Comedia (consultancy)

Comedia was founded in Britain in 1978 by Charles Landry. It stands for a combination of 'communication' and 'media'. Initially Comedia was a publisher focusing on two areas: how activist organizations got their message across and second it described the dynamics of the emerging cultural industries sector later known as the creative industries or creative economy. In 1985 it sold its list of 70 publications to Routledge.

In its early years it was instrumental in highlighting the economic and cultural potential of the creative economy by measuring their impact in places like London, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona, Cracow, Manchester and South Africa. The sector is a set of growing interlocking industry that focus on creating and exploiting intellectual property products; like music, books, film, and games, or providing business-to-business creative services such as advertising, public relations and direct marketing. It includes too live performance. Economic activities focussed on designing, making and selling objects or works of art such as jewellery, haute couture, books of poetry or other creative writing, or fine art also often feature in definitions because of the value deriving from a high degree of aesthetic originality.

Since the mid-1980s Comedia’s focus has been on how cities can revitalize their public, social and economic life and how cultural activity or the creative economy might help this process. This work increasingly broadened out to how cities communicate their ambition to their citizens and the wider world and how in turn citizens can more actively shape their urban future.

Comedia tried then to explore how creativity, a cultural perspective, greater design sensitivity or using the artistic imagination could make cities a more enriching experience as well as be a source of economic well-being.

The need for businesses to be more creative had already by the early 1980s begun to be the accepted canon. Then people became increasingly interested in how the imagination associated with artists, scientists or explorers could also be useful for cities looking to rethink their purposes and ambition as well as change their image in the light of the growing, intense global competition.

Comedia’s goal was to highlight emerging themes, to challenge orthodoxy, to be innovative and controversial. Examples were studies 'Out of Hours' in 1989 a study of 10 British cities that brought attention to the potential of the 'night time economy'. In 1993 'Borrowed Time looked at how libraries could reinvent themselves for the 21st century given new trends in communication. Other studies look at the future of cemeteries, parks, museums.

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