Abstract
Creative industries are increasingly understood to contribute to localised innovation and dynamism. This paper provides a methodologically consistent comparison of creative industries across France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. We map spatial agglomerations of creative activities showing evidence of urban concentration, which for Britain and France coincides with the dominance of capital cities, whilst for Spain and Italy, significant concentrations can also be found in secondary cities. The four countries also differ in the specialisation profiles and in the role played by policy makers. A lack of dove-tailing with the European Union smart agenda is argued to be a cause of concern.
The scholarly debate on creativity started with Florida’s (2002) work on the creative class, which highlighted spatial patterns of creative professions leading to a better understanding of the importance of place in shaping the locational accumulation of the creative process (Boschma and Fritsch, 2009; Clifton and Cooke, 2010; Florida and Tinagli, 2004; Tödtling et al., 2013). In this paper we analyse the geographical distribution of creative industries drawing upon a sector-based approach to address a gap in understanding concerning the spatial organisation of the creative industries. There is indeed little research on the geography of the creative industries at the aggregate level, exceptions being country studies on Italy and Spain (Capone, 2008; Lazzeretti et al., 2013), Britain (De Propris et al., 2009) and Austria (Trippl et al., 2013). These studies found creative activities to be unevenly distributed geographically and to form clusters, especially in urban areas. Cross-country comparative studies are even fewer with, for instance, Power and Nielsén (2010) looking at the distribution of creative and cultural industries across European Union (EU) regions at the Nomenclature des Units Territoriales Statistiques (NUTS) 2 level.
This paper presents a methodologically coherent comparison of the spatial distribution of creative industries across four EU countries: France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain (Boix et al., 2013). Differences across these four countries enable us to compare realities where more high technology intensive creative activities have been prioritised, such as in the UK, with others where softer forms of creativity have been targeted. The creative profiles of the four selected countries reflect the different emphasis that national policy-making has placed on creative industries; such idiosyncracies pose a challenge at the EU level when designing an overarching framework to promote the creative economy as a driver of innovation and competitiveness.
In the absence of an EU classification, we decided to adopt the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) classification because it is in our view more comprehensive than others and particularly formulated for international comparison (others classifications include DCMS (2001), WIPO (2003), Eurostat (2007), KEA (2006)). As creative industries we include printing, publishing, advertising and related services, architecture and engineering, arts and antique trade, crafts, design and specialised design services, designer fashion, film, music, performing and visual arts, photography, broadcasting, software, computer games and electronic publishing, and heritage. 1 This allows for a balanced analysis of creative and cultural industries across the four countries.
Our methodology maps the geographical concentrations of creative industries relying on employment data at the local-labour-market (LLM) level. 1 Indeed, LLMs are territorial units of analysis that enable us to meaningfully capture local processes of agglomeration of creative activities, namely creative clusters (De Propris et al., 2009). LLMs coincide with the overlap between the agglomeration of firms and the community of people, making it ideal to study systemic phenomena (Sforzi, 2009). There were 384 LLMs in France (in 1999), 243 in Great Britain (in 2001), 686 in Italy (in 2001) and 806 in Spain (in 2001). LLMs have already been used as territorial units for the analysis of creative industries at the national level in Italy, Spain (Capone 2008, Boix 2013) and Great Britain (De Propris et al, 2009).
The data used in this research has been extracted from countries’ Census of population and production: the most recent data available refers to 1999 for France, 2001 for Italy and Spain and 2007 for Great Britain. 2 We use firm-based employment data by three-digit NACE sectors. In the absence of comparable sub-regional gross domestic product (GDP) or turnover data across the four countries, firm-based employment provides a good proxy of economic activity.
The spatial agglomeration of creative industries in the four countries is calculated by means of location quotients (LQs) for each LLM for the selected creative industries. LQs are calculated as follows:
where Lij is the number of employees in creative industries i in a LLM j; Li is the total number of employees in creative industries i; Lj is the number of employees in a LLM j; and L is the total employment in the country. A LQ figure greater than 1 indicates that the spatial concentration creative industry i in LLM j is greater than the national average. The greater the LQ figure, the more specialised is an area in a particular creative industry; therefore, LQs measure spatial industrial specialisation. LLM-level LQs are calculated for each country separately. 3
We additionally apply an employment filter selecting only those LLMs where creative industries have more than 1000 employees. This minimum employment agglomeration threshold enables us to capture areas where there is both specialisation and concentration of some specific creative activities.
Overall, creative industries account for a significant share of these countries’ employment. The largest is found in Italy with 8.8%, followed by Great Britain with more than 6%. In contrast, creative employment accounted for just above 5% in France and 5.8% in Spain.
The location patterns of creative industries differ across countries (see Figures 1 and 2). In France, there is a major concentration of creative employment around Paris with the remainder thinly spread over the rest of the country. Spain, on the other hand, shows two key creative poles around Madrid and Barcelona (see also Méndez et al., 2011). The spatial pattern of creative industries in Britain is simultaneously “very concentrated”, with secondary “hot spots” around Manchester and Leeds, as well as around Glasgow and Edinburgh. The centripetal forces around London have been counterbalanced by centrifugal ones with a huge concentration of creative employment in London but also around its large surrounding “donut” in the South East and South West, where a large number of LLMs show a high concentration of creative employment. Italy shows another different pattern, one that is characterised by the existence of three major poles in terms of Milan, Rome and, to a lesser extent, Turin. In addition, a more diffused and polycentric pattern is visible around the centre-north of the country, in Padua, Verona, Bologna and Florence.
Specialised local-labour market (LLM) (location quotient greater than 1 and minimum 1000 jobs in creative industries by LLM).
Absolute employment in creative industries by local-labour market.
We define LLMs specialised in one creative industry as Local Creative Systems (LCSs). They account for almost two thirds of the employment in creative industries in each country (Figure 1). There are 44 LCSs in France, which account for 13% of the LLMs and 60.2% of the employment in creative industries; there are 39 LCSs in Great Britain, which account for 16.8% of the LLMs and 59% of the employment in creative industries; there are 87 LCS in Italy, accounting for 12.7% of the LLM and 55.5% of the employment in creative industries; and in Spain there are 43 LCSs (5.3% of the LLMs), which account for 58.5% of employment in the creative industries.
Not only are creative industries spatially concentrated, but they also tend to co-locate near each other, especially in urban areas. This confirms a number of studies that have found that creative activities are attracted by urban areas, for instance due to the richness and thickness of personal networks, in addition to other hard and soft factors (Musterd and Gritsai, 2012). The largest concentration of LCSs is around London, accounting for 46% of the employment in creative industries in Great Britain, followed by Paris, which accounts for 38% of French creative employment. The third largest concentration is in Madrid with one quarter of all Spanish creative employment, followed by Barcelona, Milan, Treviso-Padua, Rome and finally Lyon and Manchester (see Figure 2).
We find that each of these four countries tends to specialise in different creative industries: France and Great Britain are the most diversified, although France specialises slightly more in publishing, architecture and film and Great Britain in architecture. Italy specialises in fashion and architecture, while Spain specialises in fashion and printing. Our findings confirm the important role that fashion plays in Italy and Spain, for which both countries show a high degree of specialisation.
The profile and spatial dimension of creative activities have implications for the design and implementation of policy strategies. Despite this, a correspondence between the territorial pattern of creative industries and an empowered local level of policy-making towards creative industries is unclear. With the exception of Spain, where funds are highly decentralised to local administrations, in the other countries central governments are directly controlling more than half of the budget allocated to creative industries through industry-specific rather than territory-specific policies. However, the spatially concentrated nature of creative industries would suggest that for effective policy, a place-based approach is to be preferred to an industry-based approach. This would be consistent with a multi-level governance approach that allows a lower level of governments to design and implement place-based policies. France spends on creative industries twice as much Britain, Italy and Spain. Meanwhile, Britain is the only one that had until 2012 a clear government policy agenda in support of creative industries; since then the new coalition government has promoted an austerity plan that has penalised cultural industries whilst favouring, for instance, digital technology through the creation of the national-level Connected Digital Economy Catapult. The multi-level governance of creative industries policy is more apparent in France, Italy and Spain than in Britain, where the abolition of regional Development Agencies in England and the set-up of Local Enterprise Partnerships has effectively renationalised regional economic development policies (Hildreth and Bailey, 2013), including those devoted to creative industries.
Given the geographical concentration of creative activities, an EU smart policy ought to have a territorial dimension. The concept of the firm cluster as a policy-enabler runs through EU competitiveness, innovation and cohesion policies, and is dove-tailed with the smart specialisation imperative embedded in the next round of Cohesion Funds. Creative industries are well placed to be leveraged to drive the innovation and creativity of localities in line with smart specialisation and to be peppered across a wide range of place-based initiatives.