Posts with tag UK

We sit right above the swimming pool, in a former swimming hall, for our meeting with Kate Oakley at City University London (UK). The changing lockers are still on the side, but now used as storage of books and documents. It’s nice, somehow. Nothing can be changed in the hall, Kate Oakley tells us. So if you remove the floor the swimming pool is still there. Now neatly covered and transformed to one of the meeting points and reading rooms for students. Kate Oakley is a writer, policy analyst, and now visiting Professor at Department of Cultural Policy and Management. She has followed and written a lot about creative industries and the new British independents, i.e. the small-scale entrepreneurs. We meet her to talk about the Cultural Leadership Programme at the City University and also creative industries. Where is it going?

UK is the cradle of cultural and creative industries, introduced about a decade ago by the Blair Labour Government and their Creative Industries Mapping Document. But what will happen now with the notion of cultural and creative industries? Kate Oakley says, after some thinking, that she sees a division in argument between on one hand “creativity”, and the other “innovation”. This means that you will find those who argue stronger for the Arts and Arts Policy, and those who enforce innovation in the more narrow sense where aesthetics are used to raise value in more traditional businesses. The creative industries managed to show the practice and everyday life of culture and cultural entrepreneurs, something that tends to get lost in this division.

So, where is the question of creative industries in UK nowadays? 2010 is election year and it’s always a time when not much will happen. And it does seem like the question has slipped from the Labour’s priorities. The Conservatives, on the other hand seem to show more interest in cultural heritage than creative industries. Maybe the recession has forced other priorities in focus, maybe not enough advocacies and lobbying from cultural politicians on fellow politicians in other areas has been done? An experience from a project in Western Sweden with Artists and politicians show that many cultural politicians feel a lack of arguments in relation to other political areas.

We also meet Nicola Turner at the Arts Council and discuss Cultural Leadership and the Cultural Leadership Programme. Quite interesting.

At Creative Choices website you find After the Crunch, a book trying to put light on these issues, and also thoughts about “So what’s next”. Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham wrote the book Creative Industries after the First Decade of Debate, and in 2008 you could listen to many of the leading researchers within cultural and creative industries at a one-day symposium at Milton Keynes, “The Creative Industries: Ten Years After”. Nätverkstan was there, read about it here. This facts file from UK Department of Culture, Media and Sports from 2002 might be useful: ci_fact_file.pdf.

The visit to London is part of a study visit done by Kulturverkstan, the two-year Project Management Training Programme, run by Nätverkstan. Photos taken with Iphone.