About Creative City
The creative city is a concept developed by Australian David Yencken in 1988 and has since become a global movement reflecting a new planning paradigm for cities. In his article “The Creative City,” it was first described in the literary journal Meanjin. In this article, Yencken argues that while cities must be efficient and fair, a creative city must also be committed to fostering creativity among its citizens and providing emotionally satisfying places and experiences for them.
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) in 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 spelt out a broader agenda stating that while cities’ efficiency is essential, there is much more needed: “The city should be emotionally satisfying and stimulate creativity amongst its citizens”.
In subsequent writing about creative cities, the tendency has been to concentrate on one or other of the two necessary characteristics proposed by Yencken for a creative city but rarely on both together.
A significant 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”.
Another critical early player was Comedia, founded in 1978 by Charles Landry. Its 1991 study, Glasgow: The Creative City and its Cultural Economy was followed in 1994 by a survey on urban creativity called The Creative City in Britain and Germany.
The terms cultural industries and cultural resources were introduced into Europe by Franco Bianchini in 1990, who was coming from Italy was acquainted with their notion of resource culturali and further developed in Australia by Colin Mercer from 1991. Bianchini based his concepts on Wolf von Eckhardt, who is 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”. 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. This approach has been criticized by Jamie Peck as a “neoliberalizing” of a city’s culture, as cultural spaces and elements are reconfigured into economic resources, thus bringing them inside the neo-liberal market economy.
As well as being centres of a creative economy and being home to a sizable 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 organizations create the economic growth one hopes to find in a creative city by taking the city’s innovative product 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 — that produce this creative product. Then, the middle ground serves as a space for the upper ground and the underground to contact one another. The middle ground can consist of physical areas, for example, neighbourhoods with high populations of creative individuals, or galleries and bars where these individuals congregate. It can also consist of organizations, such as art collectives, that bring together creative individuals. The middle ground allows the underground creative product to be given a more concrete form by synthesizing disparate creative outputs into discrete products. Its capacity as space also allows individuals from the upper ground and individuals from the underground to meet, facilitating the transfer of ideas and people from one level to another.
This theoretical framework’s policy implications are that, to harness the economic growth potential that creative industries bring with them, urban governments must foster the growth of the middle ground and underground and the upper ground. This can be done through urban planning initiatives that create spaces that can be used as a middle ground and encourage the “creative class” that comprises the underground.
Others have criticized this policy dimension of the creative city concept as a tool, not for revitalizing cities, but for creating an industry dedicated to offering urban renewal promises. In Richard Florida’s work on creative cities and the creative class, he quantifies various town’s “creative potential” measures. He 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. To do this, city governments will hire consulting firms to advise them on boosting their creative potential, thus creating an industry and a class of expertise centred around creative cities.
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. 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 largely by lifestyle factors, such as tolerance and diversity, urban infrastructure and entertainment.
Scholars such as Jamie Peck criticised Florida’s work 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, merely 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 touts as hotspots of the creative class are at the same time home to shocking disparities in economic status among their residents. To explain this, he points to the inflation of housing prices that an influx of creatives can bring to an area and the creative class’ reliance on service industries that typically pay their employees’ low wages.
Critics also argue that the creative city idea has become a catch-all phrase in danger of losing its meaning. Cities also restrict its importance to the arts and activities within the creative economy professions, calling any cultural plan a creative city plan. Such actions are only one aspect of a community’s creativity. There is a tendency for cities to adopt the term without thinking through their real organizational consequences and changing their mindset. The creativity implied in the period, 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.
