Creative Industries, governmentalities and heterotopias: the case of local government in France

Creative industries, since 1997, have become assets for economic and cultural development. Nations around the world, at different political levels, are now focusing on the development of a creative industries policy. The success of this concept can be linked to the fact that this meta-sector has one of the highest levels of economic growth in these last years. Despite the growing number of studies on creative industries, the rationale behind the implementation of this type of policy remains unclear. We seek to further understand how and why local governments are participating in creative industries and how it is spatially acted, by using the concepts of governmentality and heterotopias, as defined by Foucault (1991a, 1997), to explore the rationality and the dynamics behind this policy.

Our study focuses on the case of the “Grand Lyon” and its economic development agency. In early 2006, Lyon decided to launch a creative industries policy focused on its two existing creative clusters linked to fashion and video games, Lyon Vision Mode and Lyon Game respectively. A transversal approach was taken to include various and often unconnected sectors. Lyon is the third largest French city with a strong industrial economy. The city has the ambition to be in the top fifteen of the creative regions in Europe.

Our results demonstrate that, first of all, the practices of creative industries highlight the different types of technologies that were expressing the rationality and mentality of the ‘governors’. We also found that the policy deployed by the local government created two types of heterotopias (Foucault, 1997). These separate and different spaces appeared as places for creativity in the development and implementation of the creative industries strategy. These heterotopias help to build a sense of community among the participants, and create a tribe, clan, or as defined by Florida (2002), a class.