Street Art Fair 2016 Credit: Hanoi Creative City 

 

Journalist and media consultant Truong Uyen Ly took an ethnographic approach to researching creative hubs and policy concerns around the operation of hubs in Vietnam. The report starts with giving an overview on the situation of the cultural/creative industries and creative hubs, with an analysis of where they currently are within the legal system.

Key parts in this report present information from conversations with hubs owners, managers, and collaborators that establish a picture of how creative hubs are run on the ground. Voices from the creative hubs are strongly represented throughout the report; hub owners generously share about what they would want from policy makers and how they overcome existing challenges in their work.

Towards the end, the report offers a quick estimation of the scale of creative hubs community in Vietnam, which involves over 100,000 people through both online and offline platforms. The main conclusions of the report stresses the key challenges of addressing the lack of mutual understanding between local authorities and creative hubs. The growing presence of creative hubs, their communities and networks in Vietnam also means they urgently need the government’s support with practical policies and consistent actions and decisions from authorities of all levels to help increasing their contribution to the cultural and creative industries, and more broadly to the creative economy.