A Post-Creative City?*

Abstract

Culturally-led urban redevelopment became the norm throughout Europe during the 1990s. It was rationalized as the idea of a creative city – a city for a new creative class – and characterized by the insertion of new art museums in post-industrial zones, the designation of cultural quarters, and the adoption of city branding strategies based on reductive images of the city as a cultural site. In some cases, local cultures were marginalized; in others, the promised new prosperity did not arrive while the aestheticisation of space led to gentrification. The creative city is not a socially coherent but – in contrast to the modernist city of public well-being – a socially divisive city, in which culture as the arts is privileged over culture as the articulation of shared values in everyday life. The 2008 financial services crisis has interrupted this trajectory, however, providing an opportunity to re-assess the idea of a creative city and the values implicit in it. Alternatives emerge in direct action – notably Occupy in 2011-12 – and activist art. Could there be a post-creative city? Could the creative imagination of diverse urban groups lead to new socio-political as well as cultural formations? That might be another urban revolution.