Urban villages as incubators of creative clusters: the case of Guangzhou

Since the mid-2000s, cultural and creative clusters, especially arts clusters, have flourished across cities and towns in China as a result of local governments' efforts to establish the cultural and creative sector for urban regeneration. Although many clusters arose organically without policy directives, some later encountered intense government interventions after being officialised as the city's strategic cultural industry bases. Arguing that this top-down creative placemaking approach, although seemingly commercially successful, overlooks the needs of grassroots artists – thus compromising the creative nature of the cluster – this paper highlights the nurturing socioeconomic environment attractive to grassroots artists and other creative people created through a bottom-up approach. Through case studies of two arts clusters in Guangzhou, we find that organically grown, village-based artist clusters can better nurture creative people than planned arts districts, for these clusters feature a flexible and autonomous land development arrangement, frequent interactions between artists and village residents, and a broad spectrum of entrepreneurial opportunities.