This article was downloaded by: [114.108.214.

136]
On: 18 January 2015, At: 08:02
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Urban Design

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjud20

Creative Milieux: How Urban Design

Nurtures Creative Clusters
a
Quentin Stevens
a
School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Australia
Published online: 12 Jan 2015.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Quentin Stevens (2015) Creative Milieux: How Urban Design Nurtures Creative
Clusters, Journal of Urban Design, 20:1, 1-7, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2015.981393

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2015.981393

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
 Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015
 Journal of Urban Design, 2015
Vol. 20, No. 1, 1–7, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2015.981393

EDITORIAL

Creative Milieux: How Urban Design Nurtures Creative

Clusters

QUENTIN STEVENS
School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Australia

The so-called ‘creative industries’ are increasingly being presented as an

important tool of urban regeneration and economic development. Many cities
worldwide are seeking to make themselves more creative, by developing
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

strategies, building facilities or defining particular quarters. Such policies have

been influenced by debates that claim the importance of place for economic
development, and for the operation of creative industries in particular. There is an
extensive literature that seeks to understand the relationships between place and
the creative industries. This work mostly focuses on the locational choices of these
industries and their workers, as well as the resultant spatial patterns of the
industries’ work and leisure activities, and the distribution of the firms
themselves. Creative industries seem to cluster in neighbourhoods on the fringe
of the inner city, the “zone in transition” identified long ago by Burgess (1928, 106),
“an interstitial area in the throes of change from residence to business and
industry” which is home to a “mobile and mixed population of youth and old age,
aspiring and defeated individuals, pleasure-seeking Bohemians and hard-
working students . . . and radical freethinkers”. As Preston (1966, 236) later
noted, this zone has a number of distinctive physical characteristics, being
“typified by mixed land use, aging structures, general instability, and change, and
by a wide range in type and quality of functions”. This type of urban physical
environment would seem to potentially have an important role in creative activity.
However, it is only very recently that researchers have pursued more detailed
investigation of the spatial conditions that support the creative economy: what
urban morphologies, building types and qualities of place attract and retain
creative workers and foster creative production. Rantisi, Leslie, and Christopher-
son (2006, 1791) noted that “the physical landscape of the city is an important
factor for the operation of the creative industries, operating in direct and indirect
ways”. However, the majority of existing studies come from the disciplines of
economics, geography and urban planning. Montgomery (2007) has done much to
define a field of enquiry around how urban design connects to the creative
industries and their clustering, but there is lack of both detailed case studies and
comparative analysis.
With the aim of understanding these relationships, emergent research in
urban design is starting to investigate how issues such as quality of place, urban
morphology and other spatial factors support the processes that underpin creative
clusters. This work is informed by new methodologies for studying the micro-
geographies associated with the creative industries and creative practices. These
aim to map the diversity of settings that are relevant for these processes and
provide a more detailed understanding of their spatial patterns, raising new
q 2015 Taylor & Francis
 2 Editorial

questions for the design disciplines. Policy tools can potentially incorporate these
advances into urban design practice in order to nurture creative clusters. This
special issue of the Journal brings together some of the diverse but limited current
research in urban design and spatial planning that focuses on the physical settings
of creative clusters at a variety of local scales.

The Scope of Creative Clustering

The six papers collected here show that the clustering of the creative industries is a
broad international concern. The contributors’ studies span 10 countries on 5
continents, and examine first tier cities of international trade and control as well as
other cities further down the global hierarchy. They complement the extensive
research going on in the USA and across continental Europe. They also suggest it
would be interesting to explore the forms of creative milieux that may exist within
rapidly-developing cities in other parts of the world, such as Guangzhou, Hong
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

Kong, Lagos and Johannesburg. The papers’ data indicate that the urban design
issues they investigate have relevance to hundreds of creative firms and
thousands of individuals. As the research by Florida (2002) has noted (and further
encouraged), city managers are particularly keen to attract and retain these types
of actors.
To address this special issue’s core question of how urban design nurtures
creative clusters, the contributing researchers have all had to define what they
mean by creative industries and creative clusters, to acknowledge the scope of
urban design as a set of observable spatial and social phenomena and as a domain
of policy and practice, and to explicitly frame research questions and methods that
might help in understanding them. In these terms, the six papers have some
significant commonalities, but also point to certain areas that remain open to
debate and future research.

Shared Insights
These six studies tend to agree on the shortcomings and gaps in existing research
on creative clusters, in particular the lack of detailed empirical evidence already
identified by Rantisi, Leslie, and Christopherson (2006). Many of the contributors
note the absence of precise mapping of creative enterprises within existing
clusters, and of the relationships between those enterprises, in terms of the spatial
milieux and activity patterns that link them. Another common thread among the
papers is looking at creative work that goes on in sites of informal social
interaction as well as in workplaces in a more limited, traditional sense.
Most of the clusters the authors report on are in city fringe districts within
very large cities—the zone in transition already noted above. These areas are, as
Mckenzie and Hutton observe, “places constantly in the making”. They often
contain a heritage of early industrial buildings, although some areas are older still,
and others more recent. These districts either have been, are being, or will be
gentrified. The researchers often point to connections and tensions between places
and patterns of creative work and general urban leisure, particularly nightlife.
Several of the contributors note the impacts of gentrification in the displacement
of creative industries, class struggle or changing modes of working. Several of the
papers also make explicit contrasts between creative milieux and parts of a
neighbourhood or its surroundings that are more uniform and less creative, but
 Editorial 3

that can nevertheless be argued to be integral to the life and success of these
clusters. Indeed, difference and mixing is a key common thread across the papers.
There is ample confirmation of Wood and Dovey’s suggestion that it is the “mix of
mixes”—particular combinations of urban forms, land uses, activities and socio-
economic profiles—that create vital creative clusters. Part of the stimulus of these
milieux also appears to come from the tension, dynamism and almost inevitable
changes that accompany these differences: a certain necessary “level of anarchy”
as Mckenzie and Hutton argue, or in Costa and Lopes’s terms “liminality”. This
makes it hard to isolate, valorize and plan policy around any particular enduring
urban design solutions. Several of the authors advocate for flexibility and
freedom, and openness to diversity and change, rather than overly-prescriptive
built forms and policies that attempt to preserve particular configurations of
creative activity. A key lesson seems to be that creative milieux are constituted as
continuing accumulations and transformations of people, building types and
symbols over time.
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

One very specific, linked theme frequently addressed by the contributors is

smallness of scale, in terms of the actions that are undertaken to utilize or
transform the environment creatively, and also in physical terms, noting the
importance for creative clusters of fine-grain urban morphology, pedestrian-
friendliness and walkable distances. In most of the case studies, major traffic
arteries are confined to the margins of the clusters. Small-scale urbanism is
frequently argued to facilitate chance encounters that foster creative develop-
ments. Durmaz adds that the walkability of London’s Soho is complemented by
its strong virtual broadband connectivity to industry partners across the entire
planet.

Creative Differences
Six papers in a nascent area of enquiry cannot, of course, be definitive, and all
these similarities are still open to contestation and refutation by future research.
Beyond these limited, general commonalities, the contributions also diverge
significantly, presenting great scope for further development of the field. The 12
creative clusters analyzed in the papers highlight significant differences in
physical, developmental and political contexts that shape creative enterprises and
their spatial manifestations. Even the examinations of cases within individual
papers are seldom tightly comparative, because of the uniqueness of the histories,
contexts and forces that define them. Clearly urban design lessons about creative
clusters from one city, or even one part of one city, cannot simply be reproduced
elsewhere.
Many of the differences between the sites discussed and the findings reached
reflect core methodological differences in the research. The first three papers by
Mckenzie and Hutton, Costa and Lopes, and Wood and Dovey all explore the
urban design characteristics of districts that are widely recognized as loci of a
range of cultural production and consumption activities. The latter three papers
by Boontharm, Durmaz and Martins start by looking at the specific needs,
activities and spaces of particular industries: fashion, film and digital media. The
six papers identify a wide range of industries that can be considered creative.
They also seek to query and clarify what actually count as creative enterprise,
activities and actors.
 4 Editorial

The studies vary in the scale and focus of their analysis, looking at urban
morphology, building typologies, public spaces and the architectonic elements
that delineate them, such as doorways, windows and seating. They vary in their
emphasis on the public realm vis-à-vis private spaces and buildings, although
they generally all recognize the great importance of the interfaces between these,
and how those are designed and managed to control and filter social interaction
and the spread of knowledge and ideas.
The contributors make use of many different types of data, theories and forms
of analysis. Familiar to urban design research, these include field studies of built
form, its aesthetics, its functional capacities, and its actual uses, through first-hand
observation, photography and video documentation, as well as content analysis of
images and documents, analytical mapping of built forms and activities, cognitive
mapping of user perceptions, and analysis of policies and regulatory instruments.
Web searching is inevitably a key approach to identify the nature and location of
creative businesses that are often new, small and technology-savvy. Other
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

methods are drawn from the social sciences, including first-hand and digital
ethnography and, importantly, extensive interviews and surveys with actors who
fulfil a range of roles within large, small and solo creative enterprises. As Martins
demonstrates, detailed work with such informants is necessary to understand the
aims, constraints and practices of firms and individual workers. It also allows
identification of, as Mckenzie and Hutton put it, people’s “subjective, personal
and emotional response to the locality as imagined or constructed”. The
contributors’ analyses vary between precise empirical categories or measure-
ments and narrative accounts of the overall atmosphere or ‘feel’ of particular
districts. Mapping is crucial to several of the studies, whether in terms of certain
urban design dimensions that potentially support or correlate to creative activity,
or charting actual activities and their relationships. The variety of methods and
conditions that these six papers explore underscores the wide range of factors that
shape the fortunes of the creative industries being examined, and the complex
interconnection of social, economic and physical issues that frame them. Several of
the papers attempt to diagram these relations, illustrating thinking that is still in
progress. This special issue does not provide an answer to the question of how to
design or manage successful creative milieux, but rather demonstrates the range
of questions and approaches that urban design thinking can bring to such issues.

The Contributions
The contributions begin with three papers examining the distinctive urban design
characteristics and redevelopment processes of urban districts where a variety of
creative production and consumption activities can be found.
Murray Mckenzie and Tom Hutton’s paper on culture-led regeneration in
Victory Square in Vancouver provides a broad background to the political,
economic and policy agendas and dynamics that continue to shape the urban
fabric of creative districts. They examine how culture and creative enterprise can
be instrumentalized by city governments and boosters for the general physical
and economic regeneration of an urban area, as a conscious effort of changing
aesthetics, not only or necessarily pursuing wider economic development with a
genuine focus on the arts or creative work. They portray this harnessing of
creative workers in ‘comprehensive makeovers’ of disinvested urban districts as
an alternative approach to the emphasis on a single, new, spectacular cultural
 Editorial 5

building encouraged by projects such as the Guggenheim Bilbao. However, their

case of Victory Square has the prospects to be something else again; a small-grain
urbanism of historically variegated buildings, distinct from ‘heritage districts’
elsewhere in Vancouver, where adaptive re-use can draw upon a range of both
material and symbolic potentials, and where, quote: “local interventions can
involve a more socially-inclusive range of ‘creative’ practitioners and a much
broader definition of what constitutes ‘cultural’ practice”.
Pedro Costa and Ricardo Lopes draw on an extensive photographic survey of
three cultural quarters in Lisbon, Barcelona and São Paulo. Their analytical frame
connects three features: the localized systems of production and consumption
evident in each district; the character of everyday life, which for them includes the
specific ways spaces are governed; and the symbolic systems that lend meaning to
social life and its spaces. Their framework suggests links between the social and
the morphological which other research could pursue further. Costa and Lopes
emphasize the importance of public space to creativity in terms of performance,
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

display and engagement with the heterogeneity of other people. They highlight
that tensions and conflicts between agents with diverse interests are an inevitable
part of such settings. They also illustrate two key urban design characteristics that
condition these encounters: first, threshold spaces such as windows and arcades,
where people, activities and symbols spill in and out of a range of private settings
that constitute a wider public sphere: second, the prevalent building typologies
that serve as a regulating mechanism to maintain the ‘human scale’ of social
interactions and constrain gentrification by limiting the potential returns on
redevelopment. In the context of gentrification, they note a particular tension
between creative production activities, which often occur at low levels of
capitalization, and consumption of creative outcomes, which is often far more
upmarket. A consequence for the character of these districts is the “progressive
replacement of performing and visual arts with design shops and nightlife”.
Stephen Wood and Kim Dovey look at two creative clusters in Melbourne and
Sydney. They characterize two different scales of clustering: the five-minute
walking distance of 400 m x 400 m of street blocks, and the ‘district’ scale of one or
two square kilometres within which related land uses agglomerate. Their
systematic mapping of a range of variables across both clusters suggests a rich,
dynamic ecology of built form and social features that might help sustain
creativity. They place much value on the quality of the street environments in
these districts, asserting this supports informal encounters and interactions,
which in turn supports new social contacts, new ideas and thus creative
enterprise. Drawing on their analysis, they argue that a vital creative cluster
depends on an assembled ‘mix of mixes’: combinations of urban morphologies,
grain sizes, building types and frontage types that suit combinations of land uses,
activities and people. Further to this, they suggest that the ongoing adaptability of
these environments contributes to their viability for continuing to accommodate
and support a range of creative activities. Good fit for one current creative use
does not mean the same urban design conditions can suit other creative uses later,
or suit the same tenants as their activities inevitably grow and change. Wood and
Dovey’s analysis suggests creative enterprise has already adapted many buildings
in these areas, and that the adaptability of the buildings is just as important as any
particular qualities they already had.
The remaining three papers focus on particular creative industries to see how
they cluster and what design conditions suit their practices and interests.
 6 Editorial

Davisi Boontharm explores a relatively little-known context of creative

districts in three major East Asian metropolises. Her core point is that the local
small-scale fashion industry in each city is not just a creative tenant of the urban
fabric, but that fashion businesses are also creative in the way they use and subtly
re-deploy or ‘requalify’ that ‘fabric’. Her observations about how this industry is
using urban space add a distinctive new dimension to the study of urban design
vis-à-vis creative clusters. Urban spaces are being creatively ‘re-fashioned’ as
consumption goods, although not in the typical gentrification model. Boontharm
notes of Tokyo in particular that the re-use of ordinary, ‘second-hand’ buildings by
fashion businesses has occurred in parallel to a fashion trend that emphasizes
creative re-use of old clothes and fabrics and natural, found materials. Both seek to
establish new and hybridized aesthetics and meanings. Boontharm’s character-
ization of creative milieux as assemblages in a constant process of ‘becoming’
through myriad small-scale actions is best illustrated by her analysis of Bangkok’s
Chatuchak Market, with its flexible, temporary market stalls being repeatedly,
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

rapidly transformed into fashionable boutiques, creating new urban character

within a minimal built context.
Bahar Durmaz and Juliana Martins each take up the challenge put forward by
Wood and Dovey, to ‘ask how it works’, by getting inside the practices of creative
work in specific industries. They do this through interviews with creative
producers, as well as through their own detailed analyses of practices and
settings.
Durmaz examines large, long-standing clusters of film industry activities that
have existed for over a century in London and Istanbul. She identifies an
overlapping range of physical, aesthetic and social characteristics of these clusters.
Her findings confirm the importance of core urban design principles such as
support for walking and chance encounters and cafés for formal and informal
meetings, to which she adds attention to small scale ‘micro-places’ such as
building alcoves and laneways that frame social contact. One of her important
findings is that such urban design characteristics are not necessarily perceived as
important by the creative actors, compared to the classical economic factors of
proximity and agglomeration, social factors such as cosmopolitanism and a young
highly-educated population, firms’ and workers’ historical and psychological ties
and investments in an area, and the established image of such clusters which
lends firms credibility and prestige. Clearly creative industries are not only about
dynamism and transformation. Similarly to Boontharm’s observations about
Tokyo, Durmaz notes that the many films and television shows shot in the
Istanbul neighbourhood Cihangir contribute to its popularity: creative enterprise
adds value to urban form just as urban form supports creative enterprise.
Juliana Martins studies a different district and a different industry within
London: an emerging cluster of digital media firms in Shoreditch that only came to
wider attention in 2008. Her approach is unique in being ‘production-centred’,
starting from a framework of specific work activities within one creative industry,
to look at the range of urban settings and design characteristics that mediate them.
The great advantage is to then understand how various sites and design
characteristics within a given cluster are actually used and how they relate to each
other operationally. Martins emphasizes that office spaces are in fact still very
important for a range of core creative industry activities. She also points out a
wide range of other sites constituting the ‘extended workplace’ for digital media,
including not just studios and incubators, but also cafes and public spaces, and
 Editorial 7

even residences. Martins develops a typology of ancillary spaces used for creative
work in terms of their functionality, their infrastructure, and the atmosphere they
provide for workers, their associates and their clients. She reinforces the finding
common to many of the papers that the public realm and the wider quasi-public
sphere of ‘third places’ are both important to creative people, not just for their
consumption leisure needs, but for the planned meetings and chance socialization
which are both key parts of their productive work. This leads her to a specific
focus on characteristics of spatial design and management that frame people’s
access and control to particular third places. She finds that the varying levels and
mixes of activities in such settings at different times are important in defining a
community of creative workers. Like Whyte (1980), Martins emphasizes the
important role that managers of spaces play in regulating and supporting
informal social interactions that help engender creative production.
These six papers suggest many different ways that urban design research
might come to better understand the forms, activities and needs of clusters of
Downloaded by [114.108.214.136] at 08:02 18 January 2015

creative activity, and many ways that urban design practice might help to nurture
them. Creativity requires trying new things, and I hope that these papers can
encourage other urban designers to make innovative contributions to the future of
the creative industries in cities.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Juliana Martins and Bahar Durmaz for help in identifying and
encouraging some of the other contributing authors and for their contribution to
framing the debates in this issues.

References
Burgess, E. W. 1928. “Residential Segregation in American Cities.” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 140 (1): 105–115.
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and
Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.
Montgomery, J. 2007. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Preston, R. E. 1966. “The Zone in Transition: A Study of Urban Land Use Patterns.” Economic Geography
42 (3): 236–260.
Rantisi, N. M., D. Leslie, and S. Christopherson. 2006. “Placing the Creative Economy: Scale, Politics,
and the Material.” Environment and Planning A 38 (10): 1789–1797.
Whyte, W. H. 1980. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Washington, DC: Conservation Foundation.