An international consensus has emerged on the need for strong and early action on sustainable development, involving creative initiatives aimed at improving the quality and diversity of life in new ecologically and creatively informed developments. But there has been relatively little research completed on how the collaboration and internationalization of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) from emerging markets like China can power this process. In particular, SMEs are more vulnerable to the threats of globalization than larger companies despite their important role in the local economy. Hence this paper will take a bottom-up approach, focusing on the needs in this respect of Chinese “stigmatized” cities, which have benefited economically from industrial development over the past decade, but with severe consequences for the inhabitants, ranging from air pollution, transportation nightmares, ant-social housing, lack of diversity of indigenous services and facilities, and community destruction. The first part of this paper will describes the current problems/developments of the creative industries context in China and how this impacts on SMEs. Then it identifies deficits and problems on existing theories and practice regarding to SME cluster building in the face of globalization, taking a critical social psychological perspective. After addressing shortcomings of the traditional, mainly top-down, approaches and how they may be overcome by taking a bottom-up creative approach to building collaboration between SMEs, the paper confronts the question: how can GDACS (Group decision authoring and communication support) provide a suitable facilitating infrastructure for SMEs' cooperation in a creative industries cluster integrating both top-down and bottom-up perspectives and activities? It considers in particular the case of the building of a multinational SME cluster by the International Creative Industries Alliance (ICIA) of Beijing, following the ICIA's aim to “engage in real-world implementation cases, achieving results and producing outputs in ways that give new social, community, ecological and economic benefits”.