Local planning practices and institutional innovation of the creative city: the case of Taipei City

Abstract

Introduction The city’s institutional responses toward the making of creative cities has become a crucial issue for contemporary urban governance and planning studies (Scott, 2011). Although the exchange of academic knowledge has sped up transference of the normative creative policy from Western cities to East Asian cities over the last decade (Kong et al., 2006; Evans, 2009), less research has focused discussions on the mobility policy of creative city and related planning practices in Asian urban contexts. Particularly, globalising discourses of creative city policy become hegemonic projects that are widely circulated to influence local planning practices; this transnational concept has then been differentiated, adopted, and translated into a new policy panacea by justifying the spatial planning practices for creative industries and individuals (Peck, 2005; Grodach, 2012; Evans, 2009). While the inter-cities network of creative city policy is constantly structured through the mechanism of policy mobility and territorialisation processes (Prince, 2010, 2012), cultural contradictions emerge between global ‘best practices’ and the territorialisation process of the creative city concept, generating socio-economic and institutional tensions in the implementation process of urban development.