Murray Living: an argument for the future of creative industries in regional communities

This paper looks at the potential role of creative industries for regional communities, by presenting preliminary research conducted in the Murray Darling Basin in a project we have called Murray Living. The current focus of the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin is on regional economics and bio-diversity, as detailed in the MDBA project The Living Murray. Our project Murray Living, is premised on the corresponding need to investigate the socio-diversity of the Basin by looking at experience of regional living. The communities located in the villages, towns and cities of the Murray-Darling Basin have been derived from the agricultural landscape. The relationship between this landscape and townscape is clearly defined by the historic boundaries between agriculture and urban culture creating rural islands of population clusters. The concept of regional development, once imagined to be unlimited, is now on a collision course with new kinds of limits ' limits to biodiversity and flows of energy and water ' in contrast to increasingly unlimited flows of digital streams, leaving regions to compete for population and productivity, and stretching the boundaries of regional identity. The research revisited the historic agri/urban boundaries to determine how people experience this condition based on the necessity to propose new forms for regional living and landscape. Murray Living asked people in the Murray-Darling Basin to illustrate their experience of living in this contested region of Australia, by using a research methodology previously developed for the city of Glasgow.