Environments by Design
Abstract
The creative economy is touted as an engine for economic prosperity and social good in urban areas. A combination of the cultural industries, city branding, cultural tourism, and the creative class, this field has gained attention worldwide as a tool for municipal policymakers to foster city building. Many cities and consulting entities have produced studies and reports on the promise of the creative economy. However, there exist few analyses of these reports and their inherent policy value.
This article explores creative economy reports from five cities on three continents — Adelaide, Austin, Chicago, London, and New York – using the Narrative Policy Framework through an iterative coding framework. This emergent policy framework looks at the setting, the characters, the plot, and the outcomes or moral of the story to analyze the framing of policy in a new and different way. Reports on the “creative city” have been written and commissioned to operationalize local creative economies, measure creative economic outputs, create a picture of the labor force, and contextualize the value of artistic creativity within a municipality.
One often-cited aspect of the creative economy is its reliance on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action as a tool for innovation and economic development, and cities themselves are entrepreneurial in their collective effort to compete for development resources, attract jobs, and attract people. The project of the city puts it in competition on local, national, and global scales and encourages entrepreneurial action (e.g., identifying and capitalizing on opportunity, capturing an audience, building a recognizable brand identity.). The key contributions of this article center the ways that creative economy reports use rhetorical devices and empirical data to support their claims and recommendations and forwards policy learning and adaptation as an important tool for municipal policymakers.
Dr. Shoshanah B.D. Goldberg-Miller (PhD, The New School) is Associate Professor of Arts Policy and Administration and Affiliated Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University. Dr. Shoshanah Goldberg-Miller specializes in creative economic development, cultural policy, arts entrepreneurship, and nonprofit management. Her book, Planning for a City of Culture: Creative Urbanism in Toronto and New York (Routledge 2017) uses policy theory as an underlying construct to understand the role of arts and culture in urban transformation and revitalization. Dr. Goldberg-Miller has published articles in Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Urbanism. City, Culture and Society. Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, Cities, Artivate, and Journal of Enterprising Culture, and has co-authored chapters in Entrepreneurship in Culture and Creative Industries and Creating Cultural Capital. She examines how cities use arts and culture in planning, fostering livable communities and creating economic development strategies to build their brand, attract residents and tourists, and distinguish themselves from other urban centers worldwide.
Dr. Rachel Skaggs is the Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Assistant Professor of Arts Management. Dr. Skaggs completed her PhD in sociology at Vanderbilt University where she was a fellow at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy.
Dr. Skaggs’s research focuses on how workers in post-bureaucratic employment situations (freelance, project-based, self-employment, and other forms of free agency) are able to craft careers out of a series of self-directed projects and jobs, particularly in creative industries. She is especially interested in how workers in these situations collaborate and cooperate along the way. Her research has focused on topics such as the importance of social networks in music industry careers, arts entrepreneurship, how artists learn to deal with rejection and failure, and the public perceptions of artists in local communities. This work has been published in sociological and arts-focused venues such as Work and Occupations, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, and Business Creativity and the Creative Economy.
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Thursday 17th June, 2021