{"id":44079,"date":"2026-06-25T11:33:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T03:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.socsc.hku.hk\/?post_type=school_news&p=44079"},"modified":"2026-07-30T17:44:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T09:44:57","slug":"the-challenge-to-creative-cities","status":"publish","type":"school_news","link":"https:\/\/web.socsc.hku.hk\/tc\/school_news\/the-challenge-to-creative-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"The Challenge to \u2018Creative Cities\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was originally published in HKU Bulletin<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Creative activities tend to cluster in places such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but could this change with AI?<\/div>\n
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Geographers have long observed that creative economic activities tend to cluster in space. Despite technological advances and books such as\u00a0The World Is Flat<\/em>\u00a0by Thomas Friedman, the need for workers to gather in person has persisted, especially for activities requiring creative thinking and input, such as finance and software innovations and film production.<\/p>\n

But the advent of AI has put a new question mark over clustering.\u00a0Professor Patrick Adler<\/a>\u00a0in the Department of Geography, who specialises in the creative economy, has started to grapple with the issue.<\/p>\n

The digital age and the emergence of diffusion technologies, such as the Internet, personal computers and mobile devices, were predicted to replace the need to cluster. This did not happen because revenue and new technologies continued to be generated from clusters, and teams still needed to meet face-to-face to function properly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith AI, though, something transformative is happening because it lowers the number of people you need on a team. You don\u2019t need to be centred anymore. Maybe,\u201d he said, \u201cthis time will be different.\u201d<\/p>\n

He pointed to the prediction, first mooted two years ago by OpenAI\u2019s CEO Sam Altman, that a one-person, US$1 billion company is on the horizon \u2013 something that would be built by an individual using AI with no other humans explicitly involved.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very instructive that OpenAI is very small, that the DeepSeek team is very small. You would have thought they would need thousands of people, but they don\u2019t. If there are smaller teams, there will be less need to concentrate physically. So it appears AI could become a decentring force,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Lessons from the recent past<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the other hand, there is the traditional importance of teams and collaboration to creative output, especially when it comes to complex products such as films and new phone technology. Being in close proximity not only makes workers more productive, it makes them perform better, he said. They establish common standards, which is important for maintaining and increasing quality. Knowing those standards and not having to explain them to each other can also speed up production. Clustering also fosters trust and encourages innovation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re living in the same physical community as your buyers or the people you\u2019re buying from, you\u2019re going to be able to take more risks because you trust more. And there\u2019s the idea that you will treat each other fairly today because you\u2019ll have to encounter each other again tomorrow. When you\u2019re less physically proximate, that\u2019s less the case.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recent past has also shown that, if anything, technology might make proximity even more important. Despite the advent of email and instant messaging, the most important decisions still get made face-to-face.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe never would have predicted that \u2013 the idea would have been that more work would happen at a distance because of the technology. But somehow, this increased the value of being close to the centre. People who are near head office do better than people who are far away. Another countervailing point is that the AI companies, like Nvidia and OpenAI, are all coming from the Bay Area, and they\u2019re even more concentrated than in previous technological waves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Hong Kong also has a concentration of people involved in what Professor Adler calls \u2018creative inputs\u2019 \u2013 using creativity and cognitive powers to generate value in finance, consulting and the like. The Greater Bay Area is starting to see clustering similar to Silicon Valley, while Korea has become a global hub of creative products.<\/p>\n

Transitions matter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Still, AI threatens to disrupt things. To avert that, he believes the transition to the technology needs to be handled carefully, especially given the current unevenness of its adoption. In areas such as coding, it is replacing core work, while in fields like film production, adoption is patchy \u2013 visual effects specialists and film editors are embracing it, but screenwriters are shunning it. AI adoption may also require additional time spent interacting with it and monitoring its output, at least initially, which could reduce productivity. These transitional costs should not be left to chance, though.<\/p>\n

\u201cTransitions matter. It\u2019s a mistake to think that we will just eventually adopt these technologies, because while that may be true, the ones we adopt really matter. The wrong technology could predominate,\u201d he said, citing the example of Betamax, which was technologically superior to VHS [Video Home System] but stumbled at the market.<\/p>\n

Creative industries therefore need to recognise that AI is here to stay and act on that. \u201cThe question is, is there something transformative about AI where people don\u2019t need to be centred anymore? You don\u2019t want to be historically na\u00efve, but these technologies are qualitatively different and they are disruptive. We\u2019ve been here before, so it\u2019s worth thinking through what happened in the recent past,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

With AI, though, something transformative is happening because it lowers the number of people you need on a team. You don\u2019t need to be centred anymore.<\/p>\n

Professor Patrick Adler<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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