The spatial imaginaries of creative clusters: Examining the role of R&D programmes in creative placemaking

Creative clusters – geographic concentrations of creative industries sector activity, its skilled individuals, organisations and institutions – have attracted significant investment globally, becoming an important driver of economic growth. In this paper, we frame investment in creative clusters as a mechanism for creative placemaking. Creative placemaking occupies a dual role as a driver of economic development via arts-led ‘regeneration’ of high streets and flagship infrastructural projects like cultural quarters, yet also as a sustained stewarding of creative places through social engagement and community-centred decision-making about cultural projects. This distinction is typically framed as ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ creative placemaking. We use the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D (BBCRD) programme as a case study to show how this distinction becomes less black and white. BBCRD created a ‘twin city’ spatial imaginary distinct from the geography of existing cultural or placemaking policy remits. The novel contribution of this paper is in how it evidences the intersecting scales of creative placemaking and unpacks the effectiveness of multi-city regionality for creative clustering, using fine-grained empirical data on the impact of top-down placemaking initiatives for the existing creative ecology of a place. This type of data and analysis is largely missing from literature on both clustering and placemaking. Given the continued international replication of the clusters model, recently renewed via ‘supercluster’ and ‘creative corridor’ discourses, we propose that an ecological understanding − that takes place specificity, relationality and scale into consideration – is pressing, and offers a route for complementarity between top-down and bottom-up creative placemaking.