Sustainability, the Handmade and Cultural Industries

Abstract

In amongst the buzz about the creative industries with its associations with forward-thinking, progressive ideas; inclusion and openness to new people and ideas; funky, groovy, informal creative ‘types’; youth; cities and all the connotations of a cosmopolitan and, indeed, liberal world view that come with them, few questions have actually been raised about the environmental ethics of cultural work. Slowly increasing attention is being paid to the demographic homogeneity of the cultural workforce, especially, as already stated, in terms of race and gender. But beyond the ways in which creative workers are implicated in green consumption, marketing and environmentally sympathetic architecture and urban design, little has been written about creative industries and climate change. This is partially because such a breadth of industries and professions has been strategically collected under the one banner as a means to make stronger, collective claims about the value and importance of the sector. With so many people and sites within it —C publishing alone captures everything across the political spectrum from green websites to mouthpieces of the extreme right (not that the latter are featured in any creative industries mappings) —C it is impossible to generalise about actions and intentions across the sector. But as a discursive frame, by its very definition, cultural workers are those ‘involved in the production of “aesthetic” or “symbolic” goods and services; that is, commodities whose core value is derived from their functions as carriers of meaning in the form of images, symbols, signs and sounds’ (Banks, 2007, p. 2).KeywordsLake DistrictCreative IndustryCultural WorkCultural IndustryEthical ConsumptionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.