Last week I took a trip to the South East of Germany, to the city of Erfurt to be precise. The Ministry of Economic Affairs of the province Thuringia had invited me to present at a workshop around the theme “Space for Ideas.” This was also a launch-event for the new Creative Industries Agency the Province set up earlier this year with the purpose of supporting the roughly 20 000 Thuringians working in creative professions and also raising awareness within the province, country and the world that Thuringia has indeed something to offer when it comes to the creative industries.
This initiative is remarkable for a number of reasons. To begin with, in terms of a German province setting up a Creative Industries Agency, Thuringia is second only to Hamburg. The city state of Hamburg, however, is a creative industries giant in comparison – traditionally strong with regard to advertising, print, music and film and recently turned into a hotspot of the gaming industry. So a significant creative sector densely concentrated within a small metropolitan region: of course they have their own agency.
The province Thuringia does not even have a proper metropolis let alone a concentrated creative sector. The creative industries are rather scattered throughout medium and small scale cities such as Erfurt, Gera, Jena, Weimar. Hence the challenge here is a rather different one: one that perhaps begins with indeed raising awareness among the creatives themselves that they are part of a bigger development within the province.
The “Space for Ideas” event was a successful kick-off in this respect: among the 80 participants (from the creatives, entrepreneurs, government and other officials, city planners, etc) there was a clear sense of excitement and readiness to put Thuringia on the creativity map. There were three locale initiatives setting the tone for the discussion with a short presentation. Towerbyte from Jena, a successful network of e-commerce related companies that have recently finalised the planning stage of a new 10 000 m2 ICT building. As an interesting background to this story serves the – from an Amsterdam point of view rather positively shocking – fact that the city of Jena has a vacancy rate of 0 percent. Henriette Gruber presented Kreativetage, a great little space right in the centre of Weimar hosting artists and creative entrepreneurs (it felt a bit like Amsterdam’s OT301). Like all projects of this kind, they are struggling with the double-challenge of running the place and being entrepreneurs at the same time. Plus there is the ever-present gentrification threat due to the house’s top location. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it… Finally Robert Hollmann presented Coworking Erfurt which is a small space but a good start for a city like Erfurt.
Me and my German colleagues Peter Schreck and Bastian Lange shared some of our thinking on ways in which the spatial structures of our industrially configured economies might be turned into the topological spaces that are not only necessary for the creative industries to flourish but that might also pave the way towards a future economy that is much more effective in valorising knowledge and creativity. In the long run, the structural economic weakness of provinces such as Thuringia might well turn out to be an advantage in terms of building such a creative economy of the future. There simply is no choice: establishing sustainable creative industries will have to be a highly innovative effort as the traditional structures one finds e.g. in Hamburg are not there to fall back on. So Thuringia’s decision to set up a Creative Industries Agency could be a crucial step toward a proactive and future orientated economic policy. It is obvious that in order to be successful, the creative industries need to be part of an innovation ecology connecting them efficiently to the old economy.
So no shortage work for the new Creative Industries Agency. However, if this goes well we might be seeing a new model for economic development in the making (no pressure, Herr Kiefer!)…
