Creative + Economy

The Creative Economy. I did not like that phrase too much. To me, it lost its meaning from being said, written and powerpointed too often. Just one of those buzzwords. Until recently.

A few weeks ago I visited the town I went to school to - a beautiful, small town in the Eastern part of Germany. Strolling through the once busy mall had a sobering effect: Every second shop had closed, the remaining stores could not take away the air of neglect and depression. I wondered if the empty space could be put to some better use, at least as an interim solution.

The question is relevant for many small and big towns and city districts today. When consumption is low and commercial rents are still high, shops are closing, inviting decay and vandalism into the neighbourhood.

Many districts or landlords have already found an answer to the question what to do with empty storefronts: They rent the space at a low price or even for free to artists.

Especially in the U.S., storefront art is very common (see random examples here, here and here), the same can be said about the UK, where the government is now even funding such projects with a GBP 3 Million grant scheme.

That creative folks are often primary settlers who breath new life into run-down districts has been demonstrated before (e.g. in Berlin). More Governments, municipalities or local business alliances have understood the positive impact that artists have on local business - and are now purposefully supporting them. Jo Leahy, director of the Stroud Valley Artspace (UK) sees that creative residents may ultimately what it means to speak about a busy town. "It's another way of judging a town. We're used to measuring a place by how busy the cash tills are. This is about measuring somewhere by its ideas, by the things that people are making happen here." (quoted in the Guardian) - Apply this to Economy as a whole and you get the Creative Economy everybody is talking about!

Picture: Anelia Lazaroff, "Twilight" in an empty store in L.A. - part of the Phantom Galleries LA (see their flickr photostream here)