User:Andrew 43333/Creative city

The creative city is a concept that argues creativity should be considered a strategic factor in urban development. In addition to cities being efficient and fair, a creative city provides places, experiences, and opportunities to foster creativity among its citizens.

Early developments
Partners for Livable Places (later Communities, but hereafter referred to as Partners) founded in 1977 was important in the early development of the creative city idea. Partners initially focused on design and culture as resources for livability. In the early 1980s, 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 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 too 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 which 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) 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 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 1991 study, Glasgow: The Creative City and its Cultural Economy was followed in 1994 by a study on urban creativity called The Creative City in Britain and Germany.

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.

Critiques of the concept
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. 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.

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 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.

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.

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.