ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex and often fraught scholarly relationship between cultural policy and the emergence of what has come to be identified as the creative industries. It charts the ascendency of creative industries’ agendas out of the academy and into national policy, especially via the high profile and highly influential British creative industries model championed in the early 2000s by the Blair government’s Department for Media, Culture and Sport, which was itself a further development of the short-lived Australian Creative Nation framework. It will explore how creative industries approaches have settled down through the lens of two key sites for action and concern. First, the rise of creative place making including, following Florida, the policy fetish for urban redevelopment focused upon attracting creative workers. Second, drilling down to the employment coalface of creative industries, it draws attention to the exclusions of the contemporary creative workforce (particularly those of gender) as but one means to examine what has been lost in the shift from cultural policy to creative industries, namely, the focus on socio-cultural inclusion. It argues that the adoption within creative industries policy and scholarly approaches of the US urban policy-driven ‘creative class’ ideas of economist Richard Florida represents a significant de-coupling of creative industries from cultural policy. Coupled with an emphasis on the utopian expansive possibilities of digital technology, this served to consolidate the creative industries as a commercially focussed championing of entrepreneurial creativity, at the expense of arts and cultural policy as social goods with value beyond that which can be economically defined.
