An Urban Policy Framework for Culture-oriented Economic Development: Lessons from the Netherlands

Abstract

Over the past few decades, culture and creativity have been at the center of the shift in urban economies toward the non-material and the relational. In the new "cultural-economic" paradigm, the hypermobile class of creative workers and symbolic mediators is considered the vanguard of the knowledge society, and is nurtured and competed for by an increasing number of ambitious city governments. However, the integration of creative talent into the urban economy is not without problems: many cities are rapidly coming to realize that "traditional" approaches to economic development offer little help in the case of cultural industries, and that their impacts could be short-lived or socially ambivalent. More insight is thus needed into the dynamic relationships between culture and urban development, and on their implications for policymaking. This study is an attempt to build such knowledge, using qualitative information on four Dutch cities that have chosen culture as one of the spearheads of urban policy: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Eindhoven.