Creative services

Abstract: To provide new insights into urban hierarchy, this article brings together one of economic geography's oldest and most well-established notions with one of its newest and most disputed notions: Christaller's centrality and Florida's creative class. Using a novel original database, the article compares the distribution of the general population and the creative class across 444 city regions in 8 European countries. It finds that the two groups are both distributed according to the rank-size rule, but exhibit different distinct phases with different slopes. The article argues that the two distributions are different because market thresholds for creative services and jobs are lower than thresholds for less specialized services and jobs. The article hence concludes that centrality exerts a strong influence upon urban hierarchies of creativity and that the study of creative urban city hierarchies yields new insights into the problem of centrality.

Abstract: Applied design and creative services are central to the formation of metropolitan landscapes and urban culture (both in historical and contemporary contexts), as well as to the production of the full range of industrial and consumer goods. More specifically, applied design firms are essential to the development of advanced industrial systems, and facilitate the operation of flexible production regimes by (1) enabling production differentiation in segmented markets, (2) improving productivity, (3) promoting production synergies, (4) enhancing short-run customized production, and (5) contributing to the condensing of longer-run style cycles. A case study of design and creative services firms in Vancouver discloses that such firms exhibit important commonalities with other producer services industries (e.g., intermediate market orientation, clustering propensity, divisions of labor). At the same time, firms engaged in the production of design may be differentiated from “mainstream” business or corporate serv...

Abstract: This manual has been designed and written with the purpose of introducing key concepts and areas of debate around the "creative economy", a valuable development opportunity that Latin America, the Caribbean and the world at large cannot afford to miss. The creative economy, which we call the "Orange Economy" in this book (you'll see why), encompasses the immense wealth of talent, intellectual property, interconnectedness, and, of course, cultural heritage of the Latin American and Caribbean region (and indeed, every region). At the end of this manual, you will have the knowledge base necessary to understand and explain what the Orange Economy is and why it is so important. You will also acquire the analytical tools needed to take better advantage of opportunities across the arts, heritage, media, and creative services.

Abstract: The government wants more people to start up new small enterprises. In practice, this is likely to mean more sole traders without employees, a heterogeneous group sometimes identified with, and sometimes distinguished from, small enterprises. In this paper, we confront that contradiction, drawing upon academic and policy‐oriented writing on small firms and upon a wider literature on labour markets and employment trends. Being self‐employed is not synonymous with being enterprising, but most self‐employed people will need skills associated with enterprise to survive. We overview the cultural sector, which has been identified as a key growth sector for jobs and one in which very small businesses and self‐employed individuals predominate. We explore in depth the “enterprising” behaviour of a subgroup of the cultural sector, people offering creative services to the print and broadcast media on a self‐employed basis. Our particular focus is upon how they form and manage working relationships. The expectation was that, while few would formally become employers, collaborative, colleague‐like working patterns would be adopted to avoid isolation and overcome the vulnerability of small size. This was true, but only for a very small group. For the most part, links with other self‐employed people were tentative and fraught with suspicion. Distrust was pervasive and often coexisted painfully with a desire to form new links for information seeking, sociability and to combat the commercial disadvantages of working alone. Typically, the most important working relationships were with employees of client companies, and many were determined to see these links as longterm, personal and not purely commercial. There was a marked lack of skills in negotiating and marketing.