Dave Harte: Creative has been ‘done’ in Birmingham

Jul 30 2010 By Dave Harte

I spent a delightful year in the city council last year working on the ‘digital’ agenda.

Early on in my tenure I attended a strategic group looking at where to focus support for the business community.

Drifting a little from my digital brief I put it to them that we’ve got a growing sector called the ‘creative industries’ that we should perhaps consider as a beneficiary.

“Dave, we’ve done creative industries,” was the response, said in a tone that made me feel like a naïve YTS trainee in short trousers.

They were right; Birmingham has ‘done’ creative industries.

In fact from 2002 to about 2008 the city had some very good, focused support for creatives.

So why take a decision to retreat from supporting a sector that showed growth two per cent higher than the rest of the economy throughout the noughties?

There are two potential reasons I think. Firstly the ‘digital’ agenda emerged all shiny and vague, happily regurgitating the statistics for the creative sector and applying it to itself.

In fact although the stats for digital (identified as software and computer games) are impressive, they’re also more volatile, dipping like a, well like a big dipper, in bad economic conditions and doing the reverse in the good times.

Secondly, an arts lobby suddenly started articulating themselves as part of the ‘cultural industries’ – a term so broad that in measurement terms it includes workers in leisure centres.

The result was that those who actually create the most value in the creative industries, in Birmingham that’s architecture, were cast adrift from the discussion.

Their economic weight used to promote the agendas of other emerging or lower economic value sub-sectors.

As the lobbying to form local economic partnerships begins, I think it’s time to return to the notion of the ‘creative industries’.

It’s a notion that’s identifiable in research, it’s still growing and it reflects Birmingham’s wide-ranging expertise in this area.

Further, to conflate the creative industries with the arts will take us back to where this sector was in the 1980s, ignored and marginalised and surviving on philanthropy and grants.

Not so much ‘done’ as ‘done over”

* Dave Harte is award leader for the MA in Social Media at Birmingham City University