Conclusion: A ‘Slow Creative Industries’ Movement?

Abstract

Though this book has covered much ground, the one constant throughout has been the complex affordances and sensory relationships intersecting cultural work and place, particularly the multifaceted encounters with the natural environment: individual and collective, productive and restricting, detrimental and sympathetic. The project grew out of my own direct experiences of the fraught negotiations that friends who were committed to what I have referred to as ‘good’ cultural work have faced while trying to balance the precariousness of creative employment, personal ethics and the need for an income. The latter comes with an added imperative with the arrival of children. While a few may not have had to give up their ‘dream’, they may have tempered their expectations a little, being grateful for secure employment in allied industries such as arts and cultural management or teaching (including at a tertiary level which additionally affords the innovative creative space of research). Others still, especially in Australia, have made the sea- or tree-change move in search of more affordable housing in a nation where five of the six state capital cities feature in global top 20 lists of the world’s most expensive cities to live, where even Adelaide outranks in terms of housing affordability London, Rome, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro (Dowling, 2012). Having regularly commuted between Adelaide, London and Manchester to undertake this study, this comes as little surprise.

I can’t understand all these industries where vast amounts of money are made but they’re not actually making anything. I can’t — I just don’t get it. I can have it explained to me and I just don’t get it, actually. Seems to me that actually that’s what people have always done. They’ve traded things that they’ve made and I just don’t understand this credit swaps or whatever. You know, like I just don’t get that… my family were manufacturers, so there was always a product. (60–69-year-old female potter, Lake District)