Broadening the Perspective of Urban Cultural Policy: Mapping the Agglomeration of Creative Industries in Istanbul

The creative industry in Istanbul has long been closely associated with the city’s central urban areas. However, the urban periphery has its own, highly localized, creative industry profiles that often go overlooked in urban cultural policy. This paper aims to chart the local specializations in creative industry agglomerations, and in doing so to uncover patterns in the coexistence of certain creative industry subsectors in particular neighborhoods. By focusing on copresences rather than volume of activity, the paper shows that while Istanbul’s creative industry may be concentrated in established inner-city locations, various subsectors deviate from this. Certain neighborhoods in the middle and outer urban areas have distinct creative industry agglomeration profiles, and this show potential to develop into their own creative habitats through the copresence dynamic. The paper’s descriptive and analytical approach to the spatial organization of the creative industry promises to expand Istanbul’s current urban cultural policy approach, which fails to fully acknowledge the diversity and interconnectedness of creative industry activities in the city’s periphery.