Mapping Mapping China: Urbanisation - 8 Creative Industry: The Creative Real Estate

Both M50 in Shanghai and Blue Roof in Chengdu are now recognised as National Cultural Industry Parks, formalising the management institution behind the scenes. The creative business acts as a catalyst that brings refreshed energy into vacated urban space. Such a mechanism was soon added to the government’s toolkit for rebooting the land economy.

In Shanghai, West Bund was a riverside area that needed a reboot. It was a few kilometres south of the EXPO 2010 site. The big event moved all the industries away and left the area with empty warehouses and vacant lots. It remained quiet and empty until the first West Bund Biennale in 2013. The idea of the Biennale was to use creative events and creative businesses to attract investments. Well-known artists were invited to participate in shows and exhibitions that lasted for a couple of months. A dozen of the world’s leading architects were commissioned to build public facilities along the Bund. Conferences were held. Leading global entertainment brands such as Dreamworks were invited to open their offices there. The method worked as promised. Within two years, the prices of surrounding residential properties nearly tripled.

In the bottom-up cases of M50 and Blue Roof, the artists’ community played both catalysing and beneficial roles in the boom process. In the West Bund case, the artists were initially external players and didn’t transform into key stakeholders in the end. Nevertheless they were part of a productive marketing practice and their withdrawal was as clean and neat as designed.

But for the artists in 798 District of Beijing, things might not turn out that optimistically. The beginning of the story is almost identical to the ones in Shanghai and Chengdu: Empty warehouses found passionate artists that needed space. Galleries and workshops flourished and soon gained fame and success. But right now, the artists of 798 are suffering from their own success. Gentrification has taken place as predestined, and many artists have had to move out because the properties are not affordable anymore.

Why wasn’t 798 able to gain a similar power and recognition as the other cases? Many think that the answer lies in the revolving community of 798 artists. Without a clear community it is impossible to start dialogues with the powerful real-estate economy, let alone negotiations with the land market.

The fact that the creative industry wasn’t able to fight the real-estate economy in 798 was only a miniature model of China’s urbanization. But it poses questions about the role of the authorities in sustaining the creative industry and bringing out their contribution to cultural development in the cities in China.