Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing

Coordinators: Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço

Mobile Research Laboratory, Beijing, China

Based on preliminary fieldwork in Beijing in 2005 and 2006 and follow-up discussions at the MyCreativity convention of international creative industries researchers held in Amsterdam, 2006, this project adopts the model of a mobile research laboratory as a framework for collaborative research on the creative industries and media education in Beijing.

bei-ci beijing, 2007
bei-ci beijing, 2007

This project brings international and Chinese academics together with urban research organisations, artists, curators, media producers and policy-makers in order to undertake trans-disciplinary research on Beijing’s creative industries (bei-ci). Through collaborative practices of self-organization, one of the primary aims is to create a ‘counter-mapping’ of creative industries in Beijing. Unlike the usual mapping documents on the creative industries, which are typically derived from compilations of statistics on economic growth in the sector, this project will produce an alternative map of the creative industries in terms of the following vectors of research:

• migrant networks and service labour
• eco-politics of creative waste
• informational geographies vs. creative clusters
• centrality of real-estate speculation for creative economies
• import cultures & export innovations in architecture and urban design
• artist villages and market engineering

Trans-CIB will consist of seminars, workshops and fieldwork organized around these six vectors.

Check out the orgnets-project website for a full oversight of this research.

Publications

Creative China, Cutting and Pasting?, an article on architectural copyright published in the MyCreativity-newspaper

The Rise and Fall of Beijing’s Creative Business District, an article on Beijing, 798, Gaobeidian and the Creative Industries published in Commercial Real Estate in China.

Links

China East Asia Media New Media
China | East Asia | Media | New Media is a site dedicated to research on creative industries focusing on Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. China | East Asia | Media | New Media is a researcher’s network. It came into existence during an international conference at QUT in July 2007. The network is initiated and managed by Michael Keane.

One World, One Dream: China at the Risk of New Subjectivities
China’s transformation is becoming the central phenomenon in the emergence of a new, complex and in many ways threatening world society. An essay by Brian Holmes, January 2008.

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spatial agency:
Established in 2007 by Bert de Muynck and Mónica Carriço, movingcities is a think tank based in Beijing Shanghai whose work focuses on how the practices of architecture and urbanism affect the city.

Their name is a reaction to the influential 'Shrinking Cities' project, which they critiqued for an over emphasis on just one part of a larger phenomenon. In contrast they see contemporary urbanity as being in constant flux and speak of city-regions that incorporate shrinking and expanding, rural and urban.

Their work takes the form of projects, writings and collaborations as well as interviews. (...)

Their projects take the form of embedded research on the city, usually carried out in collaboration with other architects."

creative cities:
Mov­ing­Cit­ies is an inde­pend­ent research organ­iz­a­tion based in China

archiblog:
MovingCities is a blog investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. MovingCities features urban research, critical architectural investigations and publications. MovingCities operates from Beijing Shanghai, China.

snowball architecture:
Bert de Muynck is the other half of MovingCities, a Shanghai based duo of “shrinks in the urban debate” as him and his partner Mónica Carriço like to describe their practice. MovingCities are also the curators of Snowball Shanghai – Event on Finnish Architecture to be organised in Shanghai this March.