Detroit is a global center of creative activity. It is home to some of the highest concentrations of industrial and commercial designers, advertising and marketing professionals and fine and performing artists in the country.
Don’t trust me? Well click on over to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have the numbers to support these assertions.
Despite these numbers, Detroit’s creative community remains scattered throughout the region–a region covering more than 1,200 square miles. Missing is the creative density that has come to define other global creative centers: centers where creative talent lives, works, develops relationships and develops skills, centers that have come to define regions and help them tell their story of economic transformation and economic relevance.
The Detroit Creative Corridor Center (the DC3) is a partnership between Business Leaders for Michigan and the College for Creative Studies whose vision is to establish Detroit as a global center of creative business, creative innovation and creative talent. Its work: developing a series of strategic interventions whose focus is to encourage the creative density necessary to position Detroit’s creative community as a formidable economic engine. Such efforts surround business acceleration for creative sector businesses; creative sector business attraction strategy and analysis; and developing creative community networks, recognition and development.
In developing these interventions, our staff has come across case study after case study which identifies physical space for creative activity, learning and development as a feasible and value-added intervention that will cultivate a strong pipeline of economic growth, connectivity and innovation needed to grow Detroit’s creative community.
With support from the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, the DC3 will launch a prototype studio to serve as an idea incubator of sorts for Detroit’s Creative Corridor in spring of 2011. It is a 2,500 square foot flexible and technology rich studio whose work environments and service offerings are designed to position growing creative firms for prosperity and growth in Detroit. On site business development consultants and partners will assist member firms with planning and strategic needs. Membership will be flexible to accommodate daily, weekly and monthly users–and creative professional development organizations will be invited to host meetings, skills-building sessions and other activities in the space so as to cultivate community. Best of all, it is located in the main concourse of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, the College for Creative Studies’ new and resource-rich home to its various design programs.
Think of the studio as co-working space meets accelerator services, with access to some pretty unique and world-class resources as a result of our partnership with College for Creative Studies and location in the Taubman Center.