Our introduction is provided by Professor Colin Riordan, who was appointed Vice Chancellor and President of Cardiff University in September 2012, and who spotted Creative Cardiff’s potential early, sharing in its ambitions for the university’s focus on research and civic mission and its ambitions for the Cardiff Capital Region to grasp the opportunities offered by the UK’s emergent creative economy. For all of the devastation caused by COVID-19, there is no doubt that this digital, creative economy will be even more important in the decade which follows Creative Cardiff’s fifth birthday than the decade we see in the rear-view mirror.
Cardiff University is proud to be home to the community of researchers and practitioners who recognised the need to provide leadership in order to bring Cardiff’s creative sector – industry, research, education and policy – together in more strategic ways. As a flagship enterprise, Creative Cardiff combines the university’s expertise in research and development with its emphasis on innovation and its commitment to civic mission. This has enabled Cardiff University to speak knowledgeably, proudly and with impact in discussions about the City Region’s cultural and business strategies.
It is the distinctive characteristics of place that the Creative Cardiff team have set out to understand and respond to so well.
What is it about the Cardiff Capital Region’s creative workforce that makes it so important to the city, region, Wales and the world?
What might creative citizenship mean for both individuals and the region? What were the particular challenges facing a city of multiple small creative entities? What kind of connections could most valuably be forged to achieve critical mass and a sense of common identity and brand? What kind of creative funding programme might prompt the best game-changing ideas? Through consultation, co-production and the creation of peer networks (partners, stakeholders, funders and supporters), Creative Cardiff has assisted the sector in arriving at answers to these questions, while remaining ready to respond to leftfield challenges and to the shifting social and economic circumstances that have marked its anniversary year.
In 2018, along with other partners, Creative Cardiff played a key role in securing funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative Industries Clusters Programme for Clwstwr – a project to create new products, services and experiences for a sustainable screen and news sector in South Wales that will as a result be better equipped to compete in an industry dominated by the integrated strength of global media companies. As Creative Cardiff reaches this anniversary, it has again taken up a leading role, with a strong cohort of partners, in developing a large-scale UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strength in Places bid, whose aim is to build on Clwstwr’s success and establish the Cardiff Capital Region as a global centre for media innovation that grows talent, connects up creative assets and plays a key role in defining the region’s sense of place – both for its own multicultural citizens and for the rest of the world.
Five years in, Creative Cardiff’s ambition continues to help define and shape the cluster, constellation, ecosystem and engine that form the Welsh capital region’s creative life.
