Citizens who post on YouTube or Facebook, upload their music profiles on the internet or blog are helping to make their cities among the world's most creative and dynamic places to live.
A world-first index designed to assess how creative different cities were around the globe showed that internet content generated by their citizens was what helped set the most creative cities apart, said Dr Jason Potts, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology.
Comparing cities such as London, Cardiff, Melbourne, Brisbane, Berlin and Bremen, the index was commissioned by the Beijing Research Centre for Science of Science (BJSS) to identify places with the greatest sources of creative development.
"Global cities are increasingly engaged in intense competition with each other in the process of globalisation," Dr Potts said.
"The most important factor in this competition is 'human capital', meaning enterprising, talented and creative individuals.
"Creative people and their interactions help drive socio-cultural and economic evolution, and this is the main reason our index focuses on them."
The CCI Creative City Index was developed by Professor John Hartley, Dr Jason Potts and University of Queensland PhD student Trent MacDonald, with research assistance from Chris Erkunt and Carl Kufleitner, also from UQ.
Dr Potts said that earlier creative city indices emphasised factors such as public spending on cultural events, visits to galleries or the number of theatres and restaurants.
"This is what we call passive consumption, and the results have been similar between cities," he said.
"We felt that in the age of digital literacy, we should also investigate the active role of individual citizens in adding to creativity, which no other study has previously done.
"So we've included the role of the creative and engaged citizen in making and producing - uploading and not just downloading - creative cultural content. We call this 'microproductivity', and it is where we find the biggest contrasts between cities."
Out of 300 factors measured in the study, the main indicators of microproductivity included the number of video uploads to YouTube that come with the city name, the number of music profiles uploaded on the internet, images uploaded or tagged and the number of social networking users of the most popular platforms.
Using the new index, London came in with the highest score at 83.6, followed by Berlin with 49.2, Melbourne with 41.8 and Brisbane with 37.0.
"What it means is that people living in London are each producing almost twice as much digital media content - not that it's a bigger city," Dr Potts said.
"For instance, for Google Images, London had 82 million uploads in total and Melbourne and Brisbane had around four million each.
"We expected that London would come in first place, and previous indices have indicated that London was a more creative city than Melbourne, but these new results show that the difference has been widely underestimated.
"While both cities have similar passive consumption of culture, Londoners on average are far more active when it comes to sharing their ideas, creations and culture on line than are Melburnians.
"Though we did not do a global comparison of all the major cities, our aim was to measure the role of non-professional consumers and users. Doing so, we get a very different picture of what constitutes a creative city when citizens are included.
"This highlights the increasing importance of microproductivity in the cultural, social and economic impact of creative industries."
The CCI Creative City Index is available at http://bit.ly/wuX0jx
Media contact:
Stephanie Harrington, QUT media, 3138 1150, stephanie.harrington@qut.edu.au
