Creative city

For other uses, see Creative city (disambiguation).

A creative city is a city where creativity is a strategic factor in urban development. A creative city provides places, experiences, attractions, and opportunities to foster creativity among its citizens.

Creativity and imagination in urban activities

Openness and imagination are the seeds of a thriving organizational ecosystem, a vision the creative city champions. It posits that conditions need to be created for people to think, plan and act with imagination in harnessing opportunities or addressing seemingly intractable urban problems.

A creative city requires a combination of hard infrastructure and "soft infrastructure". The latter includes a mindset, how opportunities and problems are approached; the atmosphere, incentives and regulatory regime. Soft infrastructures that fosters creativity further include: a highly skilled and flexible labor force; dynamic thinkers, creators and implementers. According to the concept of the creative city, creativity can come from any source, including anyone who addresses issues in an inventive way, for example, a social worker, a businessperson, a scientist or a public servant. The concept is both about having new ideas and the capacity to implement them.

A culture of creativity becomes embedded in how urban stakeholders operate. By encouraging imagination within the public, private and community spheres, the idea bank of possibilities and potential solutions to any urban problem will be broadened.

A creative city nurtures, attracts and sustains creativity so that ideas, talents and creative organizations thrive. The built environment—the stage and the setting—is crucial for establishing the environment. A creative environment is a place that contains hard and soft infrastructure that generates a flow of ideas and inventions. A creative environment can be a building, a street, an area or neighborhood, a city or a region.

Cultural resources are embodied in peoples' creativity, skills and talents. They are not only things like buildings, but also symbols, activities and the repertoire of local products in crafts, manufacturing and services. Urban cultural resources include the historical, industrial and artistic heritage of assets including architecture, urban landscapes or landmarks. They also include local and indigenous traditions of public life, festivals, rituals, or stories as well as hobbies and enthusiasms. Language, food and cooking, leisure activities, and fashion are all part of a city's cultural resources, as are sub-cultures and intellectual traditions that can be used to express the unique culture of a location. They include the range and quality of skills in the performing and visual arts and the creative industries. An appreciation of culture should shape the technicalities of urban planning and development rather than being seen as a marginal add-on to be considered after housing, transport and land use have been dealt with. This focus draws attention to the distinctive, the unique and the special in any place.

Early developments

Partners initially focused on design and culture as resources for livability. In the early 1980's, partners launched a program to document the economic value of design and cultural amenities. The Economics of Amenity program explored how cultural amenities and the quality of life in a community are linked to economic development and job creation. This work was the catalyst for a significant array of economic impact studies of the arts across the globe.

Core concepts used by partners were cultural planning and cultural resources, which they saw as the planning of urban resources including quality design, architecture, parks, the natural environment, animation and especially arts activity and tourism.

From the late 1970s onwards, UNESCO and the Council of Europe began to investigate the cultural industries. From the perspective of cities, it was Nick Garnham, who when seconded to the Greater London Council in 1983/4, set up a cultural industries unit to put the cultural industries on the agenda. Drawing on, re-reading and adapting the original work by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s which had seen the culture industry as a kind of monster and influenced also by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, he saw the cultural industries as a potentially liberating force. This investigation into the cultural industries of the time found that a city and nation that emphasized its development of cultural industries added value, exports, and new jobs, while supporting competitiveness, continues to expand a city's and nation's growth in the global economy.

The first mention of the creative city as a concept was in a seminar organized by the Australia Council, the City of Melbourne, the Ministry of Planning and Environment (Victoria) and the Ministry for the Arts (Victoria) on September 1988. Its focus was to explore how arts and cultural concerns could be better integrated into the planning process for city development. A keynote speech by David Yencken, former Secretary for Planning and Environment for Victoria, spelled out a broader agenda stating that whilst efficiency of cities is important there is much more needed: "[The city] should be emotionally satisfying and stimulate creativity amongst its citizens".

Another important early player was Comedia, founded in 1978 by Charles Landry. Its study on 1991, Glasgow: The Creative City and its Cultural Economy was followed on 1994 by a study on urban creativity called The Creative City in Britain and Germany.

Anatomy

As well as being the centre of a creative economy and being home to a sizeable creative class, creative cities have also been theorized to embody a particular structure. This structure comprises three categories of people, spaces, organizations, and institutions: the upper-ground, the underground, and the middle-ground.

The upper-ground consists of firms and businesses engaged in creative industries. These are the organizations that create the economic growth one hopes to find in a creative city, by taking the creative product of the city's residents and converting it into a good or service that can be sold.

The underground consists of the individual creative people—for example, artists, writers, or innovators—who produce this creative product.

The middle-ground bridges the gap between the polished upper-ground and the raw energy of the underground. It can be vibrant neighborhoods, buzzing galleries, or collaborative art collectives. In these spaces, underground creativity takes form, disparate ideas coalesce into tangible products, and connections spark between individuals across the spectrum. This fertile middle-ground fosters cross-pollination of ideas and talent, fueling innovation and propelling the creative ecosystem forward.

To unlock the economic power of creative industries, cities must nurture all levels of the ecosystem, not just the polished upper-ground. Urban planning initiatives can create vibrant middle-ground spaces, while targeted policies can attract and empower the often-overlooked "creative class" of the underground. This holistic approach fosters innovation, diversity, and ultimately, economic growth.

Richard Florida works on quantifying various measures of the "creative potential" of a city, and then ranks cities based on his "creativity index". This, in turn, encourages cities to compete with one another for higher rankings and the attendant economic benefits that supposedly come with them. In order to do this, city governments will hire consulting firms to advise them on how to boost their creative potential, thus creating an industry and a class of expertise centred around creative cities.

The emergence of the creative economy and creative class

There have been critiques of the creative city idea claiming it is only targeted at hipsters, property developers and those who gentrify areas or seek to glamorize them thus destroying local distinctiveness. This has happened in places, but it is not inevitable. The creative challenge is to find appropriate regulations and incentives to obviate the negative aspects. A valid concern has been the conscious use of artists to be the vanguard of gentrification, to lift property values and to make areas safe before others move in, otherwise referred to as artwashing.

Critiques of creative city and creative and cultural industries highlight them as a neoliberal tool to extract value from a city's culture and creativity. It treats cultural resources of a city as raw materials that can be used as assets in the 21st century---just as coal, steel, and gold were assets of the city in the 20th century.

Florida's work has been criticized by scholars such as Jamie Peck as, "work[ing] quietly with the grain of extant 'neoliberal' development agendas, framed around interurban competition, gentrification, middle-class consumption and place-marketing". In other words, Florida's prescriptions in favor of fostering a creative class are, rather than being revolutionary, simply a way of bolstering the conventional economic model of the city. The idea of the creative class serves to create a cultural hierarchy, and as such reproduce inequalities; indeed, even Florida himself has even acknowledged that the areas he himself touts as hotspots of the creative class are at the same time home to shocking disparities in economic status among their residents. In order to explain this, he points to the inflation of housing prices that an influx of creatives can bring to an area, as well as to the creative class' reliance on service industries that typically pay their employees low wages.

Critics argue that the creative city idea has now become a catch-all phrase in danger of losing its meaning and in danger of hollowing out by general overuse of the word 'creative' as applied to people, activities, organizations, urban neighbourhoods or cities that objectively are not especially creative. Cities still tend to restrict its meaning to the arts and cultural activities within the creative economy professions, calling any cultural plan a creative city plan, when such activities are only one aspect of a community's creativity. There is a tendency for cities to adopt the term without thinking through its real organizational consequences and the need to change their mindset. The creativity implied in the term, the creative city, is about lateral and integrative thinking in all aspects of city planning and urban development, placing people, not infrastructure, at the centre of planning processes.

Landry's original Creative City vision, focused on holistic urban transformation, has yielded to a Florida-centric model prioritizing economic innovation and its skilled workforce. This shift has reduced the Creative City to a mere business tool, a far cry from its initial ambition to reshape urban policy. Now, the "thesis" is palatable to existing power structures, neatly fitting into the global economic order. Yet, the debate simmers on. While some cling to the holistic vision of city-wide creativity, others equate the Creative City solely with the economic engine of the creative class.

Global impact

In 2004, UNESCO established the Creative Cities Network (UCCN). UCCN was established to share best practices and partnerships that can help sustain and improve a city's creativity. All cities recognized as a member of the UCCN agree that creativity acts as a strategic factor of sustainable development.

The UCCN have seven creative fields: crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, media arts, and music.

See also

• Creative industries
• Smart city

External links

• www.creativeclass.com
• www.creativeeconomy.com
• www.urbanumbrella.net (Non Profit)
• www.livable.org
• www.meshcities.com
• List of UNESCO Creative Cities