Hua Jian

Researcher, Director of Cultural Industry Research Centre of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences

I. Cultural space building as an important part of creative city

Cultural space building should be given priority in making cities more creative. These cultural spaces are smart, compact, and intelligent city entities, artistically recognizable with designs and signs, offering people an experience of multiple charms with historical legacy, cultural imagination, and art appreciation. Thus the cultural spaces include multiple functions, including creation, experience, production, gathering, exchange and emission of ideas.

UNESCO Creative City Network initiated by UNESCO in December 2004, based on UNESCO’s Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity, which encourages cultural diversity and inspires urban residents to develop diverse cultural resources, creating a new model for sustainable economic development. Cultural diversity is an international trend initiated by the UN and echoed by many, which serves as the fundamental goal of advocating and building “Creative Cities” around

the globe. Developing “Creative City” stands for an important trend for human civilization with the in-depth development of the globalization.

According to the Creative Economy Report, a series of publication jointly compiled by institutions, including UNCTAD etc., the meaning of initiating “Creative Cities” has gone beyond creative industries and creative economy. This is because “Cities have one crucial resource – their people. Human cleverness, desires, motivations, imagination and creativity are replacing location, natural resources and market access as urban resources. The creativity of those who live in and run cities will determine future success.”29 The fundamental goal of building “Creative Cities” is to spur creativity and imagination in people and convert their creativity into important assets and wealth that could be value-added, invested and circulated.

Considering this, cultural spaces in the light of creative city are distinguished by the four following characteristics: First, cultural space is where the cultural and creative professionals, or creative entity, gather together, and the concentration of cultural productivity occurs, making it a magnet for large amounts of capitals including monetary capital, social and cultural investment. Second, it is a cluster of cultural infrastructure facilities and a wide range of cultural services, making it the birthplace of and place for release of various brainchildren because the it takes the lowest to pursue “creative activities” here, and it is the most convenient to carry out creative work and it is the most internationalized place. Third, as a place boasting large numbers of cultural and artistic events, cultural spaces make it easy for players in cultural industry to engage in a wide spectrum of research and development, content creation, performance and exchange. Such spaces are also facilitating the engagement of community members in sharing productions based on creative ideas, bestowing them the value of culture. Fourth, these spaces provide experiences rich in esthetic value, making them highly artistically distinguishable. B. Joseph Pyn, an American scholar, once pointed out, experience is the fourth genre of economic value provision . In short, the combination of the convenience of infrastructure, creativity of creative actors,the dynamism of cultural exchanges and aesthetic experience defines what cultural spaces are in a creative city. 

The quality and size of cultural spaces in a creative city are the basics for creative goods. It is far from enough for a city of culture to give play to its function as art trade centre.A creative city must be a place for art production, selling and consumption are in place. It is the human spirit unique to the city that constitutes the core of the culture space. From the practice of different countries in building the Creative Cities, we can see that the more cultural spaces a city has, the more flourishing its creative ideas and dynamism become regardless of its geography and the size of population. For remote middle or small sized city, small size and a small population may be the disadvantage, but once it inherits rich historic legacy and tap diverse cultural resources, it would witness a surge in creative ideas, which would make it an internationally well know city of creative ideas.