Dr. Bastian Lange, Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig/Multiplicities, Berlin, Germany: Stadt Metropolitan Regions as Creative Homes

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1 THE WHEREABOUTS OF THE CREATIVE HOME Three short inputs on the notion of the Creative Home Heimat is of course different for everyone, Inga Wellmann concludes, but are there better Heimats than others, in terms of, for example, effectiveness and creativity? How strongly is the idea of creativity linked to urbanity? Does place matter in an era driven by digital tools and virtual spheres? Wellmann introduces Dr. Bastian Lange, Prof. Thomas Rempen and Holm Friebe, who were to respectively discuss the city, the countryside and the digital world (Stadt, Land, Fluss) as the ideal Heimat. Dr. Bastian Lange, Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig/Multiplicities, Berlin, Germany: Stadt Metropolitan Regions as Creative Homes Lange introduces three theses on how policy-making can foster the creative industries in the RUHR area. First, nowadays, metropolitan spaces cannot be considered as a fixed entity of social, cultural and economic actors. Increasing mobility and spatial dynamics make it difficult to design adequate policies. Secondly, the decentralized metropolitan RUHR area is a set of multilocal zones with no clear centre and is closer to the idea of a transit area. Thirdly, policy-making for the creative industries is challenged by the absence of a stable, spatial social and economic centre. It is vital to shift the view from fixed spatial centres to open socio-cultural places and how they are organized and orchestrated. Lange identifies four dimensions of places, run by creative workers: 1. Places as social interfaces for the distribution of creative products Production in creative industries is rather disperse, transitory, fragmented, and takes place in decentralized temporary projects. It has no clear, stable and lasting centre and creative people constantly wander between various projects

2 and their own. Creative workers need places to expose their products to various social groups. 2. Places as testing realms Undefined spaces serve as temporary spots to expose newly invented products. Artists and creative people like designing their own environment as they present their products at unknown places in order to create their own story. For policymaking, less activity is more efficient, post heroic management instead of strong leadership. 3. Openness permeability boundaries Creative places face the challenge of condensing social ties at a certain place in order to exchange knowledge and to test products. Places should thus be reconceptualised where instability becomes a necessity to avoid routines and create diversity and openness. This generates new milieus, genres, perspectives and styles. 4. Temporary places permanent instabilities From the perspective of creative workers regarding market product placement, places have to be open and unstable in order to attract a broad audience. That is a rather tricky state for stakeholders because once a place has been invented, it is more likely that the achievement is secured and stable than it is invented anew. A brief conclusion: 1. The places of creative industries are constant transitory socio-spatial testing realms. 2. These places function on the basis of instabilities. 3. These places and their protagonists intend to irritate everyday perceptions and the mechanics of dominant urban and regional values. >>

3 Prof. Thomas Rempen, Communication Designer, Büro Rempen GmbH, Drensteinfurt-Rinkerode, Germany: Land Rural Areas as Creative Home Professor Thomas Rempen states that creativity is at home in your head wherever that head may be and consequently implies that to run a creative business from the countryside does not have to be limiting. Rempen, however, also points out that he would not have started his first advertising agency in the countryside as he wanted to be where the buzz is; he declares that life and business in the countryside is easier if you are already successful and if you have a certain degree of personal awareness. Furthermore, running a business from the countryside was not possible before the internet. The internet has facilitated working independently, on the go and free of constraints in general. According to Rempen, there are at least three good reasons speaking for a creative Heimat in the countryside: 1. Being away from the hustle and bustle frees your mind, establishes creativity and inspiration, and offers an opportunity for focused concentration and efficiency people are more straight-forward and lateral thinking. 2. Keeping an office in the country helps you to keep your feet firmly on the ground it becomes easier to get to the bottom of things and there is no reason for opportunism. 3. Great concepts are created in small spaces and teams and sometimes even by individuals as opposed to production, which is dependent on other actors in the market. In addition, our NRW countryside is simply beautiful, says Rempen. Rempen has two proposals and promotions to help the creative industry in NRW: creating a genius loci and inventing the event creative chateau. He believes that a genius loci (a protective spirit of a place) could be created though a start factory sponsored by the NRW government and large companies as a public-

4 private partnership, bringing the best minds and talents to the region; the best international creatives would be offered one-year scholarships over the internet. >> Holm Friebe, Author and CEO of Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur, Berlin, Germany: Fluss Digital Home I tend to find the category creative more and more problematic over the years, not to mention Heimat. Therefore, I approach the subject from a different angle and focus on topics that together form the basic conditions of the so-called creative industries: work, the nature of work, economic structure and physical production, says Holm Friebe. He further believes that all these conditions will undergo dramatic changes in the near future. Firstly, work will become liquid. Secondly, co-working and Wikinomics will symbolise the new concept of work and thirdly, the next industrial revolution is approaching. The number of solofreelancers and single-entrepreneurs has already risen by more than 25% in Germany in the last decade and Friebe calls this growing type of worker digital bohemia, indicating that they organise their work in loose, non-hierarchical networks, often in metropolitan contexts. To them, flow is important in two regards: it indicates the quality of intrinsically motivated, self-programmed and satisfied work and it symbolises the change from a stable profession to a diverse stream of projects. Wikinomics is a term created by Don Tapscot that embraces the new paradigm of co-working and decentralised peer-production. An example of this trend is the emergence of co-working spaces all over the world, for example the Betahause in Berlin, Friebe says. He furthermore declares that the next industrial revolution is around the corner and that it will affect the industrial production chain and the entire structure of our physical economy as it challenges the logic of mass production. Moreover, he assumes that the next

5 industrial revolution will bring creative industries and old-fashioned industrial policies together as the revolution is not (only) about creativity, but about a new way of starting businesses and manufacturing high-end products with shared resources. >> Followed by a short discussion with Dr. Bastian Lange, Prof. Thomas Rempen and Holm Friebe Dr. Bastian Lange, Prof. Thomas Rempen and Holm Friebe discussed the trend of nomad workers who work where they feel like and consequences of this on NRW with its many different areas. Lange affirmed that and that possibilities of working where you feel like is related to scale; in microscale processes you can look at more details and differences, but in general you have to allow and accept the existing heterogeneity. Friebe was of the opinion that for some production networks there were still reasons for sticking together and that the location did matter sometimes. However, he continued, new collaborations would emerge and the next generation copy shop might for example have a fabbing centre attached. Lange agreed with Friebe that mobility was not always possible, whereas Rempen pointed out that people needed to be more mobile these days and artistic people needed to be brought together. What it always came down to, however, was communication.