Christine Hamilton: "Florida's work captured the zeitgeist and helped us fall in love with our cities"

Since the discovery of the “Creative City” (Charles Landry, 1995) and the “Creative Class” (Richard Florida, 2002) the future wealth of cities and whole economies has been tied to the growth of creativity. Do these findings and propositions proved to be helpful in developing either the economy or the city – or even both?

It is nearly a decade since the publishing of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class. His work on creative people and successful cities came at a time when, in the UK, there was a huge expansion in cultural buildings and the rise of the creative quarter. Building on the perceived success of Glasgow City of Culture 1990, urban policy grew up around the development of the creative industries as a means of tackling economic and social regeneration. Above all, Florida's work captured the zeitgeist and helped us fall in love with our cities.

We, at the Institute for Creative Enterprise at Coventry University, are pursing a strand of research examining the link between creative industries and urban policy have been re-visiting Florida's work, examining how urban policy might be developed in the future. And we are looking at three questions:

• Are creative people attracted to some places more than others?
• Are some places more than others propitious in creative economic growth?
• Do jobs follow people?

What kind of planning or policy making needs to be applied?

We have undertaken some initial survey work and our finding so far suggest that the availability of work and other economic factors pay a major role in deciding where to live. People follow jobs runs counter to Florida's findings that jobs follow people. However the benefits of the city plays a role a in retaining skilled mobile workers, including those working in the creative industries. We also found that the worst aspects of a place were perceived as being crime, quality of the public realm, vandalism etc. It is surprising that cities have not focused attention on tackling the negative aspects of their areas to retain ‘talent’, rather than the gimmicks, iconic architecture, and sometimes banal flagship developments, designed to grab the limelight.


Which conditions are really important for the development of creative quarters?


Place marketing strategies have resulted in cities competing for the same mobile capital which privilege those not residing in the city. There is a danger of a creeping sameness in the cultural and leisure offer of many cities and large scale gentrification is leading to the erosion of local character.

What the Institute for Creative Enterprise is advocating is a re-positioning of current creative city strategies. They should be re-aligned to the needs and motivations of the so-called ‘creative class’ but also retain creative professionals in an area as part of a strategy to sustain recently established creative milieu.


Interviewee’s profile

Name: Christine Hamilton

Current occupation: Director, Institute for Creative Enterprise, Coventry University

Three crucial turning points in your professional life:

• My first job: at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, where I learnt that bold, beautiful, thrilling theatre could engage with an audience from all backgrounds without compromise, and that being well- managed was part of being brilliant.
• I was a participant as well as a spectator in Glasgow, City of Culture 1990: experiencing fantastic events, the re-invention of the image of a city, and how public policy can be shaped with the flimsiest of evidence.
• I made several trips to the former Soviet Union during glasnost and perestroika which was for me a truly mind stretching experience. I also attended a workshop in Sofia, Bulgaria in the 1990s with representatives from Holland, Estonia, UK and Bulgaria. There was no one language which everyone could speak comfortably, but we mixed socially using English, German, French and Russian. It made me realise what being European actually meant.




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