Creative City Policies Research Articles

Fuzzy based Decision-Making Algorithm for Solving Big Data Issues in Smart Cities

To better provide urban services and build an increasingly sustainable architecture, big data can be used to make more efficient use of current assets while enhancing the caliber of services offered to local inhabitants. However, there are several challenges to incorporating big data into existing infrastructure. Therefore, this research aims to determine the problems associated with Big Data’s effectiveness in developing intelligent towns and to investigate the connections between those difficulties. The 14 issues with Big Data were found through a literature study, and the precision was checked by feedback from professionals. Next, we employ a combined approach based on fuzzy interpretation, Structured simulation, and the Fuzzy Making Decisions Trial and Assessment Laboratories to decipher the connections between our identified problems incorporating Big Data into the development of smart cities is hampered, as shown by the analysis of links between challenges, primarily by the heterogeneous inhabitants in developed cities and the lack of connectivity. The findings of this study will provide creative city practitioners and policy planners with the information they need to successfully tackle these obstacles, clearing the way for the widespread adoption of smart city technologies. This research is a first step towards creating an interpretive structural model of the difficulties brought on by Big Data in cutting-edge urban planning. The study attempts, in part, to use this paradigm to better understand the relationship among the highlighted issues.

Creative city: Interrogating the influence of property developers on Brisbane’s arts and culture

ABSTRACT This article scrutinizes the often forced collaboration between the arts sector and urban development. Despite prevailing narratives that cast artists’ involvement positively in urban revitalization, this global trend, integral to creative city policies for urban development, conceals complexities. Highlighting how these seemingly cooperative practices are rehearsed in global cities and replicated in peripheral cities such as Brisbane, Australia, this examination has been largely prompted by the 2020 sale of the Metro Arts building in Brisbane. The location of this multi-arts institution was an incredibly valuable asset in a city that aims to promote its creative city credentials. Moreover, despite the substantial public investment in Metro Arts’ building, its sale was misrepresented as a private matter. A close examination of this event reveals the ways property developers can be tremendously influential upon the arts and cultural sector—what, where and how art is commissioned and displayed, and ultimately, what is publicly funded.

Free Milieus, Creative People: An Investigation of Creative City Policy in Istanbul from the Perspective of Governmentality

This paper analyzes the creative city policy for Istanbul, which has recently become a popular throughout the world. Cities are expected to be creative milieus that foster free circulation of people, ideas, and interactions for economic growth, global competitiveness, and social development. Drawing on Foucault and governmentality studies, this paper first argues that the creative city policy is a neoliberal political rationality that seeks to stimulate individuals' creative capacities through structuring urban space. Neoliberalism includes the de-governmentalization of state and the active participation of non-state actors in the governing processes. Second, using examples from street gentrification, industrial heritage re-functioning, and co-working spaces in Istanbul, this paper dissects how creativity, freedom, and economic growth intersect in urban space and how a broad coalition of political parties, state agencies, local authorities, non-governmental organizations, small-scale cultural entrepreneurs, and creative professionals have been formed around the creative city. As a result, creative city policy is a form of governmentality that includes official documents as well as spatial strategies of a heterogeneous coalition of state and non-state actors.

The changing dynamics of the creative city: Toward an inclusive, participatory, and place-based cultural policy in Wellington, New Zealand

ABSTRACT The policies and practices of creative cities are transitioning from a more externally focused and neoliberally oriented creative agenda toward local, place-based approaches that are grounded in the principles of social and cultural inclusion, participation, and diversity. However, little research has specifically examined the tensions, trade-offs, and opportunities cities might face in this transition. This research explores the creative dynamics of Wellington, New Zealand’s creative capital, pursuing a more inclusive and community-oriented policy. Using a case study approach, we identified seven key themes critical to supporting more inclusive and place-based creative city policies: affordability; availability of creative and cultural infrastructure; a supportive built environment; celebration of Indigenous culture and creative expression; support for inclusion and diversity; reliable funding resources and supportive regulations and processes; and grassroots community innovators. We developed these themes by considering both Wellington’s creative city policies and the existing creative dynamics of the city, which provide implications and recommendations for other cities experiencing similar transitions in their creative city policies.

Creative is not always lucrative: how grassroots film communities defy the ‘creativisation of culture’ in post-authoritarian Indonesia

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the phenomenon of film communities in post-authoritarian Indonesia by taking four Bandung-based grassroots film communities as our case studies. Drawing on a research work underpinned by a non-exploitative insider methodology grounded in a dialogical participatory observation supplemented with semi-structured in-depth interviews with key participants, we argue that these grassroots film communities defy the ‘creativisation of culture’ process, which is an underlying mechanism of the Creative City agenda, by demonstrating three distinguishing features related to the motive, organizational mode, and the primacy of non-conventional film screening spaces. Due to these distinctive features, the Bandung-based grassroots film communities embody the traits of an underground scene, driven by the politics of value and underpinned by the DIY ethic of autonomy rather than by the logic of economic profitability, which runs counter to the Creative City policy with its emphasis on monetizable creativity.

The relationship between creative developments and place: a position paper

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore and clarify the relationship between creative developments and the concepts of place and placemaking. Design/methodology/approach This paper systematically reviews scholarly literature on the relationship between creative developments and the concepts of place, and critically analyzes the extent to which creative developments acknowledge different aspects of place. Findings The findings demonstrate that the relationship between creative development and place is multifaceted, and combines physical, cultural and social aspects of place. However, the literature also calls for the greater valuation of particular facets of place, including the daily experiences of communities and local cultural producers, alongside symbolic and imagined aspects of place, all of which inform either positive or negative perceptions of urban form. In addition, the authors argue that the cultural value of the creative industries needs to be better acknowledged in creative developments, implying support for a range of cultural practitioners. Research limitations/implications The authors argue that embracing a more holistic understanding of place in creative development has the potential to minimize the negative impacts sometimes associated with such developments (like gentrification and social displacement) while generating greater social and cultural benefits to people and place. The study findings raise questions that frame a critical research agenda for creative-led developments and creative placemaking in this context. Originality/value By examining the broader relationship between creative developments and place and identifying areas neglected by researchers, this research contributes to an articulation of “creative placemaking” that moves creative city policy toward enhancing community development.

GENTRIFICATION IN TOKYO: Formation of the Tokyo West Creative Industry Cluster

AbstractInner‐city areas function as incubators of creative industries in metropolitan cities. The areas adjacent to Tokyo's city center also play an important role as a location for small to medium‐sized creative industries. First, against this background, this article explores the relationship between the characteristics of locations of creative industries and Tokyo's built environment. Aside from the city center itself, where the creative industries’ major customers are located, the authors observed a creative industry cluster to the west of the city center. We named this area the Tokyo West Creative Industry Cluster (TWCIC) and found that a ‘live–work’‐style cluster has developed there, which functions as an incubation place for creative industries. Second, by conducting a case study on urban regeneration in progress in the Shibuya Station area, a core area of the TWCIC, we further examine how gentrification caused by property‐led urban regeneration is now threatening the TWCIC. The article concludes that commercialization and purification will eventually widen spatial inequality and lead to the loss of the unique culture of tolerance and freedom that has hitherto nurtured the creative culture in TWCIC. Consequently, fundamental changes are required in property‐led creative city policies.

Creative Clusters and Creative Multipliers: Evidence from UK Cities

Economic geographers have paid much attention to the cultural and creative industries, both for their propensity to cluster in urban settings, and their potential to drive urban economic development. However, evidence on the latter is surprisingly sparse. In this article, we explore the long-term, causal impacts of the cultural and creative industries on surrounding urban economies. Adapting Moretti’s local multipliers framework, we build a new twenty-year panel of UK cities, using historical instruments to identify causal effects of creative activity on noncreative firms and employment. We find that each creative job generates at least 1.9 nontradable jobs between 1998 and 2018. Prior to 2007, these effects seem more rooted in creative services employees’ local spending than visitors to creative amenities. Given the low numbers of creative jobs in most cities, the overall impact of the creative multiplier is small. On average, the creative sector is responsible for over 16 percent of nontradable job growth in our sample, though impacts will be larger in bigger clusters. We do not find the same effects for workplaces, and we find no causal evidence for spillovers from creative activity to other tradable sectors. In turn, this implies that creative city policies will have partial, uneven local economic impacts. Given extensive urban clusters of creative activity in many countries, our results hold value beyond the UK setting.

The Role of Creative Placemaking

The Role of Creative Placemaking

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

‘Covid-19 opened the pandora box’ of the creative city: creative and cultural workers against precarity in Milan

Abstract Creative and cultural workers (CCWs) concentrate in large cities due to the livelihood opportunities they facilitate. Synchronously, cities have experienced the highest rate of Covid-19 infections. Focusing on the case study of Milan, the paper explores the criticalities of the sector and the impact of the pandemic using qualitative interviews and digital ethnography. It highlights how C-19 has exacerbated the effects of neoliberalism on CCWs, illuminating their precarious working conditions but paradoxically providing time and focus for workers to collectively organise. This paper captures CCWs use of the city to make their precarious working conditions visible in response to the unsustainable demands of neoliberalism. It also engages with the need for re-futuring contemporary understanding of the creative city, questioning the value of agglomeration economies and creative city policies, especially if workers’ rights and livelihoods do not become central to the future local policy agenda.

Mobility Perspective in Anthropology of Policy: Case Studies Urban Policy in Indonesia

This article explores anthropological perspectives in public policy by using the central concept of policy mobility. Through this concept, we will show how policy resulting from the accumulation of knowledge, strength, and geographical imagination moves from one territory to another. The emphasis on forming policy ideas is different from policy studies from another perspective that looks at governance to shape the behavior of the people. We take the case of forming creative city ideas in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan to show mutation and hybridization of policies. We use ethnographic methods to collect data, supplemented by literature reviews on creative city policies. For decades, Balikpapan has been known as an extractive industrial city, especially in the mining and forestry sectors. Due to pressure from national and global environmentalists, exploration of natural resources must be limited, reducing urban productivity. Policymakers see the creative city as an opportunity to improve the city's economic life while maintaining the sustainability of the local natural and cultural environment.

Alternative creative spaces and neo-liberal urban transformations

Examples of alternative creative spaces exist in nearly all cities, arising at different historical periods, with all now weathering the recent corrosive effects of neo-liberal urbanisation and incorporative creative city policies. This paper examines three such spaces, the ‘art house’ KuLe which formed immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall; the alternative cultural centre OT301 which came about in Amsterdam in 1999 just around the beginnings of the ‘creative city turn’; and MACAO an urban cultural movement/ space which emerged in Milan in 2012, following the effects of the 2008 financial crash on creative work precarity. The key contribution this article makes to the literature on urban resistance and incorporation, is to provide a multi-layered historical analyses of three alternative creative spaces, existing in three different European cities, which emerged in three slightly varying time periods in relation to the development of the neo-liberal creative city. The first section of the paper conceptually outlines and critiques the coming together of neo-liberal and creative city transformations, provides a typology of what is meant by alternative creative spaces, and examines the importance of historical and place factors. The remainder of the article analytically explores the specific ‘place histories’ of the three alternative spaces mentioned above, as well as unveils their common current dilemmas, as they struggle to exist in the contemporary period. How have such spaces coped with the increasing pressures of property development, gentrification, and cultural incorporation, and what are the main difficulties and barriers today to surviving, and linking up to other urban social movements to create wider political change? It is argued that while the challenges here are considerable, these three spaces provide nuanced lessons and dilemmas common to all types of alternative creative spaces.

Inadequate adaptation of creative city paradigm? Taiwanese cultural and creative-led urban regeneration policies through the eyes of urban development experts

ABSTRACTLike other East Asian countries, Taiwan has in the last decade experienced the transmission and adaptation of creative city policies, coming mainly from western urban planning models. This quite fast and at times insufficiently reflected adaptation of cultural and creative-led urban regeneration schemes has left marks on both the social and physical fabric of Taiwanese cities. Using interview evidence and combining it with a modified Delphi method to analyse the outcomes of implementating creative city policies, the article explores the potential emergence of new shifts, i.e. re-orientations of Taiwan's creative city policies.

Creative labor as moral and ethical subjects and its limitation: Creative City Yokohama, Japan

ABSTRACTThis study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Yokohama, Japan. To shed light on this workforce’s everyday experiences and labor subjectivity, this investigation draws ideas from recent research trends of “creative labor” from the field of media and cultural studies, sociology of work, and political economy of communication. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations, this research focuses on how the ethical and moral dimensions of labor subjectivity in creative work are prominently important in explaining Yokohama workers’ everyday living and working experiences as creative labor. Unexpectedly, this study found that these moral and ethical sentiments and actions, which take on the role of retaining their labor motivation, actually limit the development of political subjects who can resist given precarious working conditions and thereby hinder them from building a collective solidarity as “workers.” Thus this investigation concludes that the creative worker’s subjectivity retreats to solely a moral dimension rather than to a political one. Through this finding, this study explores whether the articulation of moral-political and social values in the course of cultural work can evolve from creative workers’ moral and ethical sensitivities and actions.

Digital Cartography Enterprise: Neoliberalism, Governmentality and Digital Infrastructure

The Gigatown competition (2013–2015) was a joint initiative between the telecommunications company Chorus and the New Zealand government to award a New Zealand town ‘the fastest internet in the Southern Hemisphere’ through a social media competition. In this paper, I argue the competition stimulated a range of activities that cohere with creative and smart city policies, the growth of information and communications technology (ICT) and immaterial labour, and the participatory turn in urban governance and planning. In its attempt to remake city-space as receptive for an imagined ICT future, the competition exemplifies what I call a Digital Cartography Enterprise. This term captures both the neoliberal and post-industrial spatial rationalities of urban planning and policy with respect to securing ICT-readiness as well as the governmentalised disciplining of the population to creatively subsidise such a venture through appeals to their entrepreneurialism in a social media competition.

Regulating and resisting queer creativity: Community-engaged arts practice in the neoliberal city

This article draws from and advances urban studies literature on ‘creative city’ policies by exploring the contradictory role of queer arts practice in contemporary placemarketing strategies. Here I reflect on the fraught politics surrounding Radiodress’s each hand as they are called project, a deeply personal exploration of radical Jewish history programmed within Luminato, a Toronto-based international festival of creativity. Specifically, I explore how Luminato and the Koffler Centre, a Jewish organisation promoting contemporary art, regulated Radiodress’s work in order to stage marketable notions of ethnic and queer diversity. I also examine how and why the Koffler Centre eventually blacklisted Radiodress and her project. However, I also consider the ways Radiodress and Toronto artists creatively and collectively responded to these tensions. I maintain that bringing queer arts practice into discussions about contemporary creative city policies uncovers sites of queer arts activism that scale up to shape broader policies and debates. Such disidentificatory interventions, acts of co-opting and re-working discourses which exclude minoritarian subjects, challenge violent processes of colonisation and commodification on multiple fronts, as well as fostering more collective and relational ways of being.

The political subjectivization of Korean creative workers: working and living as urban precariat in creative city Seoul

This study aims to reconsider and re-evaluate the rapid circulation of global creative city policy from the viewpoint of its creative workforce by focusing on the case of Seoul, South Korea. By locating creative workers’ experiences in Korea within the growing scholarship on the precariat, this research not only attempts to fully understand the complexity of labor subjectivities of creative workers but further explores how creative workers can actually become political subjects who can resist their given precarious working and living conditions. By using Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘political subjectivation’, it attempts to show how creative workers can empower themselves as ‘political subjects’ who strategically disavow their given self-identities as ‘individualized creators’, and through this language they are able to recall the often neglected subjectivity of ‘solidified labor’. In doing so, this research contributes to theoretical insights so that we can better understand what leads to political formation of creative workers.

Urban cultural policy and creative city making

Provides an historical understanding of creative city policy formation Explains how creative city concepts descend from earlier urban cultural policy models Identifies and examines two emerging creative city policy movements around the concept of “making” Identifies challenges for creative city making policy.

“Creative city” policy mobilities as transformation of dispositives – arrangements of “networking” in the European Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg

Abstract. Following the calls for context-sensitive policy mobility research, I propose to analyze policy mobilities as transformation of dispositives. Michel Foucault's context-sensitive notion of dispositive stresses the context-specific, heterogeneous relations between linguistic and non-linguistic practices, subjectivities and materialities as well as the influence of power/knowledge and sedimented features in policymaking. These sensitivities are valuable contributions to policy mobility research. I draw on empirical research on creative city policies, which are re-embedded in the European Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg, to illustrate that line of argumentation. I reconstruct and compare related (sub-)dispositives: the mobile creative city policies, the historical and current contexts of the policies' re-embedding. Consequently, I use arrangements of networking as an empirical lens to understand the differing logics that shape the re-embedding of creative city policies in the European Metropolitan Region Nuremberg and the mutual transformation of policies and their contexts.