The Creative City is a concept set out by David Yencken and Charles Landry in the late 1980s. The idea has a number of trajectories including Swedish researcher, Gunnar Törnqvist’s notion of the ‘creative milieu’ - a term first used by Hippolyte Taine, Philippe Aydalot and colleagues investigations of innovative milieux at Gremi.^[1][2][3] Another strand was the work of Ake Andersson on creativity and economic development in a regional context and Peter Hall’s long term interest in innovation and creativity in cities summarized in his magisterial work ‘Cities in Civilization.^[4][5]

In 1988, a seminar in Melbourne called The Creative City was largely focused on the arts, yet included a speech by David Yencken,^[6] According to this seminar Yencken argued that "cities must be efficient and fair but also committed to fostering creativity among its citizens and to providing emotionally satisfying places and experiences for them". Charles Landry and his colleagues at Comedia from the late 1980s onwards established the notion as a practical urban policy tool that saw creativity as a resource for urban development. This included the imagination of artists, scientists, businesses, ordinary people as well as the civic creativity of public officials defined as imaginative problem solving applied to public good objectives.^[7]

The Creative City proposed a new planning paradigm from which an at times contentious global movement emerged. The first attempt to implement the concept at city level was the 1991 study, Glasgow: The Creative City and its Cultural Economy undertaken by Comedia,^[8] followed in 1995 by a study on urban creativity in 10 cities called The Creative City in Britain and Germany.^[9] In the same year, the first book on the topic appeared.^[10] In parallel a series of conferences in Glasgow, sponsored by the Anglo-German Foundation, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Huddersfield that reinforced the concept.^[11][12] The Huddersfield Creative Town Initiative funded by £7million from the European Union was the first comprehensive attempt to apply and embed its principles to a city.^[13][14]

Landry in ‘Lineages of The Creative City’ writes: “The creative city when introduced was seen as aspirational; a clarion call to encourage open-mindedness and imagination implying a dramatic impact on organizational culture. Its philosophy is that there is always more creative potential in a place. 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. It was a response to the dramatic economic, social and cultural transformations across the globe from the early 1980s onwards that required a re-assessment of cities' resources and potential.^[15]Creative infrastructure is a combination of the hard and the soft. The latter includes a city's mindset, how it approaches opportunities and problems; its atmosphere and incentives and regulatory regime. The soft infrastructure includes: A highly skilled and flexible labour force; dynamic thinkers, creators and implementers. It is not only artists or creative economy participants who are creative. It can anyone who addresses issues in an inventive way be it a social worker, a business person, a scientist or public servant. A culture of creativity is seen as crucial in how urban stakeholders operate. By encouraging and legitimizing the use of imagination within the public, private and community spheres, the ideas bank of possibilities and potential solutions to any urban problem will be broadened. The aim is to identify, nurture, attract and sustain talent so as to mobilize ideas, talents, and creative organizations with an appropriate set built environment and help to establish a creative milieu.^[16][17]

Partners for Livable Places "later Communities" founded in 1977 was important in the early stages of the creative city idea. Partners initially focused on design and culture as resources for liveability.^[18] In the early 1980s, Partners launched a programme to document the economic value of design and cultural amenities. Their Economics of Amenity,^[19] The programme explored how cultural amenities and the quality of life in communities 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.^[20]

Core concepts used by Partners were cultural planning and cultural resources, which they saw as the planning of urban resources including architecture, parks, quality design, the natural environment, animation, arts activity and tourism. From the late 1970s onwards UNESCO and the Council of Europe began to investigate the cultural resources and their associated 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 put the cultural industries on the agenda.^[21] Drawing on, re-reading and adapting the original work by Walter Benjamin,^[22] and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s/1940s which had seen the culture industry as a kind of monster and influenced too by Hans Magnus Enzensberger Garnham saw the cultural industries as a potentially liberating force.^[23][24][25] A follow-up initiative in Australia was a Creative Australia National Workshop in 1989 on 'The Relationship between Creativity and an Innovative Productive Future' jointly sponsored by the Commission for the Future and the Australia Council for the Arts".^[26]

Simultaneously Comedia in Britain founded in 1978 by Charles Landry were responding to the dramatic restructuring of the global economy and saw creativity as the new resource for urban transformation replacing location, steel and coal,^[27] and began undertaking a series of projects on creative hubs and urban environments, such as ‘Establishing a Media Zone in Birmingham in early (1988), assessing the Cultural Economy of Barcelona in (1990) or London World City (1991).^[28] Additionally it sought to create a framework for measuring creative cities.^[29]

The term cultural resources was central to the creative city agenda and its link to creativity. These are embodied in peoples' histories, skills, the repertoire of local assets and a city’s physical landscape. It was introduced into the English speaking world by Franco Bianchini in 1990,^[30][31] who coming from Italy was acquainted with their notion of resorsi culturali and further developed in Australia by Colin Mercer from 1991 onwards.^[32] Bianchini based his notions on Wolf von Eckhardt, who in 1980 in The Arts & City Planning noted that "effective cultural planning involves all the arts, the art of urban design, the art of winning community support, the art of transportation planning and mastering the dynamics of community development", to which Bianchini added "The art of forming partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors and ensuring the fair distribution of economic, social and cultural resources''.^[33] Mercer added cultural planning has to be "the strategic and integral use of cultural resources in urban and community development." Bianchini elaborated the term cultural resource in collaborative work with Landry. They stated: "Cultural resources are the raw materials of the city and its value base; its assets replacing coal, steel or gold. Creativity is the method of exploiting these resources and helping them grow." This focus draws attention to the distinctive, the unique and the special in any place.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, the creative city concept was to some extent hijacked by a focus on the creative industries so losing sight of its larger aims that in periods of “transformation it is necessary to create the conditions for people, organizations and cities to think, plan and act with imagination to solve problems and create opportunities”.^[34] In the late 1980s, at its origins, it had focused on the role of artists and sectors like design, new media, music, film or performing arts as well as the associated cultural infrastructure like museums or galleries. They were important in maintaining local distinctiveness given the structural changes at that time and their role in establishing identity and belonging.^[35]

The British government’s major mapping exercise of the value of the creative economy sector through its Department of Culture, Media and Sports in 2001 generated global interest.^[36] After a time lapse within the European mainland other countries and cities began similar research and was acknowledged by the European Union with the first comprehensive assessment of the sector in 2001 called ‘Exploitation and Development of the Job Potential in the Cultural Sector in the Age of Digitalisation’.^[37] In 2005 global recognition came when the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD set up a high-level panel on creative industries and development and produced its report in 2008.^[38]

Yet these are not the exclusive realm of creativity, although they can play a significant role in fostering the creative urban agenda. The core notion advocated a culture of creativity to be embedded into how the urban stakeholders operate stressing that by encouraging and legitimising the use of imagination in all spheres the ideasbank of possibilities and potential solutions broadens. Creativity is context driven. What was ‘creative’ in the 19th or 20th century will be different from what is creative in the 21^st. What is regarded as creative in one culture and in one circumstance will differ, yet a key principle is openness.^[39]

In the first years of the 21st century, the publication of John Howkins's The Creative Economy and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class gave the movement a dramatic lift as global restructuring was hitting deep into the US.^[40][41] Florida's book hit a nerve with its clever slogans such as "talent, technology, tolerance" and interesting sounding indicators like the "bohemian index" or the "gay index", that gave numbers to ideas. Importantly it connected the three areas: a creative class – a novel idea, the creative economy and what conditions in cities attract the creative class. Florida concluded that economic development is driven in large measure by lifestyle factors, such as tolerance and diversity, urban infrastructure and entertainment.^[42]

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 so destroying local distinctiveness.^[43] 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 this is artwashing.^[44]

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 favour 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.^[45]

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 neighborhoods 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.^[46]

The original Creative City vision of Landry has been almost entirely superseded by a Florida-based vision framed by economic innovation and its requisite skilled labour. The Creative City in many places has become a business project, not a framework for total urban policy transformation. It has scaled down its expectations, and no longer demands that urban policy develop a creative imagination. The “thesis” can be implemented as strategy without unsettling too many ruling assumptions on the role of cities in the global economic order. The debate about creative city still contains the two strands - the more holistic notion of comprehensive urban creativity and those that deem that the creative economy largely represents what a creative city is.^[47][48]

Starting from the 2000s onwards, many cities across the globe developed creative city strategies most focusing on the culture and creative economy.^[49][50] Recent work by Landry has sought to refocus on the importance of civic creativity and the creative bureaucracy,^[51] defined as imaginative problem solving applied to public good and public interest objectives, where urban creativity needs an aim and an ethical frame. Creativity should address the dynamic of our current economic system which is ‘materially expansive, socially divisive and environmentally hostile’. This includes being sustainable, developing a human centered, human scale or humane environment where peoples’ needs are primary and ensuring people drive technology rather than the reverse.^[52]

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