The Creative Economy

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  #WinterABC2021 Day 4

In a time of rapid globalisation, many countries recognise that the combination of culture and commerce that the creative industries represents is a powerful way of providing a distinctive image of a country or a city, helping it to stand out from its competitors.

The value of widely recognised cultural ‘icons’, such as the Eiffel Tower in France, the Taj Mahal in India or the Sydney Opera House in Australia has given way to whole cultural districts that combine arts and commercial activity, from the Shoreditch district of London with its design studios, tech businesses, cafes and clubs to huge prestige projects such as the West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong or the cultural hub on Sadiyaat Island in Abu Dhabi that represent billions of dollars of investment.

Awareness of this broader significance was reflected in a UK government publication of 2009, Creative Britain, which argued that effective long-term policies for the creative industries depended on policy initiatives, many of them at city and regional level, that were social as much as economic and that included, for example, the need for radical changes in the way children’s education was being planned, if Britain’s economy was to achieve long-term success as a home of creativity and innovation. At this juncture, I am inclined to ask, what are African governments doing about the “creative economy”?

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  Can African creatives contribute to the economy?

The debate has since moved on so significantly that a new definition has been called for; a simple definition of the ‘creative economy’, rather than ‘creative industries’, as “…those sectors which specialise in the use of creative talent for commercial purposes”. Writer Robert Hewsion observes in his book Cultural Capital – The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, “It is the configuration of relationships that gives a system its essential characteristics. Thus, it is less helpful to define the creative economy by what it does, than try to understand how it is organised”.

This, in turn, opens up a whole new arena for discussion. It seems that these industries, especially the thousands of small and micro-businesses that are at the cutting edge of creativity, may not only be of growing economic significance but, in some sense, are a harbinger of a whole new economic order, providing a new paradigm for the way in which businesses are organised, education is understood and provided, value is measured, the working lives and career prospects of millions of people are likely to develop and how the cities they live in will be planned and built.

The African landscape is built from different mortar though. This train of thought is yet to run past the rails of Africa. We are yet to catch up…

Imagine, just imagine, how the creative economy of Africa, moulded by African creatives within the confines of the many tourist destinations strewn across the continent, would be flourishing.