Creative Ecology Research Articles

The spatial imaginaries of creative clusters: Examining the role of R&D programmes in creative placemaking

Creative clusters – geographic concentrations of creative industries sector activity, its skilled individuals, organisations and institutions – have attracted significant investment globally, becoming an important driver of economic growth. In this paper, we frame investment in creative clusters as a mechanism for creative placemaking. Creative placemaking occupies a dual role as a driver of economic development via arts-led ‘regeneration’ of high streets and flagship infrastructural projects like cultural quarters, yet also as a sustained stewarding of creative places through social engagement and community-centred decision-making about cultural projects. This distinction is typically framed as ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ creative placemaking. We use the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D (BBCRD) programme as a case study to show how this distinction becomes less black and white. BBCRD created a ‘twin city’ spatial imaginary distinct from the geography of existing cultural or placemaking policy remits. The novel contribution of this paper is in how it evidences the intersecting scales of creative placemaking and unpacks the effectiveness of multi-city regionality for creative clustering, using fine-grained empirical data on the impact of top-down placemaking initiatives for the existing creative ecology of a place. This type of data and analysis is largely missing from literature on both clustering and placemaking. Given the continued international replication of the clusters model, recently renewed via ‘supercluster’ and ‘creative corridor’ discourses, we propose that an ecological understanding − that takes place specificity, relationality and scale into consideration – is pressing, and offers a route for complementarity between top-down and bottom-up creative placemaking.

Reimagining Pathways Into Culture and Creative Industries in the City of Seattle

In view that Culture and Creative Industries (CCI) are multi-sector, emergent, and complex, this paper couples the theoretical perspective of Margaret Archer’s Morphogenetic Approach with Adam Kahane’s Tansformative Scenario Planning (TSP) as its strategic framework to discover, articulate, and connect cross-sector (community-based organizations, industry, government, and education) CCI efforts. This study has sought to understand how and in what ways the actions found in the creative sector can be leveraged to enhance participation and ameliorate the outputs of socio-economic efforts across the full spectrum of the greater Seattle region. Thus, though this example it contributes to the creation of vital places of public welfare, where public frameworks and policies nurture accessibility and participate in connected culture and creative ecology.

Becoming Ecological: The Contribution of Collaborative a/r/tography to Generalist Primary Teachers’ Agency in Arts Education

Internationally, it is widely acknowledged that many generalist primary teachers (GPTs) enter the teaching profession with a paucity of arts practice and pedagogic skills. Many perceive a lack of confidence, competence, and community to change this, particularly in regional and isolated teaching contexts. As a means to address this, this article considers the value of engaging in collaborative a/r/tography as a means of developing more creative ecological approaches to teacher professional development and learning. A multimodal storied assemblage of four primary teachers’ experience of engaging in collaborative a/r/tography is explored, and through diffractive analysis, the authors surface the intra-acting affective agents that enable metho-pedagogic learning possibilities. Specific ways in which collaborative a/r/tography works to foster GPTs’ curricula and metho-pedagogic sensibilities, as well as a sense of creative ecology, are addressed. Speculation as to the ways in which collaborative a/r/tography fosters GPTs “becoming ecological” in relational practices and processes of curriculum enactment and pedagogical engagement is offered thereby contributing to understandings of the generative capacity of a/r/tography as a framework for developing teacher agency and change.

Creative Ecologies in Borderline Personality Disorder Research: Just What the Doctor Ordered

This article draws on the power of creative methods to call for a more collaborative, ecological approach to awareness, education, and research analysis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Drawing on affect theory and empirical research using a co-creation methodology, we advocate for the power of peer-directed support provision for those experiencing BPD. Through recognition and advocacy for this emerging area, the article advances the ways in which more holistic, ecological protocols can help shift research into BPD from a deficit-framed diagnostic approach to a more strengths-based agentic approach that recognizes the wider context and multiple factors beyond the individual.

The Front Edge of an Advancing Wave-Crest: Creative Ecologies and Designing Sustainable Futures

This editorial introduces the 15 articles in this special issue entitled “Creative Ecologies: Designing Sustainable Futures” and contextualizes them against a rapidly expanding field of climate and ecological studies, creative and affect theoretics, and a burgeoning array of creative relational methods and methodologies extending 21st century qualitative inquiry. The collection calls for a deepening of ethical, political, and eco-collaborative commitments to the work of global research that goes beyond neoliberal discourses of innovation, impact, and human exceptionalism and argues that only in this way will the vital work of academic activism and advocacy remain relevant, revolutionary, and sustainable.

Patchwork Vectors for the Anthropocene: The Role of Creative Ecologies

Qualitative social inquiry into action on climate change involves understanding the intersections between contemporary social life and the technological development for environmental matters that work in this context. Thus, this article presents a solution in two parts about how to do qualitative research into the climate change action of human populations. Part 1 unravels the complex political and technological situation that we find ourselves embroiled within, and specifically with respect to climate change. The resultant patchwork vector theory of this article comes from Deleuze/Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and lays out the expansionist system of global capitalism in terms of speeds, flows, and thresholds. Second, the creative ecologies theorized here examine the reality of social-political organization in response to climate change. In sum, these creative ecologies are arranged to pry into the qualitative principles of the patchworks through a combination of Bookchin’s social ecology, Guattari’s Three ecologies, and Harris’ creative agency. In combination, the dual strands of patchwork theory and creative ecologies in this article gives rise to a new qualitative methodology, suitable for social investigation under climate change and here applied to (a) play and (b) water.

A Transcultural Teacher’s Creative Ecologies: Poetry-ing the Entanglements of Institutional Privilege and Love’s Care in a Melbourne College

This article is a transcultural teacher’s critical autoethnography of entangled privilege and care in a university residential college. Using prose poetry as poetic inquiry, I write the entanglements of institutional privilege and love’s care in a college. I write my pedagogical subjectivity evocatively, where I am interdependent with my creative ecologies of humans and environment. In this article, I first discuss transculturality, creative ecologies, and pedagogical lived experience that inform a poetic inquiry method. I then offer a series of critical autoethnographic prose poems as inquiry into transcultural pedagogy in the college, evoking interconnected privilege and care in the college.

Collaborative Creative Engagements as Drivers for Re-imagining Classrooms and Pedagogies

This paper presents a study examining how pre-service teachers understand and experience the limit(s) of classroom creativity in a Canadian higher education class. Participants first completed a modified version of the Harris Creativity Audit to assess their preliminary understandings of creativity policies and practices, as well as perceptions of the value and feasibility of incorporating creativity into their own teaching. The survey results informed the content of a two-part workshop where participants utilized participatory design and sketch modeling to further explore their understanding of classroom creativity. Data analysis resulted in three themes: (a) the impact of physical space; (b) assessing creativity and assessing in creative ways; (c) challenging the educational system. This study is part of a multisite Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council–funded project that aims to explore creativity in higher education to empower educators and students to develop creative agency through creative ecologies and collaborative assessment.

Capacious Methodologies for an Unravelling World: Three Research Ecologies

In this article, we take Dan Harris’ conceptualization of creative ecologies as a provocation to think individually and collectively across three very different research ecologies and the methodologies we use to navigate them. The three research ecologies originate with slippery eels and multispecies ethnography around the Hawkesbury River (New South Wales); affective filmmaking and experience of gender in Australian secondary schools: and the sociomaterialities of living and researching with/in a small girls school on a Himalayan mountainside. We articulate something of these diverse projects, asking what the concept of creative ecology does in our research practice. Together we ask: What work does inhabiting creative ecologies as concept do; and what does thinking with/in creative ecologies mean for our research work? Finally, we speculate how re-conceptualizing research as creative ecologies might offer more capacious ways to address issues of conceptual, cultural, and ecological justice in this unravelling world.

The Crealectic Method: From Creativity to Compossibility

Can we fruitfully apply creative ecology practices in the world of industrial production? Enter the crealectic method for innovation and self-innovation, aiming at fostering creative long-term thinking and acting. The crealectic method proposes five steps: Step 1—Resetting (doing tabula rasa); Step 2—Crealing (reconnecting with the “Creal”); Step 3—Profusing (letting ideas pour out without censorship); Step 4—Compossibilizing (connecting compatible ideas); Step 5—Realizing (understanding and making real). I describe a pilot test of the method within the Research and Development unit of Vattenfall, a Swedish power company dedicated to fossil-free energy production.

Le processus d’intermédiation comme levier de l’innovation sociale

Intermediation plays an essential - but little studied - role in the dissemination of social innovation (SI). In this article, we seek to understand how the process of intermediation in social innovation is constructed and what its effects are. We combine the actor network and creative ecology theories to explore the practices and dynamics at work in the case of the Start-Up de Territoire (SUT) programme. We show that the intermediary function is gradually structured over time, and we identify 4 intermediation processes of SI that condition the transition to scale: building the vision of the territory, expanding the network, bringing out the middleground, and articulating the different levels by distinguishing between top-down and bottom-up translation.

Une approche par l’objet-frontière de la production collective de l’innovation sociale. L’exemple de la plateforme touristique Les Oiseaux De Passage.

This article looks at the process of collective production of social innovation involving a diversity of actors and organizations. It mobilizes the conceptual framework of the boundary object integrated into a dynamic social infrastructure, enabling the articulation of logics stemming from the strata of creative ecology (underground and upperground). The research is based on a qualitative study of “Les Oiseaux De Passage” platform, whose ambition is to offer alternative tourism based on storytelling and hospitality. The results show that a digital platform co-constructed by a creative collective from different social worlds, organized as a cooperative, can play the role of a facilitating boundary object.

Feminist Ecologies in Cyprus – exploring a contested landscape

What if the architectural object were revealed to be something closer to a thing among other things, operating necessarily in ecological relation, apt to emerge only to decay.Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorising the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2018), 7.

The Artist as a Subscription: Patching music as an artistic device

This article aims to explore the concept of patched/versioned musical works as creative ecologies. It identifies how the internet’s involvement in music creation and dissemination influences choices related to the release of such works. Throughout this writing, the author looks at the increasingly volatile structures surrounding recorded music in the early twenty-first century as a result of streaming platforms such as Spotify and video-based social media sites such as TikTok becoming the primary means for music consumption. It explores this volatility as a method for approaching the release of new music within dynamic musical ecosystems and looks at the growing art scene focusing on this way of working, drawing parallels between artistry and subscription-based services where content continually evolves over time.

Cultural backstages as urban creative ecologies: The case of Glasgow

Amid growing interest in the creative industries and their influence on urban planning and regeneration strategies, this article revisits cultural backstages and their underlying infrastructural conditions. By cultural backstages, we mean those urban production sites which accommodate small-scale, independent and often invisible cultural producers and businesses who operate from the margins of the creative sector in cities. This study approaches backstages as urban creative ecologies because a complex set of relationships and interactions exists between the physical spaces, the individuals, their activities and the resources required for cultural production in cities. It also argues that these relationships are defined by four infrastructural conditions: (a) financial models, (b) social networks, (c) public interfaces and (d) the adaptive capacity of their spaces and organisations. Based on a fieldwork-led comparative analysis, the research examines the ecologies of four production sites in the Barras area of Glasgow’s East End and analyses how their fourfold infrastructural conditions are constantly negotiated between top-down strategies and bottom-up initiatives. It concludes that while the relationships, interactions and infrastructures within these ecologies differ, they still share common ground: they operate in close proximity to each other and rely heavily on localised yet collective forms of support. Together, they form a wider ecology at the neighbourhood scale and they add cultural and social value to its function. This article concludes that cultural policies and urban planning strategies need to consider the complexity and dynamic nature of these ecologies and design recommendations ought to prioritise these fourfold infrastructural conditions to safeguard diversity in the public culture of cities.

A creative ecological approach to supporting young people with mental health challenges in schools

Holistic and ecological approaches to mental health support have been identified by many as best-practice approaches for creating and sustaining well-being. Those who experience mental health challenges including, for example, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), often struggle to find adequate, sustainable and ongoing care from clinical settings, and recent research shows that additional strategies such as peer support programs, arts approaches, and holistic school-based collaboration work effectively. More generally, the mainstream population continues to suffer from outdated, overly medicalised and frequently inaccurate notions of the experience of poor mental health and the effective support of those who suffer, and peer- and school-integrated approaches go some way toward better education about mental ill-health. This article uses a creative ecologies model (Harris, 2016) to help schools implement student- and family-led support programs for students experiencing mental health challenges in school settings.

Private Equity Blues: Warner Music Group, Nonesuch Records, and Jazz in the Era of Financialization

AbstractSince the 1980s, the Nonesuch label, a longstanding subsidiary of the Warner Music Group (WMG), has become noteworthy for its steady market performance during a period of volatility for media multinationals. Nonesuch Records, having once been an adventurous boutique classical label under Teresa Sterne, has developed over the last three decades as a creatively idiosyncratic and commercially successful “adult” imprint under Robert Hurwitz, the erstwhile director of the Munich-based Edition of Contemporary Music jazz label.Nonesuch has not historically been understood as a jazz label, though it has served as a home for a few jazz acts, including Bill Frisell, Fred Hersch, and the World Saxophone Quartet. By the early years of the new millennium, though, Nonesuch had become one of the few major label subsidiaries willing to maintain an active roster of jazz instrumentalists, harnessing its diversified roster as a source of strength.This paper examines the Nonesuch label's cultivation of a distinctive jazz niche and situates this development against the backdrop of a period of structural turbulence for the WMG. The leveraged buyout of WMG in 2004, which precipitated the dissolution of the Warner Jazz subsidiary and the transfer of much of its jazz roster to Nonesuch, reflects a contemporary logic of financialization, where value extraction has become the overriding goal of corporate restructuring. Mergers and acquisitions enacted at the uppermost reaches of major label corporate hierarchies pass along significant costs to the label subsidiaries and their artist rosters, installing precarity at the core of the music industry's creative ecologies.

Zantray lan Ginen : Performing the Feminine and Haiti’s Sacred Spaces

Abstract: Here we come together as Caribbean artists committed to ecofeminist activism and the sacred sanctuaries that support life in this era of climate disaster . The multilateral conversation Zantray lan Ginen , which could be translated as “Afro-fertilized or Africa-fertilizing wombs,” is an exploration of the interconnectedness between Haiti and the Caribbean through Vodou, the kinships between women’s wombs and nature, and the sacredness that traverses those circles. At the crossroads of performance studies and environmentalism, this conversation brings together the creative ecologies and speech flows of four female artists: Haitian choreographer, artist and performer Linda Isabelle François Obas, interdisciplinary artist Oceana James from Saint Croix (US Virgin Islands), Cuban dancer-choreographer Yaima Santana Galindo, and me, Stéphanie Melyon-Reinette, a performer-choreographer from Guadeloupe. I met each of these other artists during my own artistic peregrinations in Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico.

Lorenzo Magnani: Discoverability—the urgent need of an ecology of human creativity

Lorenzo Magnani: Discoverability—the urgent need of an ecology of human creativity

Multicologies? The development of multi-racial creative ecologies in East London

ABSTRACT In post-industrial economies, the creative industries have become major drivers of urban transformation. However, industry reports show that racialised minorities remain underrepresented in the UK’s creative industries. In this context, East London’s growing number of creative-industries hubs run the risk of re-inscribing existing patterns of racial exclusion onto the urban topography. In this article, I utilise analytical models drawn from the study of the creative industries and urban sociology to examine how racialised inequality in the creative sectors can become spatialised in an urban setting. I argue that East London’s regeneration process is largely structured by discourses of institutional ‘diversity’ that have historically failed to deliver greater levels of inclusion in the sphere of creative production. In this context, I point to the need for multicultural creative networks and production hubs, that I term ‘multicologies’, where racialised practitioners from complementary sectors of the creative industries can be spatially concentrated.