Urban Creative Poles

URBAN CREATIVE POLES (UCP) is an international project financed by the Baltic Sea Region Programme. Five European cities – Cottbus (Germany), Linköping (Sweden), Klaipeda (Lithuania), Tartu (Estonia) and Zielona Góra (Poland) – have entered into collaboration in the framework of the project. The project ran from December 2010 till December 2013.

The objective is to create and apply good practices in the public sector to promote cultural and creative industries (CCI) as growing economic sector and basis for innovations in the strife for the knowledge-based economy. This includes the improvement of framework conditions, the promotion of entrepreneurial skills and competitiveness of CCI, the improvement of their external visibility through transnational marketing and networking and the exploitation of potentials in the development of decayed urban areas through the allocation of creative industries in those districts.

A set of set of activities was carried out, starting from mapping different fields of creative industries and ending with local activities but also joint actions between the cities.

This e-learning is a collection of those activities and best-practice examples within the scope of the UCP project.

The examples show the variety of approaches for fostering and promoting CCI on local as well as on international level. With this collection we try to give recommendations to other municipalities, economic development agencies and other institutions in medium-sized cities. Additionally this e-learning leaves space to add your own examples and comment on our activities.