Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents critiques of how kampongs are relabelled as 'creative' but the development strategies are not clearly designed to support creativity and innovation processes

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a typical example of how a globally-recognised notion of creativity is interpreted and used as a tool for stimulating local development in a developing country, inter alia, through city (re)branding. We examine the case of Bandung, an Indonesian city, particularly on how the local government used the creative city momentum in managing kampongs (community clusters). The local government relabelled several kampongs as creative in order to rejuvenate the brand image of those old clusters, which often reflect long-established community businesses. However, the local government has not gone beyond relabelling and pays less attention to the nature of and strategies for promoting creativity and innovation in the kampongs. In fact, those kampongs reflect two different conditions. First, despite various limitations, some kampongs have evolved and show potentials for accommodating innovation in an informal situation. In some cases, the local government does not bother with the informal status of the economic activities present in the kampongs, even if the activities do not fit the land use plan. Rather, informality is used as a strength of developing (or branding) the kampongs. Second, others do not show any form of innovation and thus, the rebranding strategy does not help revitalise the business conditions in the kampongs. Anchoring to the case studies from several kampongs in Bandung, creativity is defined as the acuteness to foresee the opportunity of creating jobs, instead of using the sensitivity to generate innovation.