During this afternoon, at Casa da Música, in Porto, a conference on Creative Cities Strategies, held by Creative Industries Worskhop(CIW2010), an event from Universidade do Porto/P.INC, Universidade Católica, University of Austin - Texas and ADDICT, some important issues were lightened up about Creative Cities and Creative Industries Clusters. Guests included Michael da Costa Babb (ADDICT), David Gibson (IC2 Institute) and Mehjabeen Price (South West Screen), on creative cluster projects, and Mark Hall (“Fish: Global Sushi”), António Ferreira (“Embargo”) and Marta Reis (Black & White) on film projects.

One of the things that I’ve certainly learned was the way several creative clusters are working in other countries, and I understood that, although we are a step away from environments like Austin or Bristol, we have the full potential - and I think the eager - to strive and make this subject of major economic return. References on that are the spontaneous Braga “music cluster” that is building an incredible visible creative movement, as well as STOP (Porto ancient mall) that is the “musicnest” to several bands. What lacks, as the speakers said, in several similar events, is coordination.

David Gibson gave the example of the old Austin Airport that became a music stage to newborn musicians and film studios for the Austin Film Society, a non profit society that supports film production in Austin, and several other initiatives that made Austin a capital of creative industries, specially music, film and interactive, specially with SXSW (Hugh Forrest, from SXSW Interactive, was in Porto, at Future Places Festival 2009, talking about the strenghts of the Festival).

Prentiss Riddle (IC2) presented the “Branding a city” pannel, which made me realize that you can’t create a creative city if you don’t invest (time, money, knowledge, connections) on building the “bridge” to get to the other side of the river. Just like in Porto, where you have the trigger, the entrepeneurship and the will of making it happen - either from a tradition of industrial economy, or the variety of origins of Porto inhabitants, or the human factor in multi and intercultural environments (as Mehjabeen Price said in her presentation) or the budget availability difference from the capital, or the cultural and creative scene that has been built up, or several other issues.

Porto is happening. Creating, ‘creativiting’ and making several things happen without resources or top knowledge, before. Now we have resources, what can’t we do? :)

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