Posts tagged Creative Economy

New Book: Sustainable City and Creativity - Promoting Creative Urban Initiatives

This book offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyzes principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice.

Authors: Luigi Fusco Girard, Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy, Tuzin Baycan, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey and Peter Nijkamp, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/Sustainable-City-Creativity-Promoting-Initiatives/dp/1409420019

About the book

The notion of ‘creative cities’ - where cultural activities and creative and cultural industries play a crucial role in supporting urban creativity and contributing to the new creative economy - has become central to most regional and urban development strategies in recent years. A creative city is supposed to develop imaginative and innovative solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental problems: economic stagnancy, urban shrinkage, social segregation, global competition or more.

Cities and regions around the world are trying to develop, facilitate or promote concentrations of creative, innovative and/or knowledge intensive industries in order to become more competitive. These places are seeking new strategies to combine economic development with quality of place that will increase economic productivity and encourage growth.

Against this increasing interest in creative cities, this volume offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyzes principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice. In doing so, it puts forward ideas about stimulating the production of an innovative knowledge for a creative and sustainable city, and transforming a specific knowledge into a general-common knowledge, which suggests best future policy actions, decision-making processes and choices for the change towards a human sustainable development of the city.

Available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/Sustainable-City-Creativity-Promoting-Initiatives/dp/1409420019

Aca-article: Renegades on the frontier of innovation - the shanzhai grassroots communities of Shenzhen, China

This article examines recent developments in southern China commonly described as shanzhai. It also describes the fuzzy boundary between formal and informal culture and notes the interaction between three spheres of activity: official culture, the market and grassroots culture.

Authors:Michael Keane & Elaine Jing Zhao, Queensland University of Technology. Published online as part of the Asian Creative Transformations’ Work-in-progress paper series.

Open access: http://www.creativetransformations.asia/media/wipps/Renegades_on_the_frontier_of_innovation.pdf

Abstract
This article examines recent developments in southern China commonly described as shanzhai. The term translates as “hideaway of mountain bandits”. While shanzhai is often condemned as the embodiment of China’s “knock-off” industries we argue that it might be more appropriately viewed as an instance of China’s emerging creative economy and an example of rapid prototyping. The paper traces the evolution of shanzhai mobile phones and the materialization of the shanzhai ethos in popular culture. In arguing that shanzhai provides inputs into creative industries the paper describes the fuzzy boundary between formal and informal culture and notes the interaction between three spheres of activity: official culture, the market and grassroots culture.

Keywords: shanzhai, creative economy, grassroots culture, regional innovation, second generation innovation, intellectual property

CFP: Research Symposium on Creative practice, complexity and the creative economy (due April 1)

This symposium is an opportunity for us to share our findings but is also an opportunity to engage with other academics and practitioners doing research on the creative economy or on creative practice and using complexity methods.

Abstracts due April 1, 2012.

Research Symposium on Creative practice, complexity and the creative economy. 31 May 2012. Birmingham University.

This research symposium constitutes the closing event of the AHRC funded project ‘The role of complexity in the creative economies: connecting people, ideas and practice’ (AH/J5001413/1).

The symposium is an opportunity for us to share our findings but is also an opportunity to engage with other academics and practitioners doing research on the creative economy or on creative practice and using complexity methods. We would welcome paper proposals from academic and practitioners’ discussing their investigations and experiences of using complexity theory in their research on the creative economy or in their creative practice and the potential methodological challenges involved.

All interested scholars and practitioners are invited to submit, by email, an abstract for their proposed contribution to the symposium of around 1,000 words by no later than 1st April 2012 at: R.Comunian(at)kent.ac.uk

More information can be found on the project website:
http://www.complexity-creative-economy.net/final-research-symposium.html