– Culture has always thrived throughout every society and throughout every region humankind has found themselves in. Culture and creativity I think are innate properties of the human soul.
– It is something we do, as soon as we cover our basic needs, we want to create, says Dominic Power.
Professor Dominic Power from the Department of Human Geography at Stockholm University has done extensive research on the interrelations between culture and economy, and the economic geography of innovation, entrepreneurship and contemporary economic change. Much of his work has concerned cultural and creative industries and the cultural economy.
Cultural industries beyond the core
In recent work, Power has challenged the urban bias in research and policymaking on cultural industries and explored how the geography of creative and cultural industries is being remade, unsettling our assumptions about these industries’ intrinsic urbanity.
– Although culture is a marketable good, culture is always based on something unique, and which often comes out of local culture, Power says.
– The dance between local cultures, local ideas, ideas about society, activism, and where we want to be.
But these unique cultural assets are not distributed equally across space, and the interplay of people and ideas within a cultural field seems to happen more intensely in certain places than others.
–This sometimes is a reaction to the mainstream, sometimes it is cross-fertilization.
– When lots of creators happen to be in the same place doing similar things, they feed of each other, they become better through competition and cooperation, Power explains.
In economic geography this intensification is often called an agglomeration effect. This concept describes a density of interaction from which cultural production and other activates emerge.
– That density, at the creation point of culture, does not necessarily need to be a very large city or a large urban area, sometimes it can be quite a small place.
Still, Power emphasizes that the struggle for smaller communities often lies in how creativity can be translated into a product and in turn, how local products can reach a larger or even global market.
– We find agglomerations, perhaps at the periphery and also in the city, and then we have to try and think about how they find pipelines outwards, how they find a journey to markets.
The outsider
In the small town of Galway on the west coast of Ireland, cultural activists and other creative professionals have managed to secure a space for creative production, and especially in the film industry. Power argues that this happened partly through Galway’s position in the periphery.
– It’s not just geographically peripheral, it is also in some ways often been marginalized or been on the outsides.
In Galway this creative space was centred on the Irish language in opposition to the English language.
– They wanted to create some sort of post-colonial space where they could be Irish through the language, and also criticise the direction in which the country was going since its independence.
Power explains that an important aspect of the periphery is then not only being located away from the centre in a geographical sense, but also having the role of the outsider.
– It’s where people have the space to react to the mainstream, and to fight against it perhaps.
It is within this reaction to the mainstream that new things, ideas, and cultural expressions emerge.
– Innovation is not always the same as creation - we can make things, we can create things, but true innovation is often doing something markedly different. In order to understand what is different it is often through contrast, reaction, and marginalisation that we understand the borders and lines that we want to cross or challenge.
– Understanding where those borders are, understanding relational distance and try to fight against it or deal with it, creates something new, Power says.
The role of policy
So how can local communities tap into the creative potential that lies within them, and help culture thrive beyond the core? Power says that community can be highly constraining, but within the right circumstances, community can also facilitate creative production.
– Smaller communities and regions can do a lot to help creators. They can do a lot to help foster linkages between creators, and they can do a lot to help create the sort of environments that are conducive to creators.
– This might be the sort of spaces they need, such as ateliers or recording studios - there is an infrastructure, and a set of material needs the creators need for their work.
He also emphasizes the importance of tolerance. In Galway, there was widespread acceptance for cultural production and a large political backing for the development of a cultural industry.
– The entire local political community was behind the idea of celebrating culture, embracing cultural creators, not viewing them as something that was threatening or different, but which could form a core identity that was necessary for the community.
– Many of the places in peripheral areas that have created a lot of culture are places where the political and the business systems are very happy to reach out a hand to cultural actors and embrace them as people who can contribute in very real ways, Power says.
Between connection and isolation
Power also emphasize how the life cycles of creators and artists has an influence on the push and pull between the core and the periphery. In the earlier stages of an artist’s career the urban environment might serve as start-up community that holds the networks and infrastructure for creativity, he explains. But for the people who don’t become the next ‘superstars’, the urban might also be financially hostile, as big cities tend to have less space for low-income people.
– When older creative professionals have made their mark and learnt their trade in the buzzing vibrant urban areas, they go somewhere where they can afford more space.
Another factor influencing the push and pull of the urban is the changing need for staying connected and for solitude. The ability to adapt to isolation became highly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Power says that the pandemic had devastating consequences for a lot of creative professionals, but still points out that much work within cultural industries is reliant on the oscillation between connection and isolation.
– People in the cultural industries can often embrace the benefits of solitude, isolation, working from home, working from the countryside, whilst also understand that they need dip into the social arena, they need to engage with networks, and link with other people that are not necessarily near them in their everyday lives.
– Many cultural actors have lived in some sort of trans-local mobility for a long time, they deal with isolation through supplementing it with lots of travels, travels through the virtual, and also by having a little foot somewhere else.
Listen to Professor Dominic Power in conversation with Professor Michael Gentile on cultural industries beyond the core.
Read about the cultural industries in Galway mentioned in the podcast.