Creative industries, creative industrial clusters and urban regeneration : a case study in Shanghai, China

Abstract

Under the transformation from “rural China” to “urban China”, cities in this country are confronting with the increasingly complicated problems of urban decline, not just physical decay as well as functional deterioration. The approach prevalently adopted, however, is of tearing down the old and starting the new from scratch, which relies on immediate measures of physical construction but neglects the objectives of social inclusion and heritage protection. For Chinese cities, it is necessary to reconsider the issue on urban regeneration from a more holistic and multidimensional perspective.

Since the late 1990s, a new concept—creative industries—has attracted interest over the world. In recent years, many big cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have clearly seen a rapid growth of this new industrial sector; a variety of creative industrial clusters (CICs) have emerged in these cities, showing wide potentials for promoting urban regeneration. The recent rise of creative industries and CICs may provide us a new perspective to rethink the issue on urban regeneration in Chinese cities.

This study tries to explore the relationships between creative industries, CICs and urban regeneration in Shanghai. Through the exploration, it expects to find an effective approach to promote comprehensive urban regeneration in Chinese cities under the transformation context. As “creative industries” is a relatively fresh concept and the boom of creative industries and clusters just happened in China in recent years, there is a big lack of research related to creative industries in the Chinese context. The research that links creative industries with urban regeneration is much less. This study is an effort to fill this research gap.

Around an analytical framework developed from the understanding of three key concepts—creative industries, CICs and urban regeneration, this study conducts two-level analyses. Firstly, it discusses some key issues on urban regeneration, creative industries and clusters respectively at the municipal level. Secondly, it carries out the case study of M50—a CIC in Shanghai—at the local level, based on questionnaire survey and deep interviews. Through the two-level analyses on Shanghai, this study suggests that the policy makers in Chinese cities should recognize the complexity of urban decline problems and view the issue of urban regeneration from a more comprehensive, holistic and multidimensional perspective. Considering the significant implications of the creative industries and CICs for urban regeneration, this study also suggests that the policy makers should adopt the creative industries and CICs as an important strategy to promote urban regeneration, and produce an integrated and systematic plan specifically on CICs that is oriented to urban regeneration and incorporated in the city’s master plan.