In the early twenty-first century, the potential of the creative economy , made up of creative workers fulfilling creative occupations , or working in creative industries , is increasingly celebrated and encouraged. These creative workers—or, more simply, ‘creatives’—might be seen to constitute a creative class , or to live in a creative city . This creative city may not only house these creative workers, but also have creative leaders, exercising creative entrepreneurial energies, forging ahead in unchartered political waters, just as their counterparts in industry creatively innovate with new businesses and products. Or, rather, these have at least come to be popular notions.
This book aims to establish how such conceptions of creativity have come to prominence, how they are substantiated, how they are taken up in practice and how they persist. As the mentions above of creative industries and creative occupations hint at, the economic role played by creativity is seen as increasingly important in these processes. Creativity thus becomes central to what we may term an ‘economic imaginary ’ (Campbell 2014). Oakley and O’Connor provide a useful summary of Sum and Jessop’s work regarding this term explaining how ‘any course of collective action necessarily demands that we select from a range of possibilities and develop these within a particular, simplifying narrative in order to become generally accepted’ (2015, p. 13). The idea of creativity has increasingly played a role in such simplifying narratives from the 1990s onwards. It is important to note, however, that the ‘economic imaginary ’ is not merely a way of understanding or framing events, but that it also helps to privilege certain activities, to construct them and their broader contexts (Jessop 2004). The economic imaginary is thus not ‘imaginary’ in the sense of ‘fictional’. Rather, it enables a coherent account of a complex reality, and in so doing plays a role in shaping that reality. In this, we can usefully reflect on the ‘Thomas theorem’ of sociology set out in the early twentieth century: if we define situations as real, they are real in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928, p. 572) or, as Becker notes in an intensification of this theorem, ‘to a sociologist, nothing is more real than what people have agreed on’ (2014, p. 185). The chapters that follow will discuss how particular notions of, and roles for, creativity are agreed upon, and how these notions come to be taken up and promoted. In addition to considering what the real consequences of these positions are, the issue of how this creativity is defined as real will also be considered. Indeed, the time and resources expended in generating evidence to substantiate the role and nature of creativity can be seen as one of the ‘real consequences’ of this imaginary . The challenges and patterns which are found when such evidence is sought, though, are of particular concern here. The aim, therefore, is to establish where this dominant position regarding creativity comes from, what it consists of, how it is substantiated, and how it frames and shapes tangible action.
As the focus here is on the ways in which particular ideas around creativity are not only shaped but promoted and enacted, this book uses the shorthand label of the ‘Creativity Agenda ’ to refer to the set of ideas which came to prominence and which have been increasingly endorsed, promoted, and enacted from the late 1990s on. To give a sense of the nature, scope, and scale of the application of this agenda, we can consider Mould’s recent summary of events:
Since the turn of the new millennium, many urban and regional governments from all over the world, from Sydney to Sheffield, from Manila to Madison, have been enabling strategies of development purporting to stimulate creativity among its inhabitants and, perhaps more predominantly, to bring in talented, educated and creative people from elsewhere in the hope of benefiting from their economic growth potential. Moreover gargantuan financial sums have been spent on these endeavours. (2017, p. 1)
In concert with this assessment, this book argues that although the agenda which drives such spending started to make its mark in earnest relatively recently, once established, it has proven in many ways to be remarkably durable. It is this durability and persistence that the book seeks to investigate, and to which the ‘persistent creativity ’ of the title refers.
The title also refers to the process of ‘making the case for art, culture and the creative industries ’. As noted, the role of evidence in supporting the Creativity Agenda is one that will be considered in detail, and one which raises the important issue of the definition of terms. Even in the brief sketch at the outset of this chapter, we can see the idea of creativity being used in many different senses. Does this common terminology indicate commonality in the activities referred to and, if so, what is the nature of this common creativity? Questions such as this persist alongside the development of the Creativity Agenda , and this book argues that a need for a more precise consideration of how such questions may be answered also persists. One issue which will recur throughout is the challenge of defining creativity in a meaningful way, but no matter how this is done, one fundamental aspect to the rise of the Creativity Agenda is a sustained emphasis on the importance of artistic, expressive activity; whenever creativity is discussed, ‘culture ’ is seldom far behind.
In essence, then, the questions that will be considered here are about how and why creativity is conceived in certain forms, and the persistence of these conceptions. Given that the Creativity Agenda has become a global phenomenon, it is not possible to interrogate its every manifestation, and so discussion here will largely focus on a particularly influential site for the agenda, the UK. In the UK, we can see clear manifestations of the Creativity Agenda which are mirrored internationally, and which demonstrate the durability referred to above. Here it is useful to consider statements from policymakers in the UK over a twenty year period which provide a picture of ‘Persistent Creativity’ in miniature:
- In 1998, following the recent establishment of the ‘Department for Culture , Media and Sport’ (DCMS ) within UK government, the book ‘Creative Britain ’ was published in which Baron Smith of Finsbury, the first Secretary of State for DCMS , outlined the importance of ‘creative industries ’ to government policy, to the future of the economy, and to society more broadly. Smith positioned creative industries as “where the wealth and the jobs of the future are going to be generated from” (1998, p. 31), and his government’s goal as being to “put these industries properly on the political map for the first time ever” (p. 142). In addition, creativity was identified as bringing many wider benefits, such as fostering “social inclusion through shared emotions” (p. 24).
Ten years later, the picture looked remarkably similar:
- In 2008, DCMS , in partnership with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and the Department for Innovation , Universities and Skills, published a report also entitled ‘Creative Britain ’ in which the importance of ‘creative industries ’ to the government, to the future of the economy, and to society more broadly were outlined once more. In this report creative industries were positioned as being important “in the coming years” (DCMS et al. 2008, p. 1), as important to the government in their aim of creating “the jobs of the future” (p. 4) and as “increasingly vital” to the UK economy (p. 6). The report outlined a vision of a Britain “in ten years’ time where the local economies in our biggest cities are driven by creativity ” (p. 6). In addition to this economic role, however, it was noted that such industries “also bring wider social and cultural benefits” (p. 58).
Another ten years on, this picture persists:
- In 2018, Nesta —a body originally established by New Labour in 1998, but operating as a charity since 2012 (see Oakley et al. 2014)—published the report ‘Creative Nation’ (Mateos Garcia et al. 2018). In this report, the UK’s Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries emphasised the value of these creative industries—“British creative industries […] are an engine of growth”—and noted that supporting them will ensure that the country is “fit for the future” (p. 4).
The following chapters will consider how this constancy is achieved, and some of the challenges raised by the conception of creativity that persists throughout this period. Chapter 2 will examine how, although it has come to prominence comparatively recently, this persistent position rests on deeper foundations. It considers the emergence of culture and the arts as an object of political intervention, and the idea of the arts as central to wider social benefits. It also traces the emergence of a particular concern with quantification across society that gradually encroaches on the field of culture, and an increasing focus on economic valuation in the context of neoliberal ideology, alongside theorising regarding the rise of a ‘new’ economy, the emergence of which is deemed in some ways to have the potential to ‘regenerate’ urban areas.
Chapter 3 considers the forms of ‘creativity’ which the Creativity Agenda seeks to promote. The terms...