed source of potential ICT-based indicators.
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) document,
The ‘Creative Grid’ approach is derived from a report for the
World class, high profile cultural infrastructure (e.g. galleries, museums, concert halls and events programs);
Specialist creative industries support services (e.g. business acceleration and investment programs, high quality network initiatives, and continuous professional development);
Specialist and accessible/affordable facilities for different parts of the creative industries (e.g. media centres, rehearsal space, studio space, and workspace);
Higher education sector (knowledge transfer, incubation and convergence programs, and strong links across creative and non-creative sub-sectors);
School education sector, plus a strong informal learning sector (mainstreaming creativity, identifying career paths, mentoring programs);
Spaces of convergence and connectivity (to meet, exchange and build relationships);
Global partnerships and trade initiatives (e.g. business-to-business relationships and partnership above competition);
Diversity advantage;
Creative clusters where processes of cultural consumption are symbiotic with processes of cultural production;
Cultural Infrastructure at the centre.
This report also posits that the main factors that influence the changing
Digital technology (e.g. podcasting, interactive tours, instant performance downloads and interactive performances)
Third Spaces (Wi-Fi technology and work moving out of the office – third space between work and home)
Branding (aimed at creative individuals)
Internationalisation (e.g. exhibitions and tours)
These recommendations project (many of which have already been reviewed) are directly applicable to this and will therefore form part of the list of potential creativity cities indicators to be used.
Charles Landry and his colleague Jonathan Hyams have developed their own creative city index.
region of Spain, and has since been applied to 7 other cities worldwide, including Australian cities Perth and Canberra, and Freiburg and Ghent in Europe. It provides a benchmarking facility for these cities. Landry’s creative city index uses three elements – an internal assessment by the city, an external assessment by Landry’s consulting group, and a web-based survey. Landry contends that there are ten ‘creative city domains’:
Political and public framework;
Distinctiveness, diversity, vitality and expression;
Openness, tolerance and accessibility;
Entrepreneurship, exploration and innovation;
Strategic leadership, agility and vision;
Talent and learning landscape;
Communication, connectivity and networking;
The place and place making;
Livability and well-being;
Professionalism and effectiveness.
Little detail of the indicators or metrics is publicly available, although Landry declares that within each of the ten defined domains there are identified key indicators of
The
The
Substantial sets of indexes have already been created to map creative cities and global or world cities. Most of these have been developed within the past decade or so and, notably, none goes back through many decades.
It is not for us to say which of the above indexes might prosper and which might fall away. Some are more comprehensive and robust scientifically than others. Each has strengths and weaknesses and they are differentially useful and applicable, depending on the purpose. Instead of picking winners, we seek to
Unfortunately, deciding what lessons are most important is not an easy matter. Few and perhaps none of the extant indexes have been appropriately tested against objective measures of actual city development and change. They are all
Edwin Heathcote,
What is a creative city? What are its aspects and properties, and how does it differ, if at all, from a global city? Is, thereby, a creative city index (Y) simply an addition to extant global city indexes (X), as in all such inclusive X measures plus this additional Y suite of measures (i.e. X + Y)? Or is that new Y suite that we propose actually an alternative formulation to X (Y not X)? Or is it really a new and complex X-Y hybrid that is proper and true? Is a creative city a different concept and measure from a global city?
We hypothesise that to become a global city, it is necessary to first be a creative city. Such a theory implies both a developmental and an evolutionary logic. We believe it to be true regardless of the initial size of the city. We suggest the historical evidence supports or at least does not reject this proposition. Every global city can be identified with a prior (and often continuous) creative apogee.
A global city is the ‘adult’ form of a creative city, in the developmental metaphor. But equally, pursuing the metaphor, one cannot create a global city It is instructive to recall previous doomed ventures such as the Multifunction Polis in Australia:
This applies even where the designer of the green-field plan is creative to a fault, as was the case with architect Walter Burley Griffin for Canberra. He believed that: ‘I have planned a city that is not like any other in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept. I have planned an ideal city – a city that meets my ideal of the city of the future’ (Wikipedia: Walter Burley Griffin). And Canberra is well endowed with cultural institutions and notable architecture. But after a century it has never acted as an attractant; its creativity is planned too, not self-organised by a heterogeneous population pursuing their own entrepreneurial and creative interests. Australia’s creative and world cities remain Sydney and Melbourne; Canberra retains the atmosphere of a town for bureaucrats.
Thus we advise
Only small cities have great leaders; great cities find their own path. Great cities are the outcomes of clashes and conflict of systems of value and meaning as much as of harmony and community within such systems of value and meaning. These transplant only with great difficulty and only under exceptional circumstances. Hong Kong and Singapore became global cities through the synergistic creative energy of expat immigrants (from Britain, the Mainland, and across SE and South Asia) and local citizens (themselves of different origins) faced with open spaces of opportunity. In both cases the cities were built up rapidly from small beginnings in pursuit of trade and empire, but their dynamism and innovation came from individuals seeking to take advantage of these opportunities, not from being designed in advance. This highlights the basic limitation of the ‘real-estate’ approach: it has no built-in system of value because such systems are social and cultural complexes that are contained in cultural and institutional forms, not in buildings or street-plans. No great city can form without first being a dynamic and creative city, and those values arise from the self-organised interactions of myriad people, not from blueprints. We doubt that there are exceptions to this rule.
Great cities develop from within, but they do so by infusion from without. This is the seeming paradox of great city development. It grows from internal feedback, but it does so by infusion from external energy. The resolution of this paradox is to recognise that a great city is a
Thus, traditional objective measures of population or market growth are a necessary but not sufficient condition for assessing creative cities. To predict a creative city, we need also to know how it facilitates expression of new ideas and how well it can adapt to forms of meaning and value that point to the future not the past. How does a city perform as an
World cities are therefore creative in the sense that they are spaces where
This balance is hard to get right for individuals, never mind societies. By its very nature it cannot be planned, for a plan supposes prior knowledge of the outcome. A creative city is an experimental space. It does not know where it is going next, which makes it a politically difficult space to inhabit. It cannot have great leaders, only great custodians. But it can indeed have great citizens. Few could name the mayors of London or Paris through the 18th or 19th centuries, but many people know their great citizens through that time. Similarly, many people can name famous denizens of ‘Silicon Valley’ for example but they would be hard pressed to name the political leaders of that ‘city’, much less the real-estate developers of the garages, lofts and offices in which now-global corporations had their beginnings. Creative global cities are known by the achievements of their citizens.
In order to capture the dynamics of population-wide creative productivity in relation to meanings and values, brokered through the competitive clash of different institutions and networks that nevertheless together comprise the overall complex dynamic systems which compose creative cities, we need to use the insights discussed above to generate a new approach to the Creative City.
First, what a creative city Adapted from Hartley 2009: 16-17; © J Hartley.
The Value Chain of Meaning and Global Cities
Origination/ production | Commodity/ distribution | Consumption/use | |
Author/ producer | Text/ performance | Reader/ audience | |
When | Medieval | Modern | Global |
Where | Church | Public sphere | Private life |
Who (population) | The faithful | The public | DIY citizen |
Who (Intermediary) | Priest | Publisher | Marketing |
Theorist | Bible | Marx | Foucault |
Subjectivity | Soul | Individual (-ism) | Experience |
Power base | Pain of death/hell | War | Administration of life |
Sovereignty | Monarch/divine | Nation state | Self |
Military unit | Knight/crusader | Conscript/ volunteer | Terrorist |
Enemy | Peer/ heretic | Country | Civilian |
State | ‘Hobbesian’ | ‘Machiavellian’ | ‘Kantian’ |
Philosophy | Revelation | Scarcity | Plenty |
Epistemology | Theology | Empiricism | Plebiscite |
Educational reach | Elite | Mass | Universal |
Interpretive form | Exegesis | Criticism | Redaction (editing) |
Creative form | Ritual/liturgy | Realism (science/ journalism/ novel) | Reality (TV) |
Mode of literacy | Hear only | Read only | Read/ write |
Mode of address | To convert | To convince (campaign) | To converse |
Source of control | ‘Him’ – divine control | ‘Them’ – expert control | ‘Me’ – self control |
Broker of choices | No choices | Publisher/provider | Navigator/ aggregator |
Agent of knowledge | Cleric | Reading public/ media audience | ‘Consumer entrepreneur’ |
Recalling the discussion of the difference between ‘power’ cities and ‘enterprise’ cities that we identified at the outset of this report, the ‘attractant’ or creative city therefore emerges from the globalising values on the right of Table 10 below, rather from the premodern and modernising ones on the left:
Differentiating the Creative City
Empire (court) | Institution (rules) | |
Castle/ palace (politics) | Port/hub/fair/marketplace(commerce) | |
Greatness (past) | Attractant (potential) | |
Size/ power | Inflow/smarts (crucible of ideas) | |
Growth | Non-linear dynamics | |
Sunk capital | Complex of factors (capable, entrepreneurial people) | |
Leadership | Enterprise | |
Monarchical power | Mobile-elite choices | |
Past | Present/future |
In relation to the specifics of the arts and creative culture, these oppositions play out as follows (Table 11) – again, a creative city (as opposed to a powerful city) displays the values on the right:
Differentiating the Creative Arts
Cultural institution (GLAM) GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, |
Scene, festival, mall, novelty | |
National identity | Global diversity and difference | |
Prestige (“to see the queen”) Museums 24 As in the nursery rhyme: 'Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been? I've been to London to see the Queen.'– Traditionally, it's the obvious reason for ordinary folk to visit the capital. |
Social network (media, music, clubs, crowds) | |
Citizenship | Digital literacy |
In relation to the historical dynamics of
Differentiating the Media of Communication
Medium | Oral/manuscript | Digital/online |
In order to capture this emergent, future facing or ‘attractant’ city, we focus on the growing importance of youth. As a cohort, they are willing agents of risk and uncertainty, operating as both producers and consumers of experimentation and novelty in a social-network system of cultural entrepreneurship and consumer creativity. Further, as a global demographic, youth is under-recognised in much contemporary policy work, which tends to assume it is catering for an older demographic, from which elite arts producers and consumers are drawn. There is also much written about the aging demographic in many countries, including China, and certainly the overall profile of humanity is aging. However, entrants to the future workforce, those who are most interested in experimenting with novelty and willing to risk change, and who are currently educating for a creative, enterprising, and increasingly urban future, are predominantly drawn from the 0-24 age group. By 2050 there will be around 3.5 billion people under 25 worldwide. Of these, almost 1.65 billion young people will live in China, Europe, India and the USA alone, and another 1.8 billion – a majority – in all other countries:
Among those youngsters, the current estimate of people between the ages of 10 and 25 – the group most active in future forming – is more than 1.8 billion. This is what the UN calls a ‘demographic dividend’, providing the ‘labour and skills needed to rebuild cities, economies and lives’ (UNFPA 2010: 47-9). One may add that they will also be the cohort that
While providing for young people is a challenge, an aging population is also a challenge, particularly for innovation dynamics. Here, counter-intuitively, China may have more to worry about than the USA. According to one observer: ‘Surprisingly, the process of population aging is much less dramatic in the United States of America than in China or Europe – both due to higher fertility and a large number of (young) immigrants’ (China-Profile). See:
We believe that dynamic, future-facing creative cities will be characterised by a relatively high total number of both residents and immigrants in the youth cohort, and that there will be increasing pressure on China to compete internationally. Furthermore, by one calculation, Beijing currently ranks only 20th among the world’s ‘agglomerations’ of total population (all age-groups), after Tokyo (34.3m), Guangzhou, Seoul, Delhi, Mumbai, Mexico city, New York (incl. Newark, Paterson), Sao Paulo, Manila, Jakarta, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Karachi, Osaka, Kolkata, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Dhaka and Beijing (14m). Source:
The CCI Creative City Index proposes indicators for the components of a city’s population (both existing residents and incoming immigrants) that may yield a ‘demographic dividend’ for creativity while recognising that mere size isn’t everything. This requires a focus on the 10-25 years old cohort (teens and young adult), with indicators clustered around the main ‘attractant’ affordances for this cohort. Such attractants will certainly include aspects of ‘youth culture’ – media, music, festivals, clubs, crowds, scenes, malls – but these may not be the most important resources. Philosopher René Descartes dubbed Amsterdam, an early ‘world city’, an ‘ T Brook (2008)
A recent article by the E Heathcote (2011) Liveable v lovable. Financial Times.
The following indicators (Table 13) are carried over from the index library surveyed in Chapter 2 above. Many of these ‘themes’ are incorporated and merged into our final index construction.
16 General Themes of City Index Dimensions
1. Culture, Recreation & Tourism |
2. Creative Output & Employment |
3. Cultural Capital & Participation |
4. Venues, Resources & Facilities |
5. Liveability & Amenities |
6. Transportation & Accessibility |
7. Globalisation, Networks & Exchange |
8. Openness, Tolerance & Diversity |
9. Human Capital, Talent & Education |
10. Social Capital, Engagement & Support |
11. Government & Regulations |
12. Business Activity & Economy |
13. Entrepreneurship |
14. Innovation & R&D |
15. Technology & ICT |
16. Environment & Ecology |
The following sections 3.5 and 3.6 outlines the indicators that we used as a starting set from which we then refined our eventual indicator suite. These are based on the indicators that we derive directly from the CCI model as well as a suite of ‘additional’ indicators that we derive from the other indexes reviewed above.
We present this full set here because many of the eventual refinements in the six-city survey were partially based on data availability, data consistency or cost considerations, and a more expansive or comprehensive index would seek to re-include these considerations.
Because these classification sets and indicator suites are based upon our theory of the creative economy it will be instructive to summarise here what we mean by a creative economy as derived from our focus over the past decade at the CCI on the creative industries. In brief, we have identified four distinct versions of the creative industries as associated with different classes of definition. They are:
CI-1 Creative clusters | (an industry definition) |
CI-2 Creative services | (an economic definition) |
CI-3 Creative citizens | (a cultural definition) |
CI-4 Creative cities | (a complex definition) |
CI-1 Creative Clusters
Closed expert pipeline of innovation (internal to the firm) |
Creative clusters of different industry sectors – advertising, architecture, publishing, software, performing arts, media production, art, design, fashion etc. – that together produce creative works or outputs (e.g. the DCMS list) |
Provider-led or supply-based definition – institutional (meso level) creativity; measures of elaborate production by specialist organizations |
‘Creative outputs’ – i.e. consumer goods based on creative values, including music, writing, design, performance |
CI-2 Creative Services
Closed expert system of innovation (professionals across firms) |
Size of ‘creative services’ – creative inputs by creative occupations and companies |
Value-added to ‘non-creative’ sectors (e.g. health, government) by creative services – institutional (meso level) creativity |
Measures of employment of specialist creative people (professional designers, producers, performers and writers) |
CI-3 Creative Citizens
Open innovation network (innovation from beyond firms and professionals) |
Number of ‘creative |
Personal (micro level) creativity/microproductivity/market-based and non-market |
Focus now on user productivity (cloud computing, crowd-sourcing, etc.) |
Social media/user-created content |
Measures of emergent production from social networks |
Scaled-up via micro-productive institutions (e.g. YouTube, Google) |
CI-4 Creative Cities
Clash and friction between systems: industry/economy and culture (e.g. in conflicting interests in the sharing of IP) |
Sites for social meeting and mixture as well as friction: connecting culture and economy, diversity, tolerance, civility |
Creative cities are therefore those that cohabitate all four types – industry, economy, culture, and city |
Population-wide (macro level) creativity |
We are proposing that the four phases noted above, CI-1 to CI-4, also form four distinct
Furthermore, it is only at that point that we can take proper account of the growth of ICTs, digital media and the Internet, because these are now not simply in-company efficiency-technologies (as IT once was), but whole-of-society cultural forms (as the Internet now is). In other words, if we confine the notion of creative industries to the traditional (i.e. analogue) creative arts and their industrial or occupational form, we cannot account for the importance – both economic and cultural – of user-created content and the burgeoning scale of computer-enabled social networks. Since these are clearly important drivers of the creative industries, we need all four models before we can develop an index to explain creative innovation, never mind the integration of cultural and economic meanings and values.
Finally, CI-4 reminds us that these developments are competitive and uneven across space as well as time – some cities are creative innovation ‘spikes’ compared with others. Some important examples and points relating to the interaction of these four levels in a creative city are summarised below.
Interaction and Intermediation of the CCI Models
Coordination between models/levels |
Intermediaries who facilitate interactions between CI’s |
Anchor firms (innovative companies that stimulate the growth of many others e.g. Microsoft helping create the software cluster in Seattle) |
Mediating organizations (institutions for collaboration or mediating, exchange of information) |
Outstanding university research and commercial linkages (conduit for establishing key social networks e.g. internships, visits by industry leaders) |
High-end cultural institutions including galleries, museums and universities |
Commercial or entrepreneurial enterprises including street markets, shopping malls and the HQs of global media companies |
Based on the CCI Creative Industries Model and the extant creative cities literature hitherto reviewed, we can highlight numerous other issues and potential indicators for consideration. Tables 19-27 outline these aspects in terms of:
Infrastructure & Institutions
For ideas to be implemented |
---|
Copyright laws/intellectual property vs. innovation/emergence/sharing |
Suitable arts, culture and |
Ancillary service industries (e.g. media post-production, fashion, tourism) |
Structure of the sector/s (e.g. concentration of TNCs and micro enterprises) |
Interactions between public and private in the sector |
Key educational institutions |
Buildings, transport systems, communications infrastructure and public institutions |
Interaction of Agents
For ideas to be generated and propagated |
---|
Relations among networked agents (producers or consumers) |
Social learning via widespread participation in mediated interaction |
Social contagion dynamics/social network markets (Potts et al 2008a) |
Role of the consumer/integration of consumer and producer |
Clustering & Networking
Social networks, connections and human interactions |
---|
Connectedness to global system/network (flows of information, data, trade, and creativity) |
Nodes for global transactions (key place in global service industries; central hubs in communications and transportation networks) |
Clash between global flows and local agency (national/local networks) |
Inner-city clustering (density)/suburban and urban ecologies |
Cultural quarters (nexus of networks and urban cultural infrastructure) |
Meso level (urban development and cultural dynamics) |
Creative Milieu
Creative opportunities, marketplaces, spaces |
---|
Integration of cultural and economic/interaction between productive consumers and creative enterprise/relationship formation |
‘Novelty bundling markets’ (scenes, festivals, competitions, awards, venues allowing integration of culture and economy, productive consumers and creative enterprise) |
Concerts, festivals and other dually-productive/participatory events |
Integrate expert and amateur |
Integrate play and work |
‘Virtual’ Clustering & Networks
Online digital networks |
---|
Social networks, real or online |
Digital technologies/social networks |
Technologically equipped culture |
Entrepreneurial (or experimental) consumption (signalling, social learning) |
An advanced communications infrastructure on which modern transnational corporations rely, such as fibre optics, Wi-Fi networks, cellular phone services, and other high-speed lines of communications |
Population Characteristics
Citizen demographics and profiles |
---|
Youth quotient |
Consumer/audience sophistication or attentiveness |
Population creativity |
Experimental consumers |
Social dynamics |
Creative class/density |
Human resources, patterns of use, micro-level |
Highly skilled and ambitious people |
Risk-taking, creatively talented, technologically capable, and energetic |
Education, Social Learning & Experimentation
Formal and informal education including social learning |
---|
Number of students/universities/institutions |
Experimentation, learning and adaption (informal, peer-to-peer); |
Emergence of novelty/innovation/discovery |
Input prices (range of price indexes) to education, learning and innovation |
Velocity of ideas, or churn/turnover of new fads, fashions, styles, etc. |
Cultural Clash
Diversity and quality of place |
---|
Competition/contestation |
City density |
Urban metabolism rate (population turnover) |
Places in flux – new socioeconomic and ethnic groups, challenge to an old, established order) |
Culturally diverse populations (multiculturalism, backgrounds, experiences and talents) and tolerance |
Subversion of conventional wisdom |
Clusters of people/visitors/consumers (diversity of clusters) |
Festivals, events, happenings, novelty, places to mingle, scenes, competitions, venues |
The role of ‘place’/localness |
Urban Planning & Attractions
The creative city attracts creative citizens |
---|
Large-scale events (arts, showcases, tourism, etc.) |
Cultural tourism; cultural resources, heritage, and symbolic assets |
Drawing power of cities (related to culture/creativity) |
Attraction, retention and leakage of populations and/or other resources |
Self-expression, civic pride and community identification |
Urban amenities (e.g. outdoor dining, walking streets, vibrant night life, river walks) |
Outdoor recreation activities (e.g. urban kayaking, rock climbing and bike trails) |
Historic as well as modern structures, excellent public transportation, diverse residential neighbourhoods, a variety of foot traffic, wide sidewalks, and different types of buildings, open and green spaces, vibrant downtowns and centres of learning |
Infrastructure fostering creativity (e.g. arts and culture, nightlife, music scene, restaurants, artists and designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, affordable spaces, lively neighbourhoods, spirituality, education, density, public spaces and third places) |
Inherited features (e.g. history, climate, natural resources and population) |
Housing affordability (including renters, owners with mortgage, and owners without mortgage) |
Vital network of mixed-use informal spaces and passageways (pockets of social activity and neighbourhood life) |
Edge spaces and adjacent suburban residential zones (many multicultural forms come from these in-between spaces e.g. hip hop) |
Income and wealth inequality and social safety net |
Infrastructure and Institutions;
Interaction of Agents;
Cultural Complexity, Clustering and Networking;
Creative Milieu;
‘Virtual’ Clustering and Networks;
Population Characteristics;
Formal and Informal ‘Creative’ Education;
Clash of Systems, Generations and Cultures;
Urban Environment and Attractions.
Creative cities have the infrastructure, institutions and public capital for the production and development of new ideas.
Creative cities link consumers and producers. This means a vibrant local scene of consumption as well as production.
Creative cities build the social connections and networks along which social learning and copying enables creativity to spread, replicate, and develop.
Creative cities bring together complementary practices of cultural production and consumption.
Creative cities are digitally connected. Citizens have digital literacy.
Creative cities have populations that tend to be energetic, young, ambitious. These can be characterised by early adopters open to experimentation and novelty.
A creative city develops formal and informal education pathways. Formal measures would include credentialed ‘fine’ arts education or film or dance schools for example; informal creative education would include participation or media exposure and experience.
A creative city will tend to be a complex space that generates interactions of ideas from different demographics, cultures and economic activities; creativity emerges from the clash and conflict of differences. It will have attractive natural and built environments (and the criteria of ‘attractiveness’ will differ for different demographics), a diverse range of people, and vibrant street life (see cover picture).
A creative city will have a level of amenities and a sufficiently attractive and interesting urban environment that induce people to move to the city because of the lifestyle.
Jason Potts (2000), pp. 4-5
The CCI Creative City Index comprises 8 categories of sub-indexes:
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE & EMPLOYMENT
MICROPRODUCTIVITY
ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION
PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE
PUBLIC SUPPORT
HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH
GLOBAL INTEGRATION
OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY
We contend that these eight categories, which will be discussed below in relation to their pilot estimates, define dimensions that are both sufficiently uncorrelated yet additively complementary aspects of what makes a ‘creative city’.
This chapter outlines the findings of the estimates of the CCI Creative City Index and offers some discussion and justification for the various indicators and measures involved.
At present, the index has been tested on six cities (Brisbane & Melbourne in Australia, Berlin & Bremen in Germany, and London & Cardiff in the UK). These cities were chosen to provide a mix of countries with differing economic and industrial backgrounds. We also chose one large and culturally dominant city (London, Berlin and Melbourne) and a second tier city that was nevertheless still a significant economic and cultural hub (Cardiff, Bremen, Brisbane).
While the pilot would have been strengthened with additional city estimates for developing country cities, such as in Indonesia or Brazil for example, budget constraints and language limitations mean that we have only tested the results on these six. There remains much further work to develop and extend this index to other cities and countries.
The unweighted (or equally weighted) index results over the eight index dimensions are presented in Table 28 below.
Summary of CCI Creative City Index Results
CCI CREATIVE CITY INDEX | Brisbane (AUS) | Melbourne (AUS) | Berlin (GER) | Bremen (GER) | Cardiff (UK) | London (UK) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE & EMPLOYMENT | 49.8 | 54.4 | 53.4 | 49.2 | 51.7 | 96.6 |
2. MICROPRODUCTIVITY | 37.0 | 41.8 | 56.3 | 39.2 | 49.2 | 83.6 |
3. ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION | 15.7 | 30.8 | 54.9 | 12.6 | 10.7 | 97.8 |
4. PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE | 37.0 | 41.5 | 69.5 | 54.6 | 37.8 | 79.8 |
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | 100.0 | 80.1 | 77.3 | 79.3 | 68.5 | 94.4 |
6. HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH | 41.8 | 48.9 | 75.2 | 54.8 | 50.2 | 75.6 |
7. GLOBAL INTEGRATION | 40.5 | 52.2 | 46.0 | 28.3 | 25.4 | 76.7 |
8. OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY | 67.5 | 76.0 | 74.0 | 70.5 | 63.6 | 76.5 |
The results are
The results are also
Rank Order of CCI Creative City Index Results
CCI CREATIVE CITY INDEX RANK | Brisbane (AUS) | Melbourne (AUS) | Berlin (GER) | Bremen (GER) | Cardiff (UK) | London (UK) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES | 5 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 1 |
2. MICROPRODUCTIVITY | 6 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 1 |
3. ECONOMY OF ATTN. | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 6 | 1 |
4. PARTICIPATION | 6 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 1 |
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | 1 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 6 | 2 |
6. HUMAN CAPITAL | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 |
7. GLOBAL INT. | 4 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 1 |
8. OPENNESS | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 1 |
Setting the weight of each sub-index to zero derives the following sensitivity analysis results (Table 30). The percentage values tell as how much the final CCI Creative City Index changes for each city when sub-indexes are successively dropped-out of the index. The average is simply the average over all six cities. For example, when we drop “5. PUBLIC SUPPORT” from the index by setting
Sensitivity Analysis of CCI Creative City Index Results
CCI CREATIVE CITY INDEX | Avg. | Brisbane (AUS) | Melbourne (AUS) | Berlin (GER) | Bremen (GER) | Cardiff (UK) | London (UK) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE & EMPLOYMENT | -12.8% | -12.8% | -12.8% | -10.5% | -12.7% | -14.1% | -14.2% |
2. MICROPRODUCTIVITY | -11.1% | -9.5% | -9.8% | -11.1% | -10.1% | -13.8% | -12.3% |
3. ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION | -7.1% | -4.0% | -7.2% | -10.8% | -3.2% | -3.0% | -14.4% |
4. PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE | -11.6% | -9.5% | -9.7% | -13.7% | -14.1% | -10.6% | -11.7% |
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | -18.9% | -25.7% | -18.8% | -15.3% | -20.4% | -19.3% | -13.9% |
6. HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH | -12.7% | -10.7% | -11.5% | -14.8% | -14.1% | -14.1% | -11.1% |
7. GLOBAL INTEGRATION | -9.6% | -10.4% | -12.3% | -9.1% | -7.3% | -7.2% | -11.3% |
8. OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY | -16.2% | -17.3% | -17.8% | -14.6% | -18.2% | -17.9% | -11.2% |
Similar sensitivity analysis can be performed for the rank order of the cities when sub-indexes are successively dropped-out of the index. Table 31 below illustrates that the rank order of the CCI Creative City Index changes very little when we do so – for example, when we remove “3. ECONOMY OF ATTENTION” from the index by setting
Sensitivity Analysis of Rank Order of CCI Creative City Index
CCI CREATIVE CITY INDEX RANK (DIFF.) | Brisbane (AUS) | Melbourne (AUS) | Berlin (GER) | Bremen (GER) | Cardiff (UK) | London (UK) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
2. MICROPRODUCTIVITY | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
3. ECONOMY OF ATTN. | -1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
4. PARTICIPATION | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | -2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
6. HUMAN CAPITAL | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
7. GLOBAL INT. | -1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
8. OPENNESS | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The first sub-index is a familiar measurement of creative industries and services in terms of scale, scope and employment. There are three sub-levels to this category:
o Creative Industries Scale (CI-1: Creative Clusters)
o Creative Industries Scope (CI-1: Creative Clusters)
o Creative Industries Employment (CI-1: Creative Clusters; CI-2: Creative Services)
The Creative Industries Scale classification is made over six categories (see Table 32 below, available at
The Activities Included Within CCI’s Creative Segments Definition
SEGMENT AND SECTOR | SUB-SEGMENT | MAJOR ACTIVITIES |
---|---|---|
Music and Performing Arts | Music | Music Composition |
Music Performance | ||
Music Recording | ||
Music Composition Publishing | ||
Performing Arts | Performing Arts General | |
Performing Arts Dance and Ballet | ||
Performing Arts Drama | ||
Performing Arts Venues | ||
Performing Arts Opera | ||
Film, TV and Radio | Radio | Radio Program Production |
Film and TV | Film Production | |
Film Special Effects Post Production | ||
Film Scriptwriting | ||
TV Broadcasting | ||
Film and Video Libraries | ||
Advertising and Marketing | Services | Advertising Services |
Marketing Services | ||
Advertising Media | ||
Software and Interactive Content | Software | Software Development |
Software Product Publishing | ||
Interactive Content | Multimedia Internet Development | |
Interactive and Online Games Development | ||
Interactive Games Publishers | ||
Multimedia Internet Service Providers | ||
Multimedia Internet Content Publishing | ||
Publishing | Publishing | Newspaper Publishing |
Periodicals Publishing | ||
Book Publishing | ||
Composition | Writing | |
Libraries | ||
Architecture, Design and Visual Arts | Design | Architecture |
Graphic Arts and Illustration | ||
Jewellery Design | ||
Fashion Design | ||
Interior Design | ||
Product Design | ||
Marine Architecture | ||
Other Specialised Design | ||
Visual Arts | Museums and Gallaries | |
Visual Arts, Painters, Sculpters | ||
Photography |
Creative Industries scope focuses on diversity within the sector because of a long-run connection between diversity and growth. A creative global city is presumed to have a diverse industrial ecology in creative industries and we have sought to estimate that in our index construction. This alludes to the specialization vs. diversity debate in industrial and urban economics and we claim here, following the findings in that broader field, that diversity trumps specialization. The work of Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, among others, have found that over decades, industrial diversity contributes more to economic growth than specialization. Although we are not necessarily concerned with the impact of creative industry diversity/specialization on economic growth, we are making the parallel argument that, over decades, creative diversity contributes more to creativity growth than specialization.
We use standard population diversity measurements. The Shannon index has been a popular diversity index in the ecological literature and estimates the proportional abundance of sub-sectors in the overall population of all creative industry firms. The Shannon index also measures the uncertainty involved in cultural clash, contestation and mixing: the more different sub-sectors or firms there are, and the more equal their proportional abundances in the greater creative industry of the city, the more difficult it is to correctly predict which firms or sub-industries will be encountered. The fragmentation index is another common population diversity measure that we have adapted here (with much the same interpretation). We take the average of these two diversity indexes as the measure of scope. While these are perhaps somewhat abstract index measures, we suggest that such diversity indexes capture both the
The data can generally be found on the national level and are by now standardised. We transformed the data for Germany and the UK to fit the Australian standard of six categories. The data are generally available on the national level but not on the city level. However, the statistical authorities in Australia, Germany and the UK do also collect these data on an urban scale and they should be made public in the near future. For instance, the German Ministry of Economics and Technology will publish these data for the bigger cities from June 2012 onwards. In order to estimate the size of the creative industries in one city we scaled the state data (or national in the case of Bremen) down to city size by using a conversion rate. In this case we used the OECD data on patents to establish the relationship ‘patents from city/patents from entire state (or nation)’. This coefficient was then multiplied with the state data to get city-level data. This method was then applied consistently where we needed to transform national data to city data.
The results are shown in the table below (Table 33). The analysis comes as no surprise – London has the biggest creative industries in all aspects. The following ranks are the same as the population rank, i.e. Melbourne comes second, Berlin third, etc. When it comes to the scope of the industries the picture looks different. Bremen and Berlin are the most diversified cities but the difference from other cities is not big. The structure however is not the same. Melbourne’s number one industry is software followed by the publishing and print media. Berlin’s music and performing arts industry is nearly four times that of Melbourne. Although Melbourne’s creative industry is bigger, Berlin’s is more diverse.
Creative Industries Scale, Scope & Employment
1. CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE & EMPLOYMENT | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Music & performing arts | 77 | 154 | 574 | 37 | 37 | 1,854 | |
Film, television & radio | 254 | 785 | 483 | 59 | 111 | 3,533 | |
Advertising & marketing | 73 | 154 | 486 | 100 | 27 | 4,518 | |
Software development & interactive content | 865 | 2,298 | 683 | 105 | 36 | 15,292 | |
Writing, publishing & print media | 473 | 1,052 | 914 | 168 | 55 | 5,851 | |
Architecture, design & visual arts | 262 | 616 | 371 | 110 | 47 | 3,070 | |
TOTAL CREATIVE INDUSTRIES | 2,003 | 5,059 | 3,512 | 579 | 313 | 33,981 | |
PER CAPITA | 980.18 | 1,240.88 | 1,012.48 | 1,057.47 | 917.74 | 4,342.45 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Music & performing arts | 1,117 | 2,232 | 5,329 | 180 | 335 | 11,621 | |
Film, television & radio | 496 | 1,528 | 1,263 | 224 | 279 | 6,716 | |
Advertising & marketing | 1,164 | 2,465 | 2,183 | 230 | 419 | 5,584 | |
Software development & interactive content | 3,568 | 9,494 | 2,158 | 224 | 113 | 30,826 | |
Writing, publishing & print media | 389 | 867 | 1,732 | 314 | 64 | 2,905 | |
Architecture, design & visual arts | 4,001 | 9,405 | 4,967 | 628 | 508 | 10,036 | |
TOTAL CREATIVE INDUSTRIES | 10,735 | 25,990 | 17,632 | 1,800 | 1,718 | 67,688 | |
PER 1,000 POPULATION | 5.25 | 6.37 | 5.08 | 3.29 | 5.04 | 8.65 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Fragmentation index (1 = diverse, 0 = homogenous) | 0.72 | 0.71 | 0.82 | 0.80 | 0.79 | 0.73 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Shannon's diversity index (higher = more diverse) | 1.48 | 1.44 | 1.75 | 1.70 | 1.67 | 1.54 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Fragmentation index (1 = diverse, 0 = homogenous) | 0.72 | 0.71 | 0.78 | 0.79 | 0.78 | 0.72 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Shannon's diversity index (higher = more diverse) | 1.47 | 1.45 | 1.65 | 1.68 | 1.62 | 1.51 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Music & performing arts | 2,869 | 7,452 | 11,523 | 746 | 1,122 | 115,380 | |
Film, television & radio | 5,291 | 13,742 | 11,948 | 933 | 2,178 | 75,084 | |
Advertising & marketing | 1,435 | 3,726 | 9,649 | 1,297 | 528 | 112,889 | |
Software development & interactive content | 15,965 | 41,466 | 16,693 | 2,483 | 726 | 284,110 | |
Writing, publishing & print media | 5,831 | 15,144 | 15,902 | 2,253 | 792 | 89,270 | |
Architecture, design & visual arts | 10,266 | 26,664 | 5,300 | 2,289 | 1,254 | 137,150 | |
TOTAL CREATIVE INDUSTRIES | 41,657 | 108,194 | 71,015 | 10,001 | 6,600 | 813,883 | |
PER 1,000 POPULATION | 20.39 | 26.54 | 20.47 | 18.27 | 19.35 | 104.01 | |
1.0 | |||||||
The second sub-index is another unique contribution of the CCI Creative City Index, ‘microproductivity’, which measures population-wide microproduction by creative citizens, virtual connectivity between agents, and local networks and interaction. There are three sub-levels to this category:
2.1 Population-wide Microproduction (CI-3: Creative Citizens)
2.2 Virtual Connectivity (CI-4: Creative Cities)
2.3 Local Networks and Interaction (CI-4: Creative Cities)
Indicators we have used include:
Number of video uploads to YouTube
The number of videos that arise from a search of the city name – i.e. ‘London’ – is used. We would have preferred geographical-based data to measure the number of videos actually uploaded by citizens from the city, but this data is mostly unavailable and we have had to suffice with “city-name tagging”. While the number of videos is not necessarily an accurate measure of actual micro-production in the city, we believe that the relative incidence of tagging across cities should scale proportionally with actual micro-production.
Number of music profiles uploaded on the Internet
Similarly we look at tagging data for music profiles on the Internet; we would prefer, ideally, the number of actual gigs and performances in each city by semi-professional/amateur artists in dive bars or on ‘local nights’ at music venues but we have sufficed with artist profiles on MySpace Music, Last.fm, and Bandcamp. We assume that the relative incidence of established and amateur artists on MySpace Music is consistent across cities, and users of these platforms are overwhelmingly local/semi-pro anyway. Bandcamp is a social media, marketing, and self-distribution tool explicitly for micro-productive agents. It is an online music store, as well as a platform for artist promotion, that caters mainly for independent artists, providing a customizable micro-site with the albums they upload. We believe these indicators, taken together, form an appropriate measure of music microproductivity.
Image uploads/tags and blogs
A similar story to YouTube uploads/tags can be told for image uploads/tags and blogs (GoogleBlog search for city name).
A feature of microproductivity is that it is network-based. The next two sub-components measure microproductive networks – in virtual and real, physical spaces. When creativity reaches cultural dimensions located in cities, rather than being confined to production processes located in firms, the connections between culture and economy, individual talent and societal scale come into sharper focus. It is at this point that we must now take proper account of the growth of ICTs, digital media and the Internet, because these are now not simply in-company efficiency-technologies (as IT once was), but whole-of-society cultural forms (as the Internet now is).
Indicators we have used include:
Number of personal computers as a percentage of total population
A city with greater incidence of PCs is more technologically equipped; citizens are prepared for micro-productive endeavours.
Number of Internet and broadband users as a percentage of population
Number of social networking users of most popular platform
We measure the number of Facebook profiles from each city. This does not necessarily tell us how many Facebook users there is in each city, but the incidence of people who hide their location and the incidence of people who have multiple profiles should be the same across all cities (even if this were not the case, it would be telling for the openness/quality of the “social network connectedness” in cities). We look at per capita measures (as a measure of relative intensity of virtual connectivity) but also the number of social network users in aggregate to capture clustering/network effects that are important to connectivity e.g. Metcalfe’s law.
Number of profiles that 'like' Pitchfork Media
In addition to the number of social network users we look at a niche sub-culture social network. Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork, is a Chicago-based daily Internet publication established in 1995 that is devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. Its focus is on underground and independent music, especially indie rock. It is a leading tastemaker/gatekeeper and has played a part in ✓breaking" artists (helping them scale up from microproducers, to indie artists, to established artists and even mainstream recognition). It is also a leading social signaling device of sorts for microproductive types. We also use per capita and aggregate measures here, to cover intensity and clustering.
Number of professional networking users of most popular platform
Similar to social networks, we measure the number of LinkedIn profiles from each city, per capita and aggregate, as well as the self-identified subset of professional networkers from the creative industries, per capita and aggregate.)
Other suggestions (not contained in this index pilot) include
Number of Wi-Fi subscribers per capita (or percentage of households with Wi-Fi connection); number of cell phone subscribers per capita; Internet activity of population (average time spent on Internet); number of Internet service providers (ISPs).
If Virtual Connectivity is the digital face of the creative city, then
Indicators we have used include:
Number of festivals
Almost the archetypal example of local networks and interaction, festivals are a local events for performing/exhibiting creative output; an opportunity for mixing, clash and interaction; an attractant of citizens from fans/enthusiasts to micro-productive to fully-professional; a form of interactive/participatory sampling of culture/ creativity, mediating mixing, marketplace of ideas, and opportunity for social learning.
Number of charity organizations
We suggest that charity organizations perform a similar participatory role within cities’ local networks of interaction.
Other suggestions (not contained in this index pilot) include
Urbanisation of city population (share of population living in densely-populated areas, i.e. as a measure of “clash”); number of event notices (e.g. “Timeout” index and gig guides); number of council-promoted cultural/community events, fairs, and festivals; amateur art and music competitions/performances/clubs; eisteddfods; number of media, organizations or events that cater for ethnic minority groups and foreign audiences (multicultural); number of media, organizations or events that are relevant to the GLBT community; clubs and associations; professional associations (Chamber of Commerce members); number of buskers/street performers (licenced); number of print publications that focus on news and lifestyle articles which are distributed for free within the streets of the city (street press); number of magazines and newspapers distributed in the city; number of radio and TV stations broadcast in the city.
The data for sections 2.1 and 2.2 are fairly easy to obtain through simple Internet research. It is important to take comparable statistics, i.e. British Facebook statistics are best of all compared to Renren Wang statistics in China. For this index we worked with ‘tags’ as they are easy to get and to compare. There is the risk that popular cities are tagged more often (e.g. by visitors) than less popular cities. On the other hand, it could mean that ‘attractive’ cities (as discussed in 4.3) generate more creativity. Better data could be obtained if the providers of Internet services could be contacted directly to supply actual uploading data from a given city and not merely tags. This is however a matter of dealing with the companies, which can take a considerable amount of time. Data about the accessibility to the Internet and the type of connection are usually published by statistical bureaus or local trade ministries.
We wanted to collect data on participation in associations (which may include democratic, cultural or health & welfare purposes), but Section 2.3 is possibly the hardest section to measure, as this kind of information is very different in every country. German cities for instance measure the number of people who are involved in some form of sporting association, but this information is not published in Australia. On the other hand, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports on voluntary involvement and the number and amount of tax-deductible donations made by Australians, but one would search in vain for a German publication on this topic. Another issue is the nonavailability of certain services in different countries.
London has the highest score, followed by Berlin and Melbourne. It is often tagged which has to do with the attractiveness of the city. Since many things happen in London it gets referenced a lot, which brings the ‘tag’ score upwards. Berlin being the German capital has the advantage of being often quoted while Melbourne, which is bigger than Berlin, does not have the capital-city benefit. Berlin is nonetheless more creative than Melbourne, which is remarkable for a city that has only three million people in comparison to nearly five million in Melbourne.
The virtual connectivity figures demonstrate a difficulty with cross-cultural comparisons. Germany has traditionally had several private and professional networking platforms. Therefore, the German market has been more fragmentised as its British and Australian counterpart. This biases the results downwards. The simple sum of different services cannot be taken since many users use several platforms and a mere aggregation would lead to double counting and overestimation.
Berlin has an important music scene and a vast number of associations that engage in the organisation of festivals. This explains why there are more activities there than in Melbourne, which has a significantly bigger population. Other cities like Brisbane, Berlin and Cardiff are dwarfed in comparison to these big cities, but it is not surprising that scale has its effect on the result.
Microproductivity
2. MICRO-PRODUCTIVITY | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Per month | 6,380 | 16,000 | 21,000 | 4,360 | 2,490 | 29,100 | |
Per 1,000 population | 3.12 | 3.92 | 6.05 | 7.96 | 7.30 | 3.72 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Anytime (number of videos currently available for viewing) | 236,000 | 577,000 | 1,150,000 | 147,000 | 111,000 | 1,630,000 | |
Per 1,000 population | 115.51 | 141.52 | 331.52 | 268.48 | 325.46 | 208.30 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Number of artists, songs, albums, and music videos tagged with city name on Myspace Music | 1,837 | 3,260 | 30,368 | 1,966 | 1,856 | 61,538 | |
Number of taggers using city name in tag on Last.fm | 317 | 856 | 4,847 | 262 | 272 | 3,934 | |
Number of pages on Bandcamp with city tagged as location | 60 | 212 | 182 | 6 | 26 | 527 | |
TOTAL | 2,214 | 4,328 | 35,397 | 2,234 | 2,154 | 65,999 | |
PER 1,000 POPULATION | 1.08 | 1.06 | 10.20 | 4.08 | 6.32 | 8.43 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Google Images | 4,630,000 | 4,630,000 | 6,510,000 | 1,370,000 | 10,200,000 | 82,300,000 | |
Flickr | 485,646 | 1,579,129 | 3,373,740 | 144,169 | 297,199 | 9,655,532 | |
Picasa | 225,014 | 274,703 | 324,673 | 163,439 | 161,360 | 390,859 | |
Photobucket | 32,067 | 75,580 | 121,614 | 6,321 | 18,433 | 534,032 | |
TOTAL | 5,372,727 | 6,559,412 | 10,330,027 | 1,683,929 | 10,676,992 | 92,880,423 | |
PER CAPITA | 2.63 | 1.61 | 2.98 | 3.08 | 31.31 | 11.87 | |
1.0 | |||||||
19.1M | 34.8M | 71.7M | 6.9M | 15.0M | 231.0M | ||
Per capita | 9.35 | 8.54 | 20.67 | 12.67 | 43.98 | 29.52 | |
1.0 | |||||||
89.03% | 84.79% | 77.00% | 81.00% | 63.10% | 86.00% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
86.28% | 83.65% | 75.00% | 75.00% | 54.18% | 78.39% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
68.13% | 66.00% | 77.00% | 66.00% | 45.00% | 76.00% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
Number of profiles | 1,165,940 | 1,970,440 | 1,148,660 | 192,900 | 225,040 | 8,299,340 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of profiles as a % of total population | 57.06% | 48.33% | 33.43% | 35.20% | 65.99% | 59.51% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of profiles that 'like' Pitchfork Media | 320 | 880 | 780 | 40 | 100 | 2,560 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Proportion of profiles that 'like' Pitchfork Media | 0.03% | 0.04% | 0.07% | 0.02% | 0.04% | 0.03% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of profiles | 170,336 | 334,798 | 100,647 | 15,907 | 32,250 | 1,257,430 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of profiles as a % of total population | 8.34% | 8.21% | 2.93% | 2.91% | 9.46% | 9.02% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of profiles filtered by creative industries | 22,767 | 57,176 | 33,777 | 2,450 | 4,578 | 320,117 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Proportion of profiles filtered by creative industries | 13.37% | 17.08% | 33.56% | 15.40% | 14.20% | 25.46% | |
0.5 | |||||||
0.01 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.10 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
75 | 100 | 122 | 45 | 6 | 200 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
The third sub-index comprises familiar measurements of creative infrastructure and attractions. However it also includes indicators relating to the ‘economy of attention’ (Lanham 2006) that surrounds a city. There are two sub-levels to this category:
3.1 Creative Attractions
3.2 Economy of Attention
Unlike scale and scope measures in dimension 1 above, which were transformed to a per capita index to eliminate pure scale effects, creative attractions and economy of attention is not transformed in that way but remains as an absolute measure of a city’s attractions and the attention that it receives. Here we are explicitly interested in the full-scaled appeal of the city: cities compete for internationally mobile, creative citizens, and they compete of size, on the aggregate picture of attractiveness.
Economy of attention is quite similar to the “city name tagging” measurements in Microproductivity, however it is different in the sense that these indicators are more about promotion of the city and often originate from more “traditional”, professional creative industry sources (rather than microproduction from the network, pro-production from firms). These indicators are thus about the likelihood of a person encountering a city in popular culture; the general buzz around a city, and how likely you are to hear about or to know something about the city.
Indicators we have used include:
Creative attractions: number of top retailers, hotels, cinemas, theatres, museums, libraries, etc.
Economy of attention: number of pages in Lonely Planet guides; number of words in Wikipedia entry; Google Trends index score (2010); frequency of city name appearing in published books (English corpus); number of items in iTunes catalogue; number of items in IMDB (Internet movie database); number of items in Amazon catalogue.
Other suggestions (not contained in this index pilot) include
o Creative attractions: number of pubs, bars and restaurants (number of liquor licenses issued).
As can be seen, the vast majority of variables can be searched on the respective websites. The number of hotel rooms and cinemas, if not available from the statistical authorities, can be easily researched through specialised websites. The city council websites offer comprehensive lists of art theatres, museums, concert halls and libraries. Libraries can otherwise also be searched for in the statistics of the national library
associations. CB Richard Ellis Global Research publishes the number of top retailers in a city.
London attracts most attention, followed by Berlin, Melbourne, Brisbane, Bremen and Cardiff. Melbourne has a bigger infrastructure but Berlin manages to receive more attention in publishing, almost certainly because of its record as a pivotal point in European history. It seems that more tourists come to the fairly central European city, as it is more accessible than the city at the southern tip of the Australian continent, thus more hotel rooms are available in Berlin. It is noteworthy that Berlin has most cinemas of all but that their size is small. Small cinemas are more likely to show independent movies than big cinemas that can only fill their seats with blockbusters. Small cinemas are also likelier to show local productions. The same principle seems to count for the number of live venues, concert halls and performing art theatres.
Attractions & Economy of Attention
3. ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
183 | 751 | 815 | 50 | 105 | 1,428 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
15.40% | 23.00% | 37.20% | 25.10% | 22.40% | 56.00% | ||
0.5 | |||||||
436.00 | 400.10 | 454.42 | 482.23 | 456.00 | 2,024.99 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
124 | 194 | 750 | 87 | 58 | 823 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
57 | 68 | 274 | 8 | 5 | 105 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
55,628 | 69,460 | 54,421 | 10,215 | 6,172 | 129,609 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
47 | 131 | 294 | 13 | 24 | 464 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
16 | 59 | 129 | 27 | 5 | 184 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
92 | 127 | 88 | 22 | 20 | 395 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
64 | 194 | 296 | 14 | 18 | 420 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
9,040 | 13,393 | 13,533 | 12,880 | 11,841 | 16,875 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
0.12 | 0.25 | 0.57 | 0.08 | 0.06 | 1.00 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
0.10 | 0.20 | 0.52 | 0.08 | 0.06 | 1.00 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
0.0001% | 0.0006% | 0.0029% | 0.0001% | 0.0002% | 0.0185% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
Songs | 428 | 1,688 | 8,467 | 1,773 | 673 | 8,603 | |
iPod apps | 130 | 293 | 559 | 113 | 63 | 1,368 | |
iPad apps | 39 | 68 | 178 | 37 | 21 | 393 | |
Books | 3 | 105 | 149 | 15 | 11 | 431 | |
Audiobooks | 0 | 4 | 141 | 11 | 2 | 348 | |
Podcast episodes | 1,593 | 3,848 | 8,004 | 239 | 220 | 8,005 | |
iTunes U episodes | 61 | 530 | 334 | 3 | 6 | 5,507 | |
TOTAL ITEMS | 2,254 | 6,536 | 17,832 | 2,191 | 996 | 24,655 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Films with city in plot | 38 | 203 | 868 | 14 | 39 | 3,428 | |
Films with city as filming location | 295 | 1,470 | 4,428 | 139 | 223 | 9,290 | |
TOTAL ITEMS | 333 | 1,673 | 5,296 | 153 | 262 | 12,718 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Books | 1,793 | 8,704 | 51,403 | 3,959 | 2,575 | 366,994 | |
Kindle editions | 39 | 152 | 628 | 22 | 30 | 2,256 | |
eBooks (HTML & PDF) | 61 | 261 | 475 | 17 | 28 | 1,811 | |
TOTAL ITEMS | 1,893 | 9,117 | 52,506 | 3,998 | 2,633 | 371,061 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Cultural Participation is perhaps the most straightforward sub-index. It contains two sub-levels:
4.1 Attendance
4.2 Expenditure
These are about support for the creative industries and culture from citizens (as opposed to the government) in the form of attendance (patronage, involvement) and expenditure. The number of admissions to selected cultural events measures
Participation and expenditure data are as hard to find as ‘microproductivity’ data. Many of the following numbers are simply not recorded. The authorities of Berlin, London and the Australian states offer reasonably useful numbers on participation, but Bremen and Cardiff and the individual Australian cities publish barely anything on this. Alternative sources of information are the relevant venues themselves although they often do not record these statistics either and for bigger cities this becomes a very tedious task. Household expenditure data can usually be found in statistical yearbooks for countries and eventually states but does usually not exist for smaller cities as it is hard to measure and very few people are willing to participate in these kinds of surveys. In this case only the state or national level data can serve as an approximation.
Most participants in cultural events can be found in London, followed by Berlin and Melbourne. The difference between Berlin and Melbourne becomes particularly apparent here. The participation at ‘Total GLAM’ is effectively biased against Berlin, because only the numbers attending museums could be found, while all kinds of attendance (i.e. GLA as well as M) could be found for London and Melbourne. If the attendance at libraries, galleries and archives was added for Berlin, the difference would be even greater. Looking at the share of the expenditure on arts out of total household expenditure the picture becomes clear. Cultural activities in Berlin are cheap in comparison to other cities. Furthermore the living expenses in general are low, so a bigger proportion of income may be dedicated to culture and arts. The same is true for Bremen, where many participation statistics could not be found and the city is thus undervalued.
Participation & Expenditure
4. PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Art galleries | 587,005 | 763,627 | – | – | 22,049 | 1,404,819 | |
Libraries | 783,005 | 940,268 | – | – | 2,057,392 | 4,131,820 | |
Archives | 49,019 | 124,857 | – | – | – | 525,868 | |
Museums | 583,616 | 745,072 | – | – | 268,966 | 3,155,208 | |
TOTAL GLAM | 2,002,645 | 2,573,824 | 13,335,000 | 1,354,000 | 2,348,407 | 9,217,715 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Classical music concert | 158,279 | 318,449 | 990,731 | – | 64,790 | 570,942 | |
Theatre | 327,038 | 519,405 | 905,874 | – | 122,760 | 1,878,100 | |
Dance performances | 208,907 | 274,666 | 25,000 | – | 30,690 | 330,546 | |
Musicals and operas | 324,815 | 634,613 | 714,606 | – | 34,100 | 1,765,414 | |
Other performing arts | 555,400 | 796,600 | 252,011 | – | 78,430 | 961,587 | |
TOTAL PERFORMING ARTS | 1,574,439 | 2,543,733 | 2,888,222 | 459,128 | 330,770 | 5,506,589 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Cinema | 1,534,025 | 1,964,166 | 9,522,000 | 178,731 | 27,280 | 39,800,000 | |
1.0 | |||||||
Popular music concert | 637,463 | 904,269 | 1,500,000 | 300,000 | 51,150 | 2,253,720 | |
1.0 | |||||||
AT LEAST ONE CULTURAL EVENT | 1,925,182 | 2,461,255 | 4,000,000 | 800,000 | 296,670 | 5,686,887 | |
1.0 | |||||||
1,663 | 1,663 | 1,991 | 2,673 | 2,035 | 2,187 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
3.98% | 3.98% | 7.40% | 9.45% | 5.90% | 4.70% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
This sub-index measures public support at each level of government in terms of:
5.1 Expenditure
Again, this section contains very straightforward measurement of the amount of cultural funding per person by level of government. We might also like to look at the proportions of the local city government budgets that are devoted to creativity and cultural funding and ICT funding as an alternative indicator.
Government budget reports at national, state and local level are the obvious source for this measure. Unfortunately it can be challenging properly to disentangle all statements and to properly attribute expenditures to either mere bureaucracy payments or real investment in culture. The budget of the ministry of culture is generally a good approximation. This section would also include ‘government expenditure on creative industries’ if it had proven possible to attribute the payments to these industries.
An alternative measure of public support could be the proportion of local city government expenditure on arts, culture and creative industries (spend on culture, arts and creative industries/total spend). This would measure the relative importance place on cultural expenditure in government budget. This was difficult to quantify across the various levels of government; future effort could be put on refining this as an indicator.
The range of spending on culture and arts per capita is rather narrow, with Brisbane and London spending the most. Cardiff is unfortunately biased downwards because the local government’s expenditure could not be found.
Public Support
5. PUBLIC SUPPORT | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Federal | 82.56 | 82.56 | 16.45 | 16.45 | 144.15 | 144.15 | |
State | 113.80 | 70.13 | 166.68 | 171.43 | 18.18 | 79.63 | |
Local | 40.59 | 37.14 | – | – | – | – | |
Total | 236.95 | 189.83 | 183.13 | 187.88 | 162.33 | 223.78 | |
1.0 | |||||||
The next sub-index is another reasonably familiar measurement of R&D employment, education and human capital, and research capacity. There are three sub-levels to this category:
6.1 Employment
6.2 Education
6.3 Research and Development
The first indicator is simply the number of people employed in R&D. Education indicators are common to the city index literature; ours includes the number of students, graduates and education institutions. Finally, research is measured in the standard way used in other indexes by the number of patents issued and R&D expenditure.
A key part of our conception of a creative city is youth and population dynamics – the growing importance of youth. There is an obvious overlap between the youth/student and microproductive demographics: students are often willing agents of risk and uncertainty, operating as both producers and consumers of experimentation and novelty in social-networks of cultural entrepreneurship and consumer creativity. This is the very definition of microproducers.
Moreover, as a manifestation or symptom of the gap between “elite” arts producers and consumers and “microproducers/consumer-creators”, youth is often under-recognised in much contemporary policy work, which tends to cater for an older demographic. By measuring the number of higher education students as a promoter of the creative city we hope to restoring some balance to creative city policy landscape: from elite producers (older demographic) to microproducers (student demographic). Besides, it is also important to have a vibrant student population from a purely educational and human capital perspective.
National and state level statistics are generally a good and reliable source concerning education (6.2). Occasionally some of the big panel surveys from social research projects can help find statistics for individual cities. Section 6.1 on employment and section 6.3 on research and development are best of all taken from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Since all six cities are in industrialised countries the difference between the cities is not as big as in other sub-indexes. London has the highest index figure as it is home to many corporate and public research centres. Also the vast number of students and the facilities give it an advantage of scale. Berlin is again ahead of Melbourne as it can compensate the disadvantage in scale with better relative factors. It is interesting to notice that Berlin outperforms London in ‘number of patents’ and its per capita value. Bremen is slightly ahead of Brisbane and Cardiff comes last, despite its sizeable student population. It is interesting to notice that the German cities have the lowest number of university graduates out of the total population ratio while they have the highest proportion of qualified people. For the UK the opposite is the case. This could have to do with different alternative training programs like apprenticeships, which are fairly well established in Germany and Australia.
Human Capital & Research
6 . HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0.57% | 0.64% | 2.77% | 2.68% | 1.48% | 2.23% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
56.40% | 57.90% | 63.49% | 60.70% | 51.00% | 56.45% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
26.67% | 23.22% | 19.34% | 14.60% | 32.30% | 28.00% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
124,102 | 301,962 | 147,030 | 31,573 | 50,430 | 433,000 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
6.07% | 7.41% | 4.28% | 5.80% | 14.79% | 5.53% | ||
0.5 | |||||||
4 | 9 | 11 | 8 | 4 | 68 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
1 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 11 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
0.000082 | 0.000103 | 0.000202 | 0.000099 | 0.000147 | 0.000088 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
Business sector | 2,222 | 3,490 | 1,164 | 196 | 490 | 1,658 | |
Government | 293 | 563 | 1,296 | 328 | 60 | 595 | |
Higher education | 942 | 1,583 | 1,011 | 178 | 544 | 3,386 | |
TOTAL R&D EXPENDITURE | 3,456 | 5,636 | 3,472 | 702 | 1,094 | 5,639 | |
0.5 | |||||||
1,691.51 | 1,382.46 | 1,010.20 | 325.00 | 522.00 | 720.65 | ||
0.5 | |||||||
This sub-index measures global integration in terms of:
7.1 International Airport Traffic
7.2 Flows of People
7.3 Globalization
We have highlighted the shift towards the modern globalised and entirely dynamic view of great cities as zones of attraction. This view emphasizes the role of cities as international hubs, or nodes that mediate local networks with global networks and connectedness. There is a focus on growth focused transport networks, international air connectivity and the cultivation of ‘aerotropolis’ cities.
Clearly international airport traffic is a key part of global integration. Indicators we have used include:
Number of international flights, number of international passengers, international freight (tonnes), and number of cities linked by direct international flights are standard indicators
Travel distance between inner city and airport (km) and travel time between inner city and airport (minutes)
Included to measure the infrastructure of the city, linkages, etc. that makes the city amenable to international airport traffic. A city that has close, easy and timely access to its international airport from the downtown district is comparatively more integrated.
The sub-component measuring flows of people based on the premise that cities compete for ‘factors of production’ i.e. in effect, people and capital. Creative cities compete for the creative class and we have outlined some attractions and the economy of attention involved in this process; however, another point is that the creative city itself is an attractant of creative people (indeed that is
Indicators we have used include:
Total migration (net)
This tracks the extent to which the city is growing in population. While gross migration is potentially illuminating e.g. a city may have a small positive net migration but with massive inflows and outflows of people – i.e. flux – net migration is a measure of city population growth and hence an indicator of the success or otherwise of a city in actually attracting and holding onto mobile creative citizens (i.e. an output of creative cities, an effect).
Population turnover (total migration (gross) divided by total population)
This is the proportion of the city’s population that is turned over in a year, and is the ideal measure of population flux (as opposed to simply gross migration). As a measure of flux and this is actually an indicator of an attractant in the competition for mobile creative citizens. It is also a source of clash, contestation, etc. (i.e. an input to creative cities, a cause).
Globalization is measured by two indicators from the GaWC group. GaWc’s research network focuses upon the external relations of world cities as opposed to simply studying the internal structures of individual cities and comparative analyses of the same. These indicators are based on the network of business relations between the world’s largest law, financial services, advertising and accountancy firms. GaWc globalization indicator is based on the ranking and classification of world cities given by GaWC whereas the number of ✓connectives" is the actual number of connections between firms in the cities.
International airport traffic statistics are available from virtually every airport authority, whose statistics are usually quite comprehensive. Most state-level statistical yearbooks have a section on interstate and overseas migration, although these could be reduced to only net values. To deduce city data the in- and outflows show be scaled by population size. The GaWC Globalization Index has 12 categories of cities. Depending on which category the city is in it receives this score, which then merely needs to be scaled into a percentage.
This subcategory mostly depends on aggregate statistics. Thus it is not surprising that bigger cities will have a higher score. London again leads, followed by Melbourne, Berlin, Brisbane, Bremen and Cardiff. Berlin does better than Melbourne when it comes to international flights and passengers, but this is because Germany is much smaller than Australia and has more direct neighbours. Cardiff has the highest population turnover due to its big student population who come for studies and leave again after graduation.
Global Integration
7 . GLOBAL INTEGRATION | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
27,002 | 31,909 | 218,200 | 35,739 | 9,261 | 375,944 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
4,282,458 | 5,872,602 | 12,860,429 | 124,125 | 1,133,290 | 115,610,443 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
95,351 | 216,869 | 19,678 | 21,563 | 38 | 1,470,504 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
76 | 69 | 171 | 27 | 44 | 176 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
15 | 24 | 12 | 6 | 21 | 27 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
21 | 23 | 22 | 13 | 35 | 32 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
Arrivals | 108,913 | 161,801 | 147,769 | 31,446 | 27,858 | 604,785 | |
Departures | 78,378 | 102,436 | 130,951 | 30,555 | 24,750 | 601,227 | |
NET TOTAL MIGRATION | 30,536 | 59,365 | 16,818 | 891 | 3,108 | 3,558 | |
1.0 | |||||||
From overseas migration | 4.22% | 3.75% | 3.51% | 3.76% | 3.13% | 3.50% | |
From interstate migration | 4.95% | 2.73% | 4.60% | 7.56% | 12.30% | 11.91% | |
FROM TOTAL MIGRATION | 9.17% | 6.48% | 8.11% | 11.32% | 15.42% | 15.41% | |
1.0 | |||||||
50 | 75 | 67 | 8 | 8 | 100 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
17,537 | 29,599 | 23,035 | 6,989 | 4,900 | 63,354 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
The final sub-index –
8.1 Openness and Tolerance
8.2 Diversity and Demographics
8.3 Civic Engagement
The indicators below can be used to measure how open a society is, with respect to either outsiders, or dissenting opinions and practices. A more open society is believed to be more conducive to creativity. The standard indicator of openness, tolerance and diversity is the ‘gay index’ – the number of persons in same sex couples as proportion all persons in couples, relative to national average. We have extended our analysis of diversity to include not only ‘sexual’, but also ‘spiritual’ and ‘ethnic’ diversity (i.e. using fragmentation and diversity indexes), as well as including measures of youth population dynamics and income equality. Also, within the global creative city literature civic engagement is also thought to be conducive to creativity.
Indicators we have used include:
Proportion of marriages that end in divorce
Women’s freedom, and the extent to which subversion of a strong conservative cultural norm is tolerated.
Censorship/freedom of press
'Population of concern' residents per capita (e.g. refugees, asylum seekers) and number of visas granted to refugees and asylum seekers per capita
Indicators of openness to minority groups.
Sexual openness
Measured by (equally weighted) the share of registered gay partnerships as a proportion of total partnerships of the city and the share of registered gay partnerships as a proportion of total partnerships of the city, relative to national share. The second indicator (relative to national average) tells you “how gay the city is relative to the rest of the country i.e. if the city is a gay hotspot. This is an important distinction as it standardises the indicator to account for cultural differences among nations.
Religious openness
Measured by the number of people in the population with no religion and the proportion of the population with no religion. Quite simply this is the tolerance of and freedom to opt out of the dominant religion (or more so religion altogether).
Nationality openness (by birthplace)
Measured by the number of people in the population not born in the country and the proportion of the population not born in the country. Again, this is about the tolerance of the majority population for minority groups. It is also important for reasons outlined earlier about clash, contestation, and population flux.
Religious diversity and nationality diversity (by birthplace)
The diversity measures used are the same as previously discussed (diversity of creative industries). Shannon’s index and the fragmentation index estimate the proportional representation of religions and nationalities in the overall population of citizens. Thus they measures the uncertainty involved in cultural clash, contestation and mixing: the more different types religions/nationalities there are, and the more equal their proportional representation in the greater population, the more difficult it is to correctly predict the religion or nationality of people encountered in the street.
Demographics: youth populations (number of people aged 15-24, proportion of people aged 15-24, and number of foreign higher education students) and income inequality (Gini index)
The Number of foreign higher education students is quite a nice indicator here since it marries openness, diversity and youth.
Civic engagement: voter participation (proportion of eligible voters and relative to level of national participation rate) and corruption
A more open society is more engaged. This is also related to tolerance and social networks and interaction: poor civic engagement frustrates social networks and interaction.
Every statistical yearbook should contain most information needed for this index. Numbers on refugees are available with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the ministry of interior and immigration. The reporters without borders Freedom of Press Index is available for the national level. Corruption figures are taken from the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International. Voter participation is made public by the election committee. The Gini coefficient is often not published but numbers on income inequality are, from which the Gini index can be estimated. The only figure that is unreliable is the sexual openness indicator. In countries with registered same sex partnerships the figure is strongly underestimated since non-register same sex partnerships are not accounted for. Australia’s Bureau of Statistics published a different number that is even less reliable as the estimation method is wrong (e.g. two housemates of the same gender who respond that they are in a relationship are thus counted as homosexual). However, in the absence of a better measure we need to resort to this number. The diversity measure for religion and nationality is again calculated according to Shannon’s Diversity Index:
The results are mixed here, although they may be plausible. The difference between Cardiff (60.8) and Melbourne (76.3) is not large. Looking at section 8.1, Berlin seems to be more tolerant than other cities. The high rate of people without religion is probably
due to the socialist heritage as well as the need to pay extra taxes when registered with the Christian churches. Australia and the UK have a longer history of naturalising immigrants and thus score well on the nationality openness score. Nonetheless, Cardiff only recently started to attract more foreigners as can be seen in 2.2. As a prominent student city, Cardiff has the highest proportion of young people, who tend to move away after finishing their studies and thus cause strong population turnover. German cities on the other hand suffer from the aging of society, where especially Australia looks better. In terms of income inequality Berlin performs best, which is again due to its socialist heritage and its comparably low-income level. Cardiff on the other hand has a lot of students who do not earn income and thus increase measured income inequality. The results for civic engagement are similar, which is not surprising for developed countries.
Openness, Tolerance & Diversity
8 . OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY | BRI | MEL | BER | BRE | CAR | LON | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
16.92% | 14.26% | 18.02% | 15.71% | 9.89% | 10.34% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
5.38 | 5.38 | 4.25 | 4.25 | 6.00 | 6.00 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
0.0011 | 0.0011 | 0.0082 | 0.0049 | 0.0030 | 0.0041 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
0.0006 | 0.0006 | 0.0032 | 0.0019 | 0.0251 | 0.0008 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
Share of registered gay partnerships as a proportion of total partnerships of the city | 0.73% | 0.81% | 2.20% | 4.70% | 4.78% | 0.92% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Share of registered gay partnerships as a proportion of total partnerships of the city, relative to national share | 1.09 | 1.22 | 1.47 | 15.60 | 1.72 | 3.07 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of people in the population with no religion | 438,322 | 925,547 | 2,088,361 | 240,367 | 57,440 | 1,486,788 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Proportion of the population with no religion | 21.45% | 22.70% | 60.77% | 43.90% | 18.81% | 19.00% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of people in the population not born in the country | 600,492 | 1,512,173 | 836,100 | 144,001 | 21,186 | 2,660,568 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Proportion of the population not born in the country | 29.39% | 37.09% | 24.33% | 26.30% | 6.94% | 34.00% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Fragmentation index (1 = diverse, 0 = homogenous) | 0.40 | 0.50 | 0.53 | 0.6 | 0.42 | 0.63 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Shannon's diversity index (higher=more diverse) | 0.74 | 0.99 | 0.89 | 1.19 | 0.79 | 1.31 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Fragmentation index using 10 largest ethnic cohorts (1 = diverse, 0 = homogenous) | 0.50 | 0.60 | 0.25 | 0.23 | 0.1 | 0.55 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Shannon's diversity index using 10 largest ethnic cohorts (higher = more diverse) | 0.75 | 0.90 | 0.43 | 0.41 | 0.3 | 0.71 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of people aged 15-24 | 289,714 | 575,947 | 367,706 | 77,414 | 50,261 | 1,050,142 | |
0.5 | |||||||
Proportion of people aged 15-24 | 14.18% | 14.13% | 10.70% | 11.72% | 16.46% | 13.42% | |
0.5 | |||||||
Number of foreign higher education students | 56,971 | 155,233 | 23,952 | 4,731 | 24,030 | 99,360 | |
1.0 | |||||||
0.35 | 0.35 | 0.30 | 0.31 | 0.34 | 0.33 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
91.35% | 90.09% | 70.90% | 70.30% | 62.73% | 64.50% | ||
1.0 | |||||||
0.98 | 0.97 | 1.00 | 0.994 | 96.36% | 0.99 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
8.7 | 8.7 | 7.9 | 7.9 | 7.6 | 7.6 | ||
1.0 | |||||||
The proposal for a new type of index – which we have delivered here as the CCI Creative City Index or CCI-CCI – is based upon recognition of the strengths of existing creative and global city indexes. It seeks to maintain the useful and effective elements of those measures, while also acknowledging and seeking to correct their weaknesses.
The strengths of the extant indexes – including Richard Florida’s creative city index, the MORI index, the GaWC index, Landry’s creative city index, and others – revolve about measurement of creative city attractions, infrastructure, research and human capital, public support for arts and culture, public participation in culture, and openness, tolerance and global connectedness. We have sought to reproduce those same aspects in the CCI Creative City Index. However, there are several critical aspects of the creative economy and creative society that are commonly not included in other indexes, and it is these aspects that we have sought additionally to include (at the price of scaling back some of the above measures).
At the core of this strategy is the role of what are variously called ‘youth culture’, ‘consumer co-creation’, ‘digital literacy’ and other factors that relate to the role of the creative and engaged citizen (and not just passive consumer) in making and producing (i.e. uploading and not just downloading) creative cultural content. The significance of this point is that our own research at the CCI has underscored the role of the creative citizen, and especially those from the margins, including the young, in recreating culture and the industries and economies that are built upon it (Hartley 2009; 2012; Potts 2011). As we have emphasised, a global city must first be a creative city, and a creative city is invariably powered by energy and the entrepreneurial experimentation of the young, of the outsider, of those seeking to create new ideas and to challenge existing ideas. A creative city will invariably be complex and challenging, ‘lovable’ more than ‘liveable’, edgy rather than middle-of-the-road, often with a clash of cultures, demographics and ideas in its mix. Our index has sought to integrate these measures, including for example measures of youth and student populations as well as uploads and social networks for music.
The index has eight main dimensions, each with multiple weighted components (between 1 and 14), making for 72 distinct classes of measures. Furthermore, each of these is often composed of multiple measures (with between one to as many as ten individual distinct elements). Over 250 distinct measures are included in the index for each city. Specifically, consider the dimension and number of weighted measures:
DIMENSION NUMBER OF WEIGHTED MEASURES
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES SCALE, SCOPE 5
MICROPRODUCTIVITY 14
ATTRACTIONS & ECONOMY OF ATTENTION 14
PARTICIPATION & EXPENDITURE 7
PUBLIC SUPPORT 1
HUMAN CAPITAL & RESEARCH 8
GLOBAL INTEGRATION 10
OPENNESS, TOLERANCE & DIVERSITY 13
This provides for a rich index that captures many aspects of a city’s creative life, economy and potential.
Our findings are limited to the data from the pilot study of six cities, so it is too early to generalise from this. With respect to the rank order and index magnitude these findings were broadly in accord with expectation. London was expected to come out well on top, as it did. Of particular interest was the extent to which London dominated, often by an order of magnitude, and sometimes more. This is a feature that was not often seen clearly on many previous city indexes, which have tended to focus on variables that have less magnitude of per capita variation in them (such as number of hotels), or tended to cluster together (such as measures of openness).
On the ‘economy of attention’ dimension, London, and then Berlin, completely dominate the other cities, including Melbourne. It may indicate that the difference between cities at the head of the scale differ from those at the tail exponentially, according to a power law scale rather than a linear one, resulting in a ‘winner takes all’ profile of leading cities compared to ‘long tail’ cities. This same ‘super-scaling’ pattern was also observed in microproductivity. These findings indicate that there is something special about cities that are both highly creative and simultaneously global cities, in that they are more than just bigger versions of smaller ‘creative cities’.
What does this imply for strategic policy? Note that the CCI Creative City Index is calculated as the unweighted average of its sub-indexes (although weightings could be applied to the sub-indexes, if required). Also note that these scores are relative to a perfect score of 100 that would be achieved by a hypothetical ‘best practice’ combination of all six cities. In this sense, the index scores can be re-interpreted similar to the distance towards the production frontier in productivity analysis. That is, the scores represent the distance towards the city creativity frontier for Brisbane (48.7), Melbourne (53.2), Berlin (63.3), Bremen (48.6), Cardiff (44.5), and London (85.1). Thus London for example could expand its Creative City Index score by about 15% by improving its performance in any of the indicators where it is not already ranked first (e.g. by raising the level of cultural and arts funding per person by level of government to that of Brisbane). On the other hand, Brisbane can more than double its CCI-CCI score and move towards global creative city status by catching up with London in the majority of the 8 categories. Indeed, this is usual the aim of high-level government funding; and this index can assist policy-makers by providing robust, efficient, evidential data to measure comparative changes over time.
While these findings in themselves are interesting and illuminating, a proper analysis would require a larger sample of cities to be studied, as well as follow-up cross-checking and statistical analysis. This remains future work. At this stage, we believe that the proof-of-concept of the index has been successfully undertaken and that the CCI Creative City Index offers a best practice platform for the benchmarking of creative city rank and progress.
One purpose of this report is to provide for our partners in the BJSS a template for the application of the CCI Creative City Index to Beijing in particular, and to other Chinese cities in turn. Many factors included in this index will be straightforward to compile, especially for the factors relating to demographic profile, industrial structure, creative industries economy and employment, public spending, cultural infrastructure, cultural attractions, education and research, and so forth. Many of these same factors also feature prominently in alternative creative city or global city indexes.
The more challenging estimates will likely accrue to the factors that centre about microproductivity and the economy of attention. Having said that, these are actually quite easy to collect, as they are amenable to web-based search. The challenge, instead, lies in finding appropriate comparisons with the proxies used. In the dimension on ‘attractions and economy of attention’, for example, we used a raft of measures that pivoted off very specific sites such as Wikipedia, IMBD (movies), Amazon (books), iTunes (music), Google Trends (Internet search), Lonely Planet (youth tourism). It makes sense for these largely American sites to be the focal points in Australia, UK and even Germany, but given the difficulty or lack of success these companies have had in operating in China it would make sense for them to be replaced with local equivalents. While this is pragmatically necessary, it also makes comparisons across a global index more difficult without adjustments for scale, penetration, and so forth.
The same issue also arises with the second dimension ‘microproductivity’, where the index we have constructed pivots off a number of nominated but dominant digital/web sites that may have no equivalents in China. For example we have measured uploading from photo sites such as
Two other domains pose potential problems. The first relates to the standard classifications and definitions of industrial sectors and creative industries. The definitions we have used in Australia, Germany and the UK are all more or less the same, and are based on satellite accounts recently used by national statistical authorities. These are influenced in turn by the 11-sector DCMS classifications (proposed in 1998) of the creative industries. China’s classifications are not always identical to this, and in part tend to weigh toward the traditional cultural industries (including cultural tourism) and to include less of the more commercial and digital industries (e.g. software and video games in particular).
Indeed, in China the formula ‘cultural and creative industries’ has gained currency, linking creativity to heritage, artistic and customary cultures almost by definition. By contrast, there is a strand of work in Western creative-economy scholarship – including our own – that foregrounds innovation, dynamism, and entrepreneurial populism as the driving force. This means that there may be tensions between different definitions of creativity and culture (not just differences in what sectors are counted) across different jurisdictions. Such differences will produce widely varying and incommensurate datasets.
These issues of industry and sectoral definition, and also of the consistency of these classifications between local, state and national account, need to be carefully observed and reviewed. There are situations in which differing definitions may not pose a problem. If a Creative City Index is applied
A further point relates to the eighth dimension: openness, tolerance and diversity. These measures have been staples of creative city indexes since Richard Florida’s work over a decade ago. We include them here for the same reason: They provide a good measure of the tolerance to different lifestyles and beliefs, which is a good measure of a city’s willingness to tolerate and even embrace new ideas: it is a ‘proxy’ for openness to change and the readiness to value dynamism. But these issues can be difficult to measure because of sampling reluctance and reporting bias. The measures we have selected relate to levels of divorce (a proxy for women’s freedom), sexual openness (the ‘gay’ index) and religious tolerance. Sometimes official statistics on these matters can differ substantially from what is true, definitions can vary widely, and there may be official interference in or intolerance of data collection (to say nothing of the behaviours being measured). Hence these figures can be hard to track and verify accurately. These were the figures that we had the greatest trouble with in the pilot index (along with measures of local networks and interaction), and of which we are least confident. Nevertheless, they are included for good reason and we believe that the index’s quality is in significant part dependent upon quality inputs into this dimension.
We have also not sought to impress different weightings upon this index. Our initial supposition is that the ‘equal weightings’ model seems intuitively correct. Yet because some dimensions contained more variance than others, and also because the rankings were not always equal even in this small pilot sample, any change in the weightings will affect the overall outcome of the index and also the rankings.
Such issues will need to be taken up in future versions and applications of the CCI-CCI. We are confident that, with longitudinal comparisons as well as wider application to a greater number of cities, its accuracy as well as its utility will increase. It is like any system based on open connectivity; the more connections there are, the better it will be.