Abstract
The concept of creativity has become a core and inevitable issue in crucial current discussions about economic development, competitiveness, social cohesion, urban regeneration, and wellbeing. Even though it has spread globally in the last two decades, the discussions are still highly concentrated on (a) developed countries of the Western world and (b) metropolitan and urban areas. Few studies have analysed the transitional and developing countries that, in many respects, represent Europe’s and/or the world’s periphery. There is an even greater lack of studies at the sub-metropolitan level, where another type of core versus periphery relation is present (rural vs. urban or city vs. countryside). This chapter addresses these insufficiently researched issues using the example of the Ljubljana region in Slovenia, which constitutes the fringes of European territory from the economic and geographic perspectives. The results show that the creative class and creative industries play an important developmental role in the Ljubljana region despite its macro-regional peripherality. At the sub-metropolitan scale, a slight shift of creatives towards rural areas is noticeable, raising further policy and research questions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
NUTS 3 level usually corresponds to population thresholds between 150,000 and 800,000 (EUROSTAT 2011).
- 4.
LAU 2 level (formerly NUTS 5 level) consists of municipalities or equivalent units in the EU member states (EUROSTAT 2011).
- 5.
Slovenia gained its independence in 1991.
- 6.
In Slovenia there are two levels of government: national and municipal. The regional level is currently defined in various laws that also seek to regulate some activities at the regional level (e.g. in the case of regional policy), but the authorities are still those from the national or local level. The regional development agency is the administrative body that provides administrative activities and technical support to the regional development council (representatives of municipalities, business, and NGOs responsible for preparing the regional development plan, cooperation with other regions, agreement with other parties, territorial dialogue, and monitoring activities at the regional level), the regional council (mayors that ratify the regional development plan and make other decisions at the regional level), and all activities at the regional level. In the case of spatial planning, there is no mandatory body at the regional level; in the case of regional projects, the municipalities involved are expected to make regulations jointly. Altogether there are 12 administrative regions with 12 regional development agencies in Slovenia.
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- 8.
The exact definitions of the creative class and creative industries by using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes are presented in Appendix 11.1.
- 9.
Observation units are persons in Slovenia employed through employment contracts and self-employed persons with compulsory social insurance, regardless of whether they work full time or part time and regardless of whether they are on maternity leave, are on leave for care or protection of a child, or are absent from work due to illness or injury or caring for a family member. The number of persons employed excludes persons working under non-employment contracts (contract work), authorship contracts, working students, persons working for direct payment, unpaid family workers, persons employed by employers based in Slovenia that are sent abroad for work or professional training (i.e. employees of Slovenian enterprises at construction sites abroad, etc.), and Slovenian citizens employed by foreign employers abroad (i.e. in neighbouring countries).
- 10.
The data for both countries take into consideration the number of employees and self-employed in creative industries as a share of total population. The data on employees and self-employed engaged in creative jobs in other industries are omitted from this calculation. The data for Slovenia refer to 2011 and for the UK to 2010.
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Acknowledgement
The work for this chapter was partially supported by the Regional Development Agency of the Ljubljana Urban Region, Regional Creative Economy Centre under contract 1479/13-AC entitled Distribution of Creativity in Selected Municipalities of the Ljubljana Urban Region.
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Kozina, J., Bole, D. (2017). Creativity at the European Periphery: Spatial Distribution and Developmental Implications in the Ljubljana Region. In: Chapain, C., Stryjakiewicz, T. (eds) Creative Industries in Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56497-5_11
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