Creative and cultural industries within port environments: a smart specialization strategy for southern Italy

Within the contemporary economy of networks, the production of services, made of capital flows and immaterial information fluxes, has overcome the material production. The urban systems have become the nodes of these global networks, standing at the intersection points of the flows of capital, goods, workers, businesses and travelers, making them the spots where innovation, progress and economic development occur. At the urban level, it emerges the importance of the business environment, comprehending physical spaces based on the concept of proximity, that boost the cross-fertilization potential, by strengthening formal and informal networks between people. These pockets of urbanity and density have the ability to trigger innovation, which reveals itself as a spatial and knowledge-based process, that emerges from the collision of different actors and leads the process of the economic development, stimulating productivity and competitiveness. Thus, the primary challenge for cities is to create and support ecosystems able to enrich knowledge flows and innovation activities. In this sense, it is necessary to capture the global opportunities, while enhancing the most strategical territorial assets with the highest potential for innovation. The Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) can be identified among these cutting-edge, territorially-embedded activities and can be stimulated by the Smart Specialization Strategy framework. This background will be examined also within the lagging environments, in order to address the question of where the transformations dictated by innovation are currently occurring. Port cities will be explored, starting from the assumption that they are the best places to experiment changes, being multicultural gateways open to global connections that can contribute to the urban development. The explanatory issue of their significance within the laboratorization process of cities will be addressed. For this purpose, the logistic of ports will mingle with the flows of capital of cities, considering the knowledge and human side of the port-city environments, by deepening the sectors of Culture and Creativity. This will be done on the basis of an international comparative perspective about the relationship between port cities and innovation, using a mixed methodology based on pragmatic assumptions. Consideration will be given to both on-desk and on-field data, including exploratory Interviews to Key Informants. The study will be conducted considering twenty cities, within the European and American contexts, chosen for their employment levels within the CCIs. By examining their physical, socioeconomic and innovation ecosystems, it will be possible to acknowledge the fact that port cities are the contemporary spatial hubs of transformation and the primary platforms spurring the growth processes through innovation. These spots concentrate great proportions of Cultural and Creative employment and innovation spaces and present higher levels of innovation and competitiveness. Their multiculturalism emerges as a factor of innovative dynamism. The core of the investigation will be the analysis of the case studies, in view of the necessity to understand the forces acting in the emerging innovation spots within cities for transferring the model into a lagging context, shaping it to the specific needs. In this regard, the barriers to growth will be highlighted, comprehending the economic desertification, the waste of human resources and the diffuse Learned Helplessness sensation, resulting in the difficulty to spur the Local Economic Development. Innovation can play a pivotal role in this sense, leveraging the CCIs as main driving forces. The research will focus in particular on the city of Reggio Calabria and will create a model pointing out the importance of port environments and CCIs finalized within a Cultural District, anchored at an academic institution. It will be planned as a connector of elements able to stimulate the development and to create synergies between innovation, human capital and resources, implementing the sense of ownership of the place and promoting the social change, able to shift the Learned Helplessness into a Learned Hopefulness, recalling the “Theory of Change”. The study paves the way for a debate around the spatial hubs of transformation within the knowledge economy, leveraging the importance of the added value of ports and CCIs, both in strong and lagging contexts.