Creativity at the European Periphery: Spatial Distribution and Developmental Implications in the Ljubljana Region

Abstract

The concept of creativity has become a core and inevitable issue in crucial current discussions about economic development, competitiveness, social cohesion, urban regeneration, and wellbeing. Even though it has spread globally in the last two decades, the discussions are still highly concentrated on (a) developed countries of the Western world and (b) metropolitan and urban areas. Few studies have analysed the transitional and developing countries that, in many respects, represent Europe’s and/or the world’s periphery. There is an even greater lack of studies at the sub-metropolitan level, where another type of core versus periphery relation is present (rural vs. urban or city vs. countryside). This chapter addresses these insufficiently researched issues using the example of the Ljubljana region in Slovenia, which constitutes the fringes of European territory from the economic and geographic perspectives. The results show that the creative class and creative industries play an important developmental role in the Ljubljana region despite its macro-regional peripherality. At the sub-metropolitan scale, a slight shift of creatives towards rural areas is noticeable, raising further policy and research questions.