From Instruments to Ecosystems

Since the late 1990s, cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have been instrumentalised as place-based policy tools to address postindustrial restructuring, image repair, and social cohesion. This chapter argues that such policies cohere around two overlapping constructs: production-oriented measures that improve conditions of making (clustering, hubs, university-anchored R&D) and consumption-oriented measures that mobilise audiences and visitation (creative-city approaches, culture-led regeneration, cultural districts, creative tourism). Across both, a consistent paradox appears. These interventions generate visibility, participation, prototypes, and networks, yet often reproduce precarity, finance and workspace constraints, land-value uplift, displacement, and policy mimicry, especially where symbolic gains substitute for structural reform. Framed by the long shadow of deindustrialisation the chapter shows how production instruments catalyse capability while mirroring projectised, undercapitalised firm ecologies, and how consumption instruments deliver branding dividends but weakly embed local supply chains and distributional benefits. To resolve this paradox, the chapter advances a creative-industries ecosystems approach: Fund intermediaries (brokers, networks, shared infrastructures); couple cultural with social infrastructure (affordable workspace and housing, fair-work standards, pathwayed skills); hard-wire value capture and benefit-sharing into districts and events; and use outcomes-based evaluation that tracks inclusion, health, and local multipliers alongside footfall. Respecified thus, production and consumption policies can convert creative energy into durable, widely shared prosperity.