Creative City Policies Research Articles

Introduction to SI: Against the creative city: Activism in the creative city: When cultural workers fight against creative city policy

Abstract This special issue explores artists' and cultural workers’ activism in the context of urban social movements opposing creative city policy, focusing in particular on the meanings and images of creativity that emerge from this confrontation. Today this theme is important because it reveals a glaring contradiction in many culturally based urban policies currently being implemented, which have the explicit objective of fostering creativity but leave cultural workers out of their development. Cultural workers have begun to contest those policies nowadays as several authors have already been able to document (Boren and Young, 2013; Novy & Colomb, 2013), which this special issue will also contribute to. This contestation is the best proof of the paradoxical divorce between cultural workers and policy makers in charge of creative city policy. For some, like David Harvey, The confrontation results from the intensive instrumental use of culture and the arts in contemporary capitalist cities as a resource for socioeconomic development, an exploitation scheme that had also been denounced by Zukin, 1989 , Zukin, 1995 ) a long time ago.

Building alternatives to the creative turn in Barcelona: The case of the socio-cultural centre Can Batlló

Creative city policies have been critically assessed at length. Nevertheless, the bottom-up initiatives that go beyond and challenge the meaning and uses of creativity that underpin creative city policies, have received less attention. Thus, the aim of this paper is to study the nature of local Socially Innovative Initiatives (Moulaert; MacCallum; Mehmood & Hamdouch, 2013) developed in the socio-cultural field and their capacity to counterbalance the tendency towards a market rationality in urban cultural affairs. We examine this problem through a significant case study: the community-managed socio-cultural centre Can Batlló opened in 2011 in an old industrial neighbourhood of Barcelona. By analysing this case we propose to explore how and to what extent Socially Innovative Initiatives offer alternatives to creative city policies focusing on the production of socio-cultural services and innovation in governance and decision-making processes. We have collected data using qualitative methods that include observation, in-depth interviews and the study of documentary sources.

Creative City Policy in France: Case studies on Creative City Development Projects of Nantes

Creative City Policy in France: Case studies on Creative City Development Projects of Nantes

Processes and Outcomes of Creative City Policies: Case Studies on the UK, France, Australia, Japan and Korea

Processes and Outcomes of Creative City Policies: Case Studies on the UK, France, Australia, Japan and Korea

Processes and Outcomes of Creative City Policies: Case Studies on UK-Tech City

Processes and Outcomes of Creative City Policies: Case Studies on UK-Tech City

Hos in the garden: Staging and resisting neoliberal creativity

This article takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on arts interventions and creative city policies by considering the role of feminist and queer artistic praxis in contemporary urban politics. Here I reflect on the complicities and potentialities of two Toronto-based arts interventions: Dig In and the Dirty Plotz cabaret. I analyse an example of community based arts strategy that strived to ‘revitalise’ one disinvested Toronto neighbourhood. I also reflect on my experience performing drag king urban planner, Toby Sharp. Reflecting on these examples, I show how market-oriented arts policies entangle women artists in the cultivation of spaces of depoliticised feminism, homonormativity and white privilege. However, I also demonstrate how women artists are playfully and performatively pushing back at hegemonic regimes with the radical aesthetic praxis of cabaret. I maintain that bringing critical feminist arts spaces and cabaret practice into discussions about neoliberal urban policies uncovers sites of feminist resistance and solidarity, interventions that challenge violent processes of colonisation and privatisation on multiple fronts.

Artists and creative city policy: Resistance, the mundane and engagement in Stockholm, Sweden

Much of the literature around notions of the ’creative class’ and the ‘creative city’ has placed artists as a central, typical creative group. However, that literature has often placed artists in a conceptual dichotomy - either they are seen as uncritical champions of creative city policy (because it boosts their profile and markets) or they are placed in radical opposition to it. This paper explores the attitudes of a sample of artists in Stockholm, Sweden to open this dichotomy up to a more nuanced critique. The analysis considers the diversity of views, attitudes and perceptions of these artists towards creative city policy. While opposition and resistance to the application of creative city policy can certainly be found, the paper seeks to move beyond this to examine how the lack of accord between creative producers and policy-makers can be the outcome of more mundane, everyday practices. In addition, artists join together in specific projects and loose, ephemeral networks to address the issues surrounding the implementation of creative city policy in ways which oppose it but also seek alternatives through engaging planners and the public. Overall the paper calls for an understanding of artists which goes beyond the enthusiast/opponent dichotomy towards developing an understanding of the diverse range of artist responses and engagement with creative city policy.

Culturally creative cities in Japan: Reality and prospects

The creative city concept was recently introduced in Japan as an urban planning tool with the potential to alleviate social and economic problems related to cities. This differs from previous approaches to urban planning creativity in Japan in that it focuses on culture, the creative arts in particular, rather than science and technology. It has considerable appeal for cities addressing difficulties with on-going globalization, economic stagnation, and depopulation. However, the real volume of the so-called creative industries (which embody the creative city concept) is not large and is not growing, despite high expectations.This paper examines the case of creative city policy in the city of Kanazawa, which has formally adopted the creative craft city strategy, using advanced design capabilities to revitalize traditional craft industries. Conventional market-based analysis indicates that it is very difficult to halt the decline of such industries, which are steadily losing competitiveness. On the other hand, promotion of traditional craft industries and other capacity-building measures does help to increase the attractiveness of a city, and indirectly supports service oriented industries including cultural tourism. Thus, creative city policy can enhance cultural assets and contribute to a shift from previous growth models, which were largely dependent on manufacturing, to a more service-oriented and sustainable model. This would lead to an increase in visitors and consumption, and would eventually support the maintenance of the urban functions essential for Japanese cities with decreasing populations.

Locating creative city policy in East Asia: neoliberalism, developmental state and assemblage of East Asian cities

This paper attempts to map how creative city policy emerged as a new form of urban politics in East Asia. It locates the emergence of creative city policy within the East Asian context, where the current political economic movement of neoliberalism intersects with the developmental state’s historical legacy. By investigating institutional and economic practices and consequences of creative city policy in Seoul and Yokohama, this study focuses on how the urban place become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors. Through this analysis, this research critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy driven-development and considers the social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within the new creative city policy discourse.

Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung, Indonesia

This paper explores the ad hoc networks that form to move policies to new sites by examining the process through which the city of Bandung, Indonesia adopted a creative city policy. As revealed through the Bandung case, attention to the formation of these networks highlights the way that power operates within them, privileging certain ideas and structuring the ways in which information flows through their channels. This insight suggests that the concept of policy mobilities would be enriched by a closer attention to the way power is used to construct networks that promote specific policies and places as sites of ‘best practice’. Furthermore, this paper extends the concept of policy mobilities to a city ‘off the map’. In contrast to most existing policy mobilities research that tends to focus on the stable, large‐scale networks through which policies travel and on the high‐profile cities constructed as policy models, the case of Bandung provides a study of how policy mobilities may occur differently outside of its well‐established locations.

Creative city policy in the context of urban asymmetry

This article provides an overview of local governments’ opportunities to utilise creative city thinking in their local development policy. The aim is to shed light on how creative city approaches relate to structural urban asymmetry, i.e. how structural factors condition local governments’ efforts to translate creative city theories into urban development policies. For the analysis ideal types of creative city approaches are constructed to be analysed from a structural perspective. In the empirical part, three growth-oriented approaches of these ideal types – community, business and institutionally oriented creative city policies – are discussed by presenting three cases of Finnish creative communities, those of Helsinki, Tampere and Kaustinen. Analysis reveals that structural conditions affect the critical mass and resilience rather than the range of tools applied to creative city policy. Structural conditions are particularly relevant through their resonances in governance and policy outcomes and making synergetic specialisation possible.

Digging into the Creative City: A Feminist Critique

AbstractThis paper contributes a critical and intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about creative city policies and practices. Through a narrative description of community‐engaged arts interventions based on action research with the Toronto Free Gallery, an artist‐run centre and activist space, I demonstrate how feminist arts activism uncovers the multiple exclusions that creative city policies and practices entrench. In some ways, community‐engaged arts interventions can be complicit in exclusionary gentrification dynamics, particularly the production of spaces of white privilege and heteronormativity. But neoliberal imperatives are not always over determining. Feminist artists and activists are also finding ways to performatively and playfully push back at this highly regulated, gendered, and raced regime.

Creative City Policy and the Gap with Theory

The creative city concept is popular among researchers and policy-makers. On the one hand, academic literature elaborates, on a conceptual level, the importance of creativity and innovation for urban competitiveness; on the other, numerous cities develop and implement creative city policies in practice. The connection between these two is rather weak and, accordingly, creative city policy tends to be ad hoc. Our purpose in this paper is to narrow the above-mentioned gap between theory and practice, by addressing the question of how conceptual insights into the creative city can be converted into an elaborated operational approach for local policy practice. We propose a three-step approach: (1) to position a city's current creative places and communities within the context of social and economic structures, urban narratives and prevailing governance structures and style by means of a systematic analytical framework; (2) to assess the spatial, social and symbolic place qualities of the creative production and consumption; (3) to identify options for effective policy intervention. We further examine how these steps may be applied in practice, and use the city of Delft in the Netherlands as an example. A discussion of the applicability and implementation of this approach concludes the paper.

Creatives in the city: Urban contradictions of the creative city

The main interpretation of the creative city mantra acknowledges the role of a “creative class” in local economic development and its need for an unconventional urban environment. Its aim is to turn the city into an appealing urban environment for those contributing to the local economic development. The purpose of this paper is not to discuss the value, benefits or limitations of this interpretation. Rather, it focuses on another aspect of the creative city mantra: the promotion of a “creative economy” and its corollary, and that of creative industries as future major economic contributors. This paper exposes and discusses the inherent contradictions of such creative city policies. A creative economy and its associated industries are celebrated as a panacea for urban revalorization and economic development; however, the reality of working and producing in these sectors, is marked by precariousness and uncertainty, which reveals the weaknesses of such planning policies. The very features of work in the creative industries produces constraints of location that contradict the effects of such urban strategies. Real estate valorization, as much as new government regulations, are gradually driving creative workers from the city: thus the needs of creative industries and professionals are in conflict with the effect of urban planning strategies. This contribution to the creative city debate proposes a different approach to the research and political agendas, and in turn questions the sustainability of the creative city in regards to the precariousness associated with creative activities. To what extent do valorization strategies hamper the development of a creative economy and its activities? To what extent can the creative city agenda offer the opportunity to reappraise contemporary urban paradigms?

A research on traversing policy region in creative city policy

A research on traversing policy region in creative city policy

From red light district to art district: Creative city projects in Yokohama’s Kogane-cho neighborhood

This article examines how a creative city project in Yokohama regenerated urban spaces before and during the 2008 financial crisis. Japanese cases can broaden our view of post-crash effects and policies. Japan avoided financial entanglements that plague the US and much of Europe. However, its export-oriented economy, which never recovered from a long period of stagnation, now suffers because of the declining purchasing power of its Western trading partners. Moreover, the direct role of the state in urban policy suggests a different context than that theorized in Western accounts of urban entrepreneurialism (or neo-liberalism): the latter stresses the role of municipal governments and developers in using creative city policies to create sanitized forms of urban redevelopment. To address the gap in knowledge about this sort of process in Japan, I use strategic informants, observations and secondary data to examine how creative city projects helped transform Yokohama’s Kogane-cho neighborhood from an enclave of brothels to an art district. In contrast to Western cases which feature local government and development interests, I show how creative city policies also were influenced by the interactions of neighborhood groups, provincial police and a national economic development policy encouraging quality of life measures, including crime control in entertainment districts. National stimulus funds have sustained the quality of life initiatives, but the art district’s homogeneity raises doubts about its status as a creative milieu.

Constructing the creative neighborhood: Hopes and limitations of creative city policies in Berlin

Recent urban development policies have put much emphasis on the establishment of creative cities. The creative city promises to be a new city, a transformative shift from the existing and conventional ways of urbanization to one that includes creativity and livability for all. Yet, this goal is often not achieved nor is it even necessarily pursued. The dominant creative city policies are not different from the current system of urban entrepreneurialism and growth-driven urban development. The paper presents the development of Kolonie Wedding in Berlin as an example of the promise and limitations of creative city initiatives. Here, guided art walks were introduced to revitalize the local economy and property market and re-imagine the neighborhood as creative and lively. However, the initiative reinforces social and ethnical boundaries, enhances exclusion and advocates for gentrification instead of challenging these practices. The paper calls for an overhaul and revision of the creative city model in which equality, and not growth and centrality, stand at its center. Such an approach includes the enactment of creativity not as an urban development strategy but as a human right.

Urban regeneration through cultural creativity and social inclusion: Rethinking creative city theory through a Japanese case study

This paper aims to rethink creative city theory by analyzing urban regeneration processes in Japan through cultural creativity and social inclusion. The impact of Florida’s theory has led to the common misperception that cities prosper as people of the creative class, such as artists and gays, gather. However, attracting people of the creative class does not automatically make a creative city. Empirical analyses of Kanazawa City, clarify that the creative city needs a ‘culture-based production system’, a well-balanced system of cultural production and cultural consumption that takes advantage of accumulated cultural capital. This paper also examines Osaka City, where creative city policies failed to produce adequate results because they did not take root as a comprehensive urban strategy. However, in spite of these failures, a lively and inclusive grassroots movement has emerged around the creative city. This movement brings Osaka towards being a socially-inclusive creative city.

Mental mapping the ‘creative city’

Please click here to download the map associated with this article. Cultural researchers are increasingly turning to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies for visualising spatially-oriented qualitative data. This paper discusses one example, where mental maps have been employed in interviews with creative industry workers and the results accumulated in a GIS for visualisation and analysis. This technique extends on participatory and qualitative methods that counteract overtly economic and empiricist techniques regularly employed in creative industry mapping studies. Collating together creative workers' mental maps within a GIS provides a means for exposing ‘high traffic’ areas—hot spots of creative activity—and other hidden geographies that comprise the ‘creative city’. Key spaces, known within creative communities but understood by researchers only anecdotally, can be visualised with a GIS. The methodology was carried out in Darwin, the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory, which has sought to re-imagine itself as a creative city. Results from two mental mapping questions form the focus of this paper: on where ‘creative epicentres’ and ‘spaces of inspiration’ exist in Darwin. The former tend to centre on popular suburban sites and inner city spaces while the latter privileges open space and iconic harbourside settings. The differences and similarities between responses to interview questions are best revealed through 3D visualisation. Outputs from this method incorporate vernacular voices into policy-making, and can henceforth inform spatial planning, allowing for the development of more spatially literate creative city policies that reflect creative workers' actual spatial proclivities.

Impact evaluation of creative city policies

This paper concerns situations similar to the ones occurring in the city of Naples, which result in a continuous degradation that destroys resources and detracts from their future usability. The main difficulties are to be found in terms of organisational and managerial skills in integrated project planning. Besides, the sustainable development, at any territorial scale, is made not only of 'projects' but, mainly of 'policies' defining a long term strategy. Consequently, the main problem is not estimating the single 'creative' project but elaborating and estimating policies that stimulate the contents of creativity in order to support development. This paper first underlines the inefficiency causes of present regulation system. Then, we verify the contribution that evaluation procedures can give. In particular, we analyse two instruments, useful tools to overcome management constraints: the use of a methodological support to achieve the best financial resource allocation between the sectors involved and an organisation that simplifies and accelerates decision-making procedures to facilitate private participation.