Placing production in urban cultural policy: The locational patterns of cultural industries and related manufacturing

ABSTRACT

Urban cultural policy has long been framed with a limited geographic focus. Policy predominately targets central city areas where arts amenities and creative services visibly concentrate. This focus stems from a restricted definition of cultural activity, which tends to emphasize cultural consumption over production. This excludes a range of “cultural manufacturers,” which produce specialized products and inputs for the wider cultural economy. Although these industries play an integral role in the cultural ecosystem, their locational attributes have been largely overlooked in urban policy and research. Drawing on the case of Melbourne, Australia, we map location patterns of cultural industries and related manufacturing, revealing co-location in the central city and robust cultural manufacturing concentrations on the urban periphery. Our findings present a potential route for urban cultural policy to affect meaningful change in divided central cities, as well as under-served outer areas where most cultural industries and manufacturing workers live.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Australia Research Council Discovery Project, Urban Cultural Policy and the Changing Dynamics of Cultural Production (DP170104255). We would like to thank members of the ARC project team, Justin O’Connor, Xin Gu, and Chris Gibson, for ongoing discussions about the interface between cultural industries and manufacturing. We would also like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the paper and their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be acknowledged that there is “no hard and fast line separating industries that specialize in purely cultural products from those whose outputs are purely utilitarian” (Scott, 2004, p. 462). Nevertheless, it is common practice in definitional studies to make judgments of where certain activities fit along the continuum between cultural and utilitarian value and organize them into “core” and “peripheral” categories accordingly (Higgs & Cunningham, 2008; Markusen et al., 2008).

2. See Appendix C for an elaboration of the geography and parameters used in the hotspot analysis.

3. Indeed, most of this activity occurs even further afield in overseas industrial economies given the prolonged contraction of Australia’s textile, clothing, and footwear (TCF) industries (Webber & Weller, 2001).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP170104255].

Notes on contributors

Declan Martin

Declan Martin is a PhD candidate in Urban Planning and Design at Monash University. His work investigates the impact of urban development and policy on cultural production and small-scale manufacturing. His dissertation combines spatial and qualitative methods to analyze, firstly, how zoning and urban policy has contributed to inner-urban deindustrialization, and secondly, how small manufacturers and cultural producers have adapted to survive in gentrifying industrial districts. He also holds a Master of Arts (Cultural Economy) from Monash University and a Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) from the University of Melbourne.

Carl Grodach

Carl Grodach is Foundation Professor and Director of Urban Planning & Design at Monash University. Professor Grodach studies community and economic development and place-based urban revitalization planning. His key research focus has been on the urban development impacts of the cultural industries and the ways that arts and cultural planning efforts shape development outcomes. This work has evolved to focus more specifically on urban manufacturing economies and how zoning and other planning mechanisms shape industry development, interaction, and agglomeration. He is author of the book Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World (Routledge, 2015) and editor of The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2013).