CLUSTERING CREATIVITY: A SOCIO-SPATIAL INVESTIGATION OF TELOK KURAU STUDIOS AND EMILY HILL, SINGAPORE

Abstract

Cities are constantly changing. In the past, cities relied on their physical resources for growth but today more so than ever do we rely on knowledge through innovation to gain comparative advantage over other cities. With the death of industrialisation, "Creativity became the (new) engine of national, regional and urban economic growth." But beyond the economic functions of a Creative City, planners and geographers have long been interested in the socio-spatial relationships existing within cultural clusters. Cultural clusters exists in a myriad of forms- quarters, districts and belts but it is the ones that cluster within buildings that are truly the most layered and complicated of networks. In recent years, mirroring the likes of Beijing 798 and San Li Tun, Singapore has started to retrofit cultural industries into the bodies of old buildings. Telok Kurau Studios and Emily Hill are two of such examples and are good case materials to unravel if the inception of a cluster as a top down or bottom up strategy has any implications on the way space is used and produced. While it is generally understood that both the social and spatial do affect the manner in which space is used and produced within cultural clusters, the question is how. Currently little has been said about the relationship between the social and spatial. Are the two mutually influencing entities or does one precedes the other? To answer these questions, this dissertation will map up the various spatial activities occurring within the two cluster in an attempt to “make an inventory of them, try and ascertain what paradigm gives them their meaning and what syntax governs their organisation.”