Introduction

This chapter explores the social relations between cultural and creative industries (CCI) strategies, regional governance structures, and national policy agendas concerning place. Building upon previous creative industries research that frames cultural policy in the English regions within a broader socio-historical context (Banks & O’Connor, 2017; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; Jayne, 2005; Lutz, 2006), it examines an initiative to pilot Local Industrial Strategies (LIS) in two such regions, Greater Manchester and West Midlands. The chapter examines these strategies for their properties as boundary objects (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2009) that provide means for social actors to practice policy and place. Using discourse analysis we explore how the national and the local intersect within the policy documents, and identify the rhetoric of creativity, and its use within city-regional strategy. Within a context of city-regional devolution, we consider how these distinct “second-city” spaces might shape place-based approaches to creative industries policymaking, and in doing so, following Paasi (2020), produce and reproduce regional boundaries.

The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, we set out the characteristics of regional creative industries strategy through literature review, to identify key issues with specific relevance to the regional policy context, the geographies of the creative economy, and the imperatives for place-based working in the context of English city-regional devolution. Second, we introduce the methods used within analysis, which combines historical analysis of placemaking with discourse analysis of recent policy literatures. We then introduce the cases of the Greater Manchester and the West Midlands combined authorities, tracing the policy stories of their devolution ahead of presenting discourse analysis on their respective LISs. We conclude with a brief discussion on the boundary work of LIS, regional governance and identity.

Literature Review: Mapping Culture and Economy in Regional Creative Industries Strategy

UK cultural policy actors have articulated their desire to understand the role of the creative industries within regional areas for over twenty years. The formation of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) under the New Labour government in 1997 and the publication of Creative Industries Mapping Documents (DCMS, 1998) combined with a renewed interest in regional government (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015). As early as 1999, the DCMS had established a Regional Issues Working Group (RIWG) to account for inequalities in economic and social opportunities across the country. The first RIWG report identified a “lack of strategic thinking by local, regional and national agencies and a subsequent lack of integration between creative industries and other related strategies” (DCMS, 2000, p. 5). Similarly, in a study of regional strategy within the West Midlands, Jayne (2005) emphasised the absence of strategic alignment of, and inherent conflicts between different policy geographies, recommending a more “fit for purpose” policy infrastructure at a regional level (Jayne, 2005).

This sense of disconnect arose despite the efforts of the national government to put such infrastructure in place at a regional level. As Lee et al. observe, “‘regionalism’ was central to New Labour thinking in general, and a commitment to regional devolution in England was a stated political goal” (Lee et al., 2014, p. 217). Most significantly, the formation of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in 1998 was a national attempt for policymakers to redefine the economic and policy geographies of regions. The RDAs were non-departmental public bodies charged with advancing regional economic development and applying government policy at a local level. Their approach to creative industries strategy was dominated by an interest in identifying clusters of creative enterprises, a result of the governmental responsibility for RDAs lying with the then Department for Trade and Industry (Greenhalgh & Shaw, 2003). They were complemented by Regional Cultural Consortia (RCCs), another New Labour invention established in 1999. RCCs were charged with leading on regional cultural strategies and moulded to the same “holistic definition” of culture promulgated by the DCMS at both national and local levels (Lutz, 2006, p. 25). Together, they sought methodologies for sector mapping research that highlighted sector strengths and values within the English regions. A Regional Cultural Data Framework proposed standardised data collection for mapping cultural production chains locally, whilst national statistical instruments were also developed for the DCMS Evidence Toolkit, resulting in tensions between data requirements and definitions used across this range of policy geographies (Lutz, 2006).

During the early 2000s, widespread support developed for creative cluster policy models (Swords, 2013), drawing on Porter’s argument that the most globally successful clusters of firms in similar industries are “strikingly common around the world” (Porter, 1990, p. 120). Most English regions highlighted their creative industries clusters within regional strategy documents: for example, film and glass making clusters in the North East, film, TV and digital clusters in the South West, particularly around Bristol, web design and Internet services in Yorkshire and Humberside, and a variety of creative industries production clusters within the North West (Jayne, 2005). The identification of these clusters was highly dependent on the mapping capacity and approach taken within each region. Whilst a national data framework existed, the lack of consensus over standard industrial classifications for mapping CCIs has proliferated methodologies that were at best highly contestable and at worst primitive (Jayne, 2005); even the seminal Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS, 1998) has been found in hindsight to be under-researched and ill-informed (Gross, 2020). This was improved following a review of the national statistics on creative industries in 2013 that brought in data on creative occupations in non-creative industrial sectors (DCMS, 2016). The quest to map the economic geography of the CCIs continues unabated with varying approaches (e.g. Gong & Hassink, 2017; Mateos-Garcia & Bakhshi, 2016; Siepel et al., 2020) which aim to identify creative clusters, their agglomeration, spillover and multiplier effects on localities (Gutierrez-Posada et al., 2021; PEC, 2021). However, debates on the inadequacies of evidencing regional creative industries persist, not only in terms of standardisation and data availability, but also in the social and political agency of measures that are grappling simultaneously with economic and cultural values (Bunting et al., 2019; Campbell et al., 2017).

This relationship between culture and economy is a “wicked problem” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) for creative industries policy, which actively harness the economic value of cultural production through a variety of discursive strategies, repositioning key terms and definitions from arts to cultural industries to creative economy (Garnham, 2005). There are multiple models which deploy econometrics to locate creativity as a generator of value within wider industrial and occupational fields (DCMS, 2008; Nesta, 2012, 2013), or rippling out from the heart of concentric circles of arts, culture and creativity to other sectors (Throsby, 2008). There are also those who wish to unshackle CCI strategies from cultural policy, instead arguing that the economic value which the creative industries propose to these policy fields are defined discretely as either “cultural” or “economic” (e.g. Bakhshi & Cunningham, 2016). Recognising a political expediency to the assumed relationship between the “dynamic” value of creative industries and the rest of the economy, Potts and Cunningham (2008) aim to reconstruct the rationale for policy interventions through economic theory. They derive four logic models: welfare subsidy, competition, economic growth and innovation, the latter two of which they find supported by empirical evidence, and each requiring different policy approaches. They locate creative industries as central to economies through their role in the transfer of knowledge and innovation:

According to model 4, the creative industries do not drive economic growth directly, as might a boom in the primary resource sector or the housing market for example, but rather facilitate the conditions of change in the economic order…Culture is indeed a public good, but for dynamic not static reasons. Unlike the value of museums or classical arts, which seek cultural value through the maintenance of past knowledge, creative industries value lies in the development and adoption of new knowledge. (p. 239, italics added)

Using the rhetoric of creativity, rather than culture, the “state-economic” (Banks & O’Connor, 2017, p. 645) parenthesis of the creative industries welds digital technology and hard infrastructure to knowledge economies and soft power. Situated within economic geography, creative industries policies tend to be oddly non-place specific: they are not interested in the singular site (as discussed by Bell & Orozco, this volume). Rather, they prioritise national and standardisable frames over locally-nuanced and discursive properties that might complicate a comparative analysis or trouble the efficiencies of methodologies promoted central government through the Treasury’s Green Book (O’Brien, 2010). As such, they can be understood as political ontologies, acting “on behalf” of their interests (Graham, this volume). It is when creative economy approaches leave the abstract domains of the supra-regional and economic, to become situated within the local policy contexts, that they become troubled by issues of culture and power, of cultural policy and politics, whether through the subjugation of a creative precariat under the guise of the rising “creative class” (Florida, 2002; McGuigan, 2009; Banks, 2017; Brook et al., 2020) or the uneven outcomes for people and places of culture-led regeneration policy transfer (Evans, 2010; Peck, 2005):

There is a danger that an increasingly formulaic imported “creative-city” agenda will be imposed on places in a damaging and/or unrealistic manner, ignoring local needs, and missing opportunities to galvanize already existing or vernacular cultural expressions. (UNESCO & UNDP, 2013, p. 85)

The problems of irrelevant or inappropriate policy transfer and the imposition of “top down” policies on places are familiar within critical cultural policy studies. Where this chapter differs is in its object of focus that is not on the subjects (the beneficiaries or victims) of policy transfer. Rather we pay attention here to the mediation and translation of national/supra-regional policies for creative industries as they encounter local interests and regional identities. We consider how Local Industrial Strategies provide the means to do “boundary work” (Lamont & Molnár, 2002) between central and regional policy domains through the discourses of creative industries and the creative economy, which in turn provide symbolic boundaries for the Greater Manchester and West Midlands city-regions. In the next section, we explore the contexts for this boundary work within the politics and new policy infrastructures of the English regionalism.

Regionalising Industrial Strategy

A decade after the foundation of the RDAs, the emergency Coalition budget of 2010 sought to remove centralised funding for regional growth and establish Local Enterprise Partnerships to encourage a new localism which offered a central role for local business partners and leaders, and which aimed to redraw the boundaries for economic strategy. Regional policy infrastructures including RDAs and regional Government Offices were dismantled through large-scale disinvestment entitled the “Bonfire of the Quangos” (O’Leary, 2015). In a joint letter defining these sub-national reforms, Business Secretary Vince Cable and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles wrote (Cable & Pickles, 2010):

We have been concerned that some local and regional boundaries do not reflect functional economic areas. We wish to enable partnerships to better reflect the natural economic geography of the areas they serve and hence to cover real functional economic and travel to work areas. To be sufficiently strategic, we would expect that partnerships would include groups of upper tier authorities. If it is clearly the wish of business and civic leaders to establish a local enterprise partnership for a functional economic area that matches existing regional boundaries, we will not object. (p. 2)

This statement effectively removed central accountability (and funding) for regional economic development, whilst acknowledging that sub-national local scales remain a facet of industrial strategy. The matter of regional development is not easily divorced from national policy, nor politics, and remains in a contingent and binding relationship even as regional infrastructure is disassembled (Rossiter & Price, 2013). Indeed, despite the lack of central guidance on how the newly formed LEPs should behave and be constituted, these policy changes have been described as representing “a significant increase in the level of centralisation of industrial policy” (Peck et al., 2013, p. 838) adding further to the evidence of the UK as the most centralised nation in the developed world (O’Farrell, 2019).

A programme of city-regional devolution has followed these structural reforms, beginning with the devolution deal with Greater Manchester in 2014. The contractual nature of city-regional devolution in England has done little to buck the political tradition of Westminster control, rather as Sandford (2017) argues they are more akin to service level agreements delivered through locally sourced delivery:

[D]evolution deals are best understood not as developments in territorial governance, but as a series of contract-style agreements between central government and local public bodies, to pursue agreed outcomes in discrete policy areas where a common interest can be identified. (p. 64)

Like the devolution deals, the LIS join a roll call of national-regional policy instruments in England from “Towards an Urban Renaissance” (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2000) and the “State of the English Cities” (Parkinson et al., 2006) under New Labour, to the Tory-led Growing Places Fund (2011–2015), Towns Fund (2019) and Levelling up Fund (2020). Shaped by objectives established centrally, they identify common policy areas between national and the local, providing resources over which places compete. They act, we argue here, as boundary objects to promote interaction between the policy actors of local/regional and national government. As they do so, they both reveal and define boundaries and hierarchies, as well as common interests, practices and discourses (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2009). They provide translation of policy discourse across symbolic boundaries, which Lamont & Molnár describe as “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorise objects, people, practices, and even time and space” (2002, p. 168) that are historical, cultural and often related to place. By promoting symbolic repertoires, boundary objects have the potential to align different political interests through a common language, although this may not necessarily indicate shared meanings. Furthermore, they can be used politically “as powerful players to shape the outcomes that can be designated to particular tools in order to legitimate their own interests” (Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2009, p. 225).

A concern here is that whether regional and place-based interests are realised through this boundary work. Peck et al. (2013) suggest that “spatially-blind” policies may not be in themselves “space-neutral”, the danger being that:

place is viewed as relevant to industrial policy only when addressing the effects of actions rather than their specification; Regions and localities have therefore been reduced to containers within which a-spatial policies are delivered rather than sites of socio-economic interaction that can be vital for knowledge production and exchange. (p. 836)

By contrast, place-based models for regional economic development share the principles of collaborative governance, context specificity and “understandings of place that are sociospatial historical products and processes” (Pugalis & Bentley, 2014, p. 563).

It is in this context that we examine LIS: as potential boundary objects with which to agree, disagree, and practice national-regional policy discourses that shape creative industries strategies at a city-regional level. Whilst we are not able to evaluate the outcomes of the LIS on regional CCIS and their efficacy in driving economic growth, their analysis presents an opportunity to consider how places are represented within these agendas and to assess whether they are more than vessels for national policy agendas. The following section briefly sets out our research methodology, ahead of analysing the LIS case studies of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.

Methodology

Firstly, we relate the recent histories and processes of English regional devolution and policy making that led to the two LIS pilots, and identify the key protagonists involved at regional and national levels. We do so in order to establish the contexts for the production of these policy instruments and consider their influence on the social practices and discourses at play. The background story of the Industrial Strategy (BEIS, 2017) and how it came to include CCIs as economic drivers is recalled. This is followed by a critical discourse analysis approach (Fairclough, 2003) which is applied to three sets of policy documents: the national Industrial Strategy (BEIS, 2017) and its associated Independent Review of Creative Industries Sector (Bazalgette, 2017) and the two LIS (GMCA, 2019; WMCA, 2019).

We have identified critical discourse analysis as an appropriate approach to identify the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic boundaries and symbolic repertoires within the field of strategy work that is LIS. Following Fairclough (2003) we identify orders of discourse that allow us to consider the social practices embedded in these texts by genres and styles. Genres, or ways of acting, provide structure to social interaction, and are distinct from styles, which comprise ways of being, in that they can be adapted and adopted by those who use them (Collin, 2012). We also look for key absences of discourses within the LIS and identify them as social events. To perform the analysis, all documents were manually coded and auto-coded in Nvivo to identify and compare key phrases and themes as nodes and to identify and interrogate their semantic context and positioning. Keywords were also searched as text queries to establish frequency of use: we searched for key phrases and terms established with the Independent Review of Creative Industries Sector (Bazalgette, 2017) that alluded to specific forms of CCI policy rationales, drawing on the literature review of CCI strategy research. Codebooks were prepared to isolate text and to analyse and track the particular genres and styles of policy discourse when referring to CCIs were represented within the strategy tools.

Histories of Devolution: A Tale of Two Second-City Regions

As discussed in the introduction, the adoption of devolved responsibility for local economic productivity is not a novel idea and the LIS build upon existing structures such as RDAs, Local Enterprise Partnerships (2011–), Mayoral Combined Authorities (2011–) and City Deals (2012–). In this longer history, LIS are the most recent experiment by the UK government with the hope that devolved local authority offers an effective means to pursue national economic ambitions. This section delves into the regional contexts of Manchester and Birmingham and considers how specific histories and political landscapes of two city-regions shaped LIS pilot development.

Greater Manchester: Devolution and the ‘Manchester Model’: In November 2014, Greater Manchester became the first devolved city-regional combined authority in England, following a Devolution Agreement between the Treasury and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) (LGA, 2019). This agreement handed over local responsibility for transport, housing and planning as well as other additional powers to the GMCS in exchange for the creation of the city-region mayoral office; Greater Manchester voters elected Andy Burnham into this role in May 2017. Greater Manchester is a large conurbation in the North West of England encompassing two cities (Salford and Manchester),10 district authorities, and 30 towns and large villages. Two hours from London by train, but culturally very distant and traditionally a Labour party stronghold, it might be surprising that Greater Manchester was selected as a pilot area for LIS were it not for combination of historical inter-regional collaboration and contemporary political expediency.

During the period of Coalition government, lobbying for the devolution of skills provision, employment and economic productivity strategy was spear-headed by local spokespeople and politicians (Westwood, 2015). Reaching agreement involved a small number of powerful men—the then Chancellor of Exchequer, George Osborne, City Council CEO Sir Howard Bernstein, Council leader, Richard Leese, and Treasury officials Mike Emmerich and Jim O’Neill—and was highly predicated on cross-party interpersonal connections. Osborne, an MP in neighbouring Cheshire and the first Chair of the Northern Powerhouse (Westwood, 2015) provided Manchester with the requisite visibility in Whitehall, a gambit for his own political legacy:

There was no white paper or consultative document, let alone a debate in parliament. Manchester’s deal with Osborne was reached by sleight of hand, by one man [Bernstein] with a political problem to solve and another who saw this as an opportunity. (Jenkins, 2015, n.p.)

Manchester has long been an expert in boosterism, with a reputation for strong leadership, place-based working and advocacy at a city-region level long before the 2014 devolution deal (Localis, 2009). The city was familiar with the politics and discourse of creative industries and creative clusters, and the technocracy of their extrinsic powers, having come top of Richard Florida’s Creative Class Boho Index exercise in 2003, which ranked UK cities by their propensity to host the “creative class” (Carter, 2003). The move of the BBC to MediaCityUK in 2011 and ring-fenced £78m investment in a new flagship arts building, The Factory, a new home for Manchester International Festival, as part of the devolution deal (Jenkins, 2015) gave further weight to national acknowledgement of Manchester’s creative city status. In the specific context of the LIS, the 2009 Manchester Independent Economic Review (MIER) was “a pathbreaker” for the 2019 Independent Prosperity Review that provided evidence for economic development strategy. The project also benefitted from the longer history of the Northern Powerhouse (Shaw & Tewdwr-Jones, 2017):

There had been an earlier attempt to encourage a pan-regional approach via the Northern Way initiative between 2004 and 2011. While lacking resources and strategic powers, the initiative did encourage a culture of collaborative working, created a robust database covering a wider spatial level and created a momentum that cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool could harness when promoting the city region approach. (p. 219)

The Prosperity Review and the Northern Powerhouse made visible the practical local networks and a spatial economic identity required to survive the path to devolution, if not make it a poster child. Speaking in Manchester, Osborne stated how with subsequent local devolution deals, “I will not impose this [Manchester’s] model on anyone: but neither will I settle for less” (2015). The case of “Devo Manc” has been described as “a broadly accepted narrative [that] local leaders in Manchester put aside their parochial and political differences with each other and with central government, and were granted extra powers in return” (Haughton et al., 2016, p. 356). This solidarity is noteworthy: Manchester is unusual in having only one local enterprise partnership (LEP) involved in its Local Industrial Strategy. The combined authority, the first in the country in 2011, had already brought the 10 district authorities together (Bailey, 2014). The other two LIS pilot locales—Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford Corridor and the West Midlands—differ in the scale and cohesion of local governing bodies in regional governance, the former complicated by its topology across four sub-regional areas, and the latter through its different spatial and regional identity (BEIS/HCLG, 2019). The following section explores how these differences combined with the practices and dynamics of the individual actors involved in the West Midlands.

The West Midlands Engine: The differences between Manchester and the Midlands are noticeable in the policy-granted nomenclature of their surrounding areas: the “Northern Powerhouse” and the “Midlands Engine” (UK Parliament, 2016): A powerhouse is a singular institution, monolithic and static with lines of production leading into and out of a designated space. Conversely, an engine is a complex interaction of parts, and usually used to get somewhere else. This suggests that both in terms of practical governance and regional identity, if Greater Manchester is conceived as a “place” with a solid sense of grounding, the West Midlands social identity is constructed through connections made within and reaching out to many (other) places. The region’s largest city Birmingham is similarly associated with pluralism, referred to as “the city of a thousand trades” since the nineteenth-century (Brown et al., 2007).

Despite these allusions to mobility and engineering prowess, Birmingham’s city-regional ambitions have been characterised as a “mournful Cinderella unable to hitch a ride to the devolution ball” (Bailey, 2014). In the early 2010s, there was a lack of coherence to regional policy infrastructure as well as local opposition to importing a “Manchester model” of devolution. Unlike the “under-bounded” city of Manchester, which has a dependency on the surrounding local authority districts it cuts across, not least since they contain many of Manchester’s suburbs (Blond & Morrin, 2014), the city of Birmingham has a much larger geographic footprint and a more complex association with near-but-not-connected cities of Coventry and Wolverhampton. Unlike Greater Manchester’s orientation of a singular conurbation surrounding the city of Manchester (and the less often mentioned conjoined city of Salford), the West Midlands according to its LIS document is formed of three distinct areas: Greater Birmingham & Solihull, Coventry & Warwickshire and the Black Country, which also correspond to its LEPs. Regional integrity is more diffuse and trickier to operationalise, challenging external perceptions to the point where Jeffrey observes “there is no […] ‘West Midland’ social identity” (2006, p. 65).

In spite of this, devolution for the region became semantically shackled to the Midlands Engine, a phrase that also confusingly includes the East Midlands, first used by George Osborne during a visit to an engineering firm in Derby on 1 June 2015 (Osborne, 2015). The devolution deal was brokered with the newly formed West Midlands Combined Authority, bringing together three LEPs, and featuring Enterprise Zone bids, the controversial High Speed Two railway expansion, and a City Devolution Bill of £36.5 million. The requirement of an elected Mayor was met with trepidation, coming just three years after Birmingham voters rejected the idea of a mayor in a citywide referendum. Concerns about this “centrally-orchestrated localism” (Pike et al., 2016, p. 10) compounded with competition locally for leadership between the different parts of the newly bounded region. For example, the creation of a Regional Chamber laid the path for domination by Birmingham as largest local chamber, leading to “fractious divisions…centred on questions concerning the policy process and personnel rather than the substance of policy or political decision making.” (Wood et al., 2005, p. 308). However, it was the nexus of relationships between central government and the regions that was to prove pivotal in securing the West Midlands deal.

As with Greater Manchester, a charismatic political cast was once more responsible for shaping the agenda. Sir Albert Bore, twice leader of Birmingham City Council and long-term champion of the city’s regeneration, pushed ahead the combined authority agenda to create the necessary legal framework (Shaw & Tewdwr-Jones, 2017). He was joined by Westminster allies, Greg Clark as Local Government Secretary and Lord Heseltine, the formidable figure behind decades of local regeneration initiatives and architect of combined authorities (Brown, 2015). A known supporter of devolution, Clarke was crucial to its defence from those less in favour amidst the turmoil of central government reshuffling and leadership elections following the EU referendum (Pidd, 2016). Critically, Andy Street, the former Managing Director for John Lewis department stores and Chair of the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, became the Conservative hope for the West Midlands deal as Mayoral candidate in October 2016, shifting the direction away from Osborne’s Manchester model. Osborne’s removal to the backbenches by Theresa May in the previous July had created a new configuration for central-local negotiations, and the means for the West Midlands to cement its place alongside Greater Manchester in the devolution race (Harrison, 2016).

On 4 May 2017, Andy Street became metro mayor for the West Midlands and Andy Burnham, his Labour counterpart, the Mayor of Greater Manchester. Their election symbolised the culmination of a “disorganised devolution” which in principle allows for “the closer integration of administrative and functional economic boundaries and also encourages collaboration across a much wider metropolitan territory” (Shaw & Tewdwr-Jones, 2017: p. 218). It also represented continued negotiation between the national and the local, legitimation of implementation plans for newly devolved powers, and competition for resources.

For both regions, the introduction of the LIS pilots a year later provided an opportunity to develop a locally produced, place-based framework to identify strategic priorities and boost economic development, productivity and prosperity. They also, as we argue below, acted as boundary objects, legitimising CCI policy at a regional level. The following section outlines the development of the Industrial Strategy and details how creativity found its way into the LIS.

The National Story of “Creativity” Within Local Industrial Strategies

The Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain Fit for the Future (BEIS, 2017) was devised following the EU referendum. The strategy targeted national economic productivity, promising to build a post-Brexit Britain fit for the future through the “five foundations of productivity: ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment and places” (BEIS, 2017, p. 6). The idea of LIS emerge from the last of these foundations, to “allow places to make the most of their distinctive strengths” (BEIS, 2018, p. 4). Despite their national umbrella, individual regions are the authors of their own LIS. Beyond the five categories, and like the LEPs, there is little substantive information about what they should contain (Clayton, 2018). Instead, there is only guidance on how to produce LIS: they should be the “product of extensive consultation with businesses, […] public partners and the civil society sector” and that they should be “long-term, based on clear evidence and aligned to the national Industrial Strategy” (BEIS, 2018, p. 220–221). The responsibility of which industrial sectors, and who or what determines them, lies with the local.

There is no compulsion, therefore, to refer to CCIs, and there is no mention of them within the Local Industrial Strategy Prospectus (2018). Indeed, when the national Industrial Strategy was published, it was critiqued for being excessively STEM-oriented (Creative Industries Federation, 2017; Cultural Learning Alliance, 2017; Dawood, 2017a, 2017b). It had identified four Grand Challenges that it aimed to address through investment in technology and science, and sector deals were initially established in four areas: Life Sciences, Construction, Artificial Intelligence, and the Automotive Industry. The absence of any substantive discussion of the CCIs and their role within economic growth, despite over 20 references to “creative industries” within the document, concerned sector advocates such as the Creative Industries Federation (2017), who responded that:

[whilst] the White Paper is a step in the right direction including a number of important levers for the creative industries and wider economy we are deeply concerned that these positive moves will be undermined by a lack of ambition from government in terms of skills policy. (n.p.)

There swiftly followed the government-commissioned Independent Review of the Creative Industries (September 2017, Bazalgette review henceforth) led by Sir Peter Bazalgette, then Chair of ITV and recent Chair of Arts Council England, who had consistently championed the contribution of arts to the creative economy and the need for government, business, and the arts to work more closely to achieve this (Bazalgette, 2016). His review predicted the significance of CCIs for future economic success and productivity in the UK, forecasting Gross Value Added to the UK economy of £128.4 billion by 2025 based on a 3.9% year-on-year increase (Bazalgette, 2017, p. 4). Setting out recommendations to support places with the most propensity to host “Key creative clusters” (2017, p. 6), it argues that through agglomeration and a focus on existing clusters, the similarity of properties of the creative industries to those other sectors might support knowledge transfer within local economies. It argued for a “bottom-up process which allows localities, which often have a firmer grasp of their growth potential and needs than central government, to direct policy development” (Bazalgette, 2017, p. 6). The policy rationale is that this addresses “informational asymmetry” by providing more efficient business support to micro-enterprises typical of CCIs and technology sectors, since the co-location of firms provides efficiencies of scale but also because they foster a “fusion of skills […] alongside economic and social spillovers” (Bazalgette, 2017, p. 15). Other recommendations include the need for consolidated access to finance for CCIS including a Creative Industries Ladder of Growth with a regional focus.

The Bazalgette review managed therefore to combine three out of the four policy logics, welfare subsidy, economic growth and innovation, identified by Potts and Cunningham (2008) and discussed above. The recommendations of the review are largely place-shaping (rather than place-based) constructs, however, working through rather than with places as localised policy intermediaries, and positioning CCIs rhetorically as agents of change. For example, the utility of cultural and heritage offer, according to the Review, is to enhance “the attractiveness of locations to live and work and acting as an accelerator for regeneration” (Bazalgette, 2017, p. 16). In this configuration place is a locale for culture and creativity to present their welfare utility:

[g]iven that there is research showing a positive correlation between wellbeing and productivity, a place-based focus on the cultural and creative sectors should be a key element in the government’s overall approach. (p. 16)

The issue of unequal creative industries’ geographies and their uneven growth also informs the Creative Cluster fund recommendations. The Review is concerned by the large concentration of creative sector jobs in London and the South East, off-set by a number of core cities such as Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow but is optimistic that through suitable strategic intervention “middle-ranking clusters” can achieve “world-class status” (Bazalgette, 2017):

The challenge is for local partnerships of councils, LEPs, higher education and business to develop long-term strategies which merit and receive tailored support from government and national agencies. (p. 16)

The “local” here is responsible for competing for resources and developing methods to tackle the “known barriers to productivity, not least because having a focus on regional clusters will tackle regional inequalities and seek to address the barriers that prevent small businesses accessing business support and investment to grow” (2017, p. 13). Whilst this opens up the possibility for place-based working, in that these strategies are defined locally, the suggestion that creative clusters strategies will tackle regional inequalities seems misaligned: by their definition, clusters depend on sector activities being in some places and not others. The promulgation of creative clusters, whilst rationalised through the economic logic chains of agglomeration, spillovers and multiplier effects, seems counter-intuitive to the principle of combating geographic and intra-regional inequalities also expressed within the Bazalgette review and more broadly in academic discourse (e.g. Tether, 2019).

The following section analyses the LIS documents to consider how CCI policy discourses are represented. We conclude this chapter with discussion of how these boundary objects mediate “the local” and are instrumental in paroling regional borders, following Paasi (2020), as complex social practices and discourses in the institutionalisation of these city-regions.

Locating CCIs Within LIS

The passage opening the main body of the Greater Manchester (GM) LIS (GMCA, 2019) provides a typically bombastic sense of city-regional self, which combines the narrative of Manchester’s industrial might with one of political, cultural and geographical distinction:

Greater Manchester is known globally for its heritage and its pioneering and progressive culture, which reflects the distinctive personality of the city-region, its towns, rural communities and its people. A rich history, including the establishment of the modern cooperative movement, and strong cultural and sporting assets give Greater Manchester a globally recognised brand that speaks of innovation, creativity and social progress. Its scientific and industrial inventions, social movements, art and design, music and sport continue to create impact throughout the world. (p. 18)

By comparison, the West Midlands (WM) LIS opens with a narrative of recent growth that can be further extended, linked to the region’s role as central transport hub, its industrial heritage in car manufacture and promised investment in connectivity and green technologies:

The West Midlands is in renaissance: output is up 27 per cent over the past five years. Productivity increased last year at twice the rate of the UK average. High Speed 2 will further strengthen the region’s connectivity with national markets—90 per cent of which are already within a four-hour drive. The West Midlands, working with partners in the Midlands Engine, is also a growing international force: foreign direct investment projects have trebled since 2011. Carbon emissions have reduced by 18 per cent over the last five years. (WMCA, 2019, p. 7)

Although there are actually fewer references to the phrase “creative” within the GM LIS than in the WM LIS, the terms through which they are discussed—or to use Fairclough’s phrasing, the genres which represent them within broader policy discourse—places CCIs as a discrete and important industrial sector whose existence can be (and has been) used strategically for local benefit. The GM LIS strategy identifies “Digital, Creative and Media” as one of four key sectors for driving productivity and achieving national and local strategic goals (see Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
A chart of the overview of the Greater Manchester Local Industrial Strategy. Global change affects the strategic drivers. Some strategies include health innovation, advanced materials and manufacturing, clean growth, digital, creative and media, ideas, people, infrastructure, and business environment.

Overview diagram of the Greater Manchester Local Industrial Strategy (GMCA, 2019, p. 10)

Full size image

Coupled consciously with digital economies, CCIs are framed spatially by the acknowledgement of their supra-regional standing (GMCA, 2019):

Greater Manchester has the largest digital and creative sectors outside the south east, with the potential to create internationally significant clusters in broadcasting, content creation and media. (p. 12)

Within the report (GMCA, 2019), the CCI cluster, MediaCityUK, which hosts the relocated BBC and ITV production studios co-located with the Lowry Arts Centre in Salford, is identified as an asset:

Greater Manchester has many place-based strengths: from the dynamic city centre, to the creative cluster around the Quays and the concentration of research excellence on the Oxford Road Corridor, to the industrial hubs in Trafford Park, Rochdale, Wigan, and Bolton. (p. 17)

In contrast, explicit references to the CCIs in the WM LIS are peripheral to the main discussion of place-based sector strengths, and there is little discussion of creative clusters. Indeed, CCIs are not identified as a growth sector in their own right. Instead, the genre employed within the WM LIS places them under the heading of “Creative content, techniques and technologies” (WMCA, 2019, p.35), emphasising the affordances of design and creativity and their value to innovation and manufacturing through diffusion rather than agglomeration:

Creative skills and techniques are driving innovation in all industries. Factories of the future will be constructed by designers, data analysts and visualisation specialists, powered by 5G connectivity and involve the rapid design, build and deployment of virtual and physical components. These approaches, such as a ‘distributed factory’, will be developed and adopted in the West Midlands, as our manufacturing and transport supply chains evolve for the future. (WMCA, 2019, p. 35)

Therefore, rather than mapping and locating CCI clusters spatially, the WM LIS emphasises the fluid properties of technologies and techniques that ripple out across other sectors, through creative occupations within other industrial sectors. A further example of this discursive framing can be seen when the fields of virtual reality and augmented reality are described (WMCA, 2019):

[D]esign-led thinking originating in the gaming industry is combined with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to develop, prototype and test new vehicles across automotive, aerospace, rail and last mile logistics as well as the wider digital manufacturing sector…VR and superfast connectivity are being used to train the next generation of paramedics, engineers and surgeons. (p. 36)

Cultural events and designations (such as the forthcoming Coventry City of Culture and the 2022 Commonwealth Games) are viewed as testbeds for digital products and innovation; theatre performance and live music are positioned as responding to population growth and increasing demand for “creative experiences which are stimulating the market for the region’s cultural offer” (WMCA, 2019, p. 36).

This reiterates the rational of the WM Strategic Economic Plan (WMCA, 2016a) which defines the “cultural economy including sport” as an “enabling sector”, alongside retail and public sector (WMCA, 2016b, p. 4). This plan set ambitious targets for tripling the productivity of regional CCIs through infrastructure investment to create “transferable approaches—for example the contribution of gaming to innovation in manufacturing, transferable skills, including the attractions of creative industries as a pathway into manufacturing [and] digital as a driver of public service reform” (WMCA, 2016a, p. 41).

By contrast, the GM LIS presents a spatialised narrative of creative clusters, describing several different locales where creativity and the broader digital and creative industries are present, not just at Salford Quays or Manchester city centre. Care is taken to mention the ten district authorities and specific sites within them where CCIs may have extrinsic benefits and spillover effects (GMCA, 2019):

From the creative cluster in Ramsbottom to the emerging digital sector springing up around Ashton Old Baths, from Wigan Old Court’s innovative approach to the repurposing of old buildings in the town centre and the increasingly diverse offer in Oldham’s creative and independent quarter, it is clear that the digital and creative industries can be a driving force in revitalising local towns and high streets. (p. 50)

The responsibility for diffusion and spillover into other sectors lies primarily in the “vibrancy and coverage of the networks of the city region’s digital industries, which have created intersections with Greater Manchester’s traditional sector strengths” (GMCA, 2019, p. 48). Within the Manchester LIS, creativity is also associated with a broad welfare based definition of culture:

Innovation and creativity are synonymous with culture and a Greater Manchester Culture Strategy is being developed to create the conditions for creativity to flourish in every part of the city-region, enriching the lives of all residents and protecting, diversifying and growing Greater Manchester’s unique culture, heritage strengths, assets and ecology. (p. 48)

Like the WM LIS, creative content is discussed but overwhelming in relation to specific locales of production and incubation, including MediaCityUK and the Sharp Project in North Manchester, but also the Factory, which is visualised within the LIS as (GMCA, 2019):

a world-class cultural space being developed at the border of Manchester and Salford [which] will create new opportunities to bring the world’s most exciting artists and creatives to the city-region and embed further interactions with content creators, digital companies and audiences. (p. 49)

Discussion and Conclusion

Critical discourse analysis of the LIS pilots for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands reveals how these documents mediate the discursive practices of the national Industrial Strategy and its associated CCI sector review and promotes interaction between national and local policy actors. The genres of CCI strategies adopted and adapted by the distinct LIS for each city-region provide the means for the local actors to interact and to “coordinate their utterances with the utterances of other actors” (Collin, 2012, p. 85). The styles, or ways of being, of these discourses represent these actors’ interests and reveal their differences; they constitute discursive boundaries for these city-regions through the expectations of utility placed on CCI policy in relation to place. The development of these policy instruments, established locally by local actors, mix the rhetoric of creativity with local symbolic resources drawn from their cultural, historical and socio-political contexts. In tracing the national socio-political landscapes and analysing the place-based LIS strategic documents in tandem, this chapter offers novel methods in negotiating the “location” and potential local-ness of creative industries policy.

Both the Greater Manchester and the West Midlands LIS documents take up the recommendations of Bazalgette and signal how CCIs might produce extrinsic effects within broader economies and sectors. Interestingly, if somewhat crudely, they seem to select policy logics from the symbolic repertoire of the Review that meet with their public regional identities and different political ontologies. For example, the Midlands Engine emphasises the logic of innovation through complex interactions within creative economies unconfined by single sectors, transferring values and effect across diffuse networks and geographies, and drawing heavily on the symbolism and shared place memories of manufacturing and automotive production. The Northern Powerhouse of Greater Manchester meanwhile combines welfare utility with the more traditional agglomeration effects of creative clusters, reflecting its self confidence in the singular sites of production and the city-region’s track record in the discourses and practices of creative class capital. The centrality of Manchester (the city) within the Manchester Model relates the city’s claim as birthplace to industrial revolution to city-regional identity, and actively bounds and locates creative clusters, linking creative, digital and media sectors together with cultures of place.

These are active and reproductive selections, which draw on and contribute to the social identity of the two city-regions. Paasi (2020) argues that regional boundaries and narratives of identity are not fixed, and rather the topologies of contemporary regions are stretched in space, containing varied social relations that network and fluctuate:

Regions acquire their borders in complex social practices and discourses as part of the institutionalization of region. Borders are hence important as social institutions and symbols, not merely as physical lines [… they are] not bounding the practices and discourses in some abstract way, rather it is the practices and discourses that produce and reproduce such borders. (p. 26)

Viewing LIS pilot documents as boundary objects allows scholars and policymakers alike to unpick the symbolic repertoires and messy interactions within national-regional CCI policy discourses and understand the agency of the local, and the place of culture and creativity, within the ongoing border making of regions.