Artistic creative clusters in France : a statistical approach

The Knowledge economy stresses the importance of localised knowledge as immaterial factor in the new competitive world. In this sense, creativity is considered to be a crucial element of our innovation capacity, while innovation is one of the main determinants of growth and competitiveness in modern economies. However, the territorial dimension is not always given due attention. Indeed despite the emphasis put in the literature on the lack of uniform distribution of creativity throughout space, some analytical work appears to be still necessary regarding the patterns of distribution of different types of creative industries in France. Given the relation between culture and local development a particularly interesting creative industry is the artistic sector. In this line, using 1999 Census data, 63 French artistic creative local labour systems have been identified on the basis of zones d’emploi as territorial units, with a special focus on two different artistic sectors :recreational, cultural and sporting activities ; publishing, printing and reproduction of recorded media. The initial hypothesis that the localisation of artistic industries is more concentrated than the localisation of total employment, has been confirmed,as shown for instance in Paris and its surrounding area. The relevance of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it provides applied evidence of artistic industries’ clusters in France. Secondly, it is focused on the zones d’emploi as territorial units, which have been used rarely in previous research