Spatial and temporal emergence of casual creative environments in Brisbane

Australia’s policy reports ‘Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy’ in 1994 and ‘Creative Australia’ in 2013 aim to ensure creative and cultural sectors, e.g. creative industries, to actively participate in the country’s innovation ecosystem. Following these policy reports, Queensland Government formed the ‘Smart State Strategy’ in 2007 and Brisbane City Council formulated ‘Brisbane Economic Development Plan 2012-2031’ as ‘building blocks’ to foster ideas, imagination, creativity and innovation. These strategic plans found formally planned implementations of creativity and knowledge spaces in Brisbane Local Government Area (LGA), e.g. Creative Industries Precinct in Kelvin Grove. However, informal private creativity and knowledge spaces grow in numbers all over the world, e.g. coworking spaces (Bouncken and Reuschl 2016). Today’s knowledge workers who are not bound to their office desk use these spaces as a work place for networking and coworking, while others seek to learn new skills and tinkering opportunities as suggested by the experience economy. Besides the formal implementations in the city, there is a need for understanding spatial and temporal emergence of creativity and knowledge spaces in Brisbane LGA. A holistic overview of these spaces might help to inform policy makers, decision makers, urban planners and others in planning and managing the city according to the creative and innovative citizens’ needs. Therefore, this paper explores informally emerged creative and knowledge spaces which are crucial for the knowledge and experience economy more in depth