No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
If ever Joseph Schumpeter’s (1942) notion of ‘a gale of creative destruction’ has applicability it is to Vancouver, British Columbia. Over the course of the last 25 years, immensely powerful gusts of economic change, cyclonic in their energy, have destroyed Vancouver’s old urban economy based on processing natural resources like lumber and fi sh. In their place, a ‘new economy’ has been erected resting on creative, weightless industries like those in the new media. Consequently, the old inner city where resource activities happened, and where resource- processing workers lived, has been torn up and remade. Even some of Vancouver’s suburbs, particularly the oldest, Burnaby, lying directly to the east of the city, have experienced a radical makeover as former light industrial and warehouse spaces were reconstructed as movie studios and ‘dream factories’ for the manufacture of video games. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the gale of creative destruction that has touched down in Vancouver, transforming the city into, among other things, a media cluster. In particular, we focus on two of the city’s media industries, both of which generate over a billion Canadian dollars in revenue each year: video games and fi lm and TV production. The chapter is divided into fi ve substantive sections followed by a brief conclusion. First, we outline the recent historical transformation of Vancouver from a staples- producing local metropole to a world city that is now one of the termini on the global media industry’s international circuit of labour, capital and ideas. Secondly, we discuss the origins, development and geography of the video games and fi lm/TV clusters within Vancouver. Thirdly, we describe the particular critical institutional contexts that diff erentially have borne upon and shaped the development of the two clusters, and which include the role of the state, labour organizations and non- profi t institutions. Fourthly, we identify the internal dynamics propelling each of the two industrial clusters, setting their respective future trajectories and constraints. Finally, we speculate about the two industries’ future prospects, which include the blurring of the boundaries that so far have kept them distinct.
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.